The right to life for the unborn child

Persons with a disability-physical or mental

Persons threatened by euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Innocent victims of war-be it just or unjust.

The poor who die daily because of disease and lack of food. The poor who are forced to live on or below poverty wages.

Even the criminals who experience state sponsored killing.

Pro-life All The Way

Unfortunately, many Christians, including Catholics, are pro-life in some ways, but not in other ways. If we are true disciples of Christ, we will be pro-life in all of the above mentioned areas even though we may feel led to give our time and energy to only one of the above areas.

In their Pastoral Letter called: Living the Gospel of Life-a Challenge to American Catholics, our U.S. bishops state:

Bringing a respect for human dignity to practical politics can be a daunting task. There is such a wide spectrum of issues involving the protection of human life and the promotion of human dignity. Good people frequently disagree on which problems to address, which policies to adopt and how best to apply them. But for citizens and elected officials alike, the basic principle is simple: We must begin with a commitment never to intentionally kill, or collude in the killing, of any innocent human life, no matter how broken, unformed, disabled or desperate that life may seem. In other words, the choice of certain ways of acting is always and radically incompatible with the love of God and the dignity of the human person created in his image. Direct abortion is never a morally tolerable option. It is always a grave act of violence against a woman and her unborn child. This is so even when a woman does not see the truth because of the pressures she may be subjected to, often by the child's father, her parents or friends. Similarly, euthanasia and assisted suicide are never acceptable acts of mercy. They always gravely exploit the suffering and desperate, extinguishing life in the name of the "quality of life" itself. This same teaching against direct killing of the innocent condemns all direct attacks on innocent civilians in time of war.

Pope John Paul II has reminded us that we must respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors. It is increasingly clear in modern society that capital punishment is unnecessary to protect people's safety and the public order, so that cases where it may be justified are "very rare, if not practically non-existent." No matter how serious the crime, punishment that does not take life is "more in conformity with the dignity of the human person" (Evangelium Vitae, nos. 56-57). Our witness to respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including the lives of those who fail to show that respect for others. The antidote to violence is love, not more violence.

As we stressed in our 1995 statement Political Responsibility: "The application of gospel values to real situations is an essential work of the Christian community." Adopting a consistent ethic of life, the Catholic Church promotes a broad spectrum of issues "seeking to protect human life and promote human dignity from the inception of life to its final moment." Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence and injustice. Any politics of human life must work to resist the violence of war and the scandal of capital punishment. Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing and health care. Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas. Catholic public officials are obliged to address each of these issues as they seek to build consistent policies which promote respect for the human person at all stages of life. But being "right" in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life. Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable states renders suspect any claims to the "rightness" of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community. (#20-20)

As I reflect on the above paragraphs, I see two things that we must be very clear about as Catholics and faithful disciples of Christ.

If I say I am pro-life, I must be pro-life all the way. I must embrace a "consistent ethic" towards human life.

Being "right" on some life issues could never be an excuse for being wrong on others, especially when the issue has to do with the unborn child.

In the context of today's gospel, we can say the Lazarus at our door is the unborn child, the starving and/or homeless person, the innocent victims of war and terrorism and even the criminals on death row. Today's gospel clearly tells us that when we ignore the needy and vulnerable ones in our midst, we are ignoring Christ and jeopardizing our eternal salvation. The rich man ended up in hell because he ignored the needs of the poor man.

Eleven Beliefs about Abortion an avid Pro-choice Feminist now sees as Lies.

Of all the beliefs about Life issues which our church hold, none is more important than our belief about the dignity of the unborn child. The rest of this column will now focus on this issue. In the coming weeks, I will address other life issues.

About a year ago, a parishioner passed along an article written by Frederica Mathewes-Green. In the 70's ( and maybe the 80's, I'm not sure when her conversion happened) Frederica was a campaigner for a woman's right to choose. But along the way, she came to see the truth of how wrong abortion was for women. Frederica writes:

Thirty years later, there are many things I regret about those years-don't get me started! - but chief among them is how shortsighted I was about the impact of Roe. What can I say, except that I just didn't know. I thought that women would only have abortions in the most-dire circumstances. I thought that the number of abortions would be small. I thought every child would be a wanted child. I thought the unborn was nothing but a glob of tissue. I thought abortion would liberate women. I was wrong.

Roe has taught us many lessons which now govern our lives in ways we can barely perceive. Instead of being one small tool for women's advancement, abortion opened a chasm, and a lot of unexpected things fell in. It turned out to be an irresistible force, because abortion makes things so much easier for everyone around the pregnant woman. Before Roe, unplanned pregnancy created many problems for many people-the woman's lover, her parents, her siblings, her boss, her landlord, her dean. Abortion changes the picture instantly: "Just go get it taken care of, dear, and it will be as if it never happened." Women were expected to do the sensible thing and save everyone else a lot of fuss and bother. Overnight, unplanned pregnancy became her private problem a burden for her to bear alone. Abortion-rights rhetoric compounded this effect with terms emphasizing her isolation: My body, my rights, my life, my choice. The flip side of all that first-person assertiveness is abandonment. The network of support that once existed had been shattered.

