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Why do those who challenge pro-lifers ignore this key question?

The burning issue at the center of the abortion debate is simple and unavoidable.

(Image: kishivan | us.fotolia.com)

As Election Day approaches, I am seeing a lot more public statements and posts on social media challenging pro-life people. Many statements seem to be charged with a great deal of fear, fear that the pro-life movement is gaining traction as people become increasingly aware of the horrors of abortion.

The statements I have seen do a lot of mocking of pro-life people. The critics who write them drag out a number of old and tired arguments in favor of abortion or against the pro-life position, but none of them has even attempted to answer the real question:

“Is abortion murder?”

If “murder” is defined as the intentional killing of an innocent human life, then science and logic tell us that abortion is a form of murder. And murder is always wrong. It is what is known in moral theology as an “intrinsic evil,” an act that is always evil, regardless of the circumstances, personal motivation, or other extenuating factors.

When I was young, politicians and others who supported abortion would claim that they didn’t know when human life begins. I don’t hear anyone claiming that anymore, as science so clearly indicates the existence of a new human life from the moment of conception that such a claim would rightly be labeled “anti-science.”

Other social media posts, even some by prominent Catholic writers, ask whether or not pro-life people are truly pro-life or “just pro-birth” (to quote one way the matter is expressed). Are pro-life people as committed to helping mothers and born children as they ought to be? Are they sufficiently committed to other social justice causes, such as immigration, caring for the poor and the sick, and so on? To be pro-life, those who post such things assert, requires being “pro” all lives and not just those of the unborn.

This argument makes an important point, but evades the burning question at the center of the abortion debate: Is abortion murder?

A pro-life person should stand ready to support mothers in difficult situations, to adopt or otherwise help children born into difficult circumstances, and support all of the causes that promote human dignity from conception to natural death. And personal experience tells me that they very often do.

But even if a pro-life person is a rotten person in every way except that he opposes abortion, he is still correct in opposing abortion. There is no other attack on human life or dignity about which we say that in order to oppose X you also need to oppose Y and Z and do A and B, or your opposition to X doesn’t count.

There is also the horribly misleading, “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but…” argument. This argument fails to recognize the basic truth that no society can be a true society if it “leaves people alone” to the point of allowing them to destroy human life.

There are many ways we can and ought to “live and let live” in a free society such as ours. And the rights of women deserve special respect because they have so often been violated. But it would be an extremely toxic kind of lawlessness that allowed murder of any kind to remain legal.

Then there is the argument that men should not tell women what to do with their own bodies. Here it is important first to acknowledge that motherhood is a blessing and a burden that no man could fully understand or appreciate.

Having said that, however, the essential point is that from the moment of conception, there is a new body that must be taken into consideration, that of the unborn child.

Abortion poses a mortal threat to an unborn child’s body, and so it is a moral imperative that we do all we can to protect these children. And there are many millions of women who are at the forefront of the pro-life movement, so it is disingenuous to cast all pro-life people as manipulative and power-hungry men.

The final argument, at least of those that I have seen, is the one that rejects abortion except in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger.

First, it needs to be said that such cases represent only the tiniest fraction of abortion cases. Secondly, no matter how difficult the circumstances, it is never okay to perform an evil action in order to achieve a good result. You cannot murder one person in order to heal or save another. [Here I am not referring to cases when it is possible to accept that harm will befall an unborn child due to treatment given to a mother, such as would be the case in some chemotherapy treatments. Specific moral guidance is needed for such specific circumstances, but an abortion is never permitted.]

While we firmly hold that abortion is an evil and we work for its elimination, it is also true that we must love and care for all people, including those who have promoted abortion or had an abortion themselves. For example, Rachel’s Vineyard is an excellent ministry of the Catholic Church dedicated to bring healing to those wounded by abortion. And it is our faith that God loves every person and forgives every sin confessed to Him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We are all sinners in need of God’s incredible mercy.

As we pray in the Divine Mercy Chaplet, “For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” May He show His great mercy to all unborn children, their parents, all politicians and medical personnel, and to all of us as we strive to proclaim the Gospel of Life.


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About Fr. Charles Fox 86 Articles
Rev. Charles Fox is an assistant professor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit. He holds an S.T.D. in dogmatic theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), Rome. He is also chaplain and a board member of Saint Paul Street Evangelization, headquartered in Warren, MI.

