The social acceptance of abortion is a profound moral failure and pretends that such decisions can be relegated to mere individual choice without having negative consequences on society as a whole.
The term ‘social order’ normally refers to a set or system of linked social structures, institutions, relations, customs, values and practices that conserve, maintain and enforce certain patterns of relating and behaving. Yet the most fundamental building block of a just social order is respect for human life.
In a statement on abortion, the American Jesuits said: “Until men and women individually and collectively make a profound commitment to the value and dignity of all human life, we will never find true peace, justice and reconciliation God desires for us”.
God is the source of life, so life is infused with a God-given dignity; all life is holy and pure, and if we respect God, the giver of life, we must respect life itself. But in an attempt to sooth their conscience, abortionists refer to unborn children, especially in the early stages of pregnancy, as mere cells and tissue. There is an ongoing debate on when human life begins – whether at conception or when the heart starts beating, or at some other time.
God’s gaze is more intense precisely in the case of ‘exceptions’, in the case of the voiceless
Yet Scripture clearly affirms that “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you” (Jeremiah 1:5). As we read throughout the Bible, God knows all things, even that which is yet to come, and has known this since eternity. So God also knows each person, each life – even before they are conceived.
Psalm 139:13-16 asserts this infinite knowledge of God: “For you formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.
“My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skilfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book, they all were written, the day fashioned for me, when yet there were none of them.”
Paradoxically, while through the advance of medical science we are prolonging the life of elderly people, we fail to protect voiceless babies in their mother’s womb, when such children “live and move and have such being” fashioned by the Divine (Acts 17:28).
Alas, many politicians adopt an attitude that ‘anything goes, as long as we keep the people happy and get their votes’. They justify the right to kill in situations that are conveniently called ‘exceptions’. But little do they realise that God’s gaze is more intense precisely in the case of ‘exceptions’, in the case of the voiceless, in the case of the most vulnerable and poor, in the case of the widow, the stranger and the fatherless.
God calls these ‘exceptions’ His children, who He made in “His image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26), and He issues a clear warning: “You shall not murder” (Matthew 5:21).
Gordon Vassallo is an accredited spiritual guide at the Centre for Ignatian Spirituality.