To continue a pregnancy came to look like an insane choice, one that placed an unfair burden on others. Having a baby in less-than-perfect circumstances came to look like a crazy and even selfish whim. A woman in an unplanned pregnancy was not just permitted to have an abortion-she was expected to. And that has made all the difference.

After the above introduction, Frederica lists eleven beliefs about abortion , which she now sees as lies.

#1. "Abortion liberates women." The initial argument about the time of Roe was that exercising self-determination was in itself empowering. This thesis did not stand the test of time. Before long it was obvious that women were choosing abortion in sorrow and distress rather than as daring self-expression. They usually didn't feel liberated afterwards, instead they felt numbness, sorrow, and relief.

#2. "It's a woman's choice." The next argument was that, even if abortion isn't a fresh blast of emancipation, at least it's her own idea. But too often women themselves disproved this, saying, "I didn't have any choice, I had to have an abortion." Roe didn't add more options to a woman's plate; it made one option nearly inevitable, because it would be overwhelmingly attractive to those with an interest in keeping her life unchanged.

#3. "Women have abortions only in extreme circumstances." I believed this in those pre-Roe days, even though my friends were traveling across seven states to have abortions simply because they were in college and not married. That seemed extreme enough at the time. Pro-choice leader Kate Michelman has been credited with saying that Americans believe in abortion under only three circumstances: rape, incest, and "my situation." Under those generous criteria, the numbers of abortions has risen to over 40 million. About 3,500 each day. No one expected this.

#4. "Men don't have to lose their careers when they're going to have a baby." Abortion seemed the perfect solution, allowing women to compete with men in the workplace by discarding pregnancies to keep in fighting form. But we had accepted a false premise. Men don't have to lose their children in order to keep their careers.

#5. "Men don't have any right to a say in her decision." Of course they do; a father has as much right as a mother to care for his biological child. But the majority of unwed dads, of course, greet this proposition with relief. Another way of phrasing it is, "Men don't have any obligation to be involved in her problem."

#6. "Anti-abortion activists want to turn back the clock." Not true; whatever America will be post-Roe, it will not be what it was before. Rather, it's abortion that pretends to turn back the clock, by offering a woman the illusion that she can push the rewind button on her life and go back to the time before she was pregnant. It can't be done. Once you're pregnant, a new life has begun. That may have been a topic of debate 30 years ago, but not any more.

#7. "It's just a glob of tissue." This was probably the biggest shock I sustained in my changing views of abortion. I really thought that the unborn was an unformed mass and not technically alive till some point late in pregnancy. A physician's pamphlet showed me a being that looked remarkably like a baby at six weeks' gestation, before most abortions are done. Even prior to that, when it looked more life a crawfish, it still was a human being. From the time the sperm dissolves in the egg it's alive and has a unique genetic code never before seen on earth, with 100% human DNA. It's a different shape, that's all. I'm a different shape now than I was at 8 or will be at 80. When did we start discriminating against people based on their shape?

#8. "It's so small." When I first began to lean toward pro-life convictions, I had a hard time getting over how tiny the unborn is. How could something so little deserve human rights? I came to realize that it is an irrelevant, and even pernicious, consideration. Do children deserve less protection than adults, because they're smaller? Why would feminists advocate such a view? Most women are smaller than most men. Should a tall guy get to vote twice?

#9. "Every child should be a wanted child." Now that Roe is 30 years old, every person in America under the age of 30 could have been aborted. Every child is a wanted child-the unwanted ones were all aborted, to the tune of one abortion for approximately every three live births. So how come the rate of reported child abuse is so high? In the early years after Roe there were 60,000 cases of child abuse reported annually. Today there are three million cases reported annually, a fifty-fold increase. The reasons for this increase are debatable, but one thing's for sure, abortion didn't prevent it. Aborting "unwanted" children hasn't helped. Instead, it's taught us that an unwanted person has no right to live. A child might be wanted very much during pregnancy, and not-so wanted a few months later when she's crying in the middle of the night. But abortion has taught us that a child deserves to live only if her parent wants her. It's a bizarre principle for feminists to endorse, who were vigorously fighting on another front against the idea, "I'm nothing unless a man wants me."

#10. "My right to control my body." When a woman realizes she is pregnant and doesn't want to be, she may feel understandably panicked. It can feel like her body has been taken over against her will, and she can block out any thought except the desire to get rid of it. As one post-abortion woman told me, "It's like looking down and seeing a tarantula on your arm; you don't stop to think that some people keep them as pets." However, it's not truly the woman's body, too, and that must at a minimum mean the right to keep her arms and legs attached to her body.

