Judie Brown
Babies by the numbers
By Judie Brown
According to reports, the abortion rate in the United States continues to decline. In its article on this subject, the Guttmacher Institute – the research arm of Planned Parenthood – says in its summary: "The decline in abortions appears to be related to declines in births and pregnancies overall." But the other shoe drops in the summary, when it says: "Attempts to reduce abortion through coercive restrictions are a direct violation of individuals' dignity, bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom."
And therein lies the rub. The politically charged language quoted above gives Guttmacher's research away.
It is not coercive to pursue proposed laws that attempt to regulate how or where preborn babies are killed. Such efforts are flawed, but they attempt to respect the individual dignity of the preborn child – a fact pro-abortion forces cannot countenance.
Supporters of abortion cannot admit that the preborn individual's dignity is violated every time an act of abortion renders a human being dead! Indeed, the very act of abortion is a violation of individual dignity!
Further, since when is it rational to argue that the expectant mother has bodily autonomy, but her baby has none? Only in America would such a statement even bear a crumb of credibility, because only in America did seven justices of the Supreme Court decide that people preparing to be born are not actually people at all and thus have no human identity. Since that time – January 22, 1973 – millions of people whose lives began the same way yours and mine did have died because legal denial of their humanity has crushed their bodily autonomy under the gavel of so-called reproductive freedom.
My point, however, is simple: Declining numbers of killings do not justify a moment of celebration or glee. The fact remains that, as long as pro-life Americans are working to regulate or control the killing, they are confusing the uninformed by injecting moral relativism into a situation that is undeniably heinous for every single preborn child – not just the ones a flawed law happens to save.
Pro-life attorney Gualberto Garcia Jones sums this up beautifully when he writes: "Pro-life organizations are dancing with the devil by supporting [a] morally flawed bill. They are abandoning the least of God's own image-bearers in the hopes of a political win, and this will inevitably result in losing the blessings of God."
Here we are nearly half a century later celebrating the fact that, as a nation, we are not killing as many individual persons prior to birth as we were a year ago! We are losing the blessings of God because we have set aside His law that says "You Shall Not Kill" in order to chip away at a nation's devotion to the massacre of the innocent.
And that, my friends, is the sad truth.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church minces no words on this topic: "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."
Babies are not numbers, my friends. They are babies even when they are a single cell in size. Let us never shy away from making that clear and teaching this truth: "No one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."
A baby is not a statistic. A baby is always and every case a gift from God.
© Judie Brown
December 6, 2019
According to reports, the abortion rate in the United States continues to decline. In its article on this subject, the Guttmacher Institute – the research arm of Planned Parenthood – says in its summary: "The decline in abortions appears to be related to declines in births and pregnancies overall." But the other shoe drops in the summary, when it says: "Attempts to reduce abortion through coercive restrictions are a direct violation of individuals' dignity, bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom."
And therein lies the rub. The politically charged language quoted above gives Guttmacher's research away.
It is not coercive to pursue proposed laws that attempt to regulate how or where preborn babies are killed. Such efforts are flawed, but they attempt to respect the individual dignity of the preborn child – a fact pro-abortion forces cannot countenance.
Supporters of abortion cannot admit that the preborn individual's dignity is violated every time an act of abortion renders a human being dead! Indeed, the very act of abortion is a violation of individual dignity!
Further, since when is it rational to argue that the expectant mother has bodily autonomy, but her baby has none? Only in America would such a statement even bear a crumb of credibility, because only in America did seven justices of the Supreme Court decide that people preparing to be born are not actually people at all and thus have no human identity. Since that time – January 22, 1973 – millions of people whose lives began the same way yours and mine did have died because legal denial of their humanity has crushed their bodily autonomy under the gavel of so-called reproductive freedom.
My point, however, is simple: Declining numbers of killings do not justify a moment of celebration or glee. The fact remains that, as long as pro-life Americans are working to regulate or control the killing, they are confusing the uninformed by injecting moral relativism into a situation that is undeniably heinous for every single preborn child – not just the ones a flawed law happens to save.
Pro-life attorney Gualberto Garcia Jones sums this up beautifully when he writes: "Pro-life organizations are dancing with the devil by supporting [a] morally flawed bill. They are abandoning the least of God's own image-bearers in the hopes of a political win, and this will inevitably result in losing the blessings of God."
Here we are nearly half a century later celebrating the fact that, as a nation, we are not killing as many individual persons prior to birth as we were a year ago! We are losing the blessings of God because we have set aside His law that says "You Shall Not Kill" in order to chip away at a nation's devotion to the massacre of the innocent.
And that, my friends, is the sad truth.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church minces no words on this topic: "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."
Babies are not numbers, my friends. They are babies even when they are a single cell in size. Let us never shy away from making that clear and teaching this truth: "No one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."
A baby is not a statistic. A baby is always and every case a gift from God.
© Judie Brown
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
