40 Days For Life
This is an interesting effort asking Christians to focus their prayers on bringing an end to abortion in this world. It is one of the hard things about dealing with such a moral outrage as it continues year after year and decade after decade. How do you keep up your energy? The basic arguments remain unchanged so it is hard to keep writing new stuff. Certainly in the blog world it is always the new posts that get attention. So an effort like this gives us reason to talk about abortion once again.
The focus on prayer is also quite good. The issue really is not abortion. Abortion is a clear sign that society has lost its moral center. My son was delivered by C-section at 34 weeks. We were assured that 34 week babies do very well and there was very little risk in taking the baby at that point. Seeing him and having the medical community work hard to insure his health and having many doctors and nurses declare him to be cute. Then knowing that society and many of those same doctors and nurses would be just as happy if we had asked them to kill our baby at 34 weeks. It just seems so obvious society has lost it’s moral center. Whatever process they are using to determine right and wrong has come off the rails because they are getting this answer wrong big time.
Of course the root cause of this was not abortion. It started with the sexual revolution. We wanted pornography. We wanted promiscuity. But we didn’t want more children. Children became a hazard of sex. Contraception was seen as the answer. Sadly even many Christians bought into the mindset that sex without the risk of pregnancy was a great idea. There were two lies being told. One was that contraception was moral. The other was that it removed any risk of pregnancy.
Contraception told us that we could meddle with the sacred space where reproduction occurred. Add latex, add chemicals, snip organs, no moral questions here. Once people got used to the idea of doing unnatural things to their reproductive organs then abortion seemed like just one more step. They were assured by Christians that sperm and egg were very ordinary needing no special moral treatment. Then they had trouble understanding why the same stuff became sacred at the moment of conception.
There was also the mindset of contraception. Sex was no longer thought of as a procreative act. So when contraception failed it seemed wrong to retroactively make it procreative. A couple who was having sex and not considering procreation was doing nothing wrong. How could you not offer them some way out?
There was also the notion that abstaining from sex was just unrealistic. It became much more so with the acceptance of pornography and unchaperoned dating. Lust isn’t something you should control. Just feed it. What could go wrong?
So now abortion is the place where two values collide. Society tries to respect life but at the same time it affirms sexual immorality. We cannot fix the abortion problem and leave the current thinking about sex in place. It just won’t work. It requires nothing less than a reclaiming of the Catholic sexual ethic. How do we get there? Well, that is why we need to pray. We need an outpouring of God’s grace.
