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August 1, 2022DOZENS OF ATTACKS ON pregnancy centers and pro-life offices in recent months have brought into clear relief that the “abortion rights” movement is lawless.
Church teaching, of course, holds that any law or court decision permitting abortion does not have any validity, and is in fact an act of violence rather than a just policy that has any claim on conscience.
Given the inherent violence of abortion itself and the policies promoting it, there is no surprise that the rest of its supporting structures are violent also.
Because there is no rational justification for abortion, its proponents have shied away from the legislative process, which involves debate and persuasion. Instead, they have relied on raw judicial power. Abortion-on-demand was handed to them on a silver platter in Roe v. Wade. Its supporters did not have to do the painstaking work of lobbying and the patient back-and-forth of lawmaking. Overnight, and out of the sky, came abortion as a “constitutional right.”
This is why, as soon as they saw this special status threatened by the Dobbs case, so many of them behaved like spoiled children, yelling and screaming when something that belongs to them is taken away.
That is also why, instead of gathering at statehouses, they gathered at the houses of Supreme Court justices. “Give us our rights back!” was their attitude, rather than saying to legislators, “Listen to our persuasive arguments in favor of our policy positions.”
his attitude also shapes the response of the abortion “rights” movement to existing laws: they do not enforce them.
District attorneys in San Antonio, New Orleans, and Atlanta, and attorneys general in Michigan and Wisconsin have publicly come out and said they will not do their job in enforcing pro-life laws. In Arizona, a Democrat is campaigning on such a promise. These abortion supporters are providing cover for a criminal enterprise.
Breaking laws that make women safer is also a popular pastime of the abortion industry. The organization Americans United for Life, in its Unsafe project, documented 2,400 health and safety deficiencies in 300 clinics across 39 states, from 2008 to 2020.
As I have always said, if you’re willing to kill a baby, you’re willing to violate safety standards. You can’t practice vice virtuously.
Advocacy of abortion, as the U.S. bishops stated in their document Living the Gospel of Life, has poisoned our society: “Nations are not machines or equations. They are like ecosystems. A people’s habits, beliefs, values and institutions intertwine like a root system. Poisoning one part will eventually poison it all. As a result, bad laws and bad court decisions produce degraded political thought and behavior, and vice versa. So it is with the legacy of Roe vs. Wade” (n. 9).
Increasingly, the battles we face in the public square are not just between competing policy preferences or even opposing philosophies. They are between common sense and insanity.
To justify abortion requires an abandonment not only of religion and morality, but of reason. If we wonder how we’ve reached the point where people and institutions can publicly declare that a man is not a man and a woman is not a woman, we should consider that for 50 years we’ve said a baby is not a baby.
That was the break with reality when the Supreme Court legalized abortion. And the bitter fruits of that willingness to distort reality have continued to blossom.
This is no time for despair, and neither is it time for neutrality. It is not simply rhetoric to say we are in a spiritual and moral civil war. It is time for clarity, for courage, for political action, and for speaking one’s mind within the family, the Church, and the public square.
Father Frank Pavone is among the most prominent pro-life leaaders in the world. In 1993 he became national director of Priests for Life. He also is president of the National Pro-life Religious Council. He served at the Vatican assissting the Church's pro-life work under Pope St. John Paul II.
