Celebrating Our Common Dedication to an Ethic of Life And Not Resting Until a Culture of Life is Achieved

It is most heartening to read an ongoing dialogue here on the Mirror of Justice among diverse members of our common Catholic faith who all are genuinely committed to an ethic of life. We may not fully agree on how best to advance that sacred principle in a fallen world, but we should celebrate the progress that our community of Catholic academics and legal thinkers has made toward common-ground about at least some politically viable and plausible measures to reduce the loss of human life through abortion.

Further, we likewise stand in agreement that there is ample room within our Catholic communion for all persons of good faith who express and manifest a heartfelt dedication to the protection of unborn human life, despite differences on the political responses appropriate to the moment and political and legal context. We ever must maintain our counter-cultural role, never giving in to the temptation to distort Catholic teaching in a misguided attempt to make Catholic moral principles safe and unthreatening to those who follow the latest secular or academic trends. But neither are we to withdraw from the world or fail to exercise wise and practical judgment when engaging with it.

At the same time, our theological, legal, and political deliberations about the sanctity of human life should not remove us from honest confrontation with what is occurring all around us. We must not avert our eyes from the reality of the culture of the death. We must never forget the heartbreaking fact that the most dangerous place for a child in America is in his or her own mother’s womb.

Some time in the year 2008, the 50-millionth unborn child in this country will be legally aborted, measuring from the time the abortion license was mandated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Fifty million lives lost. No other calamity in our nation’s history resulted in casualties even approaching that number. We should be stunned and humiliated and ashamed that we have allowed this to occur in the nation we call our own.

More than a million unborn children are deliberately killed in this country every year. By contrast, 60 convicted murderers were executed in the United States last year. According to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, not once in any single year during the past half century has the number of executions exceeded double-digits (the high mark was 98 in 1999, which was unusually high).

If two new diseases were identified in the United States this year, one that took more than a million lives each year and another that was rare malady affecting fewer than 100 each year, surely we all would agree that society should leave no stone unturned in saving the million, while being more deliberate but hopefully not neglectful toward the rare disease. For the rare disease that affected so few, we might regard it as tragic but understandable if society was unable to marshal considerable resources to eradicate that disease as a high priority, among the many other social justice needs competing for finite resources. Moreover, for the disease that stole away a million lives each year, we would demand diligent and expeditious attention and would reject as plainly inadequate any partial measures that might reduce the death rate by only 15-25 percent, saying that we should not rest until the disease were eradicated altogether or at least until its lethal force was reduced to a tiny fraction.

Turning from the analogy and back to the realities of lives lost each year in this country by deliberate but legal action (particularly abortion and capital punishment), we also must look beyond the rate of occurrence to the magnitude of evil. Any deliberate taking of human life, without necessity, diminishes our society, and in my view (which I believe consistent with and increasingly compelled by Catholic teaching) the execution of convicted murderers who are securely imprisoned for life cannot be justified in this society. Yet it is difficult to generate the feeling that the execution of someone like a Timothy McVeigh was a tragedy. By contrast, abortion steals the entire lives of innocent unborn children, depriving both those persons and the rest of us of all their potential, their communal relationships, and their communion as living people of God. In sum, as Mark Sargent posted earlier yesterday, “the evil is very grave—the deliberate destruction of an innocent human life.”

For these reasons, as much as I welcome any progress, and as willing as I am to accept a political arrangement that achieves some results over an absolutist approach that accomplishes nothing, I still worry that half-measures directed toward intrinsic evils—such as genocide, slavery, torture, and abortion—could easily turn into a road-map toward incomplete justice. By all means, let us create a true culture of life, that abolishes the death penalty as well. But let us never lose sight of the greater priority of protecting innocent unborn human life. Prudential judgment, which is such a valuable faculty for determining how to translate abstract principles of social justice and the good society into practical reality in a complicated world, should not become an excuse for tolerating the most egregious of evils. I may not agree with all that Cathy Kaveny writes in the "Thomist Perspective on Abortion" piece that Michael Perry well highlights here on the Mirror of Justice and in his book "Under God," but one of her concluding points should be emphasized: “A lenient attitude toward abortion [should] be viewed as a prismatic and poignant example of a callousness toward life in general, a callousness that must be eradicated in all its forms” (emphasis added). While we should do what we can today, we must not rest until all—most poignantly including the not-yet-born—are able to thrive in a culture of life.

Greg Sisk