Day for Life

I am glad that my PP ignored the guff from Eccle's Tonsquare and reminded us that today was about praying for an end to abortion, euthanasia and similar evils. It reminded me that I had intended to post a few more thoughts on the topic. 

If, as I take to be axiomatic, the battle against abortion and other evils associated with it is primarily a spiritual battle, we should take care to think about it primarily in spiritual terms.

As I have said before, the Devil attacks life at its weakest stages because he is a coward.  But it is worth considering what else we know about him. 

We have it on the best authority that he is a liar and the father of lies. and that too is reflected in his onslaught on humanity waged via abortion.

Off the top of my head, I can think of 4 lies at the heart of the abortion business (I am sure there are more):

Lie no. 1: The unborn child is not a human being (or variants of this lie: eg is not endowed with the same rights as born human beings etc)

Lie no. 2: Abortion will make everything the same as it was before for the mother; ie as though she had never been pregnant.

Lie no. 3: Abortion is a medical procedure.

Lie no. 4: Abortion is necessary to ensure women’s rights and freedoms.

Each of those is demonstrably untrue, and the fact that the abortion industry is built on lies is one of the reasons that it is so disastrously damaging, not just for the unborn children who are killed, but also for their mothers (and fathers and others) and also for the medical and other staff involved. And Satan laughs.

If my supposition is correct, that it is primarily a spiritual battle, then we should be fighting primarily with spiritual weapons: at one level, truth and charity; and at another level, prayer and fasting. I will come on to this in my next post...

In the meantime, here is a passage from Gaudium et Spes which Ttony highlighted over at the Catholic Reading Group as being a fantastic summary of a truly Catholic pro-Life position:

“Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.” (Gaudium et Spes, §27)

Any source