Pro-Life

From an opinion piece in the Omaha World Herald, August 23, 2020, titled “Neither U.S. political party fully follows Catholic Values” written by Thomas Kelly, a professor of systematic theology at Creighton University:

In such an important election year, arguments will undoubtedly emerge that President Donald Trump is somehow “pro-life” because of his two Supreme Court appointments and various other symbolic and largely rhetorical “pro-life” statements. This would be a terrible mistake to make, and Catholic voters should know the truth. While unborn life is and always will be precious in the eyes of the Catholic Church, all life is precious, and so much of that life is under assault because of Donald Trump.

Pope John Paul II reminded us what Vatican II named as intrinsic evils. “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free and responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer the injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.” (no. 80)  Clearly, intrinsic evils extend beyond personal choices related to human reproduction…. 

Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky recently emphasized the focus of Pope Francis. “Pope Francis has given us a great definition of what pro-life means,” Stowe said at the webinar. “He basically tells us we can’t claim to be pro-life if we support the separation of children from their parents at the U.S. border, if we support exposing people at the border to COVID-19 because of the facilities that they’re in, if we support denying people who have need for adequate health care access to health care, if we keep people from getting the housing or the education that they need, we cannot call ourselves pro-life.”

There is a drastic difference between abortion and all the social anomalies that the professor feels likewise fall under the pro-life banner – and that is death by the hand of another!  Abortion violently terminates a life while the other “pro-life” issues he suggests are about improving a living being’s existence.  We should all want others to have a better life but that is radically different than the battle to protect the very existence of a person which is what the pro-life movement is about.  The professor has inserted socialism into an anti-abortion movement.

This response to the professor’s opinion:  Letters to the Editor, OWH, 08/27/2020, by Patrick Prince, “…but disagree with his main point.  He is equivocating various intrinsic evils when there is a hierarchy.  The Catechism describes only one sin as abominable, and it is abortion (Page 2271)…Without the right to life, no other rights have a foundation.  I cannot vote for someone who does not know the difference between serving the public and allowing it to be killed.”

And then this comment by Thomas Hilgers (a clinical professor at Creighton) in the opinion page of the OWH on 09/12/2020:  Life is at the very core of all our rights.  Without human life there are no human rights.  They do not exist because life does not exist.  Working for the establishment of the very right to exist is not “single–issue voting” as Professor Kelly suggests, but is at the very foundation of the right we believe have been given to all of us by God.  If we destroy human life, we destroy that foundation.

Being pro-life is about protecting others from death – it is not about improving the lot of the living.