ProLife / ProChoice
Pro Choice does NOT mean Pro Abortion!
It's time to think beyond black and white.

Page Index:
Rant from the host - Tim Nyberg
Pro Life? Look at the Fruits - Dr. Glen Harold Stassen
Abortion and War
No Place to Stand - Heidi Schlumpf
Read also: The Full Gospel of Life - David Batstone
Indifference Kills
Open Letter to Chuck Colson - Jim Wallis
Horror Stories - Molly Ivans (complications to the theory that it's a black and white issue)
The Larger Shame - Nicholas Kristof in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

(portions sourced from Kelly Hearn, Alternet)

by Dr. Glen Harold Stassen

I am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, "pro-life" is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world.

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Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

A conservative Catholic bishop has suggested that it’s a sin to vote for a candidate who isn’t pro-life. But what does it mean to be pro-life? There has been an increase in abortions in America during the last four years, due at least in part to more economic hardship for poor would-be parents. And, as Emmanuel Charles McCarthy reminds us below, there are unborn children dying elsewhere, as a direct result of American foreign policy. McCarthy, a Byzantine priest, is the founder of The Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame and a co-founder of Pax Christi-USA. He and his wife, Mary, who holds a Ph.D., have thirteen children.

At 2 a.m. on Christmas morning in 1976, we were awakened by a mad pounding and screeching at our front door. I went downstairs to determine what was going on. Since I could not see who was on the other side, I tried to ask a few questions through the door. All I received for an answer was more pounding and screeching. But amidst the cacophony I heard the words, “I’m hurt!” So, I opened the door.

As soon as I did, a man lunged through, looked wildly around, vomited and collapsed at the bottom of the stairs where my wife, who was pregnant, and my seven children were standing. I called an ambulance and it came, with an uncalled police car right behind it. The man was drunk and had smashed his car into a tree. By the time the medics and police finally left it was 4:30 Christmas morning. The possibility of the children going back to sleep at that point was “zero!”

About 4:30 that Christmas afternoon my wife, Mary, told me there was “bleeding.” Before Christmas Day was over a miscarriage had taken place. The doctor called it a “natural abortion.” One week earlier, he had said, “Everything is just fine.” The cause of the Christmas loss he said was probably the trauma and severe tension coupled with the fatigue of the day.

Obliviousness to Terror and Trauma
In the very first news program I saw on TV after the start of the 1991 war between the U.S. and Iraq, an American pilot was being interviewed. He said he experienced no interference in dropping his bombs and that when he left Baghdad, “It was lit up like a Christmas tree!”

For reasons probably related to Christmas Day 1976, the immediate thought that came to my mind was, “Imagine all the abortions that are going to take place in Baghdad over the next weeks.” As I read the triumphant headlines in the newspapers day after day—“U.S. Pounds Iraq from Air”—and saw the pictures of missiles streaking into Iraq, I could not help but hear the silent screams of all the little Iraqi children in utero who were having their lives ripped from them. The lucky ones were the ones who took a direct hit. The ones, who were aborted because of percussion, vibration or because of the terror, trauma, malnourishment and/or exhaustion visited upon their mothers by war, would probably have suffered less agonizing deaths at the wrong end of a suction machine in an abortion clinic.

Thunderous Silence
Yet the silence on this matter of abortions induced by war in the Church, in pro-life circles and in Christian peace and justice efforts is thunderous. It is as if abortion for saving a person’s reputation is absolutely evil; abortion for saving a family’s economic life is absolutely evil; abortion for saving a person’s job is absolutely evil; abortion for saving a person from what he or she perceives to be an intolerable personal future is absolutely evil, but abortion to save oil fields for the present and future control and profit of American and British oil interests or to save the world from non-existent weapons of mass destruction or from a local dictator is morally permissible! It is as if patriotic earplugs have been discreetly employed by pro-lifers in order to not hear what they have been telling others to listen to for over thirty years—the silent screams.

It does no good to slickly try to argue that when Baghdad is bombed it is not the primary intention of the bombing to induce abortions, but rather the primary intention of the bombing is to save Kuwait or to save oil wells or to save our country’s standard of living or to save us from a hypothetical attack by Saddam Hussein. These arguments are nothing more than the pro-choice arguments wrapped in a flag. No one ever chooses abortion just for the fun of aborting. Abortion is always chosen in order to save something that is considered of more value than the child in the womb or in order to be saved from some evil that is considered a greater evil than abortion. This is what the pro-choice philosophy is all about—abortion as the lesser evil.

