12 Reasons why Abortion is the Most Important Moral Issue of the 21st Century

The Culture of Death says that human life is cheap and can be discarded when not wanted. The Gospel of Life says that human life is created in the image of God and must be cherished and protected in every possible way. Our culture faces a choice between life and death.

The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all human rights and no other human rights are possible without it. There can be no feeding of the hungry, no clothing of the poor, no visiting of the prisoners and no offering a cup of cold water to those who are murdered before birth. No one can be truly concerned for the poor, the weak, the helpless, the elderly, the frail, the handicapped, the minority, the economically disadvantaged or the victims of discrimination who is not pro-life. It makes no sense to be anti-war or anti-capital punishment while being indifferent to the murder of the weakest and most helpless among us. All social justice issues begin with the issue of abortion.

Some would have us believe that abortion is “just another issue” to be horse-traded in the cut and thrust of party politics. But the fact is that abortion on demand is a central issue one for those who are advancing the agenda of the Culture of Death. It is nothing less than legalized private killing and is the key to many other anti-humanistic behaviors, principles and policies. Abortion is far from being a single, stand-alone issue. It reveals a mindset that is deeply pathological and it reflects a society that is altogether too passive, resigned, tired and apathetic when it comes to resisting evil. Abortion sets a precedent for taking other forms of human life.

1. Euthanasia - the next issue to debate after abortion on the list of those promoting the Culture of Death is euthanasia. If pre-born human life is of no value and not worth protecting, then the elderly and the sick are at great risk. Euthanasia presupposes that human life is no different from animal life and that what is acceptable and humane for animals must be acceptable for humans. The principle of the sanctity of human life is at stake. We need to remember that some people have just as great (or greater) financial incentives to kill their parents as they do to kill their preborn children.

2. Infanticide – Many people believe infanticide is “no big deal” but Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, along with many others from all religions and no religious backgrounds, beg to differ. It is an issue of murder. No one can explain why it is all right to kill a baby one minute before birth, but not one minute after birth. Abortion on demand – which is the law in the US and Canada – is a certain prelude to infanticide. The Greco-Roman culture that early Christianity confronted (and converted) practiced infanticide by exposure. Christians would go out to the garbage heaps of Rome to save children. One could even argue that abortion is just a technologically advanced form of infanticide.

3. The Silent War Against Black People – More black babies are aborted than white ones – proportionately. Planned Parenthood often locates their abortion facilities near black inner city neighborhoods. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist who favored limiting births among the “inferior races” and Planned Parenthood carries on her racist program of eugenics today. People of African descent in North America know that many white people wish they would just go away; abortion is one of the methods used to implement that wish.

4. The Silent War Against Girls - Abortion is legalized private killing and baby girls are more vulnerable than baby boys. For many social and financial reasons, parents often choose to abort a girl so they can try for a boy. In countries like China and India this practice is so wide-spread that it is now beginning to cause many social problems due to a shortage of women, but it is increasingly common in the West as well. No one can be a true Feminist who fails to oppose the killing of babies just because they are female.

5. The Silent War Against Handicapped People - About 90% of Down Syndrome babies are now killed before birth in the US. What is this but blatant, unjust discrimination against the handicapped? This is a very new phenomenon based on recently-developed pre-natal genetic testing. How can we as a society expect to nourish a respect for the handicapped among us if we allow this evil attitude to take root that killing one’s child just because he or she does not measure up to our standard of perfection is morally acceptable? The sympathy accorded parents who abort handicapped babies is appalling and parallels the sympathy accorded to Nazis who launched their euthanasia program against the handicapped in the 1930’s.

6. The Corruption of the Medical Profession – The introduction of legalized abortion into Western societies required that Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors for over two millennia had to be revised. Doctors renounced their oaths to “do no harm” and added killing to their job description. For centuries, doctors have been trusted precisely because they always refused to get involved in taking life, even when pressured by the state to become executioners, for example. As doctors become desensitized to killing, patient trust will decline and we all will be worse off as a result. This affects people who have no direct involvement in abortion, euthanasia or other culture of death practices.

7. The Corruption of the Law – Western law has gradually been reformed over centuries to prohibit the legalized private killing of individuals by other individuals in power over them. Once under Roman law the Patriarch of a household held the power of life and death over members of his household. This was abolished under Christianity. The same goes for the right of the White slaveholder to kill the slaves he owned. The same goes for the right of Lords under feudalism to kill those under their authority. At various times and in various ways, the Christian West abolished all right of private killing. But in the second half of the Twentieth century legalized private killing made a comeback as mothers gained the “right” to kill their children. Soon children will have the “right” to have their parents killed under euthanasia laws. The principle of the inviolable right to life as the foundational human life is being eroded.

8. Eugenics – Eugenics is a group of humans taking control of the future evolution of the human race to make is in their own image. For example, the eugenics movement of the early Twentieth century was widespread and powerful in all Western countries and one branch of it motivated Nazi campaigns of forced sterilization, killing of “useless eaters” and cruel medical experiments in the death camps. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a leader in this movement and sought to use sterilization, contraception and abortion to decrease the “breeding potential” of inferior races like African Americans. Eugenics is scientific racism combined with violence.

9. Cloning people for Spare Parts, i.e. So-called “Saviour Siblings” – This was recently legalized in the UK by the Labour Party. To bring human beings into the world just for the purpose of taking their organs out of them to transplant into another person is sick, evil and demonic. At this moment, the idea of aborting a fetus to harvest its organs or tissue to save a sibling is considered ethical by many people. Abortion is essential to people with this mindset. The novel Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is about children raised for no purpose other than to have their organs harvested at the cost of their lives. It is unbearably sad and morally repulsive both at the same time. This is the “Brave New World” into which the Culture of Death leads and abortion is an absolutely necessary step on the road to get there.

10. The Choice Women Need - and deserve is not just the “choice” to kill their babies or be on their own raising them. The pro-abortion forces are not really pro-choice. If they were they would have better responses than just abortion and welfare for women in crisis pregnancies. They would support women who choose to carry and place for adoption. They would support women who choose to carry and raise the child. They would understand that most women want to bear the children they conceive, but find the deck stacked against them and abortion the expected thing to do. We should not let men off the hook and let it be simply the woman’s problem. Women deserve better.

11. Abortion on Demand Only Benefits Predatory Males - who are not prepared to take their responsibility as fathers. If we really cared about women and children we would demand that men take responsibility for their actions and we would stop treating women like sex objects for males who pervert sex into something selfish and superficial. The culture of abortion is great for men who want to pressure women into having sex and it is great for men who want to exit the scene once the natural result of sexual intercourse occurs. But it is not great for women or for children or for society as a whole.

12. Demographic Suicide – Almost 60 nations of the world currently are not reproducing themselves and world population is set to age rapidly and start declining during the 21st century. When a wealthy nation refuses to have enough babies even to maintain the population and thereby chooses to die out, one has to wonder what kind of despair lies behind such a collective decision. We need 2.3 babies per 1000 women per year and most of the Western world is currently between 1.3 and 1.7. But the root causes of a decision to commit demographic suicide are very important. The hedonism, materialism and individualism of Western culture, which the West has exported around the world, are pathological symptoms of a deeper spiritual malaise. People who are schooled to think primarily of their rights and entitlements are simply unable to commit to self-sacrifice and the common good. Abortion feeds the culture of entitlement and selfishness and the end result of the Culture of Death is the decision to die as a culture.

There are other reasons, but these are twelve of the most compelling ones to make the eradication of abortion from civilized societies the highest priority for the 21st century.