Save the Babies
Sunday, October 5, 2008
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Respect Life Sunday

By Father Ray Ryland, Ph.D., J.D.

Our nation was horrified—and still is horrified—that on September 11, 2001, terrorists killed more than 3,000 people. We call it the worst act of terrorism in our history and in all of modern history.

Yet on that same day far worse acts of terrorism occurred.

On September 11, 2001, more than 3,000 babies were murdered in this country. Not a single word of it was reported in the secular media. And that’s not all.

Go back to January 23, 1973, to the most infamous decision ever rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade. On each of 10,000 days before September 11, 2001, thousands of babies were murdered.

The slaughter didn’t stop on Sept. 11, 2001.

On each of 2,575 days since Sept. 11, 2001, to the present, 4,000 more babies were murdered.

According to the National Right to Life organization, since January 22, 1973 almost 36 years ago, 48.5 million babies have been murdered. And that does not count the millions of babies killed by oral contraceptives that contain an abortifacient—as all oral contraceptives do.

And the slaughter goes on: Where’s the outrage?

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The very debilitating “post-abortion syndrome” is now well-documented and acknowledged. Apart from the destruction of innocent life, abortion is totally demeaning to women. As one woman author sadly expressed it, abortionists treat a woman like a rental car: Vacuum her out and she’s ready to be used again!

The slaughter of millions upon millions upon millions of babies both causes and reflects lack of respect for innocent human life. That slaughter has made human life cheap in our culture.

It is no wonder that the incidence of child abuse has skyrocketed since abortion became widespread. We should not be surprised when kids take guns to school and shoot their teachers and kill their classmates. We should not be surprised when parents destroy their own children. We should have expected that the pornography industry would become a multi-billion dollar business.

The way we mistreat our elderly and infirm and handicapped is another result of the cheapening of life. Now people are having their handicapped children killed before birth, or even at birth, by casting the babies aside to die in soiled utility rooms and then be put in the garbage.

We have our drive-by shootings, our “road-rage” killings: You know the symptoms as well as I do. Our movies, TV programs, popular music—they all reflect this cheapening of life, and at the same time contribute to it.

It’s all a vicious moral circle: The more babies we kill, the more hardened we become and therefore the more we kill and the more hardened we become and on and on. Make no mistake about it: The dreadful conditions we’re talking about will never be changed, our quality of life can never improve, so long as we go on killing babies.

A few years ago Pope John Paul gave his annual address to the diplomatic corps gathered at the Vatican. The Holy Father challenged the assembled diplomats on several levels. His very first challenge was: “Respect life itself and individual lives: everything starts here” (section 3, emphasis added).

In other words, the issue which underlies all the world’s most serious problems is the lack of respect for life and for individual lives.

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Three days ago, Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia issued a statement for this Respect Life Sunday. Cardinal Rigali is chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. His statement is entitled “We Cannot Tolerate an Even Greater Loss of Innocent Human Life.” The theme for Respect Life Sunday this year is “Hope and Trust In Life.” The statement follows.

On October 5, 2008, Catholics across the United States will again celebrate Respect Life Sunday. Throughout the month of October, Catholic parishes and organizations will sponsor hundreds of educational conferences, prayer services, and opportunities for public witness, as well as events to raise funds for programs assisting those in need. Such initiatives are integral to the Church’s ongoing effort to help build a culture in which every human life without exception is respected and defended.

Education and advocacy during Respect Life Month address a broad range of moral and public policy issues. Among these, the care of persons with disabilities and those nearing the end of life is an enduring concern. Some medical ethicists wrongly promote ending the lives of patients with serious physical and mental disabilities by withdrawing their food and water, even though—or in some cases precisely because—they are not imminently dying. This November, the citizens of Washington State will vote on a ballot initiative to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In neighboring Oregon, where assisted suicide is already legal, the state has refused to cover the cost of life-sustaining treatments for some patients facing terminal illness, while callously informing them that Oregon will pay for suicide pills. Such policies betray the ideal of America as a compassionate society honoring the inherent worth of every human
being.

Embryonic stem cell research also presents grave ethical concerns. The Catholic Church strongly supports promising and ethically sound stem cell research—and strongly opposes killing week-old human embryos, or human beings at any stage, to extract their stem cells. We applaud the remarkable therapeutic successes that have been achieved using stem cells from cord blood and adult tissues. We vigorously oppose initiatives, like the one confronting Michigan voters in November, that would endorse the deliberate destruction of developing human beings for embryonic stem cell research.

