It's Time for a Gospel of Equality for Unborn Children
" I'm personally opposed to abortion, but …". That's the stance of many poor-choice Catholics in this day and age. How is it that, in spite of very clear teaching regarding abortion, and in spite of Catholics personally adopting it, many do not want to criminalize it?
Most Catholics understand that the taking of a human life is a serious thing, otherwise, why else would they oppose it? For the last forty years, the Church has underscored the evils of abortion and the importance of the right to life, yet Catholics continue to relativize the importance of these teachings. The Church has not been able to crystallize the issue for the average layperson, and this is why the Church's efforts to sensitize the faithful have not borne as much fruit as desired.
The average Catholic is more in tune with the zeitgeist of the age than the doctrines of the Church. The culture tells him the important thing is not what principle to uphold-- because all truth is relative-- but whom to defend, because people are concrete entities whose reactions you can gauge. For this reason, Catholics pay more attention to Church teachings that emphasize the dignity of the poor and the oppressed, rather than those that attempt to explain the abstract concept of why life must be defended. The message that needs to be transmitted is this: human life confers equality, and equality must be recognized socially and politically. If the Church would stress the need to acknowledge the legal and social equality of the unborn child, rather than the right to life, it would tap into the sympathies that already exist among even the most lapsed of Catholics.
Emphasizing equality would in no way negate what the Church has already taught. In fact, it would be a natural development. The Church already assumes that the unborn child is an equal. The average layperson does not. And there lies the problem. The layperson does not automatically equate the soul of the newly conceived child with that of an adult human being. Our culture has so perverted the meaning of humanity, that human life is considered a thing, not a person. While the Church can certainly continue to stress the value of human life in and of itself, it should also attempt to attune its message to the proclivities of its audience.
Some might object to shaping Catholic doctrine according to what the faithful are ready to receive. No doubt the Truth cannot be arrived at simply according to what people will accept. However, in this case, we are not talking about concocting a new doctrine simply to make the faithful happy. It is a matter of re-formulating what the Church already knows to be true in order to better communicate her teachings. The desire on the part of liberal and lapsed Catholics to fight for the poor and oppressed is a laudable goal, even if these beliefs are sometimes coloured by faulty logic and modernist assumptions. In preaching equality, the Church would be appealing to the Truth the average Catholic already knows, rather than trying to instruct them on a construct they do not relate to.
By transmitting this message of equality, the Church would be helping the pro-life movement transcend the liberally defined parameters of the so-called abortion debate. The question would no longer be whether a Catholic supports or opposes abortion rights, as the mainstream media defines the conflict. Rather, the question would center on whether a prominent Catholic supports or opposes the equality of the unborn child. The Church, in re-framing the question this way, would not be seen as opposing a so-called medical operation called abortion, or upholding an abstract principle called the right to life, but instead would be standing up for yet another marginalized and oppressed group. The Catholic who grows up seeing the Church defend the unborn child as opposed defending the right to life would be far more likely to heed the call to protect the unborn, because he knows that he cannot defend the poor and the persecuted in society in the name of his faith without including the unborn child.