If you’ve ever read a newspaper, or just stepped outside the safety of your home, you know there are many people in the world who suffer terribly. Many of these people are young, innocent children. Over the past couple months, I've had several people claim that by opposing abortion, I must not care about those children who are suffering. They are very much mistaken.
It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the difficult circumstances in which someone might consider abortion in order to spare a child from enduring great pain and suffering. I do. I can even understand why someone might think abortion is best in their situation. Often, people are trying to be compassionate when they tell me that they don’t think abortion is very good, but it is better than the alternative – a child living a life of suffering. That does sound compassionate – but only if we don't consider what abortion really is. When we realize that abortion is the violent destruction of a tiny human child, then we can see that their sense of compassion is twisted and misguided.
Aborting the child is a band-aid solution that fixes nothing. The circumstances which would have caused the suffering have not disappeared – instead, the child has been discarded. If our approach to end suffering includes discarding the one who is suffering, then we haven't really solved our problem. Eliminating potential suffering in individual situations doesn't count towards ending child suffering in general if the means to end the suffering includes killing the child.
This may be obvious to pro-lifers, but it bears repeating because many people in our culture do not grasp this concept. They are repulsed by the idea of killing a toddler to end his suffering, but not by killing the embryo. Perhaps understandably, we might feel less bad about the death of a child in the embryonic stage, as compared to a toddler, but our emotional connection to people at certain stages of development isn't what determines whether or not we should kill them.
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I believe what pro-lifers sometimes fail to articulate to our challengers is that abortion isn’t a solution to child suffering, and banning abortion isn’t a solution either. Abortion has nothing to do with ending or not ending child suffering. Before abortion was legal, children sometimes still suffered horribly. Now that abortion is legal, children still sometimes suffer horribly. When abortion is ended, children will probably still sometimes experience terrible things. Ending abortion isn't a proposition to end child suffering. The argument that banning abortion will lead to children's suffering has no weight when we realize that currently women do have access to abortion and child suffering hasn't ended. That isn't even taking into consideration the violence done to children by abortion itself.
A young man recently asked me what my solution was to end the suffering of children if abortion wasn’t an option (in my ideal world). I told him honestly that I didn’t have one. I have no five step plan to end the atrocities committed across the world. I admitted this might sound cheesy, but I believe these atrocities won’t end unless people really learn to love. Giving women the option to abort their children isn’t teaching anyone to love – in fact the very opposite. With abortion, we teach people how to dispose of problematic people. Not aborting a child in a difficult situation at least gives her parents, and others, a chance to to learn to love.
Reprinted with permission from CCBR.