Americans Aren’t Extremist on Abortion

‘A ll life is worthy of dignity and respect.”

Inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Sisters of Life and Cardinal Timothy Dolan prayed for the protection of all human life. It was the 49th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s grave Roe v. Wade decision, which ushered in a regime of “unfettered access to abortion,” as Cardinal Dolan noted. He talked about his own niece, who shares a birthday with Roe, who at a young age faced a serious cancer diagnosis. Her doctor talked to her about how he thought he could help her, but also that we belong to God, and it is for Him to ultimately decide when it’s time to go home to Him. She’s in her thirties now, married, with a daughter who was adopted as a baby. Dolan also talked about two police officers who were shot the night before in New York City — he visited the family of one who had already died and prayed at the bedside of one who would die later in the week. The man who shot them was in the same hospital, being treated by a team of doctors. Because it’s not the doctors’ call to decide who lives and who dies, who is worthy of care and who isn’t, each patient receives the care they need.

At least that’s how medicine is supposed to work. When we live at a time of abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and medical rationing, something has gone wrong.

Outside the cathedral, people were yelling and swearing. A “F*** the March for Life” gathering made a commotion. Some of the organizers and participants regularly protest prayer vigils and Masses for life in New York City. If they didn’t choose to believe a caricature about the people praying, they might just come to know that we are praying for them — not because we think them evil, but because we know they don’t see life for what it is. They don’t know that there are networks of services to help women in need. Instead, their signs protest “forced birth.” In New York in the near term, abortion isn’t going to end — it’s probably going to increase if Roe is overturned in the Mississippi abortion case now before the Supreme Court. Already the current governor has implored pregnant women in Texas, where a heartbeat bill has been in effect since September, to come and have Lady Liberty embrace them for their abortions.

The Vigil for Life at St. Patrick’s was also the regular Saturday-night vigil Mass in anticipation of Sunday. The people who were there because of the Roe anniversary stayed for an hour of prayer afterward, but it was other Mass-goers, many of them presumably tourists, who wound up accosted after Mass with expletives from the abortion supporters. It’s one thing to harass the people who by now know what they are getting into when they pray in witness for life on the hostile streets of New York. It’s another for unassuming Sunday Mass congregants to see what abortion extremism looks like. It’s basically what pro-abortion politics is, unvarnished. The professionals use words like “choice” and “health care.” But these folks projected “God loves abortion” onto the cathedral in bright colors. Most people aren’t there.

The day before, Marist poll numbers commissioned by the Knights of Columbus found that 71 percent of Americans support legal limits on abortion. I don’t think most Americans even know that you can get abortion pills in the mail under the Biden administration. And 63 percent of those polled oppose that policy. We are not actually an extremist nation when it comes to abortion. And the more people see the extremism, the more I pray that abortion will be seen as the human-rights travesty of our time, which touches so many aspects of human life, making people miserable and our society more violent, pitting mother against child — the most fundamental relationship there is — and letting men off the hook. Abortion is not good for women and the children who are killed in it, or for the men who want to be selfishly use women — and girls — for their own gratification.

On the night before the March for Life in Washington, D.C., at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis have all prayed, there was an annual Mass. Unbeknownst to those of us praying inside, a much more professional group calling themselves Catholic projected pro-abortion language on the outside of the Basilica. A reporter who was outside tweeted a photo, or most of us wouldn’t have known. That was a desecration beyond what the angry God-loves-abortion people were doing. None of them have told me they are Catholic. But people who use the faith to make God in their own political image are committing an offense against God and His great gift of life, an offense that hurts and confuses — and ultimately kills.

All life is “sacred and fragile,” Cardinal Dolan said. “All life is God’s alone, to give and to take.” At the D.C. Mass, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore talked about so many of the Catholic Church’s ministries that serve women — including women who have had abortions — to heal. And he challenged everyone present and listening to step up to the plate and Walk with Moms in Need, as an initiative of the U.S. Catholic Bishops urges. In reparation for the evil of abortion, we need more and more people showing what it means to be pro-life. It’s love for women and children, not violence. We need a culture where the options to abortion are ubiquitous. This can be done. It must be. And we might just find some common ground along the way with more Americans than not.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.