Abortion: The Worst Kind of Poverty

Since we are privileged enough to live in a country as wealthy and prosperous as the United States, it's easy for us to believe that we are truly rich, and that we have eradicated poverty for the most part in our society. Blessed Mother Teresa, who spent the majority of her life serving the poor, marginalized, diseased, and dying people of Calcutta in India, firmly disagreed with these preconceptions. In 1975, when an English interviewer expressed pity for the people she served, her response shocked him:

The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people...You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is. What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.

Having spent the majority of her life living among and serving people who experienced some of the worst physical suffering and deprivation possible, Mother Teresa was an authority on human suffering. Years after this interview, she would hear about the epidemic of abortion in the West, and famously comment:

It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

Abortion is NOT a Religious Issue

The vast majority of people who oppose abortion are religious, especially in the United States. Unfortunately, this fact leads many supporters of legalized abortion to assume that the only reason people oppose abortion is because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. While sincere religious belief, and belief in Christianity in particular, will certainly motivate a person to work more diligently in the cause of putting an end to abortion, it does not follow that the Pro-Life movement is a religious movement, or even that the best arguments for the Pro-Life view depend on a belief in God or the Bible. On the contrary, it can be shown that abortion is a severe violation of basic human rights on the basis of ethical principals and medical science alone, apart from the revelation or teachings of any religious tradition. Therefore, the Pro-Life movement is a civil rights movement, not a religious movement, which is why there are secular and even atheist people who support it.

Every argument that I've ever heard or read in defense of legalized abortion either makes an irrelevant distinction between unborn and born children or else could also be used to justify infanticide. The following argument summarizes why abortion is immoral and should therefore not be lawful in any country that claims to respect human rights:

1. All human beings have the right to life.

2. Unborn children, regardless of their stage in development, are human beings.

3. Therefore, unborn children have the right to life.

"It's My Body!"

From the instant that the female's egg cell is fertilized by the male's sperm cell, a new, separate, and unique organism exists. Despite how much supporters of legalized abortion like to present themselves as being up-to-date scientifically speaking, many of them still either fail to recognize, or worse, refuse to accept this undisputed fact of biology. Ambiguous, inaccurate, or even blatantly false terms and phrases are often used in an attempt to redefine the newly formed human being as something else, such as: clump of tissue, collection of cells, pregnancy, potential human being, and parasite (yes, seriously). An organism is an individual living member of a species. A clump of cells, whether they make up a tumor or part of a human organ, will never grow into an adult member of the human species, like an embryo will under normal conditions. In short, everything science tells us about human embryos and their development supports the idea that the life created at conception, while completely dependent on its mother for survival, is a unique and separate human organism, which, given time, nutrition, and the proper environment, will grow into a fully developed human being like you or I.

"Fetuses Aren't Human Beings"

Usually, when people try to argue that embryos or fetuses aren't human beings, they will point to some factor or set some criteria which they claim disqualifies the unborn life in the womb from being considered a human being. Such factors include: having the shape/form of a human being, having all of it's own functioning organs, viability (the ability to survive outside of the womb), and a nervous system capable of experiencing pain. The problem with all of these factors is that, when defining what is essential to being human, they are all irrelevant. Given how gradual the process of human development is, there is no concrete moment that you can point to as the moment at which the life form/organism becomes human. If the unborn are not human because of their level of development, then newborn children who are barely more developed should not be considered human beings either. Also, if consistently applied, this reasoning would imply that no one is fully human until they are in their twenties and a physically mature adult, which is clearly absurd. The viability factor also doesn't work as a criteria for determining whether or not something (someone) is a human being or not, because it is very common for premature infants to require incubators and other life support for survival, and it would rightly be considered seriously wrong to kill one of them. Often people will say, "Yeah, but they're born already." So, being human depends on your location? If a baby is halfway out of the womb, is it only half human? I suspect the sad truth is that people think this way because when a fetus is dismembered inside of its mother's womb during an abortion, the process is more private and hidden from sight. Lastly, the distinction based on the ability to experience pain is yet another insufficient way of determining whether or not the unborn life is human or not. There are two basic reasons for thinking this: 1) We are not only human beings during the moments when we are experiencing pain, and 2) There are millions of non-human animals that do feel pain but are not given the right-to-life reserved to human beings.

