James M. Kushiner, Exec. Dir., The Fellowship of St. James -
The 46th Annual March for Life was last week. I participated in the Chicago March for Life last Sunday. A few hundred counter-demonstrators held signs and made noisy protests either about separation of church and state or the so-called right of a woman to "choose."
The pro-abortion protestors seem to want to silence pro-life marchers. They certainly tried to do that in Chicago last Sunday, banging on drums and shouting through bullhorns so that marchers on the edge of the crowd had a hard time hearing the pro-life speeches that were being made. Is it a violation of freedom of speech when others drown you out?
I've sometimes wanted to ask a pro-abortion protestor a few questions:
1) Is it a human life or not? If you insist that the entity in the womb is not a human life, what is your proof that I am wrong to say it is a human life? Science has long proven that it is alive, it is human, and will continue through all the stages of natural human life unless something fatal occurs (miscarriage, defect, disease) or is done to it (abortion, infanticide, murder).
2) Do I have a right to my opinion? That is, may I believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is a human being or should the state have the right to tell me what to think about this? If you wish the state to tell me what to believe, do you grant the state the power to tell you what to believe about God? About the opposite sex? The age of consent?
3) If you believed innocent human life was being killed, wouldn't you say something? Don't you want to live in a society in which conscientious citizens are willing to speak out when they think innocent lives are being taken? Even if you think us mistaken for defending the unborn, do you want us to silence our consciences and turn our backs if we think a terrible injustice is being done? What kind of country would it be to have most of its citizens ignore such killing? Harold O. J. Brown told me in the first interview I ever conducted (1978) that those who know what is going on but fail to speak are complicit in the crime.
Those who allow for our conscientious witness may fall back on the "choice" argument. Absolutism about choice assumes absolute human autonomy. It imagines there is a wall of separation between each self and others, a wall that only can be breached when you wish to breach it. You may choose to welcome the child, or view it, since you think it has no claim on you, as an intruder. It's your choice.
But consider sexual intercourse. The female body is intricately designed to procreate, house and grow the baby, give birth, and nurse and raise the child. The first phase, procreation, occurs as the designed result of sexual union with a male. A woman and man are engaging in the activity that is designed to bring a human being into existence. When it does not create a new baby, something is lacking.
Life begins in the womb. The sexual act is not autonomous; the two become one flesh–in the very child their two sets of DNA bring into being when they fuse together. You can see the man and the woman become one flesh in each of their children, who look like mom and dad, two themes and their variations.
The sexual revolution insists you are free to engage in the procreative act as you wish, as autonomous individuals. But to do so and insist on the right to have an abortion is to insist not merely that I have a right to sex that doesn't perform what sex is meant to do, but that if it does make a child, then I have a license to kill that child anytime before birth. This false sense of absolute autonomy means that I imagine a right to engage in sex without any commitment and without being responsible for any child I create, a child who needs committed parents. I can just walk away. If I am a woman, I must abort.
No one can say that we don't know when human life begins. Life begins every time sexual intercourse achieves its designed objective. If you engage in it and create new life, that life is, according to American founding principles, created equal with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Roe v. Wade aborts this clause of our founding Declaration.
I saw only individuals among the pro-abortion protestors and no families It is impossible for a nation that loves children to rest easy with abortion. Our federal judiciary certainly does not love children. But many citizens do. And we will speak out, for we must not keep silence about an ongoing American holocaust as long as it continues.
