Pro-Life Atheists

There's a combination I never really thought of before - a person who does not believe there's a God but does believe in the sanctity of life. Lisa Miller writes about that subject in Newsweek:

Before the election I wrote a piece for NEWSWEEK.com about white evangelicals and abortion. In that piece, I predicted that conservative Christians would not move in large numbers away from the Republican Party because of their fundamental theological and cultural objections to abortion. In response, I received many comments—mostly the usual entrenched rhetoric on both sides. But embedded in the comment boards was a surprising point of view: a tiny fraction of readers objected to the relentless framing of the pro-life arguments in religious terms. The case against abortion could be made without God, they said. Atheists could be pro-life.

Few of them are. Abortion has been a wedge for more than 30 years because its moral volatility has forced Americans to choose sides: religious vs. secular, right vs. left, traditional vs. progressive. Atheists have generally aligned with the left. In a three-year-old Gallup poll, nearly 40 percent of Christians who attended church weekly said they believed that abortion should always be illegal. Meanwhile, nearly 40 percent of people with no religion (not atheists necessarily) said that abortion should be legal in all circumstances. Just as pro-life Christians argue that life is sacred because it's given by God, pro-life atheists insist that human life is intrinsically valuable without God's help. "I think there is nothing beyond this life—but life in and of itself is unique and special," explains Matt Wallace, a UPS package handler in North Carolina who started an online group for pro-life atheists in 1999. "In abortion, a human being ends up getting killed for no other reason than he or she wasn't planned or wanted. One should always err on the side of innocent human life." Wallace is likely one of the very few atheists who voted against Barack Obama, largely because of his abortion views.

Read the rest of it here.

Speaking of abortion, look at this frightening statistic from Spain:

Abortion Now Number One Cause Of Death In Spain

Under Spain's practically nonexistent restrictions, abortions have more than doubled since the mid 1990s, climbing from 51,006 in 1996 to over 120,000 in 2007. The abortion rate is now approaching one in five pregnancies (18.3%), according to the report...

The IPF report also notes that the proportion of women having their second or later abortion has risen substantially since 2000, from 23% that year to 31% in 2006...

Spain's abortion rate is a major contributor to the country's worsening demographic problems.

Mark Steyn describes Spain as the land of the upside-down family tree: Four grandparents, two kids and one grandchild. The family tree isn't the only thing upside-down in that culture.