The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s infamous Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand calls to mind the biggest pack of lies ever set in motion — lies that have cost the lives of more than 37 million innocent babies cruelly torn from their mothers’ wombs. How is it that such a slaughter, so akin to the sordid past of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, is found in the scandalous present of the United States of America, a republic purportedly based on moral values and human rights?
Only when the deadly lies behind abortion became the conventional wisdom could a free people tolerate this crime against mankind — and mankind’s Creator.
As the master par excellence of the big lie, Adolf Hitler wrote in his political treatise Mein Kampf, “the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their head, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.”
The First Lie: “We do not know when human life begins.”
“The zygote, a cell measuring less than a tenth of an inch, surely cannot be considered a human being,” the abortionists declare.
This lie can be honestly accepted only by those invincibly ignorant of the development of the human embryo. Only machines such as clocks and cars come into existence part by part. Living beings come into existence all at once and gradually unfold their world of innate potential. A living human begins to exist at the moment of conception, even though only as a cell less than a tenth of an inch. What is important is not the accident of size or weight but the essence — which is fully human.
The Second Lie: “The fetus is merely a potential person.”
The anti-lifers repackage their first lie to claim that personhood develops gradually.
Even a “potential person” is entitled to protection, which underscores the evil of abortion’s partner in the Culture of Death: contraception. To be sure, at every instant of our lives we need to develop. (Abortionists, for example, would benefit from moral development and from growth in love and compassion.) However, we act as human persons accidentally because we are persons essentially. In simple English, someone’s acting like a person is a consequence of his already being a person. The unborn child is not a potential person but a person with potential.
The Third Lie: “The mother’s rights outweigh her baby’s — even its right to life.”
“It is you ‘fetus-lovers’ who lack compassion,” the baby-killers retort. “Why should the rights of an undeveloped fetus take precedence over the rights of a fully grown woman?”
Why? Because we are talking about a fundamental human right — the right to life. Accordingly, the right to life of the unborn child should take precedence over lesser rights of his mother, just as the right to life of a born child does. A mother is not allowed to kill her children because they inconvenience her, else why did a South Carolina court try and convict Susan Smith for murder when she drowned her unwanted children?
The Fourth Lie: “Pro-lifers do not care about the mother.”
Believing, as Hitler did, that a big lie often repeated is soon believed, the abortionists persist: “You ‘anti-choice zealots’ are heartless. Why do you favor the life of the unborn child over the life of the born mother, who may even have other children?”
We respond with the words of His Holiness Pope Pius XII: “It is a mistake to formulate the question with this alternative: either the child’s life or the mother’s. No; neither the mother’s life nor the child’s life may be submitted to an act of direct suppression. For the one and the other the requirement can only be this: to make every effort to save the life of both mother and child.”
The Fifth Lie: “Every child a wanted child.”
Switching gears, the disciples of death mock our concern for the preborn child. “Doesn’t every child have the right to be born wanted?” they ask.
Yes, we reply. The real question is how to realize this ideal — by building a Christian civilization where every child is wanted, or by murdering every “unwanted” child? And unwanted by whom? The countless couples who pray every night for a baby to welcome into their hearts and lives?
“Every child a wanted child… and if not wanted, dead.” Change the words but slightly and we have the words of an earlier Culture of Death that led to the ovens of Auschwitz.
The Sixth Lie: “Some children are better off dead.”
“It is cruel to let a child be born handicapped or gravely ill,” the able-bodied abortionist protests in his prime.Has the child finally warmed the cold heart of his enemies? No, their “mercy” is Kevorkianesque. They so love people with disabilities and illnesses that they want to kill them!
But every child is made in the image of God. In Him — and from Him — there is no blemish. God’s image lies in man’s eternal soul, not in his perishable body, and in his indomitable spirit, as the triumphs of Blessed Margaret of Castello, of Baldwin IV the Leper King, of Helen Keller, and of Beethoven — to name but a few prodigies of courage — remind us.
The Seventh Lie: “The law does not recognize the unborn child’s right to life.”
After all, the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, failed to find any constitutional protection for the right to life of preborn babies, the pro-aborts remind us.
And yet our laws recognize other rights of the unborn, such as the right of inheritance and the right of legal representation. If an unborn child can inherit, be compensated for prenatal injuries, and be represented by a guardian, then any law that allows the destruction of that innocent child is schizophrenic or, as Saint Augustine would say, it is no law at all. So, too, shall find the highest court of any land, that of the Supreme Judge of all.
The Eighth Lie: “The right to privacy grants a license to abort.”
“Roe vs. Wade’s legalization of abortion is based on the constitutional ‘right to privacy.’ Since the decision to have an abortion is a personal and private matter, like religion, government should not interfere,” says this pro-choice ploy.
But a decision is private insofar as it refers only to the interests of the one who decides. When it involves the rights of others, it can no longer be considered private, and this is precisely the case in abortion. What takes place in the “privacy” of the aborted womb is the murder of an innocent human being morally entitled to the full and total protection of the law.
The Ninth Lie: “Laws against abortion discriminate against the poor.”
Hearing the abortionists, one would think that abortion is an essential part of the “preferential option for the poor.” “The rich will always have access to abortion,” they prate. Mirroring their self-histories, we must not discriminate against the poor — whose babies they, like Margaret Sanger, seek to slaughter.
Yet contrary to Planned Parenthood’s propaganda, the poor are more inclined to welcome children and less inclined to practice birth control than the rich. Those whose values transcend Wall Street treasure sons and daughters more than stocks and bonds. If there is any discrimination here, it is against the babies of the morally impoverished rich sacrificed on the altars of Mammon.
The Tenth Lie: “We can work together to reduce abortions through birth control.”
“The abortion debate is polarizing the country. Let’s put aside our differences and work together to make abortion rare” — as President Clinton has advocated — “by providing free and easy access to family planning to all women of childbearing age,” the pill-pushers cajole.
“Family planning” is a rather strange term for providing abortifacients and contraceptives to young unmarried girls so that they may practice “safe sex,” i.e., fornication. As for contraception itself, it is the door to abortion — not the barrier. Abortion is, after all, the ultimate birth control.
In the end, there can be no common ground between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.