DCCW raises the standard when protecting human life

by Tammy Houle, Reverence Life Chairperson

As women of faith, we must take the high road. We must raise the standard to a non-compromising adherence to objective truth. The Holy Father states in Evangelium Vitae, "The deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end." (EV, 57.5) No matter what establishment pro-life groups or organizations may say to justify their sanctioning of exceptions, we must not concur. By their words and actions they have promoted the tolerance of some legal child killing and severed the moral truth from its fundamental purpose of protecting all human life.

To allow for and support exceptions of any kind in the abortion debate is to lower the standard and gives question to the validity of a human being's right to live. Exceptions have proven to be a lethal lie - they deny moral absolutes and the truth that John Paul II teaches is "essential" to the maintenance and preservation of human life. Rationalizing the legal killing of just one preborn child nullifies Natural and Divine Law, while negating the principle of personhood. Once this foundation of truth is undermined, moral relativism fills the void and man appropriates himself the authority to determine which human beings are deserving of protection under the law.

Law scholars will remember one disastrous consequence of departing from the absolute moral precept of the personhood of the preborn in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. In his infamous "footnote 54," Justice Blackmun reasoned that the existence of "exceptions"

in state laws that proscribed abortion - most typically, allegedly to save the life of the mother - showed that the preborn child could not be considered a person constitutionally protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. If the child was considered a person under the law, Blackmun reasoned, such an "exception" for abortion could not exist for the child's paramount right to life could not be legally subordinated to the rights of any other person.

In the cases of rape and incest, abortion can easily serve to provide a means of hiding the consequences of the deeds of the perpetrator, allowing him to continue his evil conduct. Even in those hard cases, no child comes into existence by chance, he/she is always the object of God's creative love and should not have to pay for the sins of their father. Why should a woman who has been victimized once be exploited again by someone who will make a profit from her dead child? The woman needs love, support and understanding, not the pain of allowing herself to be violated again in order to destroy her child. In the extremely rare case where a woman's life is threatened by her pregnancy, God should be the final arbiter of the life that will survive. The doctors should always follow their Hippocratic oath and do everything in their power to save both lives involved. A woman named Gianna Beretta Molla was just recently beatified by the Holy Father because she willingly gave her life at the birth of her fourth child. She knew her life was in peril while pregnant, as she was a physician herself, yet she never flinched once in her duty as a Christian mother to offer up her life for her child.

Let us not succumb to the temptation to compromise with the culture of death. Thirty-three years of incrementalism and concessions have left us no closer to ending the carnage than that fateful day back in 1973. We surely don't want that many more decades of the brutal bloodshed to continue. We must stand on resolute conviction and truth.