Where do you stand on war?
The Pro-Life Action League laments the loss of any innocent human life. However, we do not have a general position opposing war, nor have we taken a position in opposition to any particular armed conflict.
Killing is always a tragedy, but not all killings are equally wrong. A simple example would be a police officer shooting and killing an attacker to prevent him killing someone else. In such a case, the killing is a tragedy, but the police officer has not done wrong. On the contrary, it was his duty to shoot, and if necessary kill, the attacker.
Likewise, war is sometimes necessary—as when the Allies defended themselves against the Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. So it is not a question of taking a position “against war” in the way that one can take a position against abortion.
Innocent people inevitably die during wartime. That doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic, but the fact that innocents die is not, on its own, enough reason to say that a war is unjust. Some wars are just and some are not, and reasonable, decent people can and often do disagree about the justice of any particular war.
Crucial Moral Distinctions
A just war is waged in order to preserve life, even if that means some people die (our own soldiers, enemy soldiers, civilians killed unavoidably). Abortion, on the contrary, attacks the very notion that life has value. No abortion is ever just—there is never a good enough reason for aborting an unborn baby.
We are not commenting here on whether any particular use of armed force is just or not. We are simply arguing that a far more basic principle is at stake in the case of abortion.
Those who support U.S. involvement in any particular armed conflict believe it to be just (even if they’re wrong), and thus believe that the lives the war defends have value. Those who support abortion have, whether they know if or not, abandoned the more fundamental principle that life has value and that innocent life must not ever be deliberately taken.
