By Judie Brown
Frantic and misinformed are two words we use to define most media statements. A very good example of this can be found in the following paragraph from The Hill, a leftist website: “Texas bans abortions in almost all circumstances, but the nine Republican justices on the court found that the medical exceptions allow doctors to treat women even if they are not at imminent risk of death.”
Once again, the focus is on expectant mothers, who are never referred to by those accurate words. They are mothers, and of course it is their preborn children who are facing imminent risk of death every time she decides to abort her baby rather than carry her to term.
In the same category we find Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s inane “bans off our bodies” initiative. The project goal is to make sure women understand that any suggestion that a preborn child is a person must be denied because only the body of the expectant mother is important.
And in Nebraska the abortion rights versus preborn child rights argument has created a ballot nightmare. There are three initiatives in this coming November’s election: 1) protection of abortion rights, 2) regulation of abortion after the first trimester, and 3) recognition of the preborn child as a person.
One reporter suggests that the first two may have a chance of passage, but the proposal regarding human personhood has no chance. Or to put it another way, the politics of life does not have a chance of being based on reality because the facts get buried in the rhetoric.
An insightful description of resulting rhetorical swamp is the web of unreality. The commentator asks:
How can ordinary people escape the web of unreality? If they want to discuss something, they look to social media, and if they want to find anything out, they consult Google. These can both be channeled by search, engagement, and propagation algorithms. Developments in AI seems likely to enhance that ability, and the alternative can seem to be free-floating theorizing that easily goes crazy.
Lost in the fog are the simple facts regarding biology 101 or ethical standards as embodied in the decalogue. Logic has given way to the sound bite, resulting in confusion, disinformation, and a risk of death for preborn children and many others.
Pope Benedict XVI said during a 2005 homily,
Only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world.
It is only where human beings welcome this joy—living it, spreading it, and celebrating it—that the risk of death cannot flourish.
In the heart where joy abounds, evil has no chance!
