By Judie Brown
In the state of North Dakota, a strict law making most abortions illegal was recently reinstated by the courts. This has sent many pro-abortion proponents into a frenzy because in their world every act of killing a preborn child should be legal.
North Dakota’s solicitor general commented on this recent ruling, saying, “It’s been clear since our territorial days that in order to justify killing another human being, there must be a threat of death or serious bodily injury.” According to the Catholic Herald, “[Judges] Jensen and Tufte held that while the statute ‘does not present a clear answer to every imaginable situation,’ no law ever can. What matters is that it provides ‘minimum guidelines to avoid arbitrary and discriminatory’ rulings, an argument mirroring the traditional Catholic position that moral principles do not lose force because difficult cases exist.”
The most significant words in this quote, “difficult cases,” were overlooked in the mainstream media commentary, but we would like to underscore the importance of those words. This is so because the justices are saying, regardless of current attitudes toward the killing of the preborn and that regardless of the situation surrounding the procreation of the child, her life is intrinsically valuable and deserves protection under the law.
At American Life League, we believe that even if she was conceived in rape, her life should not be ended. Even if the father of the child committed incest, the preborn child should not be killed. Even though a doctor might want to commit an abortion by suggesting that the baby is a threat to the mother’s existence, aborting that child is not defensible.
In other words, two people exist, and each must be treated with justice.
Putting this truth in another format, a simple pie chart illustrates the horrors of the enormity of abortion deaths, showing that there have been more lives lost to global abortion than the combined deaths attributed to the Holocaust, the Spanish Flu, World War I, and the Black Death. This is so because over the past decades the intrinsic value of an individual human being has been discounted to the point where people not yet born are treated with disdain, hatred, and rejection. Quite simply, the perfect definition of a culture of death.
When we met with Pope John Paul II in 1995, shortly after he had written the compelling encyclical letter The Gospel of Life, he repeated the words of that profound letter, saying, “We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life.’ We find ourselves not only ‘faced with’ but necessarily ‘in the midst of’ this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.”
This is precisely what occurred in North Dakota, where at least for now, some of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters, those difficult cases, remain protected by that state’s laws. But we have to ask, for how long and why in only one state within this great nation?
The answer is that, as pro-life people, we may have lost our way. It may be that some of us have strayed, discounting the difficult cases because a pyric political victory demands that we do so. We may have forgotten that the fifth commandment does not say “Thou shalt not kill except . . . ”
Whatever the reason, it is time for the people of this nation to reacquaint themselves with a fundamental fact of pregnancy. An expectant mother is not a debate topic; she is a human being with a child. Both she and her child are precious beyond measure, and even when her baby may be perceived as a difficult case, that baby is still a human being.
So, let’s not treat her like a case of soda! Let’s treat each and every baby and their mothers with the respect required of a civilized people committed to justice for all—born and preborn.