The Role of Language

I once found myself reading through the (dreaded) comment section of an online article about abortion. In the comments, a woman had tried to defend the idea that fetuses are human beings, but she was ganged up on by a few people in favor of legalized abortion. The comments of one man in particular struck me as astonishingly illogical. He wrote to her, "No, it is not a human being. It is a fetus. Understand? Words have meaning. Learn your words." Apart from being extremely condescending, his comment was completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not fetuses are human beings. What is a human being? It's an individual, living member of the human species. What is a fetus? It's an individual, living member of the human species in an early stage of its development. The fact that we use different terms for human beings depending on their age or stage in development does not in any way undermine the fact that they are a human being. Imagine someone arguing, "No, it is not a human being. It is a teenager. Understand? Words have meaning. Learn your words." Ridiculous!

"I Think Abortion is Wrong, But..."

How many times has someone told you that they are personally opposed to abortion, but they don't want to "impose their views" on someone else? I hear it all the time. The question that always immediately comes to my mind  is, "Why doesn't anyone ever use that logic with other moral issues?" In other words, what is it about abortion that makes people believe it to be seriously wrong and yet still think it should be legal? There seems to be only one plausible reason for this distinction regarding abortion. Unlike other moral actions in question, abortion is based entirely on sex, more specifically, on the modern idea that all people have the right to have as much sex as they want without commitment or consequences. Contraceptives are the most common means of trying to achieve a responsibility-free sex life, and abortion is simply back-up contraception. If personal pleasure and being in control of your life are your idols, your only absolutes in life, then eventually your conscience can become so decayed that you're willing to sacrifice anything in order to possess those idols, even the life of an innocent human being. When you consider how frail and broken the heart of a person must be in order to accept abortion as a morally acceptable action, it becomes easier to understand how Mother Teresa could say, “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." If love is the most valuable thing that we can ever give or receive in life, then being deprived of love to such an extent that you would choose or support abortion is literally the worst kind of poverty possible.

A Most Disturbing Trend

When you read about the worst crimes committed against human beings throughout history, and especially the large scale crimes of the 20th century like the Holocaust, you will see a trend in the way the people responsible for those crimes understood their victims. Every case involved the redefining of human beings as non-human or sub-human. Last year, on the day before the March for Life in Washington D.C., I had the privilege of visiting the National Holocaust Museum. While I had already read a significant amount about the Holocaust, seeing the displays, videos, and pictures showing the horrors which took place less than 80 years ago was a chilling but much needed reminder for me of just how much evil and destruction we humans are capable of bringing about. There was one video in particular that deeply disturbed me. In it, members of the British military were liberating a concentration camp, and while there were a few surviving prisoners to rescue, the soldiers spent literally days burying all the bodies and remains of bodies. In fact, there were so many bodies that they had to dig mass graves and push the bodies in with a bulldozer. When I saw the heaping pile of hundreds of starved and disfigured human corpses, I immediately recalled images that I had seen of dumpsters full of aborted human fetuses and their remains. The two images are similar in that both reveal the fruits of what Pope Saint John Paul II called the "culture of death." We all recognize madness when we see it.

