The Holy Innocents: In Defense of the Unborn

The Holy Innocents: In Defense of the Unborn

 
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you;” (Jeremiah 1:5) “Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother's womb.” (Psalm 22:5)

 
Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.From the first moment of existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2270)

 
Introduction

The Catholic Church often finds itself alone in the United States and in the International Community, in its defense of “Life” and the rights of the unborn.  In the United States and Canada we find some of the most extreme legislation and judicial decisions, literally leaving the unborn child with no rights and defenseless.  Much like the decision to defend slavery in the nineteenth century, long after most predominantly Christian nations had given up the practice; we may very well find ourselves on the wrong side of history in our lack of defense for the Right to Life of the unborn.  

Roe v. Wade is the twentieth century equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sanford – the infamous decision holding that slaves and their descendants were not and could not be “citizens” of any American State for purposes of the Constitution.  Conceptually, the Roe abortion rule is like slavery; it de-humanizes and treats as chattel a whole class of humanity. As Dred Scott held that Blacks were not persons entitled to constitutional protection, so Roe holds that unborn humans are not entitled to basic constitutional protection for their lives.  As the Court in Dred Scott said that Black slaves are merely the property of their owners, so Roe said that an unborn human being is merely property belonging to it’s pregnant mother – which the woman can dispose of as she wishes.   If, as Abraham Lincoln said at Coopers Union, the message of slavery is that a man is not a man if he is Black, the core message of Roe is that a human being is not a human being if he or she is in utero. (CNSNews.com, Lynn Wardle, January 23, 2015) 

 
The justice which the Catholic Church seeks for the unborn is part of the “seamless garment” of life; the association of life issues with the seamless cloak of Jesus that his executioners did not tear sense it had no seam.  This term was coined by the Catholic activist Eileen Egan (1912–2000) and further developed by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernadin (1928–1996), to promote the notion of a “consistent ethic of life” as concerns the issues of abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia.  Within the last hundred years we have witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, the holocaust of the Armenians by the crumpling Ottoman Empire and the holocaust of the unborn, which in length of years and numbers lost, is greater than all others.  

The Right to Privacy

The philosophical and judicial notion of a “right to privacy” has its roots in the philosophy of the seventeenth century British Empiricist philosopher John Locke, whose ideas on government greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson.  Locke opposed the “divine right of kings” style of government, which was popular in France and other European countries of his day.  He supported the deposing the last Catholic monarch of England, James II and the installing of William and Mary to rule as limited monarchs.  In his “Natural Rights Theory,” he  proposes that every person is born with a right to life, liberty and private property, in other words these three inalienable rights could not be taken away by and monarchy or parliament.  

It is this third right of Locke’s theory, the right to private property, that had been employed by modern pro-choice proponents to support their idea of a woman’s right over her body as extending to even the unborn child.  This of course was never the intention of Locke himself, his concern was to limit government search and seizures of property and to further an idea that the fruit of your labors were a part of your person.          

Much of the attention the Supreme Court once lavished on a broad concept of property ….it now devotes to certain personal liberties that it has designated as “fundamental”.  Remarkably, the property paradigm, including the old language of absoluteness, broods over this developing jurisprudence of personal rights.  The new right of privacy, like the old right of property, has been imagined by the Court and lawyers generally as marking off a protected sphere surrounding the individual….(the right to privacy was) quite literally pulled from the hat of property. (Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, 1991; pages 40, 50)

 
The Right to Privacy first emerged from the Right to Private Property in American Jurisprudence in 1890, but was concerned with the protection of private communication from unlawful use by the press and publications.  It entered the realm of law as concerns  human sexuality in 1965, when the Supreme Court struck down contraceptive restrictions legislated by the States in Griswold versus Connecticut.  This decision was a nod by the court Supreme Court towards Planned Parenthood and its contraceptive programs.  This fallacious extension of the Right to Private Property to a Right to Privacy, along with the usurping of State’s Rights by the Supreme Court reached its pinnacle in the landmark decision of Roe versus Wade in 1973.  

Ironically part of the argument for legalized abortion was the “bad science” being taught at the time, that it was impossible to say when human life begins, or when the fetus feels pain, or has viability outside the womb.  All these arguments have been debunked by science today, so much so that the feminist Naomi Wolf has declared that abortion is the taking of a human life, but that women should be allow to do so. (Naomi Wolf, “our Bodies, Our Souls,” New Republic, 1995)

With Roe versus Wade, the Constitutional Rights of the unborn, which had existed since the ratification of the United States Constitution ceased to exist. 

EVANGELIUM VITAE

Pope Saint Paul VI in 1968, had clearly upheld the Catholic Church’s teaching on the protection of the unborn’s right to life: 

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (Pope Paul VI, Humane Vitae, July 25, 1968, no.14)

 
Saint John Paul II, further explained Catholic teaching on life in his encyclical letter, Evangelium Vitae of 1995, which was written to proclaim that, “The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus' message. Lovingly received day after day by the Church, it is to be preached with dauntless fidelity as "good news" to the people of every age and culture.”(Evangelium Vitae, no.1)

John Paul II points to the confusion of culture today, the devaluation of life and the violence against the poor, elderly, women, the handicapped, and the unborn.  He names this the “culture of death,” which violates the sacredness of human life.  He writes:

In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today's social problems,…it is no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency… In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed.

In order to facilitate the spread of abortion, enormous sums of money have been invested and continue to be invested in the production of pharmaceutical products which make it possible to kill the fetus in the mother's womb without recourse to medical assistance. On this point, scientific research itself seems to be almost exclusively preoccupied with developing products which are ever more simple and effective in suppressing life and which at the same time are capable of removing abortion from any kind of control or social responsibility.(Evangelium Vitae, no. 12-13)

 
Reflecting on Sacred Scripture in Jeremiah, Job, Psalms, and the meeting of the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth in Luke; John Paul II writes, “How can anyone think that even a single moment of this marvelous process of the unfolding of life could be separated from the wise and loving work of the Creator, and left prey to human caprice?”

Conclusion

While St. Stephen is counted as being the first Christian martyr, the Holy Innocents were the first to be martyred because Christ had entered into the world.  The selfish pursuit of power and unwillingness to be open to the Truth, led Herod to slaughter the Holy Innocents, in hope of that one of them would be the baby Jesus.  Unfortunately, in our culture the pursuit of personal wealth, power, and extreme individualism coupled with a secular-agnosticism as regards Truth, has produced a new group of Holy Innocents; again in hope of removing Jesus, the Lord of Life from our world.  

Just as an individual is judged not so much by the way he or she treats their peers, but by how they treat those they have an advantage over, so shall our society be judged by how we treat those who are least powerful and in the greatest need of our protection. 

Our Lady and the Holy Innocents, pray for us!

(Rev.) David A. Fisher