Love's Beckoning
Loving the Unborn Is Difficult but Necessary If Human Love Is to Survive
There are many ways to measure the tragedy of abortion, but the starkest, perhaps, is by numbers. We are told that the Rwandan genocide claimed about half a million innocent lives. The Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million. An estimated six million were killed in the Holocaust. And according to National Right to Life, more than 52 million American lives have been lost to abortion over the last 40 years.
To the pro-life individual, this reality is horrible to contemplate. It is a bitter reminder of what happens when a society feels at liberty to decide which human beings are worthy of respect and protection, and which are not. Pro-choice Americans, however, are generally unmoved by these comparisons to historical atrocities. This is unsurprising, and not only because the unjust invariably find rationales for their evil deeds. The average pro-choice person feels confident that he is not a kindred spirit of the Hutus or the Nazis because he supposes that these oppressors felt a real hatred for their victims, actually wanting them to suffer and die. He, by contrast, does not actively despise the unborn. He simply doesn't care about them.
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Rachel Lu is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist, as well as a frequent contributor to Crisis Magazine, Ricochet and other publications. A convert to Roman Catholicism, she teaches philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, and lives with her husband and three boys in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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