A Christian, public philosophy for life: why standing for life matters for us all
A few months ago, my daughter and I went to the Newseum here in Washington D.C. There in the museum was a remnant of the fallen Berlin Wall between that divided East Germany from West Germany, and the sobering reality of the freedoms Communism removed from its own citizens. In the museum, there were also exhibits related to the Holocaust, haunting movies of man’s inhumanity to man. I remember the moderator’s challenge to “look at these things intently, really look, don’t turn away, so that such things might never happen again. Those are sobering words.
The challenge of those exhibits matters if we look with open eyes at the inhumanities in our own midst. With the concerns raised in the past weeks about the effects of policy on children, it should cause our country to look clearly at the enduring “child holocaust” that continues to happen in America. Thousands of children are killed each day, mostly as a matter of convenience for the sexual practices of consenting adults. Movies like “Silent Scream” and other gruesome pictures that try to demonstrate what happens in such clinics each day are summarily dismissed with calls to “look away” as if there’s nothing here. With science clearly demonstrating that the fetus is a child at conception, one that can feel pain at the 20th week or even before, funding the destruction of the most helpless among us is an enduring public scandal. And then there are reports like the one attached by LIVEACTION called Aiding Abusers – Planned Parenthood’s coverup of Child Sexual Abuse, 2018 It shows that an industry which provides abortions is motivated even to abuse its patients when it affects the bottom line.
Such things matter to us all because a culture that willfully destroys the most vulnerable in its midst eventually develops a coarseness and an inhumanity that can destroy the culture itself. If civility, humaneness, and peace matter for us, we need to “look intently” at abortion anew.
In 1994, Mother Teresa spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in our Nation’s Capitol, saying,
The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?... By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world…..Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.
Giving abortion a “hard look” leads us to stand for life because the sanctity of life matters for all.