Recently, there was another press briefing and another testy exchange between President Biden’s press secretary and a reporter trying in vain to get some straight answers about our Catholic president’s position on abortion, specifically when he believes that life begins.
EWTN’s intrepid Washington correspondent Owen Jensen deserves credit for his repeated attempts. Even Jen Psaki’s smug dismissal of the question reinforced the Administration’s disregard for the unborn and the nonsensical, unscientific adherence of the Left to abortion. It made news on religious and conservative news outlets. Owen has asked the same question before and received some measure of the same response.
However, it’s the wrong question to be asking: whether the unborn baby is life. The question we must ask is whether it is human life, and if not, what is it?
Pro-life Americans need to appreciate that while we see abortion as murder and as a perversion of liberty that runs contrary to God’s will, many others in this country take a more scientific, academic, and secular approach to their decision-making process on the issue.
The days of shoving graphic photos of mutilated fetuses in the faces of abortion supporters should be over. So, too, should the questions that don’t appreciate how many on the center-Left wrestle with the issue.
Our national struggle against the sin of abortion has been, and is going to continue to be, an incremental approach to shaving off a half or one percentage point at a time from public support for the notion that an unborn child deserves no human rights. This will be true regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs.
Instead of “When does life begin?”—which as Catholics we understand well, due to Church doctrine—the question should be “What is it?” or “Is it human?” The latter takes a more modern scientific approach to forcing a response and provides enough latitude for the person receiving the question to get trapped in an illogical, indefensible explanation. It puts the burden on the answerer rather than allowing them to easily dismiss the question as one that is, as Justice Sotomayor condescendingly classified it, merely a “religious view.”
Over hours of oral argument, no justice asked these questions of the Biden administration’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, or the counsel for the respondents in the case, Julie Rikelman. Like Biden and Psaki, neither attorney was forced to define the child in some fashion. The word “human” only appears eight times in more than 120 pages of transcript from the arguments.
It is the seminal question. If it is a human life in some form, then human rights must attach to it in some form. The Left has spent decades indoctrinating Americans into thinking the unborn baby does not have personhood. The latest gender craze is also about making definitions more flexible to preserve the malleability of basic elements of our humanity. After all, how can humanity be defined by certain physical and genetic characteristics if those can be constantly changed?
At eight weeks, for instance, the unborn child’s body is fully formed, including all its organs. A patient that needs a machine to breathe and therefore survive does not surrender their human rights because they are no longer independent of some other force. Viability is not a standard we use for the elderly or infirm under the law.
But maybe that’s going to change as well as the Left pushes for more assisted suicide laws in states across the country.
After more than 60 million lives lost to policies that are as deadly to the unborn as those of communist China and North Korea, the United States is on the precipice of correcting its greatest crime against God and His creation. In order to bridge the divide with those struggling in their hearts over this issue, we need to ask questions that will resonate with those who are persuadable and expose the irrational nature of the Left’s abortion propaganda.
[Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images]
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