Abortion | Seventimes70

In States Where Sin Abounds…

In Virginia where I live, sin is set to abound. The new governor and new darling of the left is diligently working to expand the culture of sin in our state. It may already abound in your state, particularly if you live in California, New York, Maryland, Colorado, Minnesota, or another state where abortion and other mortal sins are codified into law. Governors and state legislators are striving to normalize, encourage, even celebrate those sins.

But there is a silver lining. Actively resisting this culture of sin not only benefits society in the usual ways, but also can dispose one to greater graces, more rapid growth in holiness, and greater interior peace.

Most prominent within the culture of sin is abortion. In Virginia it has been legal during the first and second trimesters, and in rare cases during the third trimester. The previous governor, Glenn Youngkin (R), sought to limit abortion to within 15 weeks of pregnancy. But the new governor, Abigail Spanberger (D), supports a radical constitutional amendment that locks-in abortion-on-demand. Due to its vague language and loopholes, it could institute late-term abortion up until birth (and maybe even post-birth infanticide, as Virginia’s previous Democrat governor infamously discussed in 2019). Spanberger approved putting the legislation on a state-wide ballot to amend Virginia’s constitution.

Other grave sins expected to be instituted or to become more deeply entrenched under Spanberger include:

· Assisted suicide.
· Homosexual legal unions.
· Castration and genital mutilation of gender-confused children (unless legal victories frustrate those plans).
· Biological boys in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms.
· Schools not notifying parents about their kids identifying as transgender.
· Legalized marijuana.
· Non-cooperation with the federal government in removing criminal illegal aliens.
· Unethical gerrymandering.
· Higher taxes. (It’s arguably a sin to coerce money out of people over and above the amount needed to fund essential government functions.)
· A $15 minimum wage, thus pricing unskilled workers out of a job, hitting low-income minorities hardest.
· A flurry of new business regulations, thus driving out businesses and jobs.

As dismaying as this is, graces abound for those who actively resist – through more prayer, more vigilance, more involvement, and more action. As the saying goes, pray as if everything is up to God, and act as if everything is up to you.

Above all, pray against the depravity. Make it a part of in your daily petitions if you don’t do so already. Bolster your prayers by fasting. Read sacred scripture often. For Catholics, increase your frequency of Holy Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, confession, the Rosary, and the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

Whether this brings results on the legislative front is up to God, but one thing is almost certain: greater graces for you.

Amid the prayer, take action. Pressure legislators with phone calls, emails, and requests for meetings. Raise awareness through social media. Witness outside of abortion facilities. (Show up early Saturday mornings when abortions are frequently scheduled.) Slap a pro-life magnet on your car. March in the March for Life. Donate to advocacy groups that work against the wickedness.

During the 1920s when the Mexican government persecuted the Catholic Church, 14-year-old resistor – and now canonized saint – José Sánchez del Río reportedly told his mother, “Mama, never like now is it so easy to gain heaven”. ( Mamá, nunca como ahora ha sido tan fácil ganarse el cielo.) While our present situation is not nearly as intense as Mexico’s back then, his words nevertheless still apply. During times of moral rot, actively resisting the evil builds extraordinary spiritual merits that are harder to come by during “normal” times.

Pray not only for the thwarting of Gov. Spanberger’s – or your own governor’s – agenda, but also for the salvation of her soul and her conversion to authentic Christianity. By institutionalizing mortal sin, she is in danger of a rude awakening when she eventually passes from this world. Because of her high position she will be held to a far higher standard. As Jesus admonished,

Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more. (Luke 12:48)

And as the Old Testament states,

Because, though you were ministers of his kingdom, you did not judge rightly,
and did not keep the law,
nor walk according to the will of God,
terribly and swiftly he shall come against you,
because severe judgment awaits the exalted.
. . . for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends. (Wisdom 6:4-5, 8)

Pray also for the conversion and salvation of the legislators who pass her agenda, as well as for the citizens who voted them into office. They, too, are in great spiritual danger.

It is perhaps ironic that while the culture around you moves closer to hell, the opportunities to move closer to heaven increase. Take advantage of those opportunities through prayer and action. That may help to not only save souls, but also your state.

Filed Under: Abortion, Featured Article

Complicity in the Colossal Sin of Genocide

(A previous version of this article appeared in Crisis magazine.)

