Peace on Earth Starts with Life

During the Angelus before Christmas Day, Pope Francis reminded the world that “no child is ever a mistake…a child is a gift of life.” The Holy Father continued with this message during his New Year’s Day homily, where he called for “a firm commitment to promote respect for the dignity of human life, from conception to natural death.” The pope warned that modern-day challenges confronting human life and “the basis for building a culture of peace” can only be resolved by protecting and serving every life “born of woman.”

The Holy Father’s message coincided with a recent article from Breitbart that reports abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2024. Citing data from Worldometer, which bases its stats from government reports, and organizations like The World Health Organization, it is estimated that over 73 million preborn children died by abortion last year. According to the WHO, “six out of 10 (61%) of all unintended pregnancies, and 3 out of 10 (29%) of all pregnancies, end in induced abortion.”

Based on the data, out of the reported 140 million born and preborn people that died in 2024 worldwide, abortion accounted for almost 52% of every death, making it the leading cause of death.

Abortion as a Massacre

The global abortion numbers are heartbreaking, but so are the numbers closer to home.  According to a recent AP article, “there have been slightly more monthly abortions across the [U.S.] recently than there were in the months leading up to the June 2022 ruling” (i.e., Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). It is estimated that there were over one million abortions in the U.S. in 2023, an increase of 11% from 2020.

The Guttmacher Institute and U.S. News also reported that there has been a small but consistent increase in abortions. “In the first six months of 2024,” U.S. News reports, “the monthly national abortion count averaged nearly 98,000 abortions. That eclipses the 2023 monthly average of 88,000 and the 2022 monthly average of 81,400.” The reason for this jump is primarily access to the abortion pill. These are abortions that are outside of a clinical setting, which are “self-managed abortions” and “obtained using abortion pills mailed from pharmacies outside the United States,” says the Guttmacher Institute. Guttmacher also found that “medical” abortions in the U.S. rose to 63% of all abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020.

Today, more than 100 nations provide the abortion pill to one extent or another (i.e., through Telehealth abortions)

Every single abortion results in a dead child. This isn’t a moral claim. It’s simply a statement of fact. Each of those 73 million abortions represents a unique human being, distinct from their mother, whose innocent life was violently destroyed in their mother’s womb. Instead of being welcomed and loved by their parents and family, protected and saved from danger, these innocent, vulnerable children were dehumanized and discarded like rubbish.

It is incomprehensible!

The Sin of Abortion

“Abortion is murder,” says Pope Francis. It is the direct, intentional termination of a viable preborn child at any point after fertilization. While most people have a general understanding of what it means to have an abortion, they have become indifferent toward human dignity and tolerant of an act that destroys human life. Fundamentally, a majority of society rejects the fact that there is a human person in the womb, one who has the same right to life as those outside the womb.

Renewed awareness of the dignity of every human being has serious social, legal, economic, and political implications. Legal abortion and its mindset always lead to abortion becoming commonplace in society, creating legal and political realities that impact how people approach the topic.

Legal abortion has created structures that incentivize abortion, making it more difficult for mothers who want to give birth to their children. And as abortion has become normalized in relation to these realities, opinions and mindsets govern and impact how people approach the moral issue, as well as other ethical issues like marriage, sex, and euthanasia.

Human dignity is not something we earn or that is bestowed upon us by human entities or governments. It is not something a father or mother grants, or something they can take away. Nor is it something we achieve through accomplishments or through choices we have or have not made. Every human person from the first moment of their existence—i.e., at fertilization—is endowed with dignity because they are a human being. This inalienable and immutable dignity, which cannot be diminished or destroyed, is the source and foundation of the respect owed to each and every person, preborn and born.

Death is Not Healthcare

It is true that in pregnancy complications can arise — e.g., gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, problems with the placenta, and heart problems. However, abortion is never medically necessary. And it’s not health care. It is never morally permissible because it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. And even when the mother is physically unscathed, there are always hidden scars: the psychological and spiritual scars that sometimes never heal.

Abortion is always fatal for at least one party involved, the child who receives no benefit but only death. By definition, “every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo” (Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, no. 45). Catholic teaching has consistently rejected the suggestion that an embryo has no moral status. Once fertilization takes place, human life is present and must be respected “in an absolute way” (Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and On the Dignity of Procreation, § 5). The preborn child is a genetically distinct, living organism who is always to be respected.

When faced with medical dilemmas that impact the mother and preborn child, respect for the incomparable value of both lives must be upheld. To navigate difficult medical situations in ways that respect the moral law regarding human dignity, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has produced a document called the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) that provides ethical guidelines. These decisions must be guided by clear moral principles, in particular that the direct killing of innocent life is never permissible. All medical strategies must take into account the life and health of both patients with the result that both mother and child safely come through the pregnancy.

