Election – from the Latin ‘eligere – to choose’.
Choose life, that you and your children may live (Dt 30:19)
The core battle of our time is over life and family, as warned Sister Lucia and Pope John Paul II. It is ‘apocalyptic’, not primarily in that the ‘end times’ are upon us even if, speaking of Fatima, the awe-filled display of the northern lights in my area last night did give us all delight, and some pause. Rather, apocalyptic in its root sense of ‘revealing’ what is within each of our souls, where our hearts and our true treasure, be.
These thoughts came to mind last Sunday during the annual Life Chain, an annual event wherein on the first Sunday of October, between 2 and 3 pm – the hour of Divine Mercy – we are asked to stand silently on the side of the road as a group, holding a pro-life sign, and praying. This year, as the clock struck 2, so did a near-Noah-esque deluge, replete with thunder and lightning, which ended, wouldn’t you know it, at 3. A sign, perhaps. Of warning, but also of hope.
Numbers have attenuated over the years, and not just because of the sometimes inclement weather; it is rarely announced in most parishes, and everyone seems so busy. Now, to be clear, it is not an ecclesial event, although perhaps something like it should be. Of all the family and life issues, the question of abortion is the most fundamental, for without life, no other rights are possible. The state-sanctioned murder of the unborn will not be looked kindly upon by future generations, should they return to some sort of moral order, which seems the only condition by which there will even be future generations.
Although many questions swirl around the looming American election, none is so central as the status of the unborn, and what rights of theirs will – or, more to the point, will not – be protected. I almost wrote ‘given’ there, but that is not true. For the state gives no rights, which are given by God, but only protects, or fails to protect them.
We here in Canada have failed, with no protection for the unborn since 1988, when Parliament struck down the then-current law. No law has ever been made since, and unborn children may be terminated, for any reason whatsoever, for all nine months of pregnancy, all paid for by the taxpayer. Since the fall of Roe, a number of American states have followed suit. Should Kamala Harris be elected, the Canadian paradigm – abortion on demand – will likely be imposed on all 50 states, with no exceptions. Both she and Walz support full access to abortion right up to birth, with no conscientious objection for health providers.
The position of Trump and Vance is also problematical, but far more limited, and far more favorable to life. Individual states would have the right to make or unmake abortion laws, and their recent promise to defund the barbaric behemoth that is Planned Parenthood would save a lot of unborn children’s lives. Trump has also promised money for homeschoolers, while Harris in the past has threatened to jail ‘truants’ from the public system.
Their support for IVF and the ‘morning-after’ pill are bad. Who catechized Mr. Vance before he entered the Church? One would wish they would frame their argument in terms of toleration rather than support for these heinous procedures. As Saint Thomas teaches, human law cannot proscribe all evil, especially if it is deeply entrenched in society. Even the most pro-life candidate, no matter how extensive his authority, would likely not find it possible to completely eradicate abortion overnight, no matter how broad the law. Many oral contraceptives are abortifacient, and as a recent article points out, more humans die as ‘collateral’ of IVF than from outright abortion.
We may soon be facing a similar choice here in Canada, should there ever be an election, between the radical pro-abortion stance of current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and the leader of the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, who would do nothing to change the (as stated, open ended and fully funded) status quo, but does support adoption over abortion, and would likely not make things worse (and things could always get worse).
One of the themes of Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae is that abortion, and other crimes against life, are not primarily political issues, but rather cultural and human ones. Abortion, as John Paul cogently argues, follows inexorably upon our society’s addiction to the twin evils of trivial sex and contraception. It is a sad sign of the degradation of our once-Christian culture that all too many mothers, often desperate, are determined to destroy their own children. In the long battle against this evil, the Pope permits a multi-pronged gradual approach, when no other is possible, one aspect of which is voting for the candidate who is, for want of a better term, less bad. And the Republicans are a lot less bad, and may even do much that is good.
With the prospect of an unhinged abortion-on-demand Harris-Walz regime – to say nothing of their unbridled support for a host of other evils – the principle of going with the lesser evil is a valid, one might even say a binding choice. That is, so long as one does not formally will, but simply tolerates, the evil done by another, about which one can do little or nothing. The wheat and tares are inextricably intertwined until that final divine reaping, but some choices have far more tares than wheat.
What ye did to these, the least of My brethren, that ye did unto Me (Mt 25:40)