33 Comments

  1. In 1948 three American judges sitting in the Nuremberg Military Tribunal judged abortion to be a crime against humanity and therefore murder and extermination. – United States v Greifelt & ors [1948].

    • Sorry, not true. The case you speak of was a war crimes trial of several Nazis.The Nazis were accused of forcing women to undergo abortions. So, at most, this case stands for the proposition that forcing a woman to undergo an abortion when she does not want an abortion is against international law. The case does not rule that abortions that are desired by the mother are against international law

      • An excerpt from the abstract of the Professor of Law Jeffrey C. Tuomala’s publication Nuremberg and the Crime of Abortion:

        The crime of abortion played prominently in two international trials held at Nuremberg following World War II—the Goering and Greifelt cases. Allied prosecutors made the case that voluntary and involuntary abortion were war crimes and crimes against humanity.

        The full document can be read here:

        Nuremberg and the Crime of Abortion

        • And during 1948, the consultations, debates and conferences determining the UDHR 1948 was formulating its proscription against abortion per se, as exhaustively documented in the magisterial “Human Rights and the Unborn Child” [Rita Joseph 2009]

  2. The fact is that those who defend the killing of the innocent unborn especially those who muddy the waters. Only do so as born people. That the can’t see the absolute hypocrisy and self perceived superiority at play here is damning. God will not be mocked and they will be held accountable.

  3. In answer to the question (“Is abortion murder?”), there’s the underlying and unreal MINDSET that our questioning heads tell us only about “ideas” rather than “things.”

    No surprise, then, that we dissipate (a) from a Culture of Life to a culture of routinized abortion, then (b) from a marginalized culture of binary/ complementary human sexuality to a “third option,” and then (c) to the spectrum of alphabetical gender theory with the interchangeable transgender option, and then (d) to totally dissolved and viral tribalism. AND—in the Church—(d) from teaching the “don’t” of the Commandments to only the “do” of the Beatitudes and (e) to replacing the moral clarity of St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor (VS) with “new-paradigm” ambiguity.

    VS explains what is irreducible: “…the commandment of love of God and neighbor does not have in its dynamic any higher limit [the Beatitudes], BUT DOES HAVE A LOWER LIMIT, beneath which the commandment [!] is broken” (n. 52).

    But, now, the unborn child (and even the partially-born!) is only a transformer-toy “idea,” no longer a “fact”—a negotiable NON-EXISTENCE versus a non-negotiable EXISTENCE.

    Aquinas was not yet infected by this virtual and digital MINDSET. The non-demonstrable “first principle of non-contradiction” still had breath. On the other hand, Marx was anti-analog and anti-binary: Of our being contingent and NOT being God, he said, “this question [“contingency”] is not permitted to socialist man.” Stalin was routinely digital: “a single death is a tragedy [analog]; a million deaths is a [digital] statistic”.

    The answer to the QUESTION, then, is the fact of a self-disclosing/Triune Oneness, and therefore of who each human person really is, without exception—-versus—-Marxism in all of its unreal and successive manifestations.

    • Yes, abortion is murder and a vote for a pro-abortion candidate is a vote in favor of murder. We must remember that we will be required to answer for our actions when we stand in judgement before the Holy Redeemer at the moment of death. How will those who support abortion respond to this? Needless to say it might be uncomfortable— it will be just Christ and the one being judged, Joe Biden will not be there handing out pamphlets about “equally sacred” Church teachings.

  4. I have been a ‘pro-lifer’ from the instant I learned of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade. All these many years later, I hear other well-intentioned Catholics talking about voting for and supporting politicians and policies which will continue the slaughter of unborn children. Why? One of the chief reasons is that priests and bishops have been unwilling to use their pulpits and their pastoral work to educate their congregations on the devastating seriousness of this sin. They have hidden and continue to hide behind the stupid, “I don’t want to get political; actually, we’re not allowed to talk about politics’. LIFE isn’t political! MURDER isn’t political! Yet, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, there has been little to no formation, education, shepherding in explaining that God cannot and will not condone the sins against His smallest most defenseless children. Ask your pastor to at least explain to his people how very serious this is. Many people are so used to and have so accepted this wanton destruction of innocent life that unless they hear it from a person in spiritual authority, they will continue down this road of willful ignorance. Catechize your people! God will judge us all very harshly if we fail in this simple duty.

