“The U.S. abortion rate fell to its lowest level since
1974, to 19.4 per 1,000 women, dropping the total to 1.2 million in
2005, a report said.” — Wall Street Journal, January 18,
2008.
Recent news of the decline of abortions in America is welcome but
hardly comforting. This month the nation observes the 35th
anniversary of the Supreme Court’s grisly decisions, Roe v.
Wade and Doe v. Bolton, that sanctioned abortion for
all nine months of pregnancy, up to the very threshold of birth.
For three and a half decades, America has witnessed the destruction
of tens of millions of lives, numbers that dwarf Vietnam, September
11, Afghanistan, and Iraq many times over.
From a moral perspective, the reduction in the lives lost to
abortion, hundreds of thousands annually, is certainly a positive
development beyond measure. And yet, the sense of overwhelming
sadness persists.
Each year 1.2 million human beings are still deprived of their
inalienable right to live, to love, to work, to create, to strive,
to suffer, to fail, to experience existence that is the greatest of
gifts bestowed on every human being who comes into this world. The
darkness still engulfs the land, not just in America but in most of
what was once known as the West.
The prevalence of abortion, for almost any reason imaginable,
tracks with the decline of marriage and births, the increase in
child abuse and a host of childhood pathologies derived from a
toxic blend of neglect and over-indulgence. Our children want for
nothing other than love and order and parental authority grounded
in experience and wisdom.
All of this has precious little to do with poverty or the lack
of material resources. It has everything to do with the ideology of
personal autonomy that recognizes no restraints on the individual’s
wishes, desires, behaviors, or actions.
In the face of this determination to do what one wants, when one
wants it, not even a dynamic, unique, genetically distinct,
never-to-be-duplicated human being, making his or her untimely
appearance on the scene, can restrain such an insistent self who
cannot acknowledge the common humanity that binds one self to
another.
THE RECENT Supreme Court decision permitting a ban on partial birth
abortion, a generous term describing a practice more akin to
infanticide, is another instance of a welcome but hardly consoling
development in our public debate over the humanity of the unborn.
This was a close decision, relying on one swing justice who seemed
to have a change of heart.
But the fact that we are actually debating, fiercely, the
proposition that the destruction of a child, again, at almost the
moment of birth, should be outlawed in a society that is pleased to
call itself civilized, is really quite depressing.
Some things should be considered beyond the Pale, morally and
legally. Like slavery or child abuse, shouldn’t this awful practice
merit the scorn of a society aspiring to be both liberal and
humane?
The hard truth is that evil, even evil defined as the absence of
good rather than as a substantive force, can persist over time for
generations. It must be named for what it is, resisted, endured,
mitigated where possible, and, in God’s good time, overcome.
Testifying to the evil of abortion requires standing for
integrity of the human person manifested in the humanity of the
unborn child. In this way substantive good can trump insubstantial
evil.
THIS IS NOT a brief for quietism or acquiescence in the face of 1.2
million dead Americans each year. It is simply a humble recognition
that our feeble efforts in defense of human life may, for a time,
be without immediate effect, at least in the broader society in
which we live.
In the end we must strive to love the mothers, the fathers, and
the children who are implicated in this great evil. In this way we
can offer witness to the truth which may, hopefully, be recognized
one day by our fellow citizens.
