By Judie Brown
The fact that human procreation has been reduced to something mechanical instead of what God intended is not difficult to understand. When human beings prior to birth are relegated to mere problems that can be eliminated by abortion, what can one expect? In a culture that has rejected the natural law, anything is possible.
This is why we continue to insist and teach that every human being is a person from the moment his life begins. As members of the human family, people have rights. And these rights—including the right to be born—are paramount in our quest to create a culture of life.
But we encounter copious challenges.
In Montana, the legislative session recently came to an end and another proposal defining human beings as persons died. It would seem that the quest to see human personhood recognized in law is a much more difficult proposition than we might have thought some 44 years ago when the first Human Life Amendment was introduced in Congress. Such is the way of our morally dilapidated culture these days.
In Toronto, Canada, researchers are taking embryonic babies, killing them for their stem cells, and then using those cells to supposedly treat heart attack victims, even though the future of such treatment remains uncertain. The problem with such science is that people ignore the fact that the human embryo in question is a human being.
The story of how this all came to pass is the story of in vitro fertilization and its progeny. Because society defers to IVF as the go-to science when infertility is diagnosed, the human being has become viewed as a thing, and reproduction has replaced procreation.
In his seminal encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reminded us of the true meaning of procreation: “The question of human procreation, like every other question which touches human life, involves more than the limited aspects specific to such disciplines as biology, psychology, demography or sociology. It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects.”
Once the supernatural aspects of the human being are lost, procreation becomes reproduction, reproduction becomes a mechanical function, and the result of the union of sperm and egg becomes a thing that is either welcome in the family, useful in a laboratory, disposable because of a defect, or transferrable to a third party who cannot bear a child. This is why those who oppose any effort to legitimize the protection of human beings prior to birth recognize that by doing so they are abandoning the quest to remain in the mainstream and serve their god of political correctness. And frankly the obvious fact is that if human personhood were recognized in law as beginning at the human being’s biological beginning, IVF and other methods of mechanized reproduction would be against the law. This would end the lucrative IVF business and all those scientific efforts that have sprung from it.
The question is not whether or not they know, but whether or not we will force the issue every time we have the opportunity. By doing this we are educating the public, the very people whom the enemies of life wish to keep in the shadows of ignorance.
In our pro-life work we are the ones who must stand firm on human personhood principles because human beings are not rabbits; they are sexual creatures designed by God to procreate children according to His plan.
Every one of those children is a gift from God, not a thing to be toyed with, cut apart, or otherwise dehumanized. Period!
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Join American Life League as we defend the truth by teaching it with our Culture of Life Studies Program, by showing others how to live it with our Life Defenders program, and when arming others for battle with our Stop Planned Parenthood International program.
image: Stephen Llody-Smart via Flickr | CC-2.0