  5. Without all due respect to Father Fox, the use of the term “murder,” in discussions of abortion is very much unhelpful to the cause of protecting unborn lives. It is enough to say that abortion is the destruction of human life, that it ought to be reduced, and if a merciful Lord makes it possible on this earth, ended. Is that made more likely by the use of the term, “murder?”

    Are people on the other side who may be open to persuasion and thinking anew led to do so by the use of such language? I don’t know what evidence anyone could point to that would suggest that they are. Does it not also make it easier for those on the other side who are not open to thinking anew to bring up the grotesque distraction of whether or not, should legal protection for the unborn ever be achieved, a woman who seeks an abortion, or actually procures an illegal one, might face attempted murder or murder charges. The answer is, of course, that she should not, and as a practical matter, never would. Laws regulating abortion, as has been the case throughout almost all of history, should always be directed at abortion-providers. But having to make that point over and over is not a distraction helpful to the pro-life cause.

    In A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, Robert Bolt had his Sir Thomas More say a number of things that the real St. Thomas almost certainly never said. But when Bolt had his Sir Thomas say to his daughter, “But man He made to serve Him wittily in the tangle of his mind,” perhaps he was addressing the abortion question today.

    • Similarly, in real life, the layman St. Thomas More also wrote this:

      “Suppose wrong opinions cannot be plucked up by the root, and you cannot cure, as you would wish, vices of long standing, yet you must not on that account abandon ship of state and desert it in a storm, because you cannot control the winds.

      “BUT neither must you impress upon them new and strange language, which you know will carry no weight with those of opposite conviction, BUT by indirect approach and covert suggestion you must endeavor and strive to the best of your power to handle all well, and what you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can” (Utopia, cited in E.E. Reynolds, St. Thomas More, Image, 1958).

      Then, also this, from Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”:

      “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s [the U.S. Supreme Court’s!] command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it? No, I will not sign.”

      WITH what LANGUAGE—-in a post-Roe v. Wade flat world—-how does alert somnambulists to the fact that THE WORLD IS ROUND? And, with abortion, how does one simply turn the lights on (!), when even the sonogram’s evidence/Silent Scream goes unheard?

      • Great questions. Thomas More, whether the real one or Bolt’s, always raises questions worth pondering.

        I certainly would not pretend to be able to adequately answer the question of how one tries to turn the lights on. My first instinct would be to say that one simply keeps trying, never gives up and never despairs.

    • You take More’s words to advocate sophistry. As More’s character says, he can’t speak words with his mouth and say something else with his mind, as his daughter requests to save his life. You diagree with Fr Fox, and JPII, but not Pope Francis and advocates of Consequentialism, that there are intrinsically evil acts, which as Fr. Fox says, are different than “very, very bad acts,” but acts which no intention or situation will justify. Adultery for adultery for King Henry. Murder is murder for the woman considering abortion in case of rape or incest. Love in her case, as Fr Fox says, is truth in this case. It is a false kindness in this case that is opposed to love.

  6. An overview of the issue is helpful to answering this question. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution states [Passed by Congress June 13, 1866, and ratified July 9, 1868 the 14th amendment extended liberties and rights granted by the Bill of Rights to former slaves]. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 2 For all its intricacies, this amendment most noticeably accords substantial rights to persons. These rights include citizenship, due process, and equal protection. To avoid arbitrary enforcement of these rights, it is necessary to agree upon a definition of the word person. Looking first to the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio, said ‘the only question to be asked of the creature claiming [Fourteenth Amendment] protection is this: ‘Is he a man?’ 3 Yet, surprisingly, this question went unanswered in the landmark case Roe v. Wade that served to exclude an entire segment of the population from the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment.4 In Roe, the Supreme Court declared itself unable to answer the question of when the life of a human being begins.5 Specifically, the Court stated, ‘When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.’ 6 ‘As a result of its self professed inability to decide when the life of a human being begins, the Supreme Court rendered its 1973 abortion decision without considering whether unborn children are living human beings.’7 Implicit in this decision is the finding that unborn children are not protected as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment’ ((Dr Kelly Hollowell in Regent University Law Review II). If the Court lacked competence in defining a ‘man’ it lacked competence in deciding in favor of Roe. Furthermore, at that time there was no historical precedent for abortion. Legal description of a person specifies independence; some jurists identify separation from umbilical cord. Catholic attorneys have appealed to litigation regarding the unborn and rights attributed to the prenatal infant. America today is as some put it post Christian, and with that the inherent inviolability of human life is lost, and judicial judgment rests more on the value of life rather than its inherent right to life. Murder by abortion is not understood at large. Although Catholics [that is faithful not nominal] apprehend the matter we are compelled to convince the majority of Americans that the fetus [Latin for infant] is a human being regardless of whether it doesn’t comply with legal standards necessary for litigation. As such the parent or guardian assumes that right as the prenatal infant’s proxy. Arguing the case for murder will not convince unless it’s shown that the prenatal infant has legal rights as a person. Perhaps a more effective approach is the sonogram, and continued witness by appeal to the inherent inviolability of ‘human life’, a more applicable term used by then Chief Justice Rehnquist in his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood E PA v Casey.

