Mispronouncing "Mercy"

It seems that we are in a deeply disturbing place today and it is a war of words.

I read an article in USA Today about a woman named Kate Carson who aborted her daughter in a late term abortion because the child had severe birth defects. The mother described the abortion as an "act of mercy." I know how well-developed a child is at 36 weeks, as my own child was born at 37 weeks.

We are battling over what is now a deception of what the word “mercy” means. Killing can never be seen as a mercy because the one being killed is not asked if she or he wants to live. Abortion is never mercy because mercy rescues one from misfortune and gives a renewed life back to the person who receives it. Abortion is the quick and violent fix to someone's problem at someone else's expense.

A false mercy or a "dummy mercy" is offered to justify all types of evils and to pacify society from strongly condemning wrong actions. This false mercy is most often used to justify ending the life of the disabled whether they be the preborn, the comatose, or the elderly.

It is a dummy or false mercy to claim the disabled have a poor quality of life and death is better than life for them. No one can tell another person that their life has no value. Only elite and judgmental people claim to know what is best for another when the answer to a problem is death.

When death is offered as a “mercy,” our society has reached the tipping point. We must form a collective union, a Catholic Solidarity Movement, to stop falsehoods from taking root in society. We have to speak out, to condemn those trying to hoodwink us into allowing evil acts to be accepted.

Kate Carson is a member of the National Abortion Rights Action League. What we have in The USA Today article is worse than merely mispronouncing the word “mercy.” It's telling us to shut up and stop defending disabled people like that aborted 36 week-old baby because she's a piece of property who has no rights to her own life.

Catholics have a moral duty to defend not only people, but concepts like mercy. Christ's words have transformed societies that accept His truth and condemned societies to rot in their own evil when they deconstruct the true definitions of words like mercy.