Ron Kelsey is the archdiocesan consultant for the pro-life office. You can email him at: profile@archkck.org or call him at (913) 647-0350.
by Ron Kelsey
It is truly beautiful to see society unite and exhaust all measures to find a child who has disappeared.
We have even developed the AMBER Alert program to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious childabduction cases. Society is motivated to protect the lives of our children because of the love that we have for them.
Unfortunately, we make a distinction between our born children and our unborn children. An honest assessment will cause us to admit that our society, as a whole, does not love our unborn children. We choose to be blind toward the unborn and try to avoid even acknowledging their existence. Hence, we do not consistently respect their inherent dignity, nor treat them with respect, nor even protect their lives.
This missing love allows us to rationalize the following evil acts: killing our children by chemical and surgical abortion; manufacturing them via in vitro fertilization (IVF) or cloning; conducting research on them via embryonic stem-cell research; manipulating them via prenatal genetic screening to eliminate those who are considered undesirable with suspected genetic abnormalities or considered to have undesirable qualities, including gender; and dooming the children (embryos) of IVF that we deem to be less desirable to either permanent frozen tombs or to become subjects of medical research.
How do we correct such grievous abuses? First, we must begin by loving all unborn children. We must acknowledge that they are our fellow human beings and deserve our love. We must sacrifice ourselves for their benefit rather than sacrifice them for our benefit. We also need to use language that is based upon scientific fact and is both truthful and enlightening instead of misleading, intentionally confusing and deceptive. We must adopt the same love for unborn children that we give to our born children.
To determine how we are to act toward the unborn at any stage of development we need only to look to the church, the voice of Christ, for guidance and truth. The church has consistently taught about the inestimable value of every human being, born and unborn. Jesus dramatically taught the value of the unborn child, even at the earliest stage of development, by becoming one himself.
One could even say that the first recorded act of Jesus was while he was an unborn child when he caused John the Baptist to leap for joy, when John was an unborn child in the womb of his mother Elizabeth.
Thus, if we but look to Jesus, rather than ourselves, we will love and respect and protect all of our unborn children. Then we will build systems and laws in our society that effectively create an AMBER Alert for the unborn.
