Today, we have been asked by our Bishops to celebrate a mass for the protection of human dignity, either the Mass for Peace and Justice, or the Mass of Thanksgiving for the Gift of Human Life.  This is of course driven by the anniversary yesterday of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion on demand in our nation.  It did this by making absolute a right to privacy discovered in the “penumbra” of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, while at the same time denying personhood to the unborn child.  So we find ourselves with a legal system in which the corporation is treated as a person, but the unborn baby is not.

While the focus is of course on the dignity and sanctity of unborn life, the church always speaks of life issues in terms of the dignity of all human life, rooted in the fact of being created in the image and likeness of God.  We must beware the exceptions:  If this or that life is not sacred (the enemy, the guilty, the dying, the handicapped, etc.) then perhaps that life (the unborn child) is not sacred either.

Just a few weeks ago there was the story of a newborn infant being abandoned to die, presumably by its mother and/or father.  Periodically, we are shocked by stories of this or that mother or father killing their children.  The most recent story I saw was of a mother trying to drown her three children in the bathtub.  (Mercifully, she failed.)  This shock and dismay on the part of society as a whole is hypocritical in the extreme.  When we take a position that the child within his or her mother’s womb is simply her property to be disposed of as she sees fit, why are we surprised when the a few months later the same child is murdered?  The only difference is time and location.  Those who are handicapped in some way should take special note:  of all children diagnosed in the womb as having some handicapped, 80 percent of them are aborted.

Much is made of the need to provide safe abortions to women seeking this procedure, and we would never want to see any woman harmed in carrying out this assault on human life.  But the fact is that there is no such thing as a safe abortion if one is the child within the womb.

You see, it’s not about choice.  It’s about life, the life of the child, voiceless, vulnerable.  As Blessed Theresa of Calcutta said, “It is a true poverty that a child must die so that you might live as you choose.”