Sydney
17 August 2003
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Dr Pell
reinforces Vatican call
Nauru withdraws Jesuit activist’s visa
Students breathe easily
‘Involuntary euthanasia’ fear
Bigger role for lay leaders
Concern at axing of show
L’Arche - a sign of hope to the world
Community crisis for Merrylands
Caritas Australia backs island leaders’ talks with our PM
Catholic Mission helps with new hospital
Editorial: End of abortion
Letters: On the rite
Conversation: Sr Helen Prejean, author, death-row spiritual adviser and death penalty opponent - There but for the grace of God ...
People dancing ‘on the margins’
Church growth in Africa ‘phenomenal’
‘Clash of civilisations’ not inevitable
Five in search for the ‘real’ Fiji
Poverty: Ireland is winning the war
Obituary: Mass for former Franciscan missionary
Obituary: Mercy sister brought laughter and hope
Obituary: Papal knight who just liked to help
Muslims and Jews ‘feel under threat’
Floral feast for St Mary's
Editorial: End of abortion
More and more people and institutions are beginning to assent to the reality of human life in the womb and to follow that reality to its logical conclusion: the end of abortion.
It has not always been so. In the years that abortion has been legal through all nine months of pregnancy, much of the media has recited the pro-abortion mantras by rote, even though doing so requires them to ignore science, deny that human life begins at conception, refuse to hear the beating heart in the womb, and accept the myth of phrases like “mass of tissues” and “a women’s body”.
Throughout those same years, pro-life people have been warning that abortion is on an inevitable collision course with science.
As the unborn child is photographed in utero, as surgeons operate on babies before birth and as DNA demonstrates how unique each of us is, it becomes more and more difficult to cling to the notion that there is nothing significant about destruction of the human being before birth.
Public opinion is beginning to swing more and more away from abortion, and the law is following. One example is the movement to define the killing of an unborn child as being as serious as the killing of the mother.
Other signposts along the collision course include society’s overwhelming rejection of partial-birth abortion and human cloning, and growing unease over the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos stored in clinics.
Pro-abortion people have to bend into more and more twisted contortions to defend the killing of unborn children.
Their use of the word “it” to refer to the unborn child is telling - and another signpost. Science and abortion collide every time parents see their child’s face on a computer screen during an ultra-sound. That image is not of an “it”.
Each time men and women gaze lovingly at those images and give them names, abortion is mortally wounded.
Those parents know they cannot abort someone whose face they recognise, and it’s becoming tougher for them to argue that others should.
Edited from The Evangelist, newspaper of the diocese of Albany, New York