An article in New Oxford Review by Richard Stith, in November, 2005, compares the dismemberment of the child in the womb to what our reaction would be if we had a constitutional right to dismember our grandparents. Is it enough to call abortion murder? When other murders of a particularly horrific method are committed, we use such adjectives as “brutal,” “gruesome,” “cruel,” “vicious,” etc. But abortions are different from other murders, because the victim is an innocent and helpless child. Pope Benedict XVI, called abortion “a true war of the mighty against the weak.” Doesn’t this make it worse than ordinary murder? Don’t we feel a deeper compassion when we hear of the killings of the very old, very young or the disabled?

The worse facet of child-killing – or grandparent killing – is betrayal. It is worse for someone in the family to do the killing than for a stranger, because the evil of betrayal is added to the evil of murder. The author of the article referred to a pro-life sign he had seen in the Ukraine, when he was teaching there. Rather than saying “Do not kill me, Mommy” it said “Do not betray me, Mommy.” Society considers parental duties as among the most fundamental duties. Pope John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae, first criticizes abortion and euthanasia as attacks which strike human life at a time of its greatest frailty, but adds that “even more serious, most often, those attacks are carried out in the very heart of and with the complicity of the family – the family which by its nature is called to be the ‘sanctuary of life’.” By officially authorizing abortion, current American law tempts and enables mothers and fathers to turn violently against those little lives that depend on them. Our laws and those who support them are complicit in an act that is worse than ordinary murder.

Abortion supporters may deny that there is a person in the full sense, but we change in size and appearance at each stage of our life. The fact of a change of location from inside the uterus to outside the uterus has no impact on the inherent nature and dignity of the human person. Abortion supporters may argue that there is no parental duty where there is not full consent of the woman to accept and rear the child - that autonomy is more important than life.

Pope John Paul II found the pursuit of individual autonomy to be a root cause of many sorts of betrayals of the weak and vulnerable. “There is no place for anyone who appears completely at the mercy of others and radically dependent on them.” (Evangelium Vitae, #19). Stith observes: The drive for autonomy aims at freedom from all kinds of burdensome dependents. Those unable to bargain out their rights and duties – such as the unborn or the mentally disabled – thus come to count for very little. Their denigration is rationalized by the idea that autonomy alone is the basis of human dignity.

Mother Teresa, in her Nobel acceptance speech, said: “If a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me?” Mr. Stith commented: “Accepting the killing of strangers eats away at our community from the outside in; accepting the killing of our own children rots us from the inside out. How can any dependent human lives be safe?”

Mary Anne Hackett

Excerpts taken from November, 2005 issue of New Oxford Review, 1060 Kains Ave., Berkeley CA 94706