    • The question is whether, under the commonly accepted usage of the day, the term “person” as used by the framers of the 14th amendment, included an unborn child. The proper way to interpret these amendments is by analyzing what a word means in common usage of the day and time the amendment was passed. There is no evidence at all that when the framers used the word “person” that they meant unborn children. If that were true, since “persons” are to be counted in the census, then the framers would have assumed that unborn children would be counted in the census. This is obviously not something they intended.
      It is pretty much the unanimous opinion of all scholars that have looked into this that the framers did not intend that the word “person” be construed to include unborn children. So there really is no basis in law to construe the 14th amendment that way.
      Roe v Wade will have to be overturned, and the sooner the better. But it cannot be altered by the “person” argument.

      • How is it that in the next few decades after the Civil War every state in the Union criminalized deliberately taking the life of the child in the womb? It seems those children were considered “persons” back then.

        Most legal scholars today deny that our Declaration of Independence is a legal document, an idea that John Quincy Adams demolished. This demolition is recounted in Gary V. Wood’s Heir to the Fathers: John Quincy Adams and the Spirit of Constitutional Government. The DOI makes clear that humanity has inalienable rights to life and liberty, which Roe v Wade ignored because of the mistaken notion of contemporary legal scholars that the DOI isn’t a legal document. It is our primary legal document. The idea that it isn’t was born in the immoral and irrational defense of slavery. We ended slavery but we didn’t correct the perverse thinking that had crept into American jurisprudence while it was being defended.

      • Samton I assume then you’re in agreement with my contention that the right to life of the unborn is not found in the legal description of person. Rather it is found in unwritten Common Law tradition. Neither is Dr Kelly Hollowell’s [JD PhD] thesis a defense of the unborn based on person. That is clear in her citing the 14th Amendment rhetorical question made by its author Congressman Bingham, “‘Is he a man?” The answer as Hollowell suggests is obvious, despite the selective ignorance of Chief Justice Warren Burger and associates, [Blackmun’s opinion in favor was joined by Burger, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, Marshall, Powell. Dissent included Byron White, William Rehnquist, the latter to become Chief Justice]. As Chief Justice in Casey [Planned Parenthood E PA v Casey 1992] Rehnquist wrote in dissent “We are now in the view that, in terming this right fundamental, the Court in Roe read the earlier opinions upon which it based its decision much too broadly. Unlike marriage, procreation and contraception, abortion ‘involves the purposeful termination of human life.’ The abortion decision must therefore be recognized as sui generis, different in kind from the others that the court has protected under the rubric of personal or family privacy and autonomy” (Casey, 112 CT at 2859 Rehnquist, CJ concurring in the judgment in part and the dissenting in part). SC Justice Robert Beezer in reflection in his dissenting opinion on assisted suicide in Compassion in Dying 1995 adds “Abortion is sui generis, and the courts are on notice that these four Justices will not find fundamental any other asserted right that involves the purposeful termination of human life”. Whereas we cannot find argument in defense of the unborn in the legal description of person we instead find a more substantial defense of the right to life of the unborn in founding father Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Jefferson mirrors Catholic thought in referencing “men are created equal” alluding to the process of creation, which encompasses the unborn.

    • Why do the unconvinced remain unconvinced? Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M., shows that the blockage finally is not a matter of intellect, but of the will. He develops his points over several luminous pages, but here are a few sentences (Authenticity, i977/Ignatius 1997):

      “The popular model for reaching truth is the researchable-experimental model. One leaves ignorance behind […] through patient study and hard-nosed criticism [….] [But] Two people can examine exactly the same evidence and come up with opposite conclusions [….] A second curious problem concerns the extraordinary tenacity with which most people cling to their opinions in the areas of morality, politics and religion [….]

