The Dirty Papist

Pro-lifers are sometimes criticized for not emphasizing other quality-of-life (so to speak) issues like poverty, drugs, war, or AIDS. Those issues are important too, but unfortunately, not everybody can work on every social problem. It would be great--and some people do try to make some contribution to every kind of charity--but unfortunately there's not enough time in the day for any one person to do a lot for every issue. The people who fight abortion are just working on that particular thing because it's something they can do--maybe it's personal for them, maybe their talents happened to fill a need that a Crisis Pregnancy Center had that a St. Vincent DePaul shop didn't. Other people work on other things. There are plenty of people working on all the different social problems--or rather, there are some working on each but not enough working on any of them.

If you want to work on one, and it's not the pro-life movement, it's okay. You can't focus on one, though, pretend you think they're all worthwhile, and then tell a pro-life activist "Abortion doesn't matter or can't be stopped; my pet charity is most important or more urgent."

You can't have it both ways. Either fighting abortion is worthwhile (because abortion isn't the solution to the other problems), and you just have different preferences, or you like doing some charitable work but only want to hear support for abortion.