Love's Beckoning
Loving the Unborn Is Difficult but Necessary If Human Love Is to Survive
There are many ways to measure the tragedy of abortion, but the starkest, perhaps, is by numbers. We are told that the Rwandan genocide claimed about half a million innocent lives. The Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million. An estimated six million were killed in the Holocaust. And according to National Right to Life, more than 52 million American lives have been lost to abortion over the last 40 years.
To the pro-life individual, this reality is horrible to contemplate. It is a bitter reminder of what happens when a society feels at liberty to decide which human beings are worthy of respect and protection, and which are not. Pro-choice Americans, however, are generally unmoved by these comparisons to historical atrocities. This is unsurprising, and not only because the unjust invariably find rationales for their evil deeds. The average pro-choice person feels confident that he is not a kindred spirit of the Hutus or the Nazis because he supposes that these oppressors felt a real hatred for their victims, actually wanting them to suffer and die. He, by contrast, does not actively despise the unborn. He simply doesn't care about them.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Rachel Lu is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist, as well as a frequent contributor to Crisis Magazine, Ricochet and other publications. A convert to Roman Catholicism, she teaches philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, and lives with her husband and three boys in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade by Craig Kellogg Galer
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
An Evangelical Protestant Perspective by Russell D. Moore
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