      “Why this vast resistance to CONCLUSIVE [italics] evidence? It cannot be basically an intellectual matter. It must be largely mixed with will [….] Theologians can and do the same [….] (pre- and extramarital sex and homosexual relations) [….]
      “Not only are the unconverted in error. They do not even grasp what causes their error. Their way, says the sage, is like darkness, and they do not know over what they stumble (Prov 4:19) [….] THE WILL, ROOT OF ERROR [italics] [….] This disease is never cured, the saint [Augustine] adds, not because the doctor is inept, but because the sufferer is incurable (The City of God, bk. 6, chap. 1). When people are burdened and broken by their sins, their minds are blinded by a love for darkness and iniquity (bk. 7, chap. 31).”

      Reflecting on the “disease” and “the doctor,” might we say that man does not live by either a more convincing argument—nor by a “field-hospital” church alone?

  7. You just gotta believe that in a hundred years from now, people sitting around and talking will say “ you know people years ago actually killed the unborn by the millions!

    • Our time will be viewed much as the time of the Nazis or of child sacrifice. “Can you believe they used to do this, and nobody even spoke up about it?” They will be astounded at our behavior.

  8. Words are important which is why abortion providers describe the procedure as a “termination of pregnancy”. Under Massachusetts Law (MGL,C.112, S.12K) pregnancy is defined as “the condition of a mother carrying an unborn child” and abortion is called “the knowing destruction of an unborn child”.

  9. The problem of abortion is one of broken and perhaps irredeemable souls with no concept of love or good. A few years back I saw an interview of a women who had just had her eighth abortion. The reporter asked, “Why don’t you get your tubes tied?” To which the women replied, “I can’t be bothered.” Then the reporter replied, “Don’t you believe that the aborted babies are human?”. To which the women replied, “Of course they are human. I just don’t want the kids.” Such hardened hearts have been reported from time to time throughout history and in every nation, and not only with respect to the killing of babies. Using words to classify these deeds as undesirable in whatever which way will not solve the problem. Are such acts ‘murder’? Of course they are and the perpetrators do not care if they are. Without a lived understanding of God as caring for the lives of humans and that creation is fundamentally good, all atrocities are possible. So many now live with a conviction that God, if there is one, does not care and is the source of all evil in human lives. I see the problem of abortion as fundamentally a lack of the understanding of the nature of existence.

  10. Over 60 Million and still counting in the US since 1972 actually.Talk is all we do.Then we come back and talk some more.The results are there for all to see.Make America Great Again?It will never really happen till this Evil is banished from our land and God’s Creation isn’t erased by the Selfishness of the father & mother.One or the other or both
    as they dance to the Devils tune.

  11. I was on an online blog recently when a pro-abortion advocate made the usual remark about pro-lifers not caring about the baby once it was born. I offered the fact that my children were both adopted by me. One is a Paramedic, who, I suggested to this person, could one day save your life. Their reaction was one of disbelief and they responded on the blog with the open question, “Does anyone here believe this story isnt totally made up?” Now, my kids ARE adopted and one of them IS a paramedic, who has in fact been credited with saving lives . How sad these people cant absorb that reality.Maybe it makes the lose babies too real to them. Now, to the Catholic and pro-life stand of wanting ALL abortion outlawed, even for the case of rape or to save the life of the Mother, I tell you flatly it will NEVER gain traction.Most people, even prolifers, feel that allowing abortion in those rare cases would be a case of the “lesser of two evils”. In insisting on zero abortion for any reason, prolifers essentially are throwing the babies under the bus when a sincere amount of support could be found to at least halt third trimester abortions and post birth infanticide. You will NEVER find political support to ban ALL abortions at this point in society. Most people of all political persuasions find third trimester abortion, even those done by the 5th month, despicable and disgusting. Start with what is achievable and then worry about the rest. In a case like abortion , half a loaf IS INDEED better than none. You will save some lives. Certainly that has to be better than saving none.

