Pro-Life

In 2012, Alberto Giubilini and Francesco Minerva published a paper in a medical “ethics” journal arguing that infanticide (killing a baby after he/she is born) is acceptable and should be legal. Jill Stanek, a former abortion “clinic” employee, testified that she has seen babies born alive after a failed abortion attempt and simply set aside and left to die (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/abby-johnson-babies-born-alive-botched-abortions). This same article states that New York abortion laws now specifically prohibit care for babies born alive after an attempted abortion. In 2013, Salon published an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams entitled: So what if abortion ends a life? Ms. Williams states that she believes abortion does take a human life, and that it doesn’t matter. Her concluding remark is this: “I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time – even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.” As of the year 2020, euthanasia is legal in at least 8 U.S. states plus Washington, D.C. There seems to be a growing fascination with death in our country. Pope St John Paul II observed this as well and said that there is now a “culture of death” in the world. This culture of death is becoming more and more brazened and aggressive. The taking of innocent human life is gravely immoral. It is thus becoming more and more imperative that Catholics, and indeed all people of good will, be actively pro-life.

It might be asked if every wrong or immoral act, or simply every sin, has to be or should be civilly illegal. Of course the answer is no. In fact, such a thing would be impossible – everyone would be in jail every day; it’s neither necessary nor possible to make every sin a civil crime. However, some things are such a grave offense against both God and man, and so destructive to society, that they need to be illegal. Abortion is certainly one such offense. Legalized abortion affects everyone, whether or not you have been directly involved in one and even if you are pro-life, which I suspect most South Dakota Catholics are. It affects people’s thinking and beliefs. For one thing, there is a strong tendency to think that if something is legal, it must not be all that bad, which is reinforced when it becomes widespread. If abortion had been illegal your whole life and if you had never heard much about it and then it came out in the news that someone was killing unborn children, you would be appalled and outraged. But now that it has been legal for so long and become frequent, that appall and outrage has been largely dimmed in probably the majority of people; after a while, people just get worn out with outrage. This leads to a second effect of legalized abortion. If even the killing of innocent children no longer appalls a person then what will? Legalized abortion has desensitized people to grave evil and thus flung the door wide open to acceptance of more and more immorality; the flood ensues until finally almost anything goes. It affects young people as well; having now grown up with legalized abortion it is likely harder for most of them to see it as the grave evil it is. Finally, without question the heart becomes severely hardened. As just one example, a mother sued a hospital because they did not diagnose her child with Down’s Syndrome prior to birth; if they had, she said, she would have certainly aborted this hardship. To be able to look at your own child and say: I would’ve killed you if I had known, is hard-heartedness. Yes, legalized abortion affects everyone.

How Did Abortion Get Legalized in the U.S.?

With the expansiveness of the culture of death, the term pro-life has come to mean more than just opposition to abortion; it now includes not only opposition to the taking of all innocent human life, a respect for human life from conception to natural death, but also opposition to all which impedes human life and support for all that enhances it. Nonetheless, at least in the U.S., a major step of putting a culture of death into practice was the legalization of abortion. How did this slaughter of innocents get started to begin with? There were many factors involved, some of which laid the groundwork so to speak (such as “enlightenment” “philosophy”). But how did it actually get pushed through? Once all the background was laid, how was such a thing actually brought about? Regardless of background, no one can just jump up and say “hey, let’s kill babies in the womb” – they’d sound like a lunatic. The plotting and scheming that occurs to bring about such things rarely becomes known. Abortion is an exception, due largely to Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Dr. Nathanson, as he himself explains, was an avowed abortionist, a founding member of NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), and had himself performed 1000’s of abortions. But then he went through a conversion, became very much against abortion, and eventually went from atheist to Catholic. This is his testimony, as related in an article by Catholic News Agency (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/abortion/articles-and-addresses/an-ex-abortionist-speaks) and taken from his own book, “Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist:”

“I was one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws [NARAL] in the U.S. in 1968 [abortion was illegal then so “repeal of laws” meant: legalize it]. A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth. How did we do this? It is important to understand the tactics involved because these tactics have been used throughout the western world with one permutation or another, in order to change abortion law.

The First Key Tactic was to capture the media

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law. Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

The Second Key Tactic was to Play the Catholic Card

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its "socially backward ideas" and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as "we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics" and "Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform." And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favor of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists' opinions.

The Third Key Tactic was the Denigration and Suppression of all Scientific Evidence that Life Begins at Conception

A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy. Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions? Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.”