Love for Every Life

Pro-lifers understand that to eradicate abortion, its malicious mindset, and the injustice perpetrated against preborn children (indeed upon all vulnerable people), would mean that the value of human life would be elevated in the culture. In such a healthy society, instead of promoting and enabling abortion, every level of influence—social, legal, economic, political, medical, etc.—would pursue creative solutions that respect human dignity and lead to better outcomes for mother and child.

To realize this cultural transformation requires hearts and minds to change. This is why the pro-life movement strives to awaken society, to resensitize it to the immutable dignity of every person, preborn and born, regardless of their race, size, medical condition, or development.

The staggering number of deaths from abortion makes it the social justice cause of our time, since the sheer magnitude of the problem completely overshadows other human rights issues. Yet, very, very few outside pro-life circles acknowledge the gravity of this issue or that there is anything repugnant about such violence. Society, by in large, has become desensitized to the evil of abortion!

Value Does Not Determine Worth

With dire consequence, we have become increasingly tolerant of all kinds of violence because we are tolerant of violence done to our preborn brothers and sisters, failing to see our neighbor in the womb. “The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men,” St. Teresa of Calcutta said, adding:

It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the dependent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

Because of modern-day society’s “value” (one could go as far as to say, “worship”) of productivity and achievement, it has great difficulty recognizing the dignity of the weak and vulnerable, those who fail to meet its raison d’etre. Thus, it is easy to see how the preborn fall into this category, as well as the disabled, elderly, and dying.

Life itself is threatened by such a mindset, placing anyone who does not meet the minimal threshold of “worthiness” in grave danger. By repudiating the direct killing of the innocent, we create the moral framework to safeguard human dignity at its root, in the understanding that every life is of incomparable value from the moment of fertilization.

Support of Life in Adoption

One way to shift the cultural mindset of abortion is to recognize that there are vulnerable mothers who need our support. Although pro-lifers have built thousands of pro-life pregnancy centers and maternity homes around the country and funded them with millions of our own dollars, there is still great need. There are communities across our country without these resources, which leave vulnerable mothers and their preborn children to navigate challenges—pregnancy itself, financial concerns, threats to job and education, unsupportive partners and family members, etc.—and prey to the spirit of death (i.e., culture of death).

A second initiative that we often fail to advance is the gift of adoption, giving children an opportunity to flourish when they would not be able to do so with their biological families. This noble gift needs to be encouraged and not treat it as “least among choices” for moms and families. Such an approach stigmatizes adoption and implies that the birthmothers who choose this option are somehow negligent, rather than giving witness to sacrificial love and care.

We need a positive message about adoption, especially from our Church, which has had a long history in promoting this life-loving, noble act. Because a child has rights, and we have a duty to protect them, we must also seek high standards of practice and care regarding adoption, ensuring that children are safe and are given opportunity to be welcomed. But sadly, adoption has been tainted by our society that commodifies children—abortion, surrogacy, genetic engineering, embryonic stem cell research, etc.—treating adoption as an industry, regarding a child as a possession, and making it difficult for couples to adopt. This must change!

Though not for everyone, adoption expresses a willingness to open one’s life to another human being in need, holding the child’s best interests at heart and offering love and accompaniment. I will speak about this issue in later articles. 

A Call To Duty

Finally, we must continue to stand in public witness, marching in January and throughout the year and around the world. These events have morphed into something far bigger than a protest against abortion. They have become a potent expression of the pro-life movement’s deep longing for a more just society based upon a radically different scale of values: one that places the dignity of the individual human being, including the preborn child, at the very center.

As Pope Francis said, “the basis for building a culture of peace” can only be resolved by protecting and serving every life “born of woman.” We must, therefore, be clear in stating that there can be no transformation of society and culture, and no stopping of the spirit of death that has so overwhelmed Western society, unless there first occurs a reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person, beginning in the womb.

This cultural change, which we are calling for, Pope St. John Paul II says,

…demands from everyone the courage to adopt a new lifestyle, consisting in making practical choices—at the personal, family, social and international level—on the basis of a correct scale of values: the primacy of being over having, of the person over things. This renewed lifestyle involves a passing from indifference to concern for others, from rejection to acceptance of them. Other people are not rivals from whom we must defend ourselves, but brothers and sisters to be supported. They are to be loved for their own sakes, and they enrich us by their very presence (Evangelium vitae, no. 98).

Please join me in praying this transformation is realized.