| Politics

According to Planned Parenthood’s own statistics, in the last two decades one billion babies have been aborted. One billion! Have we had enough yet? We’re drowning in blood.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) – On Tuesday evening, Oct. 27, 2009, I had the great privilege of attending – along with 1,200 other people – a fundraising banquet for the Tidewater Crisis Pregnancy Center in Chesapeake. I went as a reporter for "Catholic Online" as well as a supporter. The featured guest speaker was pro-life hero and Nurse Jill Stanek. She was every bit as powerful in person as she is on her blog – even more so. We all need to take a cue from her as we engage the fundamental human rights issue of our age.

She spoke to us about her years spent working as a nurse at Christ Hospital in Illinois, and her struggle to shed light on the dirty little secret happening in hospitals all over the country – Christian hospitals, no less. Babies are being aborted alive (that means they survived the initial attempt on their lives) and then left alone to die, often discarded and thrown away as “medical waste”. Their deaths are blamed on “extreme prematurity” when in fact their cause of death is deliberate, forced eviction from their rightful home.

She spoke to us about what she calls “the great disconnect.” How can it be that if 51% of Americans now say they are pro-life we are still struggling to win the battle against abortion? Why is it that people will say they think it is wrong to kill a baby in the womb, and yet that belief is not evidenced in their actions? It certainly seems to have no influence on their votes. Can we truly say we believe abortion is wrong if we are not willing to stop it? Can we truly say we believe abortion is wrong if we are willing to elect lawmakers, even Presidents, who are intent on enshrining abortion “rights” into law?

This is the great disconnect. Americans will say they believe something, yet be unmotivated to defend that belief. Worst of all, Christians will say they believe something, yet be weak-willed and silent in the face of opposition to that belief. That is pathetic. Satan is mocking us and the horrors caused by abortion on demand continue.

Jill reminded us Tuesday night of a simple fact: abortion is manslaughter. Whether our laws reflect it or not, it is a crime. As Catholic Christians we know that it is an egregious violation of the Natural Law. Any person who claims to be pro-life must demand the laws be changed to reflect the truth about the fundamental human right, the right to life. It is entirely illogical and frankly absurd to charge one man with murder in the death of his unborn child and to declare another man a patriot and a hero for causing and profiting from the deaths of tens of thousands of preborn children. The only difference? In the first case, the mother wanted the baby. In all the others, the mothers didn’t want what we call the “fetus”, as if that somehow lessens the gravity of the utter evil of the act.

That is the great disconnect. This disconnect proves that we all know quite well that there’s something wrong with causing the death of a baby in the womb, but we are too weak or too selfish or too lazy or too calloused to require justice. Our conscience is supposed to be soothed by the mantra of “choice.” Who are we to tell a woman what she has to do with her body?

We are supposed to be a just society. We are supposed to be an honorable people. We do not need it explained to us that a mother’s body ends where her baby’s begins. We know that. We simply want to pretend we don’t. We want to act like it’s not our place to say. We want to distance ourselves from the responsibility by saying, “I think it’s wrong, but it’s not my choice.” While we sit mute, the truly voiceless have no defense, no advocate, and no rescue. “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not He who guards your life know it? Will He not repay each person according to what he has done?” Proverbs 24:11-12

This is the same disconnect that was at work during the shameful days of slavery. Dear Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, in a column published here on Catholic Online as well as in his Diocesan Press, made this point! Americans attempted to deny the humanity of black men and women and insisted they had the “right” to “own” another human being and subject them to degradation, cruelty and, in some instances, the taking of their lives through abuse. Evil had so corrupted the thinking of so many people, and evil is still corrupting our thoughts today. Today our nation proclaims the lawful right to kill an unwanted child. Say that out loud: America proclaims the lawful right to kill an unwanted child.

There is only one reason America still asserts that abhorrent and nonexistent “right” today: because those who know better lack the will to put an ...