Who Will Be A Voice for the Unborn in War?
Modern industrial war, once unleashed, produces an instant Auschwitz for the unborn—that’s fact, not conjecture. Mass abortions are the necessary and one hundred per cent inevitable consequence of modern war. Morally, that which a person is certain will occur, if he or she makes a particular choice, represents a choice for which he or she is responsible before God. A person cannot morally claim he or she does not intend the abortions that are absolutely certain to take place, by claiming he or she only intends to preserve the mother’s bodily health or the health of the body politic. Health is being preserved at the cost of knowingly and willing killing in utero life.

So, where is the Church’s pro-life voice for the voice-less children in the womb in Iraq, who are daily being chopped to pieces by military abortions? Or, is abortion by war the great exception to the inviolable right to life of the innocent child in utero? If so, how many abortifacient military actions is a desert oil field worth in the eyes of God? How many abortions are justified to destroy non-existent WMDs? How many does God permit in order to get rid of a two-bit dictator who sits on a black gold mine? How many? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Where are the pro-life protests of industrial high-tech war on the unborn?

Pro-Life to Pro-Choice?
It has always been the pro-choice understanding that the Church’s pro-life movement would come to the pro-choice position when a serious interest of its own or its members was attacked in a way that required the pro-life movement to see the “complexity” of the issue and the naïveté of its absolutist prohibition against destroying children in utero. Is preserving borderline neo-fascist Muslim dictatorships (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.) or control over oil fields or the vain posturings of patriotism just the “complexity” the pro-life movement or its leadership needs to find the exception to its total rejection of in utero homicide?

If not, why was the Church’s pro-life movement not being a microphone for those screaming in silence in the wombs of Iraqi mothers as tens of thousands of abortions took place, due to the brutal economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the US/UN, during the twelve years leading up to the current war? If not, why is the pro-life movement not a lone voice in the world pleading for the lives of those Iraqi children in the womb who are being torn limb from limb by the dogs of war today in Iraq? Both Old and New Testament are clear: Where more is expected silence is sinful. Moral laxism where the destruction of human beings is concerned is among the gravest forms of evil—especially for those in positions of moral or spiritual leadership.

Misnaming Reality—Deceitful Mind Games
Christmas tree lights are a symbol of new life in the baby Jesus—the Prince of Peace—who has just been allowed to complete His nine months in the womb of His mother. To analogize a Baghdad of a thousand horror- filled infernos to a “lit Christmas tree” is a grotesque misrepresentation of the event that is taking place.

However, it is an accurate representation of a human mind and heart drugged into a moral stupor by the war propaganda of erotic nationalism. Now let us pause here a moment and think: Is it not the flagrant misnaming of reality that is the foundation for all pro-abortion philosophies and politics? Is it not the obstinate refusal to call murder by its correct name, murder, that is at the heart of the pro-choice position? Is not the misnaming of murder as just another “medical operation” the hook on which all pro-choice propaganda hangs? The time has come for a clear, unambiguous position statement and for political action by the Christian pro-life movement and its leadership on behalf of the unborn children of Iraq and by extension on behalf of the unborn children of all countries in all wars. I believe God could be trying to raise the value and significance of the Church’s pro-life movement in His salvific designs, but to do this, the movement must have the courage to say an unequivocal “No” to a misguided patriotism that ignores or justifies abortions as just another “military operation.” If, however, the Church’s pro-life movement now succumbs to the temptation to start “hair-splitting” or cleverly “side-stepping” its uncompromising and vigorous defense of all the unborn, it is finished as a moral force, because it will have become the embodiment of the untruth it opposes: “I am against abortion, but...”

So to be clear, the Church is now being called to pass through the fire of Her own teaching. The integrity of Her response today will be the measure of the power of Her proclamation tomorrow in many, many areas. Murder does not become anything less than murder because it is mass murder. Logical pettifogging and rhetorical chicanery are what the pro-choice movement practices in order to justify abortion. These deceitful mind games must not become what the Christian pro-life movement practices in order to justify or ignore the abortion mills of war—even if the Church’s good and profitable relationships with the nation-state and its monied elite is jeopardized.

I hope and pray that I am dead wrong but, because of its graceless non-witness up to this moment in time, I am deeply concerned that the Christian pro-life movement—and especially its leadership—has intentionally turned a deaf ear to the silent screams of thousands of pre-born Iraqi children and instead sees only the power and the glory of the U.S.A. in a Baghdad “lit up like a Christmas tree.” God’s anawim of the womb deserve so, so much more than this from those who have been given by God “eyes to see and ears to hear.”

