The Elephant in the Room

I wouldn’t wish having to watch the presidential or vice-presidential debates on anybody, but if you did watch them, you may have noticed a serious absence when it came to the discussion of abortion. The American legal situation on abortion is in great flux. In the vice-presidential debate, you had a Catholic convert and a lapsed Catholic debating abortion, but they never spoke about what was really the elephant in the room which is the preborn child who is being killed by abortion. This is often the case because we don’t like to talk about the difficult questions.

Abortion is really a clash of absolutes - you have the health, concerns, or anxiety of the mother and the life of the preborn child. People don’t like to consider the harsh reality that every abortion kills a human life. Pope Francis, in a recent press conference, made the point yet again that abortion is always the taking of a human life.

We must constantly bring to the fore who and what it is that we’re talking about. It’s not enough to just bring up the idea of hard cases. Instead, we must remember that every abortion is a hard case and that someone lives and someone dies. This is not something that is so easily talked about in polite conversations, but it is a fact and a fact that needs to be looked at again and again. We need to say that the preborn child is a child. It isn’t just a matter of statistics. It isn’t just a matter of heart-wrenching stories. We speak of it because people will forget, ignore, overlook, or try to avoid that which is truly unpleasant.

Perhaps this is why the Jews were told to constantly teach about the central fact of their faith that there is one God. He is the God of Israel. They were told to mention it constantly; to drill it into their children, to put it on their doorposts, to bind it on their foreheads and their wrists, to constantly remember the Shema Israel. Often as preachers, we can say, I’ve already spoken about that, people already know that, or people already agree with what I’m going to say. Always remember that maybe there were some people that weren’t there the day you preached on it or it takes time for that truth to percolate into minds, and, indeed, hearts.

Yes, there isn’t a person there above the age of reason in your church who doesn’t know about neonatal intensive care units, who hasn’t seen an ultrasound picture of their preborn child, but it still needs to be said. In an age of emotions, we need to speak the truth that these are children, not just pregnancies; that they are two lives that are intertwined and not just one alone that is demanding domination; that a termination of pregnancy is always a killing. Yes, there can be outrage if you dare to question the rarities and the truths of social convention. Yes, language is being twisted to insist that one and only one person’s wishes, desires, and needs should be acknowledged and should be paramount. We need to say the hard truth about who are you killing and about who can you really be saving. In the vice-presidential debate, Senator JD Vance said we can and we must do better. We can and we must do better by constantly, continually, and tirelessly saying the truth that there is a child here who’s life is endangered, who is vulnerable and who needs to be saved.

Fr. Tom Lynch (PFLC National President)