On a webpage somewhere (sorry, I can’t remember where) someone asked, “What do pro-lifers really want?†He was skeptical that pro-lifers (PL’s) really knew what they wanted.
This struck me as strange. I would think it odd that the actions of PL’s (the sane ones, you know, the non-bombers) don’t speak for themselves. We silently protest with prayers outside abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood (usually the same thing). We vote for pro-life politicians. We march on Washington (DC) every year on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
PL’s want abortion, just like murder, to be made illegal. PL’s don’t want anyone to be able to eliminate zygotes, embryos, fetus, or babies. PL’s don’t want embryos from test tubes to be destroyed (ones from IVF and laboratories). PL’s want women to be given choices of how they are to bear and raise their children, not how to destroy their children.
Yes, abortions will still take place. However, murder and rape are also illegal and still happen everyday. PL’s also don’t want hit men to be permitted to have a room into which they lure their victims for blood-cash.
Ultimately, what PL’s want is for society to view all people as precious and sacred and to be safeguarded in the fact that all human people are to be defended. What abortion does (in addition to euthanasia) is to make society as a whole accept that some people are to be used or eliminated for other’s benefit.
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver puts it very well.
The first principle of Christian social thought is: Don’t deliberately kill the innocent, and don’t collude in allowing somebody else to do it. The right to life is the foundation of every other human right. The reason the abortion issue is so foundational is not because Catholics love little babies—although we certainly do—but because revoking the personhood of unborn children makes every other definition of personhood and human rights politically contingent.