Process of guilt will devour us

THE EDITOR: Pope John Paul in September 1987 said:  “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom, and lasting peace, then defend life..... respect every human person, especially the weakest and most defenseless ones, those as yet unborn.” This I believe. Calling for the legalisation of abortion in our nation is calling for our government to give its approval to the child killing industry.  Yes, I know the problem of abortion is huge, but so also is murder, drug pushing, theft, kidnapping and banditry (by very young adults). Should we not seek ways to eliminate all of the ills of society, rather than seek an unjust law? Dr Martin Luther King, Jr writing from a Birmingham jail noted: “There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree also with St Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.’  Now, what is the difference between the two? ... A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.

An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St Thomas Aquinas: “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” And that is the crux of the matter. The real casualty of abortion, besides the babies who die, the women who suffer and the doctors who do the killing, is our own humanity. Every society is judged by the way it treats its defenseless and dependent. If we continue on this path toward inhumanity, our society, will certainly perish. The process of guilt and dehumanization, already begun, will devour us in time. We must feel some pain for the families that are destroyed, the fathers who are thrust aside and the mothers who are deceived into becoming infanticidal accomplices, then brutally (though medically) raped and discarded on the dung heap of their own confusion, sorrow and despair. But the heart of our effort is compassion for the most helpless ones of all: the babies. Can any one deny this most pure arena for compassion — the grisly abortion procedure: the cold sharpness of the instruments, the undeniable physical and psychological development of the victim’s body, and the pain. This we have seen, and I challenge the production managers at TTT and TV6 to place before your audience any of the films — “Eclipse of Reason”, “Massacre of Innocence”, or “Hard Truth.” I know that Trinidadians and Tobagonians will cry in horror for the lives of these children as I have witnessed. Is it too graphic? Not really, when compared with much of what is shown on any night on our local television stations. But it is utterly gruesome, because it is real, it is devastating to the human person to see a baby ripped from its mother’s womb, limb by limb and its skull crushed.

The world did nothing to stop the holocaust in Germany until the brave men of the media smuggled out of that country pictures of the mangled human bodies. I remember seeing these pictures in the cinemas and I was not yet eight. Yet it was very vivid to me and I still remember those bodies. The next time I saw such images was many decades after, in our present time. The pictures of aborted babies. At present we put figures where human bodies should be, and that suits the pro-abortionists, for as Josef Stalin observed —“One death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic.” Yes, generalisation is a buffer against both guilt and sorrow. True Christianity, unconditional love, speaks of dying for the beloved of God — and who can be more beloved of God than innocent children? Let us not forget that the last words of Jesus were spoken to women, even as he absorbed all evil — even unto death: “Do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves, and for your children....”  The echo  of those words can still be heard loud and clear. Be still and listen.

Maria Annette Dopwell
Port-of-Spain