Footnote
The quotation below is from a March 24, 2003 interview by Charlie Rose, which took place on his national PBS show with Jon Lee Anderson, a writer for The New Yorker, reporting live from Baghdad. As part of a discussion of whether those Iraqis who are opposed to Saddam Hussein might nevertheless turn against the United States if the destruction wrought upon Iraq and Baghdad became too great, Anderson responds that such is a real possibility. To emphasize his point he adds:

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No Place to Stand
by Heidi Schlumpf
When you're Christian, progressive, and "pro-life," voting your conscience is often easier said than done.

What does it mean to be "pro-life"? For some, the term is understood very narrowly as the opposition to abortion, particularly through legal sanction. Others are committed to reducing the number of abortions, truly making them rare, but favor policies that don’t criminalize abortion—and prosecute women and/or their doctors—to do so. And as U.S. Catholic’s Heidi Schlumpf explains in this article, many people, on both sides of the legality question, see a genuinely pro-life stance as one that embraces respect for the human person at every stage—a position that’s hard to find in today’s polarized politics, and one that cries out for broad (and civil) dialogue across our various divides. - The Editors (Sojourners Magazine)

It’s an election year, and once again Jennifer Roth is wondering if she might as well flip a coin. The 31-year-old systems administrator is one of those "swing voters" who could go either way—a demographic highly coveted by both Democrats and Republicans as the key to winning in 2004. But neither the Dems nor the GOP does much to inspire or excite Roth.

The problem? Roth is a self-described liberal on nearly all issues except one: Abortion. It’s a view that she—and countless other "pro-life progressives"—finds entirely consistent. "In my view liberalism is all about looking out for the little guy, the people who don’t have power, money, or protection," she says.

But where does that leave her when it comes to the political process? Well, left out—not coincidentally, "Leftout" is the name of the Web site (not affiliated with a faith perspective) that Roth created in 1997 as a "haven for progressive pro-lifers" to help them "feel a little less like the only Martian on your block." The community created by "Leftout" has perhaps helped alleviate that sense of isolation, but it hasn’t exactly resulted in an explosion of pro-life progressive candidates on U.S. ballots.

So pro-life progressives are forced to make compromises, often major ones. In some elections, Roth has voted for a write-in candidate as a protest. Other years, she shops around for a moderate Republican or a Democrat who’s at least open to seriously considering the abortion issue. When in doubt, she tends toward the Democratic Party, believing its social agenda is more likely to decrease the social and economic pressure that leads to abortion.

"I don’t think it’s an accident that the abortion rate went up under Reagan and Bush but went down under Clinton," she says. "We have to integrate parenthood and school or parenthood and work to relieve some of the social and economic pressures that make abortion feel like the only choice."

Having to compromise by voting for a less-than-fully-pro-life candidate may not be ideal for socially conscious Christians, but it is unfortunately the reality in American politics. "In a perfect world, all public officials would be pro-life in the full meaning of that term," says Tom Allio, senior director for the Cleveland Diocese’s Social Action Office. In his 27 years in that position, he has yet to meet a candidate who fits that bill.

Being a fully pro-life candidate, according to Allio and others, doesn’t mean just promising to work to make abortion illegal, supporting laws against certain procedures, or pledging to pack the Supreme Court to one day overturn Roe vs. Wade. (And for some, it means using methods other than legal sanctions to reduce abortions.) While some pro-life politicians take the so-called "seamless garment" approach, adding assisted suicide, the death penalty, and perhaps stem-cell research to the abortion issue, progressive pro-lifers tend to see the issue even more broadly than that.

"To be pro-life means also to work to eradicate poverty, to provide universal health care, to provide affordable housing, to be consistent on war and peace," says Allio, whose office works on precisely those issues.

OVER AT THE DIOCESE of Davenport, Iowa, Dan Ebener heads up a similar social action office—and the pro-life office as well. The doubled job is not the result of budget cutbacks but rather an intentional effort by the diocese to link the pro-life issue with broader social ones.

"Catholic social teaching values the life and dignity of the human person. And you can’t separate the life and the dignity; they go together," Ebener says. That means considering not only abortion but also poverty, health care, and joblessness.

"To me it’s important to defend life where it’s most vulnerable, and certainly life in the womb is vulnerable," he says. "But protecting human life from abortion is only one way of protecting life in the womb." To Ebener, issues such as prenatal health care, job training for unemployed mothers, and day care for working mothers are as essential to a pro-life agenda as is fighting abortion.