Abortion is an intrinsic moral evil. It involves carrying out or arranging to carry out the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. An intrinsic evil is an action that is always gravely sinful regardless of the circumstances. There are no exceptions, no grey areas.

The U.S. federal government is guilty of and complicit in intrinsic evil because it permits abortion. With some 62 million people killed by abortion since it was legalized, not only is the government complicit in an intrinsic evil, it is complicit in genocide – which the American Heritage dictionary defines as “the systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social status, or other particularity.” In this case the particularity is the preborn.

To be sure, that does not mean federal employees and U.S. taxpayers are complicit, unless they support it and enable it.

Then who is complicit? They include the original seven Supreme Court justices who voted to legalize abortion in 1973. Presidents who appointed Supreme Court justices they knew to be in favor of keeping abortion legal were complicit in intrinsic evil, as were those newly appointed justices. Senators who voted to approve them also were complicit.

Members of the populace who vote for pro-abortion politicians are complicit in the intrinsic evil of legalized abortion, and therefore commit sin. This is particularly the case when they vote for politicians who want to enshrine abortion into federal law through an act of Congress, as well as enact taxpayer-funding of abortion. Direct funding of abortion would make the U.S. government not just the enabler of genocide as it is now, but also a principal executioner. It essentially would subcontract out the killing.

For Catholics, voting for a pro-abortion candidate could rise to the level of mortal sin, provided the three conditions of mortal sin are met: grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent. To be mortal, the Catholic voter has to be aware that abortion is a mortal sin, that his or her vote is helping to enable its continued legalization, and perhaps that he or she is not being misled by “seamless garment”-type ideas (see below). While voting for abortion is not on the same level of procuring an abortion, it is including oneself in a large group of voters who enable this national sin. Responsibility for the ongoing genocide ultimately rests with those U.S. voters who put the pro-aborts in power.

One may object that, though a vote for a pro-abort is a vote for the intrinsic evil of abortion, it is not sinful because it is a vote against other types of intrinsic evils.

What would constitute those other intrinsic evils? The death penalty? Allowance of the death penalty does not involve the deliberate killing of innocent human beings. The government assumes that the person being put to death is guilty of a heinous crime. He is a threat to society because of the possibility he could escape from prison or be released from prison by an unscrupulous judge. The death penalty also is a deterrent to would-be criminals. It is plausible that very occasionally, someone thought to be guilty but who is actually innocent mistakenly could be put to death. But this is not an intrinsic evil because unlike abortion, the executioners are not intending to kill an innocent person. Moreover, abortion involves the killing of some 850,000 innocent children per year. Under the death penalty, only about a two-dozen people are executed per year in the U.S.

What about when the U.S. wages war? This does not fall into the category of abortion because innocents are not deliberately targeted. Though many innocent people died as a result of U.S. actions during its many wars, the vast majority of them were not deliberately targeted – with the exception of the bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II. The policymakers who approved the wars considered themselves to be engaging in self-defense – or the defense of other populations – against an aggressor. They may have sinned, for example through failure to think through certain consequences of their actions, but they did not sin on the scale of legalized abortion, which entails the deliberate killing of innocents.

If a presidential candidate vowed to wage an unjust war for the purposes of raw power, territorial expansion and genocide, as the National Socialists and Communists did, then it could be justifiable to vote for an opposing pro-abortion candidate. But this is not the situation in the United States. (Moreover it would be the National Socialists or Communists who would champion abortion.)

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” states, “There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.” This should close the door on the option of voting for a pro-abort. At no time in contemporary U.S. history has there been a public policy concern that even comes close to being as morally grave as the genocide of babies.

To be sure, the U.S. government enables other actions that the Catholic Church considers to be intrinsic evils: euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and same-sex unions. They are all championed by the pro-abortion party.

Many subscribe to the “seamless garment” theory, promoted by certain bishops, which considers abortion to be just one of a number of issues such as poverty, unemployment, substandard health care, immigration problems, environmental degradation, and climate change. But none of these separate issues are intrinsic moral evils – they do not involve the deliberate killing of innocent human beings. Most if not all politicians and other policymakers are well-intentioned in wanting to address those issues. They may have vastly different policy prescriptions, but they do not intend to kill anyone. Voting for or against politicians based on one or more of those separate issues likely is not sinful either way. It is only sinful to vote for a politician who champions perpetuating a government-sponsored intrinsic evil such as abortion.

Voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not only sinful, but mortally sinful assuming the above-mentioned conditions are met. It is sinning against God, and against millions of babies who are denied a life.

Filed Under: Abortion, Previous Articles

America Dystopia

Imagine a relatively clean, orderly and educated society where people go about their lives working, studying, and playing, and who on the whole are generally polite to each other. But the society has a dark secret: some 2,500 murders are carried out each and every day. These aren’t gangland-style murders on the street involving guns and knives. These are systematic murders of children, taking place in mild-mannered neighborhoods, in what are called “clinics” staffed by doctors and nurses wearing green gowns and rubber gloves.

Because they take place in these nondescript “clinics” involving doctors and nurses, and because they have been legalized, people don’t think much of those murders. They’re shocked of course by the illegal murders of adults and young people on the streets, but the murders of tiny children that take place in the “clinics” don’t bother them much. It is a medical setting, after all.

The vast majority of the tiny children who are murdered were healthy. Some of them had physical defects, and therefore were eliminated. After all, the authorities don’t want lots of unhealthy babies introduced and thus negatively impact the fairly clean, orderly and prosperous society.

This society resembles the dystopian novel and movie The Giver, in which undesired or defective infants are legally and systematically put to death in clean, antiseptic medical procedure rooms by medical professionals. In The Giver a syringe is gently placed into the baby’s head, the baby dies, and the body is placed into a chute. (Disturbing scene from the movie here.) No one protests or thinks much of it – after all, everything takes place in a medical facility. And the authorities don’t want to do anything that could negatively impact the clean and orderly society depicted in The Giver.

This society resembles the dystopian novel and movie The Giver, in which undesired or defective infants are legally and systematically put to death by medical professionals.

Meanwhile, in the aforementioned society, the babies are put to death in a different manner. They don’t involve gentle syringes to the head. Instead, they are bloody and violent deaths by dismemberment. The doctor grabs the baby’s leg and tears it off, then the baby’s arm and tears it off, then its other leg and tears it off, and so on. To see a disturbing animation of this procedure, click here.

For adults, death by dismemberment would be the cruelest and most excruciating form of death. That’s why it’s outlawed for the rest of society. But for some reason, it isn’t outlawed for the babies.

In addition to death by dismemberment, the babies are often put to death through the use of chemical agents, causing the baby to be chemically burned alive from the inside out, taking more than an hour to die. For the rest of society, death by chemical agents is one of the most excruciating forms of death. That’s why chemical warfare was outlawed in World War II. But for some reason, it isn’t outlawed for the babies.

scene from The Giver 150x150 - America Dystopia

Scene from The Giver. (Walden Media, 2014)

So this society is actually much more dystopian than the dystopian society depicted in The Giver. At least in the latter, the babies died presumably almost painless deaths. Not so in the society of which we speak. They die the cruelest and most barbaric deaths. But they all take place in “clinics”, out of sight to the rest of society.

In this society roughly 20,000 murders take place on the streets each year, often via guns. People are up in arms about those murders, especially when the murders take the form of massacres. But the number of those types of murders pale in comparison to the number of murders that take place in the dystopian “clinics” using forceps or saline solutions as weapons: roughly 900,000 of them per year. That’s 2,500 per day. It’s the leading cause of death – even more than heart disease.

In this society, most of the legalized murders of the babies take place while they’re still in the mother’s womb. Now there’s a push to legalize the murder of babies up to the point of delivery, and even after delivery – i.e. straight-up infanticide, as takes place in The Giver. Several states in this society already permit the murder up to the point of delivery.

The governor of one of the states of this society even discussed permitting murder after delivery. A professor at one of this society’s prestigious universities, who in true dystopian form describes himself as a bioethicist, champions the killing of born babies up to a month old. So do researchers who published a paper on this subject in a prestigious academic journal. And numerous college students support the killing of born babies. This society is moving closer and closer toward the systematic slaughter depicted in The Giver – but it all would take place in “clinics”, which seem so kind and gentle.

Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, The Giver … they all depict dystopian societies. With the systematic but out-of-sight killing of thousands of babies going on every day in the nondescript “clinics” probably not far from where you live, America has become a real-life dystopian society – playing out right before your very eyes.