In The Beginning, Abortion Was Murder
The evening that the leaked Supreme Court opinion by Samuel Alito hit the airwaves, Stream contributor Jason Jones — a lifelong pro-life stalwart — was at a funeral in Washington, D.C. So he was present outside the Supreme Court, with a small band of pro-lifers, countering hundreds of outraged abortion fans. He was livestreaming the incident from his phone, and I sat at my laptop watching, fascinated.
One amusing detail: The pro-lifers who happened to show up were from the group Atheists for Life. They were standing up to the mob, even as our alleged Christian, “devout Catholic” president signed off on a statement supporting abortion up through birth.
The irony there is telling, in the sense that it tells us something.
The One Thing We Can Know for Certain
Abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. This truth is more certain than the existence of God, which requires some abstract inferences, and the weighing of evidence. There’s no need for that in the womb. Every woman knows what it means to be pregnant. Most animals know it, and most of the higher mammals make sacrifices and take risks to protect their young. Even alligators, primitive creatures from the age of the dinosaurs, care for their young. To do otherwise is evil, if the word has any meaning.
When we see the ejected, mutilated remains of unborn children, we know what we’re looking at. We see tiny, cancelled faces and delicate, severed limbs, and it makes us weep. When we learn that doctors are stealing those organs to perform monstrous experiments, we are outraged and want to hang them. That’s how the human heart works.
A Pro-Choice Jesus Would Deserve Crucifixion
Abortion is wrong. This truth is more certain than the divinity of Christ. If a man who rose from the dead told us that killing babies was right, we’d know he wasn’t God — but some wizard protected by demons. Or maybe an alien. But we’d know he wasn’t the Son of the God who gave us life.
We would reject him, maybe nail him back up on the cross, but this time set it on fire. To be on the safe side. Any church which claims that abortion is justified is a temple of evil, where you shouldn’t darken the door. It’s haunted, by the cruel spirits whom it serves.
Are We Some Mutant Species?
Abortion is cruel and selfish, a refusal to pay forward to the next generation the gift of life we each have received. This truth is obvious even to animals. In higher mammals, mothers will fight and sacrifice for their offspring. If we saw a species that slaughtered them, merely to avoid difficulties and inconveniences, we’d know that the species was doomed. We wouldn’t mourn it.
And indeed, if the human species continues to slaughter its young, there will be no reason to mourn the disappearance of man. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Let the dolphins grow legs and inhabit our ruined cities.
I Think, Therefore I Am Pro-Life
Are there any truths more obvious and certain than the wickedness of abortion? Perhaps. I’m conscious that I exist, and that’s effectively certain.
However, as Descartes realized, (and the Matrix movies explored) there’s a theoretical chance that any one of us is living in a dream, deluded by an Evil Genius, a wicked god, or a complex computer simulation.
You can’t rule it out. What we can rule out?
This crackpot theory: That in the reality we’re faced with, whatever its origin or ultimate nature, killing innocent babies of our own species is virtuous. Nope, it is contemptible. That’s more clear, absolute, and certain than my own consciousness of existence. Only Christianity urges me to summon mercy for those who do this. If I were a pagan, I’d just despise them.
Mere Instinct, Foundational Truth
You might say that it’s the primal truth, at the root of all. We see life, and say it is good. If we don’t really believe that, we’ll eventually kill ourselves — quickly by swallowing pills, or slowly through drugs and decay. Our reaction of love and joy at the sight of a child is a measure of this truth.
It’s not a “merely instinctual” reaction. Rather, this mere instinct is the fundamental truth on which we build everything else. We decide to live one more day, to make a friend, to marry a spouse, to conceive a child, to care for the old, to write a novel or compose a song or rescue a pet … because life is good. We know life is good because we see that babies are good. They are the most absolutely certain and visible good in the natural order.
If you can’t see that, you’re already half-dead. A nation of walking corpses doesn’t deserve to exist — and nature will see that it doesn’t.
Our future is pro-life, if we have one. And if we don’t, we didn’t deserve to. Because we decided that life is bad, so life attacked us as a cancer.
Life wins, in the end.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”