  12. In the next few decades after the Civil War and the end of American slavery, every state in the Union criminalized deliberately taking the life of the child in the womb. Americans had paid attention to the message inherent in what Lincoln considered the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War to be: a divine chastisement for American slavery. The message was that American jurisprudence must protect the inalienable rights to life and liberty of ALL humanity. In ending slavery and criminalizing abortion America had finally reconciled its laws with the noble principles proclaimed in its founding document, our Declaration of Independence, in particular, that the state existed to protect the inalienable rights to life and liberty of ALL humanity.
    A century later the Supreme Court overthrew that America with its infamous Roe v Wade decision. Shockingly, it did so only a few decades after the whole world, at the Nuremberg Trials, had condemned the outrageous notion that the state had the authority to “legalize” the murder of innocent humanity as a matter of social policy. The world at that time had a firm grip on a basic fact: the state exists for humanity, not humanity for the state. As Aristotle had put it: The state comes into existence so that Man may live.
    One doesn’t need to be a Christian or even theistic to grasp the simple facts:
    — Humanity precedes the state and brings the state into existence;
    — therefore the state exists for humanity, not humanity for the state;
    — therefore it is humanity that bestows and withdraws the state’s right to exist, not the state that bestows and withdraws humanity’s right to exist;
    — therefore the state simply has no authority whatsoever to “legalize” the murder of innocent humanity as a matter of social policy.
    Just as the Nazi regime raised fundamental questions about the very nature and purpose of government, so has Roe v Wade. “Legal murder” is an issue like no other. It should elicit a response from the Church as intense as the Christian Abolitionists’ response to slavery, or as intense as was the response of the young people of the White Rose to “legal” murder in Nazi Germany.

    The flock doesn’t need any more well reasoned arguments. We have had those since 1973. What the flock needs is exhortation to respond to murder of thousands of babies every day in America in a manner commensurate with the urgency of the situation. At a minimum, the bishops should make clear that it has become mortally sinful to vote for Democrat party candidates.

  13. I lost a child in 72′, my high school sweetheart, who I proposed to as I had a good job as well,declined, and flew to New York which was the only place to get a legal abortion.As a man I have parental rights and responsibilities. That aborted baby was my child too. One of the greatest (pregnant) women I ever met told me she was violently raped..when I wrongly assumed she was getting an abortion she informed me thusly: “That man beat and raped me.. I’ll be damned if I am going to let him kill my baby too.”

  14. Our courts and legislatures are dominated by lawyers. Law is the most morally ambiguous profession of all and that is being very generous. As has been said many times, “The only good lawyer is one who helps decent people navigate the mad-house their colleagues have turned the legal system into”.

    That we have made our Supreme Court into not just the arbiter but the oracle of morality is absolutely insane. Meanwhile the leaders of our Church and the churches stand by impotent.

  15. Is abortion murder? It is the intentional killing of an unborn child. Therefore, the answer is unequivocally yes. Having said that, we must also recognize that women are often victims with respect to abortion, i.e. they are often pressured into the act by family or through brainwashing by our secularized society. On the other hand, the vast majority of abortionists know exactly what they are doing, so I would accuse them of first-degree murder.

    As for accompanying mother’s after birth, there are a number of organizations that do exactly that. We have two of them here in our area that my wife and I have been involved with for a number of years.

    Other social issues involve debatable approaches. For example, what is the roll of the government versus the roll of the individual and/or private charities. Government control results in loss of taxpayer control over how that money is used. Thus, taxpayer money can be used to fund abortion or other items that are against one’s moral beliefs. On the other hand, abortion is an intrinsic evil, i.e. it is always wrong, therefore there is nothing to debate. Modern science has led to the indisputable answer that the object in the mother’s womb is a human life.

  16. “While we firmly hold that abortion is an evil and we work for its elimination, it is also true that we must love and care for all people, including those who have promoted abortion or had an abortion themselves. For example, Rachel’s Vineyard is an excellent ministry of the Catholic Church dedicated to bring healing to those wounded by abortion. And it is our faith that God loves every person and forgives every sin confessed to Him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We are all sinners in need of God’s incredible mercy.”

    This paragraph is not necessarily good (it depends on the author’s understanding of the word “love”). Love doesn’t always mean being nice. When one considers the criminal justice system – is the penalty for murder being warm and kind to the perpetrator and/or his cooperator(s)? No. The penalty can be death. It probably should be death.

    What should happen is that abortion should be prosecuted as the murder that it is. Why isn’t it? Probably because of a lack of recognition of the natural law and the dominance of the falsehood of legal positivism. Law is not some contingent and arbitrary legislative fact created by the “will of the people” to be taken as a given and never to be critiqued, but is a human participation with the natural law WHICH INCLUDES the moral order.

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