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(LifeSiteNews) — It is a well-known fact in the pro-life world that, even with the epochal reversal of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the battle for life in the US will not soon end but simply resume on a state-by-state basis. The killing of babies before birth will be more or less restricted in several Republican “red” states, like Texas, and encouraged and defended in many Democratic “blue” states, such as California. It is also difficult to calculate how many actual babies will be saved by the ruling, since it seems that the most significant barrier preventing abortion-minded women from killing their babies in abortion-restricted states is the inconvenience involved in traveling to a neighboring state.
My aim, however, is not to minimize the major victory, at least on a symbolic level, that the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents for the pro-life side. Rather, I want to argue that this decision will mark the beginning of the end of abortion in the US and the rest of the Western world only if it also marks the beginning of the end of an ideology that has been destroying the West for the last 250 years and is at the root of the “pro-choice” mentality: liberalism.
Liberalism is a false understanding of liberty which brooks no limits whatsoever: even objective reality must be set aside in order to give free rein to the subjective – and often insane or maladjusted — feelings and thoughts of individual persons. The horribly wrong Casey v. Planned Parenthood 1992 decision (which ratified Roe v. Wade and was therefore overturned with it), perfectly summarizes, in one astounding sentence, the ideology of liberalism when it states: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
It is easy to see where this “right” to hold false or dangerous concepts and opinions inevitably leads regarding abortion: this so-called “right” to define reality will naturally and logically extend to a “right” to define when life begins. And if one really does have a right to define when life begins, then one has a right to abortion – period – regardless of the truth about the human person or the justice owed to the unborn. The reason for this is simple: a coherent, legitimate authority cannot give one the unlimited right to say something, such as “life begins at birth,” unless this statement be somehow true, if only for the person who says it. And if this statement is somehow “true” for the one who says it, it cannot be wrong for that person to act in accordance with that belief, by procuring an abortion. [1]
Liberalism in practice therefore becomes incoherent: the liberal person trumpets a “right” to unlimited thought and speech, but knowing that chaos that would ensue if people actually did everything they said or thought, he then asserts that some actions are less praiseworthy than others. This incoherent ideology is a problem for pro-lifers in a liberal country, such as the US, for if one rightly wants, as we do, to limit the ability of those who believe that life begins only at birth to kill prenatal children, we must also be able to question the right to hold and express such deadly false beliefs in the first place. After all, aren’t all genocides, like abortion, prepared by propaganda campaigns which dehumanize their victims? If one wishes to end the genocide of abortion, one must seriously question the so-called “right” to express and popularize the worldview which makes it possible to think that life begins only at birth. But this, of course, flies in the face of liberal “rights” of unlimited freedom of expression and religion. It flies in the face of liberalism itself.
The problem we face, however, goes even deeper than pro-lifers having to contend with liberalism in society: it turns out that many pro-life organizations are liberal themselves and paradoxically spread the very ideology that facilitates the killing they work to end. These organizations are very often run by well-meaning Christians who, wishing to “succeed” in the current liberal context, are happy to pose as proponents of “liberty for all.” They strip from their organizational identity all religious language and imagery. They thus imply that the ultimate value in society is not God and His commandments and His life of grace, but the individual’s choice of values and ultimate meaning — except for a small parcel of non-negotiable realities concerning the moment a human person comes into being. Such pro-life groups align with liberalism in all respects except for their stance on abortion. Yet in being liberal in almost every sense, in being officially indifferent to religious and philosophical truth, their so-called pro-life efforts at eliminating abortion are severely deficient because they ignore or even foster the roots of the “pro-choice” ideology that ultimately threatens unborn human life.
