A few months after I was ordained a priest, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Row vs Wade that abortion was legal in our nation. That ruling came down on January 22, 1974, and since then, on or around this date, many have marched in protest of this decision in our law.
In these intervening years, approximately 62 million lives were legally lost in this nation alone. The controversies continue and have moved from the moral realm to the political agenda. But the basic question concerns "rights" ... but whose?
I have been asked to record for WAOB radio the "Declaration on Procured Abortion" which was issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and ratified by Pope Saint Paul VI on November 18, 1974. I would like to share a few thoughts from the Declaration (the entire document is worth the read, if you wish to understand why this issue is so important for humanity).
"The tradition of the Church has always held that human life must be protected and favored from the beginning, just as at the various stages of its development. Opposing the morals of the Greco-Roman world, the Church of the first centuries insisted on the difference that exists on this point between those morals and Christian morals." The Second Vatican Council said: "Life must be safeguarded with extreme care from conception; abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes."
Later the Declaration states: "Respect for human life is not just a Christian obligation. Human reason is sufficient to impose it on the basis of the analysis of what a human person is and should be. Constituted by a rational nature, man is a personal subject capable of reflecting upon himself and of determining his acts and hence his own destiny: he is free. He is consequently master of himself; or rather, because this takes place in the course of time, he has the means of becoming so: this is his task. Created immediately by God, man's soul is spiritual and therefore immortal. Hence man is open to God, he finds his fulfillment only in him. But man lives in the community of his equals; he is nourished by interpersonal communication with men in the indispensable social setting. In the face of society and other men, each human person possesses himself, he possesses life and different goods, he has these as a right. It is this that strict justice demands from all in his regard."
In paragraph 11 we read: "The first right of the human person is his life. He has other goods and some are more precious, but this one is fundamental - the condition of all others. Hence it must be protected above all others. It does not belong to society, nor does it belong to public authority in any form to recognize this right for some and not for others: all discrimination is evil, whether it be founded on race, sex, color or religion. It is not recognition by another that constitutes this right. This right is antecedent to its recognition [it existed before it was recognized]; it demands recognition and it is strictly unjust to refuse it."
The Declaration continues, and I may come back to it. But remember that for at least the last 2,000 years (but for centuries before the Christian era) human life was held to begin at the moment of conception - a unique human person created in the image and likeness of God and as Genesis 1 tells us, is "the world's crowning glory". That developing human life has rights that are unjustly being denied.
In Wisdom 1:13 we read: "Death was not God's doing, he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living."
