The Underutilized Gift That Would End Abortion

There are three levels of horror with regard to abortion, the first two are the most common:

Sensual. You see a baby in latter stages of gestation and recoil at the idea of abortion.
Religious. Your faith holds that abortion is wrong, and you horror at so many violations of the fifth Commandment killing little images of God.
Intellectual. You know a human being is a lifecycle, not only what he or she is at the moment. You cringe to the core that so many lives are wiped out, and everything they would have accomplished and everyone they would have procreated.

I propose the reason abortion is still legal and ‘acceptable’ by many today is because too many people see the problem only through the lenses of #s 1 and 2, and not enough of #3.

Every comment and argument that has fetal development or trimester-talk as its theme displays #1.
Every comment or argument that has God at it core displays #2.

While both sight and faith are good and important, they are not enough to persuade the masses, especially in a secular society. We are rational animals. It is our understanding, even without faith, that separates our nature from all the other animals’. It’s imperative that we use our minds, our reason, much more than we do.

Example: When my sister’s baby was born we were looking at the toddler in her playpen. I told my sister I see in front of us a beautiful baby, child, adolescent, and adult. My little niece, I continued, was an actual baby (for the time being), a potential mother, and potential grandmother. She is all these things, most of which are not yet actualized.

When I said I see the baby as a grandmother my sister would have no more of the conversation. It was too ‘weird’ for her to accept. Yet, everyone knows it’s true. A person is a lifecycle; not a particular stage of life, which is actualized for a short period of time. We are all former embryos, fetuses, children and adolescents; and some of us are actual parents and grandparents. We are our entire lifecycle – past, present, and future – not just the temporary stage of which we currently experience.

With abortion, an entire lifecycle is wiped away. My niece as a baby and as a grandmother, and everything in between (friend, sibling, colleague, coach, aunt, etc.,) would be non-existent had she been aborted. Same with our lives had we been aborted. With one abortion, countless millions will be deeply affected – whether they realize it or not. What an unimaginable evil.

Therefore, our senses are indeed important and our faith is vital; but in order to win the battle over evil, an evil whose foundation is often bathed in ignorance, we must make right use of our God-given reason. And lead others to do so. Life very much depends on it.