Progress?

Giuseppe Maria Crespi — Massacre of the innocents

I was watching the nightly news roundup or what the various Presidential candidates had to say about the issues and each other.  Little will go down as great oratory.

An especially enthusiastic proponent of abortion espoused the importance of maintaining our “progress” on issues of women’s health.

“We’ve come so far, we can’t turn back.”

It sounded so sincere.  So caring.  So modern.

I felt a bit sick.

How, in light of all our medical advancements, can free and easy abortion be “progress”?

Abortion has been debated since ancient times.  But even then, folks realized it was wrong.

In the Oath of Hippocrates – 400 BC – “I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”

Hippocrates understood that inducing abortion was bad for the woman and bad for the unborn child.

But the ancients – Greek, Roman, many others – were hardly saints.  It was a cruel world.  And if a baby was born a bit flawed, it was exposed to the elements and allowed to die.

It is interesting that unlike today’s abortionists, the ancients didn’t rip the babies from the wombs and sell the pieces for research; the allowed the babies to be born and let nature do the killing.  Perhaps that seemed less objectionable, less personal, less direct.

The ancients didn’t have the medical skills to provide much help for an imperfect baby; we do.

Starting in the 1980s, surgeons have been operating on unborn babies, correcting all sorts of defects, offering the promise of long and healthy lives to countless children.  Today, they use amazing, advanced surgical techniques with endoscopes, lasers and micro-cameras.  It isn’t Star Trek – but we’re headed in that direction.

That is real progress.

How can the society that has the ability to repair a baby’s defective heart valve before it is born also sanction the killing of an unborn baby?

Even on a practical level, it doesn’t make sense.  We are willing to spend millions – as well we should be – to help a baby in medical distress.  At the same time, we abort a baby and throw in the trash like so many leftover fish bones.  That is moral insanity.  And the insanity will continue until we understand that saving a life is good and taking a life is evil.