L’Chaim!
On May 12, 2022, the New York Times online edition ran a hit piece on crisis pregnancy centers, expressing its authors’ indignation at any opposition to a woman’s right to kill the whatever-it-is that has found its way into her womb, and the tricks used in some such places to lure unsuspecting pregnant women into them to be urged not to kill their children. It was the usual thing from the Molochists, this time the cool, intellectual type rather than the teeming Schwaermer of the street protests. The writers emphasized the terrible danger these proliferating centers pose to women—for there are now more than 2,000 of them in the United States—all using benign and comforting names to conceal the horrors of the fundamentalism within.
I didn’t know there were so many of these missions, so my first reaction to the article was thanksgiving that the work of my old friend and teacher Harold O. J. Brown and his colleagues, who labored early and mightily to establish these crisis centers, had borne so much good fruit in the attempt to save infant lives. If there is anyone who has a Harvard Ph.D., as Joe did, and wants to put it to good use, let me suggest he follow suit with similar work. Noblesse, after all, oblige, and diplomas are included in what we can’t take with us, at least in their raw form.
Let me add here (because I haven’t anywhere else to put it at the moment) that I am exceedingly interested in what the Redeemer of those little aborted souls will do with them in heaven, the sky being the limit there. I suspect they may be found very high in the Empyrean, where they behold his Face and form a choir one might die to hear. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Strict Truth the Only Christian Course
I would, however, admonish some of these centers (much hay was made of this in the New York Times article), where what amount to lies are used to lure women into them, particularly in the oblique suggestion that these are places where one might find assistance in procuring an abortion rather than counsel against it. Lies of any kind do not befit Christians, and we must not use any of the devil’s tools to accomplish God’s work, whatever we may think will be the practical cost.
It would be true that any measure at all would be justified in saving even one infinitely precious human life—but only in a place where the devil was God, the power of death had not been broken, and heaven had no descants for unborn creation. The “infinitely precious life” diversion is in fact just another article in the devil’s catechism, written by the god of the ideologues who would have us do evil that good may come. (I cut my teeth on this lie with one of its masters, Joseph Fletcher of Situation Ethics.)
Strict truth at all times is the only course a believer may take, letting the bright chips fall where they may, for the Lord who has conquered death will not be defeated by it in the full gathering of his elect. This is the Christian faith, which Fr. Fletcher eventually—and logically, given his views—renounced.
Words That Bring Everything Home
Crisis pregnancy centers’ advertising for their services should always run along these lines (as in many places it commendably does): “Considering abortion? Let us help you give life to your baby.” To a woman for whom the availability of abortion actually poses a critical, sometimes heartrending dilemma, the words “your baby” bring everything powerfully home. There is hardly one who will resent having been talked out of abortion once the child actually rests in her arms and reaches for its mother’s face as for the Face of God.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on abortion from the online archives
19.1—January/February 2006
on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
more from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
32.3—May/June 2019
on the Implications of Changing the Pater Noster by John M. McCarthy
14.1—January/February 2001
A Sociologist Looks at Fatherlessness & Its Causes by David Blankenhorn
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