A STATEMENT OF PURPOSE AND REASONS FOR PRO-LIFE COMMITMENT
Pro Life advocates believe in the Founding Fathers Declaration that it is a self evident truth that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life.
We plead with our fellow citizens to accept the authority of the Creator in giving the inalienable right to life, and to consider the consequences of having man made laws create a license to kill innocent human beings.
In the case of our tragically disordered law, citizens are given, in the case of abortion, a private “right” to kill those who are too young, too small, too handicapped, too brudensome, or for whatever reason, “not wanted.”
When this “right” and the lethal logic that supports it is established in law, there is no principled reason why it should not be applied to the “unwanted” at any point along life’s way, as advocates of eugenics, euthanasia, and assisted suicide logically contend.
The inescapably public question posed is whether we as a political community adhere to the founding proposition articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The course of progress in our political history has been one of inclusion rather than exclusion. Most notable has been the inclusion of slaves and their descendants, and the recognition of the political rights of women.
The foundational moral claim on which our nation was founded is the claim that all human beings are created equal and are the bearers of rights we are obliged to respect. This is the premise attacked by the current abortion regime and related aggressions against the gift of life. Rights are not to be confused with individual desires or felt needs. Rights are joined to duties. Those who cannot assert their rights depend upon others doing their duty to protect.
The inescapable question is this: why should we care about those who are weak, dependent, burdensome, unproductive, and undeveloped or gravely diminished in their capacity for the interactions we associate with being human? If we are unable to give a morally principled answer to that question, the very concept of human rights is emptied of any meaning or compliance and reduced to utilitarian calculation or arbitrary sentiment. The lethal logic invoked in support of the abortion license imperils the lives and well-being of millions who are severely handicapped or who are cared for in the many thousands of facilities for the aged and radically dependent.
Those most in need of defense are those who cannot defend themselves. We are called to speak on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. Among the most defenseless are the unborn child, the severely disabled, and the dependent elderly. There are today legal protections of the disabled and elderly, but the unborn are totally dependent and totally vulnerable to the will of others. Once fully born, they are deemed to have rights protected in law, even though they are at that point no more human beings and no less dependent than they were hours, weeks or months before. Yet before birth an even in the very process of being born, they are now deemed not to have rights that society is obliged to respect. This perverse view of human rights is irrational and incoherent. Its result is the unjust killing of many millions of those who are indisputable human beings and the undoing of the very concept of human rights.
We thank God for the women and men who, having been complicit in the evil of abortion, have been led to contrition, repentance, and newness of life, for abortionists who have abandoned their trafficking in death, for those who have established thousands of crisis-pregnancy centers to assist women in troubled circumstances to welcome the gift of new life; and of all who have over the years sustained a growing pro-life movement for change toward a culture of life.
This is a movement for change that, more than any in American history, claims the allegiance of millions who have no personal stake in the cause other than the protection of innocent persons.
It is most particularly gratifying that the leadership of this movement is now passing to a younger generation that views with horrified repugnance an abortion regime to which so many of their elders had become morally numbed.
Even as the dark years of unlimited abortion license may be coming to an end, the culture of death insinuates itself into sciences and most particularly into the field of biotechnology. The creation and destruction of human life for research, cloning and related purposes underscores the truth that the pro-life cause is needed for a long time to come..
Pro-Life advocates pledge our relentless efforts to persuade our fellow citizens to secure justice in law for the most vulnerable among us.
While political and legal developments are important, they are not of paramount importance. Deeper and of greater consequence is the moral and cultural impoverishment in our understanding of the gift of life, of our duties to others—especially to those who are most dependent—and of individual freedom that finds it true fulfillment not in license but in love.
Finally, our society’s drift towards a culture of death will not be arrested and reversed without a bolder and more persuasive witness to the gospel of life centered in Jesus Christ who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” To know him is to serve him, also in working for a more just social order that defends the gift of life wherever it is threatened.
Biblical truth is deeply grounded in the dignity of the human person at every stage of development, disadvantage, or decline; it is supportive of the founding convictions of our nation, and it holds the promise, which very few human societies seems able to accomplish, of restraining the barbaric devaluation of human life.
Cliff Zarsky, President-- September 2006