Monday, February 14, 2011

Truth, love and the pro-life movement

Christopher Tollefsen writes:
The pro-life movement is at an advantage over its pro-choice opposition in the struggle over the value of unborn human life for two simple reasons: truth and love.

Truth, because the pro-life movement is founded on a set of scientific facts about unborn human beings. The zygote, the embryo, the fetus: all are members of the species homo sapiens, individual human beings just as much as any reader, or the author, of this article. On this truth, developmental biology has converged with remarkable unanimity, and efforts to obscure this by referring to unborn human beings as "clumps of cells," and "tissue," or as merely "embryos" and "fetuses," are bound to fail.

Love, because the pro-life movement is founded on an ethical claim: that all human beings are deserving of the same fundamental form of respect. All deserve to be treated as equal in their humanity and dignity. Love and respect for all human beings are, like the truths of biology previously mentioned, lessons learned over a long time, and honored all too often in the breach rather than the observance. Yet these are moral truths that the pro-life movement strives to bring to the minds and hearts of all who consider the worth of unborn human life.