Protecting unborn remains central to building a culture of life

In a statement to mark Respect Life Month, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who chairs the U.S. bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities, addressed multiple direct threats to human life. But the cardinal also reiterated at the outset that the Church “will voice our opposition to the injustice and cruelty of abortion on behalf of those victims whose voices have been silenced.”

Some Catholics will doubtless object, as they have before, to what they see as this “singular focus” on abortion. So let us review, once again, why the Church’s commitment to protecting the unborn — and offering alternatives to abortion — is not a singular focus; why, rather, it is as Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard described it more than a decade ago, the “linchpin” to the culture of life we are striving to build.

There is, first of all, the magnitude of abortion’s destruction: thousands of human lives each day, a million a year for almost 40 years now — and that is just in our nation. Worldwide, the numbers are incalculable. Besides the “injustice and cruelty” to those being killed, there is the question of what this government-sanctioned killing is doing to us as a society. If — as we believe — the occasional use of the death penalty desensitizes us to the sacredness of human life, how can we help but become absolutely morally numbed by this mass destruction of these most innocent, most defenseless of human beings?

Then there are, as Cardinal DiNardo poignantly observes, “the living victims of abortion — the mothers and fathers who grieve the loss of an irreplaceable child.” As the abortion culture of necessity denies the reality of such grief, it falls to the Church and the pro-life movement to provide the love and healing that these thousands and thousands of victims need; to remind them, as the cardinal said, “that God’s mercy is greater than any human sin, and that healing and peace can be theirs through the sacrament of reconciliation and the Church’s Project Rachel Ministry.”

Finally, there is the terrible impact the abortion mentality has on respect for all human life — especially those who are vulnerable or marginalized. The movement to legalize abortion was always presented as in part a “women’s rights” issue, but also as a “solution” to a range of issues of human suffering: poverty, child abuse, disability, to name a few.

This approach targets the victims, rather than the causes, of human suffering. And in the decades since Roe v. Wade, we have seen this “destroy the victim” mentality expand beyond abortion, to include euthanasia, assisted suicide, and even promotion of infanticide, as “solutions” to the suffering of those who are mentally or physically disabled, elderly and sick, or terminally ill. We see now the wisdom in the words spoken by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, a leading voice for the “seamless garment” approach to life issues, that “a society which destroys human life by abortion under the mantle of law, unavoidably undermines respect for life in all other contexts.”

As we begin Respect Life Month, we are called to renew our commitment to protecting all human life, and to building a culture in which the life and dignity of every human being is not just respected, but reverenced.

That cannot happen — on any issue — as long as the abortion mentality prevails in our culture. Again Cardinal Bernardin:

“Protection in law and practice of unborn human life will benefit all life, not only the lives of the unborn;” and therefore “It is imperative that we, as Christians called to serve the least among us, give urgent attention and priority to this issue of justice.”

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