March for Life: Love vs. Hate
March for Life: Love vs. Hate
When considering how we live our lives, we need to make a choice: Do we want to be loving or hateful? Do we want to care for our children, or kill them?
Last week, I travelled to Washington, D.C. to visit The American Postliberal crew. While visiting, I attended my first March for Life, our nation’s annual pro-life rally. I also visited the pro-abortion Women’s March the following morning, albeit only for a little while (the chants calling for the death of children were grating after a while).
I could not help but notice something night and day about these marches: their crowds and atmospheres could not have been more different. The March for Life’s crowd was a lively mix of young people, families, priests, and nuns. All of them were smiling, hugging, and praying in spite of the windy snowfall. Everybody was joyful, normal, and pleasant — the types of people you would like to have as your friends and neighbors.
The Women’s March, by contrast, had a very small, yet unbearably venomous turnout. The main demographics present included former hippies now bitterly enduring their 60s without families of their own, women whose hormones have been cooked by birth control, and (I’m sad to say, and am not joking) sub-70 IQ men with their mouths hanging open. Everybody was angry, cursing ceaselessly and not even getting along well amongst themselves. The whole event was cursed, hence my leaving early.
If you do not think abortion is evil, you must reconcile yourself with the fact that people who dislike abortion are generally well-adjusted and people who support abortion are generally miserable. Of course, this does not mean that every pro-life person you meet will be upstanding. As I’ve discussed at length in this column, opposing something for the wrong reasons (such as out of a postured superiority), even if that thing is bad, is in itself wrong and will not save you from the dispositional downsides of having a bad character. Likewise, the average person who is lukewarm on abortion will clearly be better-souled, and therefore less outwardly disordered, than somebody who would muster snow to cheer for it. However, the average person is much less happy than your average March for Life attendee. We must consider why this is the case.
When debating abortion, Christians tend to put too much of an emphasis on abstract, deductive reasoning. They lean heavily on dry arguments like “the fetus has distinct DNA from its mother upon conception and therefore abortion always kills a person.” Although true, it is plain to see why lame zingers like this fail to convince anybody of anything: they are not the full truth. If somebody asked you why you love your mom, “she has provided me with personal, financial, and emotional support” would be a complete dud of an answer, failing to capture anything important about your mom, in spite of being technically true.
How does this “rational” and “logical” argument compare to a story from many years ago about how she made soup one day when you got sick over Christmas break, describing the effort she put into cutting the chicken and the vegetables; the dedication with which she patiently stirred the rich bubbling broth until it was just right; the gentle and attentive manner with which she carefully carried the hot soup up the stairs; its bowl clattering delicately upon its tray; how she inched your bedroom door open so as not to disturb you, before putting the soup at your bedside table and kissing you on the forehead? Is it even a contest?
With this in mind, what is the best argument against abortion? The answer rests in what separates it, and makes it even graver, than your average murder: it is an annihilation of the family. The truest, fullest love between man and woman is achieved when they become a family, giving themselves wholly to one another in marriage, and becoming one person through the complementary nature of masculinity and femininity, in all their wonderful differences.
In this way, physical intimacy is in itself a good, acting as a symbol spiritually becoming one. There is no greater joy than to love and be loved. Love between the spouses is a taste of God’s love for us, and our love for God. This familial love, like God’s love, creates life. My previous story about the mother making soup represents that reality perfectly: family life represents love between people in the purest sense and it is the key to living a good life.
Every sexual immorality serves to attack this perfect familial love in some way. Sex outside of marriage is a perversion in which two uncommitted (the only true form of spousal commitment is in marriage) people use one another’s bodies, which is why it is far less enjoyable under every metric. This is similar to how C.S. Lewis describes masturbation as keeping a “harem” of “subservient [...] imaginary brides,” thereby twisting what should be an act of selfless giving into a prison of inward objectification and creepiness. There is reason why people find these things shameful: because they are.
Likewise, transgenderism represents a suicidal ideation, in which our masculinity or femininity — among the most beautiful parts of ourselves and a wellspring of joyful responsibility — is rejected. Contraception sterilizes its users, separating sex from its primary function (the creation of new life), while also impedes the acts’ secondary function (growth in love between the spouses).
Yet, what does all of this have to do with abortion? These sins combine to form a Culture of Death, in which pregnancy — the beautiful process by which you and everybody you love was created — is treated like a tragedy, and babies are viewed as a tiresome burden. With unending propaganda that pushes this outlook onto the population, it is no wonder that people kill their children in the womb. Abortion represents the ultimate rejection of sexuality as generous love. It is the wholesale slaughter of the most innocent and dependent among us. It is pure selfishness, which is why all the sloganeering around it is about “MY body,” “MY choice,” “ME,” “ME,” “ME.”
This explains why those at the pro-abortion march were miserable, dysfunctional, and full of hate — abortion and its fellow sexual sins represent a rejection of love itself. As for the litany of circumstantial excuses people make for abortion, they do not change the fact that murder is bad. The excuses do not erase evil. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all sins, including abortion, aren’t within the purview of forgiveness through Christ, but that doesn’t make the sins any less evil.
When considering how we live our lives, we need to make a choice: Do we want to be loving or hateful? Do we want to care for our children, or kill them? Modern society seems to be choosing death over life. Hopefully, that changes.
The AdamoZone is a column by Luca Adamo, Vice President of Marketing and columnist at The American Postliberal. Published every Friday at 5:00pm EST.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of our publication! Your enthusiasm and support means a lot to all of us at The American Postliberal — and we promise we’ll work hard for your investment in our project.