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Say “HELLO?!” to Life

Dec 12, 2014

 

By The Most Rev. Ronald Gainer

Editor’s note: The following speech was given by the Most Rev. Ronald Gainer, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, Pa., during the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation 2014 Celebrate Life Banquet in Camp Hill. His remarks have been condensed due to space limitations. To watch or read his full speech, visit the website of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation at www.paprolife.org and click on the State Events page.

The Most Rev. Ronald Gainer

The Most Rev. Ronald Gainer

Did you read the recent newspaper article about a prison inmate who escaped on the 89th day of a 90-day sentence? He was quickly apprehended and then had to serve an additional 18-month sentence. HELLO?!

Or maybe you caught the story about the robber who attempted to hold up a convenience store. While the robbery was in progress, the store clerk asked the robber if she could make a phone call. The robber was stunned when, in short order, the police appeared. Only then did he realize that the clerk had called 911. HELLO?!

“HELLO?!” has become a kind of mantra – a word we say to someone who just doesn’t seem to get it. It is a kind of shorthand by which we challenge someone to wake up. That one word lets people know that somehow they have missed the point.

I would compare the Pro-Life Movement to a HELLO?! Movement. Through the witness of our words and deeds, we are calling out to a culture that has drifted from the truth, a society that has missed the point, to judges and to lawmakers and those in executive offices of our government who have got human life issues totally wrong.

Recently there was a “HELLO?!” episode in the wildly popular TV drama “Downton Abbey.” The story chronicles the lives of the Crawley Family, members of the British aristocracy, and the equally interesting lives of their downstairs serving staff.

Lady Edith, the Crawleys’ middle daughter, discovers the love of her life, Michael Gregson. Lady Edith also finds herself pregnant with Michael’s child, and Michael has disappeared. Edith is alone in her pregnancy. She knows well that a pregnancy outside of marriage would be a scandal; she would become an outcast socially, practically and personally.

Contrary to what we have come to expect from the dominant entertainment sources, the script has Edith state clearly that she “does not want to kill her wanted child.” The drama escalates, however, as she weighs the consequences of giving birth. The fear of scandal, the shame and embarrassment drive her to her Aunt Rosamund in London. Rosamund recognizes that abortion is wrong; nevertheless, she knows of someone who helps women rid themselves of their “problem.” So, she accompanies her niece to his flat. When Edith hears the cries of an aborting mother from the next room, she walks out. Rosamund, with a certain peace and relief, explains to the nurse, “It seems that some mistake has been made.”

The episode is set in the 1920s, so the pro-life, pro-abortion conflict had not yet crystallized. Edith knows that abortion kills a child, and she wants her child. There was no easy dismissal of the child as a mass of tissue. There was no assertion that this was a matter pertaining exclusively to Edith’s body. Those legalized lies were still 50 years away.

Interestingly, the English statute that made abortion illegal in the 1920s dated back to 1861 and was known as “The Offenses against the Human Person Act.” British legislators had no problem recognizing that the unborn were persons. The Act stood on the books until it was repealed in 1967 – six years before Roe v. Wade.

Edith’s situation is the classic story of a crisis pregnancy with all the pressures that are often allowed to trump the life of an unborn child. Once Edith chose to save the life of her child, her aunt Rosamund devised alternatives to save the life of the baby and spare Edith from moral, emotional and possibly physical disaster.

You do the work of Rosamund when you assist the Ediths of today from destroying life: their baby’s and their own. Pro-lifers have a significant influence on American culture and political life.

Still, it seems natural to ask why so many otherwise good people do not see the connection between the advent of Roe vs. Wade and today’s deplorable moral desert. Let me present three problems that keep many citizens from embracing the truth:

First, an increasing inability to use right reason

America has become a culture driven by marketing, and marketing works in exactly the opposite way as reasoning. Reasoning requires time, testing and comparison of competing arguments. Marketing appeals to our desires and emotions; it depends upon the suppression of critical thought. That is why a food company will show you a young affluent, athletic couple eating cereal for breakfast rather than flashing a series of nutritional facts on our TV screens.

It is the same reason why the pro-abortion media shows us the highly magnified photos of those strange looking cells at fertilization. Implicitly, they want us to think: “This can’t be human. It does not look like anything familiar.” Left alone and with proper nurturing, the embryo will progress to look decidedly human, but anyone who begins thinking that way no longer suffers from an inability to reason rightly. You become wary of the pro-abortion marketing. You become pro-life.

The loss of right reasoning extends to the most fundamental question of all: When does human life begin? Moral, legal and political issues turn on this crucial question. Since 1973, the compelling images from sonograms and the uniform discoveries in embryology regarding DNA-driven fetal development have served to convince honest, thinking people of the truth that life begins at the moment of conception and therefore deserves legal protection.

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, states, “If the suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be granted by the amendment.” In other words, if the pre-born child is a human person, he or she enjoys equal protection under the law.

In the past 41 years, the scientific evidence regarding the unborn has led to some very positive pro-life legislation. HELLO?! Such contradictory conclusions to me are some of the clearest indications that we as a society are losing our ability to use right reason.

We must continue at every turn to employ right reasoning to our best ability.

Second, our inability to remember

Often outsiders observe that our American culture has an addiction to what’s new. We enjoy the past primarily as nostalgia, but we really don’t like history because the past is over and it imposes certain restrictions on the present.

Americans learn too few of the lessons that the past has to teach us. For instance, most of us know about Hitler’s campaign against the Jews in Germany. But how many of us understand that the ethical framework for the Holocaust was already in place in the German medical establishment before the Nazis came to power? Before targeting Jewish people, the medical establishment was euthanizing the insane, mentally handicapped or terminally ill. And they did so using the utilitarian arguments articulated today by the advocates of euthanasia.

Third, our increasing inability to understand freedom

For too many Americans, freedom simply means an endless list of choices. But choice for its own sake is not authentic freedom. In place of authentic freedom, we get the untenable situation of believing what is right for me may not be right for you; what is true for you is not necessarily true for me. Daily we are bombarded by a misuse of the language of our dreams and our ideals in order to sell the idea that our choices make us free. Americans have a problem realizing that authentic freedom lies in the ability to recognize what is true and the courage to do what is right.

These three problems act as a kind of background noise in our lives and culture. It is for that reason that we need one another. The opponents of life would have us believe that individuals cannot make a difference. But it is exactly individuals that do make a difference, men and women who refuse to cooperate with evil and insist on doing good.

I would like to offer a short quote from the much beloved Pope Francis. His words come from “The Joy of the Gospel”:

“One of the more serious temptations which stifles boldness and zeal is a defeatism which turns us into querulous and disillusioned pessimists – sourpusses. While painfully aware of our frailties, we have to march on without giving in, keeping in mind what the Lord said to Saint Paul, ‘My grace is sufficient for you; for My power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9).”

Our cause will not permit us to be defeatists or sourpusses. There is joy in the very cause we promote. We will march on in joy – from knowing the truth and for sacrificing whatever is necessary so that the truth may prevail and human life at every stage and in every condition may be guaranteed the protection its sacredness requires.

Categories: Life
Tags: life