The Tide is Turning

While we cannot forget the atrocity of abortion, with all of the death and suffering it has caused over the last four decades, it is important to remember that the Pro-Life cause is steadily overpowering it's opposition, the so-called "Pro-Choice" movement. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 58% of adults in America believe that abortion should be illegal in "all" or "nearly all" circumstances, while just 39% believe it should be legal in all circumstances. Also, while the Pro-Choice movement claims to defend the rights and dignity of women, only 40% of women in America identify as Pro-Choice, and 57% consider themselves to be Pro-Life. Millenials (aged 18-34) are the group most likely to think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Also, in the past two decades, the number of abortion clinics in the US has gone from 2,176 in 1991 to 582 by the end of 2013. In other words, the Pro-Life movement is winning now, and winning the future as well. With the wisdom and witness of the Catholic Church as our guide and spearhead, we WILL abolish abortion in this country and in the world. Let us pray for the conversion of all those who support abortion, for the healing of all mothers who have ever had an abortion, all the fathers who encouraged or forced women to have one, all the doctors and nurses who work at abortion clinics, and above all, for the innocent and helpless victims of abortion, the unborn children themselves, who have been robbed of their most fundamental right, their right to life, as well as their chance to be loved in this life.

"Each of us is willed,

each of us is loved, 

each of us is necessary." 

- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

† Under the Mercy,

Chris Trummer

From Party Animal to Rational Animal

From the time I was a junior in high school until I was a freshman in college, I had many long and deep conversations with a close friend from Brazil, Felipe. Felipe asked me questions that caused me to have a lot of doubts about my Catholic faith. I never got to a point where I actually would have claimed "God does not exist," but looking back I would say that I was basically agnostic. I didn't know what I really believed or what I could really know for sure, and I was heavily influenced by Felipe's relativistic attitude towards truth and knowledge. A few years ago, I had become depressed and dissatisfied with the lack of meaning in my life, because I was working a job that I thought was pointless, going to school to get a job that I couldn't see myself actually doing everyday, spending most of my nights drinking and partying, and many of my mornings with a regretful conscience and a throbbing brain.  

Facing the facts

Finally, I started to ask myself the tough questions like, "Is this all there is in life? Hating Mondays and loving Fridays? Mechanically going through the motions of life, punching your time card, checking the boxes, motivated only by the next opportunity to get a 12-pack and play video games?" Somehow I had the honesty to admit that, if God does not exist, then the answer to these questions is, ultimately, "Yes, this is it." This was a frightening realization to me, like the harsh reality we face at a funeral. We know in the back of our minds that we will all die someday, but that fact is brought into the light when we get that diagnosis, that phone call, or we have to carry that casket. The Catholic apologist Matt Fradd said in his story of conversion from agnosticism,"When you die, people will talk about you the same way you talk about people who are dead now." Like the motivation that comes from the realization of one's own mortality, the thought that my life might be meaningless motivated me. It motivated me to search for the truth about God, reality, and the purpose of my life.

Enter philosophy

On my search for meaning and purpose I quickly came across the work of Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is a Christian (evangelical protestant) philosopher of religion and time.  He has written many books, and has also participated in many debates with some of the most prominent atheists of today, including the late Christopher Hitchens (who died in 2011), theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The argument that Dr. Craig is probably most famous for defending is the Kalāam Cosmological Argument (hereafter KCA). The KCA is a deductive argument for the existence of God.  The argument was originally formulated and defended by Muslims during the Middle Ages, and the word "kalaam" means "speech" in Arabic. The argument is simple, having just three steps:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.

Until modern times, the truth of the first or major (first) premise was more or less taken for granted. The idea that "nothing comes from nothing" seems so self-evident that most people find it almost redundant to even mention. This is, however, the goal of the first premise in an argument, to begin with something that your opponent will almost certainly agree with. The second premise was the one that received most of the criticism. Realize that, until the Big Bang Theory was proposed by Belgian priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, and observational evidence found to support it in the late 1920s, virtually all scientists believed that the universe was eternal, that is to say, that the universe had existed for an infinite amount of time into the past. Dr. Craig points out that the idea of an actually infinite past is very strange and has many paradoxical implications. For example, imagine you are waiting for a particular domino (which represents today) to fall in a row of dominoes. But, imagine that there are literally an infinite amount of dominoes that must fall before that domino can fall. How would that domino ever fall if you had to wait for an infinite amount of dominoes to fall before it? In other words, if the past is infinite, how did we manage to get through an infinite number of days in order to get to the present day? The impossibility of such a scenario, known as an "infinite regress," provides good reason to think that the universe must have had a beginning, without even getting into the empirical evidence that has been discovered in more recent times.