Pro-lifers must therefore re-evaluate the pertinence of “secular” or “neutral” pro-life efforts. It is high time that we work to cut the poisonous “pro-choice” tree at its liberal roots, rather than nourishing these roots with our official “neutrality,” and then squandering precious time plucking out, one by one, the tree’s constantly multiplying rotten fruit. We must find a weapon powerful enough to totally uproot the poisonous liberal tree. And this weapon is none other than the historic Christian Faith, eternal opponent of liberalism. This historical Faith is illiberal to the core since it puts God’s choice first and the individual’s choice always second. And here we are not talking about any form of contemporary Christianity, whose shades and modes of liberalism are legion, but the traditional Faith, whole and entire, restored and purged of its liberal compromises and mutations.
In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and quite possibly because of it (here I am alluding especially to the baffling Vatican II declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae), the human element of the Catholic Church underwent a liberalizing process which seems to have made it a principal purveyor of liberalism in the modern world. The proliferation of indifference to religious and philosophical truth accelerated after the Council to the point where, today, free rein is often given to the kind of thinking that dehumanizes the unborn and permits their slaughter to take place. But now Christian pro-lifers, keenly aware of what liberalism does to unborn babies, have a special role in restoring liberalism’s traditional foe, the Catholic Church. And pro-lifers today must embrace this role of Church restoration, shunning all worldly fear and the false humility that is really complacency, if they hope to see any progress in the cultural war against liberalism, whose battlefield is already strewn with millions of lost souls, broken families, and dismembered baby bodies.
Many pro-lifers, often with very humble backgrounds and rarely among the “elite” of this world, shrink from the enormity of the task, saying: “Surely it is not my place to restore the Church and defeat liberalism; someone more talented, more elegant, more educated must do that!” But we must not let false humility be a mask for our lack of faith or for our cowardice, for God is a God of the impossible. We must never underestimate what He can do with us pro-lifers if we accept His call. Saint Francis of Assisi heard the voice coming from the Crucifix saying, “Francis, rebuild my Church, which is in ruins.” In his authentic humility, Saint Francis understood that he was called to rebuild the chapel in San Damiano, which he did. But Our Lord had much greater plans for him. What He asked of him, and what Pope Innocent III’s vision confirmed, was that the Franciscan Order rebuild God’s mystical Body—His Catholic Church—which at the time was disintegrating from the corrosive effects of worldliness.
Today, as pro-lifers, we have all heard, in our own way, the interior call to save the unborn child from being killed in the womb; we have heard the call of our Heavenly Father: “Save my child, who is being poisoned and torn limb from limb.” In our humility, we have understood it as a call to save the unborn from death by abortion. And this we are doing, with the fall of Roe v. Wade being another step in the right direction. But there is also a deeper meaning hidden within the original call: The Church is the mystical body of Christ on Earth, which will only be fully manifested at the end of time, as the New Jerusalem. The Church on Earth is therefore like an unborn Child, to be born only after a time of gestation and of being constantly threatened with poisoning and death. “Who will save my Child from abortion?” asks God the Father. I have always seen the pro-life movement as the greatest religious order of our time, answering the call of our Heavenly Father to save His Child—His Son’s Mystical Body, His Church—from death. And saving the Church just happens to be the most pro-life thing we can do, since the Catholic Church has always been the number one enemy of liberalism and its “pro-choice” mentality.
No single Christian pro-life organization can “do everything.” But if even a small organisation renounces its secularism, its neutrality, its indifference to religion – in short, renounces its liberalism – and fully embraces Christianity, God can, and God will, use this tiniest of mustard seeds to accomplish very great things, even defeating liberalism, the ideology at the root of the slaughter of innocents we call abortion.
No matter how average or ordinary we pro-lifers may be, God is calling us . . . and He may be calling us for the very reason of our littleness. For it is indeed His way of embarrassing and confounding the haughty Prince of this passing world, and his minions.
[1] I am not saying that a state ought never tolerate some false speech. There do, indeed, exist reasons for tolerating false speech and false religions. However, a state that merely tolerates false speech is not the same as a state that recognizes a right to say such things; for a right is a means to do good, and saying something false is never good in itself. The state, however, may tolerate false speech in view of a greater good. I am arguing that were a legitimate authority to grant a right to say something which is false for some (and not merely tolerate the saying of false things), it could only be because it was true for some.