Turning to abortion, we note that most Americans favor banning all abortion or permitting it only in very rare cases (danger to the mother’s life or cases of rape or incest). Also encouraging is the finding of a recent Guttmacher Institute study that the U.S. abortion rate declined 26% between 1989 and 2004. The decline was steepest, 58%, among girls under 18. An important factor in this trend is that teens increasingly are choosing to remain abstinent until their late teens or early 20s. Regrettably, when they do become sexually active prior to marrying, many become pregnant and choose abortion—the abortion rate increased among women aged 20 and older between 1974 and 2004, although the rate is now gradually declining.

[Then follows what is the most important warning contained in this statement.]

Today, however, we face the threat of a federal bill that, if enacted, would obliterate virtually all the gains of the past 35 years and cause the abortion rate to skyrocket. The “Freedom of Choice Act” (“FOCA”) has many Congressional sponsors, some of whom have pledged to act swiftly to help enact this proposed legislation when Congress reconvenes in January.

[Note: One of the presidential candidates has publicly promised to sign the bill immediately upon its passage.]

FOCA establishes abortion as a “fundamental right” throughout the nine months of pregnancy, and forbids any law or policy that could “interfere” with that right or “discriminate” against it in public funding and programs. If FOCA became law, hundreds of reasonable, widely supported, and constitutionally sound abortion regulations now in place would be invalidated. Gone would be laws providing for informed consent, and parental consent or notification in the case of minors. Laws protecting women from unsafe abortion clinics and from abortion practitioners who are not physicians would be overridden.

Restrictions on partial-birth and other late-term abortions would be eliminated. FOCA would knock down laws protecting the conscience rights of nurses, doctors, and hospitals with moral objections to abortion, and force taxpayers to fund abortions throughout the United States.

We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot tolerate an even greater loss of innocent human lives. We cannot subject more women and men to the post-abortion grief and suffering that our counselors and priests encounter daily in Project Rachel programs across America.

For twenty-four years, the Catholic Church has provided free, confidential counseling to individuals seeking emotional and spiritual healing after an abortion, whether their own or a loved one’s. We look forward to the day when these counseling services are no longer needed, when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law. If FOCA is enacted, however, that day may recede into the very distant future.

In this Respect Life Month, let us rededicate ourselves to defending the basic rights of those who are weakest and most marginalized: the poor, the homeless, the innocent unborn, and the frail and elderly who need our respect and our assistance. In this and in so many ways we will truly build a culture of life.

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To this statement by Cardinal Rigali I must add two paragraphs from another pastoral letter for this Respect Life Sunday. This letter was issued by Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton.

Bishop Martino takes note of a common argument used by those who vote for pro-choice politicians and measures. The argument goes like this: “‘As wrong as abortion is, I don’t think it is the only relevant “life” issue that should be considered when deciding for whom to vote.’”

In response, the Bishop wrote, “This reasoning is sound only if other issues carry the same moral weight as abortion does, such as in the case of euthanasia and destruction of embryos for research purposes. Health care, education, economic security immigration, and taxes are very important concerns. . . . However, the solutions to problems in these areas do not usually involve a rejection of the sanctity of human life in the way that abortion does. Being ‘right’ on taxes, education, health care, immigration, and the economy fails to make up for the error of disregarding the value of a human life.”

Bishop Martino quoted from a Respect for Life pastoral of 2000, issued by his predecessor, Bishop James Timlin.

Abortion is the issue this year and every year in every campaign. Catholics may not turn away from the moral challenge that abortion poses for those who seek to obey God’s commands. They are wrong when they assert that abortion does not concern them, or that it is only of a multitude of issues of equal importance. No, the taking of innocent human life is so heinous, so horribly evil, and so absolute opposite to the law of Almighty God that abortion must take precedence over every other issue. I repeat. It is the single most important issue confronting not only Catholics, but the entire electorate.

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What must we do?

We must give financial support to pro-life organizations and causes.

We must support laws and candidates and platforms which are strongly pro-life.

Above all, we must pray with all our might. We must pray God will take this terrible scourge from among us. We must pray that all persons will be led to respect the sanctity of all human life. We must pray for more and more acceptance of the fact that every human life is sacred, from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death.

Lord Jesus Christ—help us save the babies!

Father Ray Ryland is CUF's spiritual advisor.

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