A post-Roe nation?
I am reprinting my parish bulletin column from this weekend below (with several of my typos fixed!)
Please continue to pray fervently not only that the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade but that we Christians will be prepared to bring the Gospel of Life to the nation when they do.
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Preparing for a post-Roe world
49 years is a long time. As of yesterday, that is how long the country
has lived under the Roe v. Wade regime – that is, the coercive mandate
from the U.S. Supreme Court to make it legal in all 50 states to kill a child
in the womb for almost any reason at any time, due to the twin judgments
decided in 1973 of Roe and Doe v. Bolton. There is an old saying that “the law is a
teacher,” so to put that in perspective, our government has been attempting to
teach over two generations of our citizens that is is perfectly acceptable to
kill a fellow human being. Or, to put in
another way, a significant percentage of our parishioners have never lived in a
world where the law didn’t condone killing of the littlest innocent
ones.
Despite the extreme length of
time, we should never simply get used to that reality. The silent voice of 63.5 million children in
this country stricken down by abortion before they saw the light of day since
that date should be far more than enough to remind us of that. As
terrible as the ruling was, I don’t think even the proponents of the ruling
would have imagined where they would be almost half a century later: living in
a world where abortion is not only allowed, but where those promoting the
egregious evil would routinely scold and hector those who opposed it as if they
were the ones with a moral problem.
Would anyone have predicted
in 1973 that a baptized Catholic president would be chief among those leading
that charge, and using the office of the Presidency to attempt to browbeat
others into supporting what the Church calls an “infamy” that “poisons human
society” and is a “supreme dishonor to the Creator.” (Gaudium et Spes,
#27)? Not likely. But we must always
remember that “ideas have consequences.”
That is, once people accepted the twin ideologies of feminism and
radical individualism (the philosophies that child-bearing holds back women
from self-fulfillment and the desires of an individual are supreme, no matter
who gets hurt in the process), then in a way this was inevitable. That’s especially true since there will
always be those who are only superficially Catholic or Christian and invested
in the thinking of the world rather than the Gospel of Christ. While those two philosophies were not new to
the 1970s, they certainly came to full flower and flourishing then.
I bring all this up because it
is very likely that we will be at a real turning point come June. That is when the Supreme Court is likely to
rule on a case that challenges the very underpinnings or Roe v. Wade. We don’t know how they will rule, of course,
but there is a significant possibility that they will allow States once again
to severely restrict the deadly practice.
If that happens, then the
judicial chokehold will be lifted and the States will have to decide what to do
again. That in turn would give Christians
an opportunity to make the case to their lawmakers and fellow citizens to save
countless lives and prevent psychological and moral harm to countless
women. We should certainly pray for
wisdom in how to proceed but also plan for this possibility so that we
are not floundering once the ruling takes hold (cf. Luke 14:28-32).
This is about much more than
just political strategy and civic involvement, however, as important as it is
for Christians to engage in both even as they pray. That’s because, even if many states enact
laws very protective of unborn children, we will have won a major battle, but
not the war. The ideologies that have
been taking deep root since before the 1970s will still be with us. We will still have a society that debases
human life, that has a terribly skewed vision of femininity and womanhood, that
mocks fatherhood and its protective instincts, and so on.
Lest we get too complacent,
we should also be aware that even if the number of surgical abortions are
drastically reduced, there is still a grave threat of killing children via
chemical abortion. In recent years and
especially under Joseph Biden’s administration which has encouraged and enabled
them by loosening safety restrictions, the percent of children killed by
chemical abortions vs. surgical has skyrocketed from a small sliver to almost
40%. These are much harder to regulate.
The bottom line is that we have
to work a two-prong approach: to remain active in the legal sphere for the
short run (while being strategically prudent) while at the same time working in
the long run to bring the Gospel and teachings of Christ to all, so no one
would never want to kill a child even if it were legally possible and
convenient. That should be the goal of every
Christian: to bring people to the truth and love of Christ and, in Him,
recognize the incomparable gift of every human life from conception onward.
Let’s pray that through the
intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the unborn, that we
will be willing to sacrifice and witness boldly and fearlessly to the Gospel of
Life so Christ may transform the hearts of our fellow citizens. By the time we reach the 50th
anniversary of that tragic court decision in 2023, let’s pray that our nation
will be a very different place, well on the way to respecting the dignity of
each human life conceived in the womb, and welcoming him or her into the world
with open hearts and arms.
