By Judie Brown
There comes a point in the history of every civilization when a brink is confronted. Tottering on that edge, people are faced with a choice between continuing to self-destruct and resolving to correct their evil ways and make reparations for the carnage they have left in their wake. Reading the words of this nation’s vice president, we are reminded that America stands on that precipice right now.
During a recent interview, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked about the overturn of Roe v. Wade, an occurrence she lays firmly and with disdain at the feet of former president Donald Trump. Harris told CNN’s Laura Coates: “By inference, he [Trump] is proud that women have been deprived of fundamental freedoms to make decisions about their own body; by inference, proud that doctors are being penalized and criminalized for providing health care, proud that women are silently suffering because they don’t have access to the health care they need. . . . So, let’s understand that the stakes are so very high.”
If you were reading her comments as an uninformed bystander, you could create a mental image of an ogre who prowled the land seeking to destroy women by cruel and unusual punishment. But of course Harris is talking about women who are with child and unable to pay someone to kill that child because of a change in laws. As is the case with all public discussion about aborting a baby in our day, the facts become victim to rhetorical mumbo jumbo.
Thus it is that Harris and her president, Joe Biden, are making the nation aware of the fact that they hold abortion in the highest regard and will, if reelected, do whatever it takes to make abortion available to any woman of any age at any stage from creation to birth.
The very idea that such discussions are publicly aired should trouble the thinking person, but in the United States—where killing the preborn is as forgone a conclusion as having your hair done or visiting a dentist—outrage seems hard to find. It is as though pregnancy has become part of the lexicon of modern-day illnesses and abortion is a simple treatment to cure the condition.
So it happens that during this rising popularity of killing innocent people, we encounter the very sad tale of deadly legislative proposals in many states aimed at making it easier to assist in the suicide of someone who has lost the will to live. Euthanasia Prevention Coalition leader Alex Schadenberg reports that “one of the key strategies of the assisted suicide lobby is to present a ‘restrictive’ assisted suicide bill for the purpose of getting it passed and once it is passed they introduce bills in subsequent years to expand the assisted suicide legislation.”
This strategy sounds eerily familiar to the plans laid out in the late 1960s by those who wanted to incrementally move America toward condoning abortion for any reason at any time during pregnancy. And since the architects of that plan were so successful, now it is time to pursue a similar strategy for ending the lives of those who are deemed unwanted or inconvenient at the other end of life’s spectrum.
It is the way of those who pursue death for others as a personal goal in life.
So what is the answer, you might ask? The wisdom of Father John Hardon gives it to us. He once wrote:
We are asking ourselves how to combat the culture of death. This culture did not arise accidentally. Its roots go back generations, even centuries. It is not only a matter of converting the openly hostile enemies of human life. It is nothing less than converting a society dominated by secularism. We are living in an age in which the world (saeculum) has become the only reality which millions recognize. They are therefore blinded to the true meaning of man as a creature of God, whose life on earth is a prelude to his eternal life with God.
Bringing America back to life requires confidence in the power of God and the will to stem this deadly flood with the power of unfailing love for our fellow human beings, each created in the image and likeness of God.