It is on precisely those other issues that the Republican Party—typically seen as more "pro-life"—loses its credibility among progressive pro-lifers. A common summary of the GOP’s philosophy by its opponents is that Republicans only care about the baby in utero. After birth, mom and baby are on their own.

"Republicans who claim to be pro-life also often have anti-life policies that are completely in collusion with the social and economic structures that compel abortion," says Kevin Clarke, editor of Salt of the Earth, a Catholic social justice e-zine.

Not only do Republicans have a spotty, at best, record on the broader social issues that contribute to abortion, they also have accomplished little on the promises they do make, leading some to wonder if they’re not all talk, little action.

"The Republican approach to abortion makes for a nice election issue," says Ebener. "We hear a lot of rhetoric, but when it comes to actually taking action, what has happened in the last three years with a Republican Senate and White House?"

With the partial-birth abortion ban, which took nearly a decade to pass, as this administration’s only pro-life accomplishment, Ebener is not impressed—especially since it was accompanied by plenty of other "anti-life" legislation such as social spending cuts paired with tax cuts for the wealthy.

Yet most pro-life groups working primarily to end abortion tend to side with the Republican Party, if for no other reason than at least they’re saying the right things. Republicans also tend to share pro-life activists’ worldview that rallies against the prevailing secular "culture of death."

But many pro-life progressives find fault with such a single-issue focus, especially when religious organizations use that issue as a litmus test for everything from deciding who can speak at parishes and schools to withholding the sacraments from politicians.

"We are not a single-issue church," says Allio. "Anyone who would say one issue is all the litmus test that’s needed is being guided by something other than Catholic social teaching. Our church does not keep a voters’ scorecard."

The U.S. Catholic bishops’ recent statement "Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility" definitely incorporates the broader scope of those teachings. Still, the misperception persists that Catholics must vote for self-described "pro-life" candidates, thanks in part to pro-life activists who imply that those who don’t vote for these candidates are somehow not "pro-life." Allio also believes it’s a myth that the key to the Catholic vote is a hard-line opposition to abortion, citing an ABC/Beliefnet poll that shows only 19 percent of Catholics believe abortion should be illegal in all cases.

ON THE OTHER side of the aisle, progressive pro-lifers also have a problem, albeit a different one. "The Democrats have really sold out. They have no credibility on the pro-life issue," says Ebener of Davenport, who like many regrets that the party that pledges to protect the little guy doesn’t include the littlest of all—the unborn.

"It’s just a real shame this issue has been hijacked," says Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, an organization for pro-life Dems who oppose abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia.

The Democrats have reframed the issue as one of "choice," seeing themselves as feminists committed to rights for women. It doesn’t help when some adamant pro-lifers come off as caring more about the baby’s rights than about those of the mother. But plenty of progressive pro-lifers put themselves solidly in the feminist camp, and they believe that abortion has not exactly been a positive thing for women.

"We have to make a better case for why abortion is not a good choice for women, why it is not liberating for women, why it actually oppresses women," says Clarke of Salt of the Earth. "By focusing only on whether abortion is legal or not, we ignore all the other cultural structures that drive women toward abortion."

To hear the pro-choice lobby talk, it would seem the only choice in an unplanned pregnancy is abortion. Pro-life feminists and other pro-life progressives, on the other hand, would like to offer women real choices—economic ones like paid parenting leave or cultural ones like less shame and guilt for pregnant teens.

Another group lacking in real choices are pro-life Democrats, who seemingly are pressured by the party to get in line with the pro-choice position. The near unanimity of the pro-choice view within the Democratic Party was evidenced this year by the presidential primary options: Not one was pro-life, in the narrowest sense of the term. (Richard Gephardt did vote for the partial birth abortion ban.)

Even Dennis Kucinich, who previously had included defense for unborn life among his liberal agenda, flip-flopped on the issue. He’s not the only one: The list of formerly pro-life Democrats includes Jesse Jackson, Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and Vice President Al Gore.

Those Democrats who stick to their pro-life beliefs—many are on the Democrats for Life advisory board—face marginalization and even outright opposition. Not much has changed since the late Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Robert Casey, as the head of the fifth-largest state in the nation, was twice denied permission to address the Democratic Convention because of his pro-life views. Even today, Democrats for Life has not yet convinced the Democratic National Committee to link them to the DNC Web site.

