The pro-life agenda has no meaning apart from its being rooted in absolute truth, in self-evident truths - truths that are true because they're true, not because somebody says they are true.- Chuck Colson
Two recent news
stories shocked pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike. In a sad way, that’s good
news.
The statistic has
everyone reeling: According to a recent survey, forty-one percent of
pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. Forty-one percent. Nearly
half.
As you might expect,
pro-lifers are deeply concerned, and already trying to find ways to bring that
number down. Archbishop Timothy Dolan to name one, called a news conference to
say that the church would be stepping up its efforts to encourage and help
women in crisis pregnancies.
But pro-choicers
weren’t too excited about this news either. The New York Times—hardly a
pro-life bastion—reported, “No one is exactly celebrating. . . . Even abortion
rights advocates expressed some concern about the numbers, trying to change the
conversation to a broader one on reproductive health.”
The Times
noted that the easy access to abortion makes the city a “magnet . . . for
doctors who wish to practice without restrictions [and] for women who want to
live in an atmosphere of sexual self-determination.”
Those are, of
course, noble and laudable desires according to the pro-choice folks. And yet
the tone of the article is distinctly uneasy. It quotes late-term abortionist
Dr. Robert Berg, who says his patients tend to be “hostile” to him, treating
him like “a punching bag” even though he’s providing a service that they’ve
asked for.
If abortion is a
morally neutral medical procedure, as the pro-choicers would have us believe,
why all the angst coming from people who are getting abortions? I think it all
comes back to what J. Budziszewski calls “what we can’t not know.”
Why would a woman be
angry at an abortionist? Because he is about to kill her child, and any woman
knows that is wrong. She can’t help but know it. None of us can. It’s one of
the deepest truths written on our hearts—that human life is sacred, and
destroying an innocent life in the womb is one of the most violent acts
imaginable.
The recent arrest of
Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia dragged that ugly truth into the spotlight.
Gosnell ran a “house of horrors” where babies were slaughtered with scissors,
where some of their mothers died as well, and where some of the babies’ body
parts were kept in jars.
The nation was horrified—but
why? Late-term abortions often involve killing babies with scissors—the only
difference is that it’s usually done as the baby is still emerging from the
birth canal, not after it’s all the way out. Some difference.
But when Gosnell
made the news, we were all reminded of what we can’t not know—that it’s wrong
to kill babies in this way, or in any other way.
Eric Metaxas, author
of Bonhoeffer, has written that the grand jury report on Gosnell may
become the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the pro-life movement. I hope he’s
right. It’s tragic that it takes something as drastic as a baby’s foot in a
jar, or a 41 percent abortion rate in a major city, to remind everybody that
abortion is an unjustifiable travesty.
But when we see even
pro-choicers getting upset about these things, then we know that the truth is
written on their hearts just as it is on ours.
May the day quickly
come when they can no longer ignore it.
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