Indeed He is risen!
During this Easter Week, we take special consolation in the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead. Not only is it the central event of our faith life, but it also provides us with great encouragement in our ongoing battle against abortion.
By conquering death, Jesus has also conquered abortion. As a result, we know that the outcome of the struggle that we carry on — this seemingly endless conflict between life and death — has already been decided.
We have, so to speak, been allowed to read the book’s final chapter before we actually get to it. We know that in the end, Life will be victorious.
From time to time, all of us need to remind ourselves of this, lest we lose heart.
Just this morning I responded to an e-mail from a student who was researching abortion for a school project. One of her questions asked if I thought our culture was “moving away from abortion”.
In response, I pointed out that in the United States, the abortion rate peaked in the early 1990s, and has been steadily falling since that time.
I mentioned that this is probably due to many reasons. For one, it’s a lot harder now than it was 20 or 30 years ago for people to believe that an unborn child is just a “clump of cells” or “blob of tissue”, because so many people have seen ultrasound images of children in the womb.
Another reason is that a lot of people have seen what an aborted baby actually looks like, which makes it a lot harder to believe that abortion is anything other than the killing of an innocent human being at an early stage of development.
Still another reason is that because there are simply so many women who have had an abortion, almost everyone personally knows someone who has had one. And in overwhelmingly large numbers, women who have had an abortion hated it, often saying it was the worst thing that ever happened to them.
As more and more women talk to their relatives and friends about their abortion experiences, and begin to speak out publicly, the less likely other women are to want to go through with it.
Surely, abortion will not be conquered overnight, so we we must never grow lax in fighting it. But so too must we never forget that we have hope in the Ultimate Victory over sin and death won by Our Lord Jesus Christ through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