The worst birthday present ever

In 2007, at the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday party, prominent cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin presented a theorem titled the "Borde, Vilenkin, and Guthe (BVG) Theorem." The BVG theorem, developed by Vilenkin and his colleagues, proved with a very high level of scientific certainty that any universe that was expanding would have to have a beginning in time. Vilenkin pulled no punches when he put forth the proof, saying this after he had presented it:

"It is said that an argument will convince a reasonable man, and that a proof will convince even an unreasonable man. Now that the proof is in place (referring to the BVG theorem), physicists and cosmologists can no longer hide behind even the possibility that the universe is past infinite. There is no escape. They must face the reality of a beginning," and later,"To view an inflationary universe without a beginning is impossible."

Once he had heard the proof explained, the birthday boy Stephen Hawking exclaimed, "My goodness! It has very transcendent implications!" No kidding! One journalist writing about the event in New Scientist magazine titled her article "Why Physicists Can't Avoid a Creation Event: The Worst Birthday Present Ever." With more and more evidence mounting to support the idea that the universe did in fact begin to exist, some physicists and cosmologists, worried about these implications, have resorted to attacking the first premise, that "Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence." The fact that they would go so far as to reject one of the most basic principals in philosophy, the "principal of sufficient reason," which maintains that every effect must have a cause that explains it, reveals how strong their prior commitment is to an uncreated universe.  

Let nothing be nothing

If the universe really did begin to exist, then that would mean that prior to its absolute beginning, the universe was literally nothing. While it may sound simple enough, it is important to understand what is meant by the word "nothing." Nothing is the complete absence of being, and it has no properties or potentialities, that is, it does not have in itself the potential to become something. It is not the low-energy state of a quantum field or a vacuum, both of which have properties, namely, that they are conditioned by time. It is also not a void, because you can have more or less of a void, and a void is dimensional and orientable. One scientist once joked, "nothing is the stuff rocks dream about." So, if the universe was really nothing before it began to exist, then it could not have moved itself from nothing to something – that would imply that it could do something. There would have to be a transcendent cause, a cause outside of the universe, that brought the universe into existence out of nothing. Also, since there is literally an infinite gap between nothing and something, we can infer that the transcendent cause would have to be all-powerful or omnipotent (sound familiar?). Suppose someone is still willing to deny the first premise and say that something can come from nothing. This raises the question, "What is it about nothing that makes it only able to produce universes?" In other words, if something can come from nothing, then why have we never observed it? Why don't random planets, objects, molecules, or even BMW's and Border Collies pop into being out of nothing? This might sound silly, but that is only because it is perfectly consistent with a silly notion, the notion that something could come from nothing.

In conclusion, I believe the KCA is sound and that it has strong theistic (or at least deistic) implications for anyone who is willing to study it honestly (key word: honestly). It is important to realize that the KCA, along with other arguments for the existence of God, does not in any way prove the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, or any particular god, but it does prove the existence of an all-powerful and transcendent cause of the universe, which is enough to refute the atheist or to reassure the person doubting God's existence. In dialogue with atheists or agnostics, it is important to remember that, once you sort through all of the rhetorical and often times emotionally charged arguments, every argument against the existence of God will be claiming one of two things:  1) that the past can be infinite, or 2) that something can come from nothing – both of which are problematic propositions and extremely difficult to support by reasoned argumentation. Thanks be to God, for all of Creation, and for giving us the ability to reason our way to knowing that He exists, as the Church maintains in her Catechism: "The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason" (CCC 286). Saint Paul wrote the following about unbelievers in his letter to the Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Rm 1:19-20).

† Under the Mercy,

Chris Trummer

Sources:

Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd Ed. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000. Print.

Grossman, Lisa."Why physicists can't avoid a creation event." New Scientist. Retrieved on 11-11-2014. URL:  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474.400-why-physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event.html. Web.