Some think that the amount of pressure brought to bear on Democrats belies the diversity of views within the party. "It’s telling," says Roth of "Leftout." "And it’s got to crash eventually."

Given the limitations of each party, it’s hard to blame pro-life progressives’ temptation to stay home and throw their hands up in frustration. Polls show that a sizeable number of pro-life Democrats voted for Bush in 2000, although few expect a repeat of that in 2004, given other issues such as the economy and the war in Iraq.

Most will have to make a compromise decision they can live with. "The perfect candidate doesn’t exist," says Allio. "Therefore the best a [Christian] voter can do is become fully informed and make the best prudential judgment they can."

Meanwhile, both the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies continue with their all-or-nothing rhetoric that further polarizes the debate—and politicians pander to their constituents on either side. "In an election year the abortion issue is used in such a targeted way to solidify one’s base, whether it’s pro-life or pro-choice," says Allio. "That just doesn’t do justice to the problem."

He and other pro-life progressives believe any solution must begin with finding some common ground between the two sides. Religious progressives who are pro-life are the perfect people to start that conversation, Allio believes, because they have solid pro-life credentials as well as contacts in the secular liberal community because of their work on other justice issues.

Clarke agrees: "The one thing we could do is to reintroduce a respectful dialogue on abortion into the political culture," he says. "We have to develop a way to talk about this issue where we’re not at each other’s throats."

While politicians continue with business as usual, many pro-life progressives are looking for solutions outside electoral politics. "Part of a pro-life philosophy ought to be creating an alternative to abortion and helping women who find themselves in a ‘problem’ pregnancy," says Allio.

Roth of "Leftout" dreams of creating a kind of "pro-life Planned Parenthood," where sex education, contraception, and counseling would be available without promoting abortion. She’d like to see pro-life progressives think proactively and creatively rather than just complain about their lack of political choices.

"If Roe [vs. Wade] were overturned tomorrow, I think we would see at least another 32 years of wrangling about abortion," Roth says. "Because it wouldn’t be by a consensus that the unborn have value. That’s what we really need."

Heidi Schlumpf is managing editor of U.S. Catholic magazine in Chicago.
No Place to Stand. by Heidi Schlumpf. Sojourners Magazine, June 2004 (Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 12-16). Cover.
(Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0406&article=040610)

www.sojo.net
Sojourners Magazine • 2401 15th Street NW • Washington DC 20009 • Phone: (202) 328-8842 • Fax: (202) 328-8757

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Start Seeing Children: Indifference Kills
The greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. - Elie Wiesel

Each day in America, some 22 children are murdered or killed; each night an estimated 100,000 children go to sleep in parks, under bridges, or in homeless shelters. Some 2,800 children see their parents divorce each day, while for a 1.5 million, the only way to see their fathers is to visit them in prison.

Globally, the statistics are even more unimaginable: almost 40,000 children starve to death daily, while millions more work under forced labor conditions, including the brothels of Asia’s tourist-supported sex market. In armed conflicts from Central America to Africa, an estimated quarter of a million children are currently employed as soldiers, some of them as young as five years of age.

Thoreau wrote in his journal, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” It is the same with many of life’s riddles. Once we get out of our easy chairs and open the blinds, their elusive answers will dawn on us. We will discern priorities that pull us beyond our comfort zones and into problems we can actually do something about. And we will realize how many children there are who can be reached and saved.

But that will mean putting away our speeches about the Year of the Child (2000) and finding the child who needs us today. It will mean laying aside our analyses about the endangered state of childhood and concerning ourselves with children themselves. It will mean starting to live as if children really mattered to us.

In 1991, while we spent billions to “save” the people of Kuwait from Iraq, two million of our own neglected children – three times Kuwait’s entire population – attempted suicide. Eight years later, in 1999, we tried to “rescue” the people of Kosovo from Serbia by bombing both to smithereens; meanwhile, during the very same period, thousands of American and Western European children died at the hands of their own violent parents and guardians.

...If the cause of so much that is wrong is our own indifference, the path toward a solution cannot remain hidden for long. If the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference, then the opposite also holds true: the greatest love is the attention we pay to each other, and especially to our children. We serve children best simply by noticing them – by paying attention to them.

excerpted from an article by Johann Christoph Arnold www.bruderhof.com
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The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, New York Times

The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.

It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.

If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.

Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.

The national infant mortality rate has risen under Mr. Bush for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.

So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The U.S. ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."

The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.

It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.

None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books every written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle.

So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.

Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

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