Be unafraid to defend human life

By Rachel Daly

There is something moving about looking out at a great immensity. Take the stars, the Adirondack Mountains, the ocean. Something about these great, expansive wonders causes us to remember the goodness and beauty that’s out there and to desire it more fervently. It is nearly, if not completely, a universal human experience.
But that coin has another side. At the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., there is an exhibit featuring an expanse of shoes representing those who were killed by Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Immensities such as this make our breath catch in a different way. They evoke a deep recognition of evil, a sickening realization of wrongness. How can one possibly look upon them and turn away as if he had seen nothing? Satan knows that we humans have a soft spot for breathtaking immensities. He is cunning, impossible to stay one step ahead of, and he doesn’t play clean. Perhaps this is a reason why the greatest human rights violation of our time, the abortion holocaust, is happening in our own backyards, and many of us do not so much as lift a finger.

We cannot look out upon the shoes or the corpses or the gravestones of the victims of this genocide and passively let the image grip us until we are moved to action. There are no shoes; there are no gravestones.
The great deceiver has chosen victims who can conveniently disappear from sight in biological waste containers, unseen by anyone, until we start to believe that they were never there at all.

As Ronald Reagan said with regard to the Holocaust, “We who did not go their way owe them this: We must make sure that their deaths have posthumous meaning. We must make sure that from now until the end of days all humankind stares this evil in the face…and only then can we be sure that it will never arise again.”
We have seen the evil of the Holocaust, and many evils like it. It is enough to shake even the most passive observers into acknowledging the wrong.

Now we must be strong against this stealthy, unseen evil. We must be active in fighting abortion, in pouring out our love on those who believe abortion is their only choice, in shaping a society where the poor, the lost, and the vulnerable are protected and cherished.

Because if we begin to do this, we begin to see that there is an immensity out there to gaze upon, and it is as scary as any—it is the immensity of a void. A void where the children lost to abortion should be. A void where our manhood and womanhood, whole and undamaged, ought to be flourishing. A void where in this society of material plenty, happiness ought to abound.

Respect for life bears so many good fruits, and where it does not exist, an empty hole remains in its place. If we look at all the good that abortion has taken from us, we can see that the void left behind is very large indeed.

We can remain on the fence no longer. The most despicable of all those involved in crimes such as these are the bystanders, the ones who in fleeing from criticism say nothing at all. Let us look upon the void and allow its immensity shake us to our deepest most human core.

And then, let us at last, all of us, be unafraid to take a stand in defense of human life.