By Judie Brown
The mainstreaming of chemical methods to control fertility has been so successful that these days some can even find what they think they need to contaminate their bodies in vending machines. Such is the case for Columbia University and others in the NY area.
But now Columbia has gone a step further. Columbia’s Barnard College is making plans to provide medication abortion to the students early next year. According to reports, the college has implemented this in reaction to the Dobbs Supreme Court decision.
Such actions are not unique to Columbia, of course, but they underscore the current attitude toward what it means to be inconveniently pregnant, as was the case when doctors such as Kenneth Ryan and Willard Cates infamously claimed that pregnancy was similar to a venereal disease and abortion was the treatment of choice.
Not much has changed in the intervening years, other than the fact that popularizing contraception and abortion has created a dearth in our population. Millions of us are dead as a result.
Politicians like JD Vance know this but refuse to admit the facts. He claimed to CNN’s Jake Tapper that he did not know any Republicans “with a brain” who would challenge women’s access to these chemicals and devices. Vance has also made it clear that while he wants to save as many babies as possible, he will not allow his moral views to get in the way of political reality.
It is clear that even though someone as intelligent as Vance may know that the act of abortion kills a person, the fact that contraceptive chemicals are killing people at much higher rates is a bridge too far when it comes to honesty in politics. This is the norm in the culture today. Preborn babies are topics; they are not actual persons who are dying.
In all but a few cases, innocent lives are expendable for any reason or in specific cases. The most recent example of a baby hanging onto life because of a political decision to defend life is playing out in Texas right now.
Texan Kate Cox is expecting a baby who has been diagnosed with a fetal anomaly. She wants to abort the child, but the state’s Supreme Court ruled against her. Cox plans to travel to another state to have her baby killed. According to statistics from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, Cox is among more than 92,000 expectant mothers who have traveled elsewhere to have preborn babies killed by abortion.
The existence of the preborn child, equated with disease, is viewed in terms of the mother and her medical needs, which is a fancy way of saying that in questions involving the inconvenient preborn child, the weaker in our midst becomes the prey. This is the vilest aspect of our tale of woe.
Voiceless and rejected, such babies are collateral damage in the woeful war defined as an expectant mother’s ability to exercise her “reproductive rights.”
Into this morass walk the valiant pro-life Samaritans. We come with our hearts open, our faith aflame, and our desire to save the innocent. It is here, at this juncture in our tale of woe that we are inspired by words of wisdom such as those uttered by Pope Benedict XVI: “The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”
College student Olivia Scarpo quoted these words in her article “What’s It Like Being a Pro-Life College Activist.” She continued, “Having the courage to know what’s right and act upon it is something that doesn’t come easily, but I believe it is a way that we achieve Pope Benedict’s definition of greatness and defend life.”
And if we too want to achieve greatness, we must live by these words, never apologizing and never compromising.