Abortion and the Rights of Unborn Girls

Few sins are as terrifying as the murder of a child. On this all must agree. Yet the younger the child is, the more fraught the discussion tends to become. In the age of sex positivity, it has become necessary to justify its consequences in terms that absolve. The precious soul of the unborn is often treated as a diabolical inversion of its true nature—a mere collection of cells, a lifeless body, a mere beating heart, a meaningless locus of consciousness. 

Much of ancient child sacrifice served a theological purpose. Indeed, Moloch has many cousins. What differentiates much of the world’s current understanding of abortion as a human right is that it does not seek to curry favor with the gods. Arguably, this makes it even worse. 

The nihilistic paganism that supplies the practical context for the pro-choice position finds its true philosophical home in materialism. The precipitous logic of mass extermination can only be legitimized by writing away the true nature of the crime. The horror of the slaughter advances in scope and precision under the banner of liberation. Some ironies just aren’t funny. 

When abortion is framed in terms of a woman’s right to choose, the conversation shifts into one of freedom. Murder is thus hoisted up the flagpole in an act of reverence. Protecting this enshrinement are the alleged saints of the secular, their cherished sacrament a perverse transposition of true sacrifice. The limits of liberty form a chaos in search of order. 

It is all too common, most notably in China and India, for gender-specific abortions to be rewarded (in this life). Men are simply more likely to provide financial windfalls to families. It is a sad fact that countless lives are lost in the process of creating new life. In more than half of cases in these countries, the lost life would have been a girl. Yet the fiery rebuttals of certain feminists who are proudly and radically pro-choice rarely acknowledge the devastation wrought on their own gender. 

Those that are most likely to oppose the death penalty are the most likely to support abortion. Save a woman, she lives for a lifetime; kill a baby, she apparently dies as an act of righteousness. The cognitive dissonance is sanctioned through a disparagement of the divine. Without God, consciousness is quick to be understood as mere epiphenomenon; without that which is immaterial, there is no immaterial soul. 

It is a mutilated morality that permits reckless sexual behavior to be honored again and again. The tragedy of the sexual revolution, its legislative aftermath and the introduction of rogue and ruthless technologies of destruction are an offense to God. For the kids that make it out of the womb, introduction to a culture brimming with licentiousness is an inevitability. The essentially atheistic orientation of the popular contemporary scene is a matter of the utmost urgency. If the culture does not change in a profound way, the simple fact is the unborn, many of them unborn girls, will be butchered in proportion. 

To the extent abortion is perceived as an issue specific to women, the destruction of innocent unborn lives becomes a rallying cry of unbridled evil. To the extent abortion is perceived as an issue for unborn girls, goodness is granted permission to flourish. Why do we draw the line at women, pausing only after the girls become adults? Just as women’s lives matter, girls’ lives matter. And just as girls’ lives matter, unborn girls’ lives matter.

The truth of the Catholic faith hinges on the answers to many questions, many of them moral. Abortion is just one example. The New and Eternal Covenant, grounded in the God of love, is a necessary prerequisite to the salvation of souls. Yet the fact that God is love means that distortions of His Covenant can take horrific form. Love, separated from its true bearing, invites devastation.  

The contemporary debate around abortion is a debate that would not be given credibility throughout much of the history of the West. At one point, our civilization knew enough to realize the problems inherent to the pro-choice position and thus did not dive any deeper. That we now know the abortion issue as a women’s issue does not speak highly of our conditioning. But the facts are plain: in positioning the discourse in terms of women’s rights, we lose sight of our shared humanity. This is not just true for many women; it is also true for many men. And in our confusion, unborn girls’ lives no longer matter.