The Most Urgent Moral And Social Issue
Fr. FRANK PAVONE
(Editor’s Note: Fr. Frank Pavone serves full-time as the national director of Priests for Life [EndAbortion.US], and pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard [RachelsVineyard.org] and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign [SilentNoMore.com].)
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What is the most urgent social and moral problem we face?
It is not immigration, or climate change, or terrorism.
The most urgent issue is abortion. It has been so for a long time and remains so today, and this is true for various reasons which have not changed.
First, there is nothing in America or in the world that is taking more lives than abortion. It claims more victims than any disease, natural disaster, war, or act of terror.
Second, without life we don’t have anything else. The right to life, as St. John Paul II said very simply, is “the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights” (Christifideles Laici). Presumably, efforts on behalf of the right to health care, to education, or to immigration, are efforts on behalf of people who are alive. Take away the right to life, and you take away all the other rights at the same time.
Third, no group of people is more defenseless than the children in the womb. They cannot speak, or even pray, and do not know the danger they face. If there is a “preferential option for the poor,” a duty to seek first those who are most marginalized and oppressed, an obligation to help the most helpless, then this speaks powerfully to the need to put the unborn first.
Fourth, not only are the unborn the most defenseless, but they are the only group whose very right to life has been completely erased from the law, and for whose scheduled death there are hundreds of legal clinics throughout America. Many injustices claim or threaten human lives.
But what other human beings are decapitated and dismembered each day in legal and publicly advertised facilities? An act of violence that is recognized as a crime is bad enough, but when that crime is transformed into a “right,” the evil takes on an even more horrifying dimension.
And fifth, the violence against the unborn is bad enough when carried out by a stranger. But adding to the moral urgency of the problem of abortion is that it is one or both parents, sometimes also with the involvement or pressure of other family members, who are authorizing the violence.
Abortion is violence against life within the very “sanctuary of life,” the family. And nothing is more destructive of the whole family than abortion.
For these and other reasons, fighting and ending abortion is priority number one, both for the Church, the state, the family, and each of us individually.
In my own priestly ministry, which is focused full-time on the mission of ending abortion, I have met countless people who have taken this to heart and are devoting every hour of time and ounce of energy that they can to saving the unborn. This often takes place as they juggle, quite effectively, numerous other commitments. They are an inspiration not only to us today, but to future generations.
In the long annals of history, people will look back on this as the age of abortion, and they will look for the foes of abortion. They will see the massive, inexplicable blind spot that so many people and institutions had toward the unborn, and they will ask: Who saw what was happening? They will calculate the number of victims, and will ask: Who was working to save these lives? They will see the vast damage done to Moms, Dads, and families, and will ask: Who devoted themselves to healing the wounds?
They will see unjust laws and court decisions imposed by government officials who had no respect for the lives of little babies, and they will ask: Who was challenging these officials, striving to hold back their hands from bloodshed, and working to vote them out of office? They will see a nation torn apart and people at every level of society deeply divided by the struggle over abortion, and will ask: Who was on the right side of that division?
We who do this work, giving all we can to the great cause of the unborn, are on the right side of history, and of justice.
