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And Who Do You Say I Am?

By Judie Brown

In conversing with His Apostles about who people thought He might be, Christ posed this question to Peter: “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15). I find this question insightful in more ways than one. And I am often reminded of this when I consider the humanity of the preborn child and the ways in which our cultural elite slough off or simply deny the truth.

Rather than admitting that this preborn member of the human family is an individual, pro-aborts will avoid the truth at all costs. They do so even when confronted with undeniable facts such as those presented in the Center for Medical Progress videos or in the pictures of aborted babies that so many heroic pro-life people hold up in silence as they pray in front of abortion mills.

It is as though the preborn child asks these devotees of death: “And who do you say I am?” to which the response is more killing, more denial, and more abuse of expectant mothers and their families.

Supporters of abortion consistently decry pro-life Americans and their opposition to aborting the innocent, using terms like “grisly” and “gruesome” to define what they refuse to admit are the pictorial results of the deadly practice of abortion.

So it was with gratitude that I read this report about Ben Shapiro’s latest explanation about the humanity of the preborn baby:

A student asked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro a question about abortion at his Berkeley speech Thursday night, prompting Shapiro to engage in rapid-fire dialogue with the student.

“Any time you draw any line other than the inception of the child, you end up drawing a false line that can also be applied to adults,” Shapiro said. “So either human life has intrinsic value or it doesn’t.”

And that is the point, of course. Note that Shapiro uses the word “inception,” which is the proper way to define the biological beginning of a person’s life, as inception is the time at which something begins.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used similar language in Dignitas Personae, saying that contraceptives were contragestational, meaning that they are AGAINST human beings existing. Further, the Vatican makes it clear that if such chemicals work prior to implantation they are literally intercepting the preborn baby, with the end result being that this baby will die.

Language is and must remain important. Thank you, Ben Shapiro, for reminding us of this.

You, dearest preborn baby, are a human being! We will defend this truth with every fiber of our being, for we know and believe what Saint John Paul II taught in his profound encyclical The Splendor of Truth: “The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the unconditional respect due to the insistent demands of the personal dignity of every man, demands protected by those moral norms which prohibit without exception actions which are intrinsically evil. The universality and the immutability of the moral norm make manifest and at the same time serve to protect the personal dignity and inviolability of man, on whose face is reflected the splendor of God (cf. Gen 9:5-6).” (emphasis added)

Without exception we proclaim that the proper response to the preborn child is recognition of his membership in the human family—always and in every circumstance.

The next time we read the Gospel of Matthew and hear Christ ask “Who do you say I am?” we will remember and reflect upon the preborn child. We will picture him asking that question of us: “Who do you say I am?” And we will answer: We say that you are an innocent human being—a tiny miracle created in the image and likeness of God! And we will never stop trying to protect you.

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Join American Life League as we work to cure this toxic pathology by teaching the truth with our Culture of Life Studies Program, by showing others how to live it with our Life Defenders program, and by arming others for battle with our Stop Planned Parenthood International program.