What is our response to those who have redefined abortion and contraception as “reproductive rights”?
Well, as is the case with most cultural excuses for sin, the term reproductive rights is a smokescreen. Too many people have decided that the right to reproduce entitles them to choose life or death at will. They then call this “right” a liberty—which to them means freedom to do as one pleases.
But if we pay close attention to the term reproductive rights, we see two obvious flaws. First is the word “reproductive.” Animals, vegetation, and copy machines reproduce. Human beings procreate. Ideally within marriage, a man and a woman join together, and in a unitive act they procreate children. As human beings, each has made a conscious choice to celebrate life and bring forth children.
The second word—“rights”—is the more confusing of those two words because, as St. John Paul II taught in The Gospel of Life, “broad sectors of public opinion justify certain crimes against life in the name of the rights of individual freedom.” He went on to teach that when such so-called rights are actually crimes, attacks on the innocent “are carried out in the very heart of and with the complicity of the family—the family which by its nature is called to be the ‘sanctuary of life.’”
To read the remainder of this article, visit the Celebrate Life Magazine website at clmagazine.org/post/pro-life-basics-what-is-our-response-to-those-who-have-redefined-abortion-and-contraception-as-reproductive-rights.