#11. "Women are full-fledged adults and deserve more rights than fetuses." Yes, this is true; adults have the right to vote and drive, and I don't think anyone is proposing giving such privileges to the unborn. However it's a long way from regulating rights that come with increasing maturity to denying the right to be alive. This is an abiding fallacy in abortion discussions, and both pro-life and pro- choice advocates fell for it. We both assumed that abortion concerned a conflict between the rights of a woman and a fetus. But in no sane culture are women and their own unborn children presumed to be mortal enemies. If continuing a pregnancy has become that unbearable, the problem is not inside the woman's body, but in a culture that is placing overwhelming burdens on her. The love between mother and baby is the icon of human connectedness, and when we complacently assume that one may want to kill the other, something has gone seriously wrong.

What does the Future Hold?

The predictions I would have made 30 years ago turned out to be so wildly inaccurate that I offer the following with fistfuls of salt. But first I'd note that legal restriction of abortion is not on the horizon. The pro-life movement has not made efforts to pass legislation that would prevent abortion since the early '90's, when the Casey decision dealt a massive and discouraging blow. Legislation proposed since then has been like planting hedges, focused on clinic regulations, parental consent, and the like. These are not laws that protect unborn life. Pro-choicers view laws like these as dangerously "incremental,: but that pays pro-lifers a compliment we don't deserve. Our powers of persuasion are not so great that we can lead a citizen who supports a parental consent law to outlaw abortion. In fact, there's a danger that these "incremental" laws will be all we get. The average citizen may conclude that the pro-lifers got a little, the pro-choicers got a little, and now everything is square. The situation may be analogous to the nation's liquor laws after the repeal of Prohibition. States passed laws regulating when and where liquor could be sold, but any adult who can read the store's sign can still buy as much booze as he wants.

Let's stay with that analogy for a moment. After Prohibition was repealed there was a vigorous backlash in which drinking was celebrated as fun and sophisticated. If you look at movies from the '30's and '40's you'll see a lot of stylish drunkenness, with the leading man stumbling and mumbling, and the leading lady clapping an ice bag for her hangover. It took several decades before people were able to admit that excess drinking causes a lot of pain. By the '80's it had become acceptable to decline a drink at a party; by the '90's cocktail parties had gone out of style. In 1981 the comedy Arthur was criticized for treating alcoholism as fodder for jokes - a complaint that didn't occur to audiences in 1950, as they laughed at drunken Jimmy Stewart and his invisible six-foot rabbit in Harvey.

The cultural rethinking on drunkenness didn't come about because the Women's Christian Temperance Union had finally devised the right slogan to "win hearts and minds" to their cause. It came about because drunkenness hurts, and eventually that truth couldn't be ignored.

Abortion hurts, too. It is a classic example of acting in haste and repenting at leisure; before the fact it looks like abortion is the only choice ("I had to have an abortion") and the woman may want to get it over with as fast as possible, like slapping off that tarantula. There are a lot of long nights afterwards, though, when she goes through the day the baby would have been born, the anniversary of the abortion, the first "wanted" pregnancy when she feels her baby move, and all the years to ahead.

But how can she speak of this grief? It's supposed to be "private" and "personal." She expects people would say, "Look, it was your decision, stop whining about it." She may fear that voicing regrets will give fodder to the pro-life movement, whom she has been told is an enemy trying to oppress her. All the insistent language of privacy makes her feel that her grief has no place; it should not intrude on others and disturb them, it should be kept inside. Everyone else has forgotten that she was ever pregnant. It's time to get over it. So why does she still feel so sad?

My hunch is that as the abortion debate cools off, as the status quo settles further into place, the instant association of "abortion" with "hot, ugly arguments" will ease. This will make it easier for people to think about without being thrown immediately into taking sides (presented usually as the cool, thoughtful people against the stupid, screaming people). And that will be a good thing, conducive to honest reflection. When women are no longer afraid of being stigmatized for voicing their grief, the grief can begin to come forth. We will find that there is a great deal there - not just among aborting women, but among the fathers and grandparents of these lost children. Over 40 million abortions means a lot of grief. It may be something just barely held back, like a tidal wave. I don't know what will result when that grief begins to be expressed, and we admit that abortion hasn't done all the wonderful things we thought it would, 30 years ago. But, speaking as a pro-lifer, I believe there is reason for hope.

For more see www.frederica.com.

Mercy & Healing Available

Some women reading this article may have had an abortion, or some of you may have encouraged or pressured a pregnant woman into having an abortion. If so, you may have already come to terms with this grave act of wrong doing through the Sacrament of Reconciliation and through counseling. Praise God many women who have had an abortion, have experienced God's mercy and healing. If you have had an abortion and you are still hurting emotionally or spiritually because of this action, I would strongly encourage you to seek the mercy and healing that Jesus wants to offer you. Over the years, I have met many women who have had an abortion and I believe God used me to be a channel of his mercy and healing for them. Please know, only the devil wants you to keep hurting because of this or any wrongdoing. God always offers his mercy to the repented sinner.

If you are ambivalent about the abortion issue, I hope the above article will help you to see that abortion is NEVER in the best interest of a woman, not to speak of the best interest of her unborn child.