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World Without Birth

by Brian Caulfield 

The Christmas message is easy to grasp. A child is born. A mother is honored. Gifts are exchanged. Joy to the world! The Catholic Church celebrates it for eight straight days, so today is still, in liturgical terms, Christmas Day.

The message of these eight days offers a simple human story that speaks to every heart in a way unlike other Christian mysteries. Good Friday is ugly and bloody to the eye – as the Mel Gibson movie was careful to point out – and one must look beneath the surface to glean what exactly is Good about it at all. Easter, the central Christian feast, has a joyous but ultimately haloed aura about it that the world nervously covers over with bunnies and bonnets.

The other great feast days –Ascension, Assumption, Immaculate Conception – require a measure of faith to fully appreciate, and are often misunderstood even by people in the pews. Yet Christmas is accessible to all because everyone has been born, and we all love babies. If we know nothing else about the Christian faith, when we see a mother and child in a manger, we understand that this is a story about the hope of humanity.

At least that’s how it’s been till now. Today, even this simple story – mother and child – is being glossed over in our public square. Merry Christmas is replaced by Happy Holidays. Christmas trees are now solstice trees. Crèches are controversial and the Prince of Peace on the town square is the basis for court battles. For fear of offending or appearing too religious, people not only take Christ out of Christmas, they seek to remove the central symbol that for all the A.D. centuries has spoken to the heart of humanity – the mother and the child.

Could it be that, more than the pressure of political correctness or religious diversity, the driving force to remove the Christmas message comes from the acceptance of abortion?

A profile in the forthcoming January Columbia, the monthly magazine of the Knights of Columbus, reports that the late Jesuit Father Thomas King would make a simple pro-life point: to say that a woman has a right to abortion is to admit that Jesus could have been aborted. More “sophisticated” theologians, no doubt, would consider Father King’s analysis simplistic, but his point stands stark to the mind: abortion strikes at human identity and threatens the hope we hold in our hearts.

There was a pro-life ad more than a decade ago that quoted an African proverb: No one knows who bears the next chief. Designed to appeal to African-Americans, the ad told a universal truth. The hope that any of us have in the future is held in the womb of a woman. A better world begins with the birth of a baby. To admit the necessity of abortion, tragic or otherwise, is to surrender to the sentiment that death is the final answer to the hardship and uncertainty of life. It is, in graphic terms, to grab hope between the serrated claws of a clamp and tear it limb from limb.

Although we know that holy Mary – “full of grace” – would never have aborted her precious child, in a very basic sense, abortion seeks to extinguish the biblical faith that a savior is even possible. No one knows who bears the chief.

Could it be that after 45 million abortions in our country since Roe v. Wade, and the complicity of an untold number of men, that babies are somewhat embarrassing today? Rather than the unrestrained “Joy to the World” that previous ages proclaimed at the birth of any child, could the sight of a newborn today cause ambivalent emotions in the very soul of our culture? Is the Christ Child in some way an inconvenient truth that too many of us don’t know what to do with? Is he the ultimate unplanned pregnancy for our society?

In addition, the almost universal use of contraceptives – some of which cause silent abortions – has changed our thinking and talking about babies. “How many children are you planning?” the newly married couple will be asked at the reception. “Are you finished?” is a common question for someone with two children. Openness to life has been recast as openness to your own life and its possibilities: financial security and career, unhampered sex and perpetual pleasure.

This private mindset leads to social policy – not only to abortion as a back-up for failed contraception, as one Supreme Court decision unfortunately phrased it – but the one-child policy of China and the agenda by some U.N. elites to reduce population to reduce carbon emissions.

If our nation ever succumbs to these policies, we may be able to draw a crooked line back to the battle over the crèche. Only a society that is – unique in our history – unsure of the natural goodness of the birth of a baby could seek to ban the crèche from public view. Only a people unhinged from their past and unsure of their path could object to the images of a mother and child, resting on the grass of a town hall, illumined for all to see against the advance of night.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)