Where do life issues begin?

(Note: I wrote this rebuttal in response to a guest columnist piece in the Greenville News. I've sent it to the paper, but I'm fairly certain it won't be published. So I'm self-publishing. Isn't Web 2.0 grand?)

The op-ed from Furman philosophy professor David I. Gandolfo in the Dec. 1 edition of the Greenville News was an interesting discourse to justify a vote for Obama in the recent presidential election. Referencing the Catholic Church’s position on abortion in a glancing way, Gandolfo was able to completely misdirect readers from the truth by inferring that pro-life supporters who voted for McCain did so at cost to other life issues.

While Gandolfo was accurate on the need of Catholics and other Christians to look beyond the abortion issue into other pro-life issues, never does he state the Catholic Church’s position: as followers of Christ, we are obligated to uphold, support and protect life from natural conception to natural death in any and every way possible. This includes all of the instances (and more) that Gandolfo referenced.

In his rhetoric to justify his own position, the professor suggests that the 45 million abortions performed don’t hold a candle to the 12 million who are starving, dying from preventable deaths, etc. Since the abortions are in the past, we should focus on what we can change in our country and around the world.

While I applaud Gandolfo’s concern for the very dismal state of the world, and share in his belief that hunger, poverty, etc. are controllable and solvable, where we diverge is on the subject of ignoring the 45 million abortions to focus on the here and now. Rather, the fact that 45 million lives have been taken should speak more loudly to true-lifers than anything else.

The Church is very clear—crystal clear—in it’s position that of all the issues facing the planet, life is at the top. It is first and foremost because if there isn’t respect for life (from natural concept to natural death), none of the other issues really matter. If we are willing to kill our own children in the womb, how can we expect peace or social justice in any other matter?

We can throw money at all kinds of scenarios, and have done so individually and collectively as a nation for centuries. Sadly we are no closer to eradicating poverty or starvation than we were 1,000 years ago. However, what we’ve seen since the legality of abortion is a total disregard for life itself, not just in the womb, but everywhere.

We’ve become so numb to what abortion is that our society wants to actually birth a baby up to the delivery of the head from the womb and suck its brains out and call that an abortion (partial birth abortion). We want legislation to limit life-saving vaccines for epidemics to the healthy and not dispense them to the infirm or elderly. We create embryos and then use the tissue for research. We use the tissue from aborted fetuses for vaccines and to treat ourselves of ailments. The feeding tube was pulled from Terry Schiavo’s stomach while she was still living. Where will the line be drawn?

Right now, as Obama is poised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as his first legitimate action as president, I’m reminded of Bill Clinton and his deeds on the third day of his presidency when he reversed Title 10 regulations banning abortion referral by federal employees, negated the ban on funding for fetal tissue transplants, ordered military hospitals (funded by taxpayer money) to perform abortions, overturned the RU-486 ban and ordered the FDA to review ways to license and manufacture it. In 1993, he authorized government funding of aborted tissue research and announced $75 million in funding for International Planned Parenthood. In 1996 and 1997 he vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban.

Not only is Obama a co-sponsor of the Freedom of Choice Act (S 1173), he has bragged on several occasions that his first act as president will be to sign it. When enacted the FOCA will immediately eliminate abortion reporting, eliminate the conscience exclusion thus requiring Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, remove parental involvement/notification, dismiss restrictions on late-term abortions and forego counseling and ultrasounds prior to abortion.

So, while Gandolfo says focusing on abortion is an oversimplification of the issue, he is clearly mistaken. Abortion is the beginning of the life issue. It is the launch point from where we started down a treacherous path that leads to genocide. Catholics and other Christians who don’t focus on protecting and defending life from natural conception to natural death, those who vote for candidates that support programs that are ethically and intrinsically against those beliefs will be held accountable.

As for myself, I will continue to pray concertedly for the conversion of president-elect Barack Obama and those who don’t truly understand what it means to be pro-life.