By Dave Andrusko
Why I have this paragraph tucked away on my hard drive escapes me; I don’t even know who wrote it! (Senior moment anyone?) The quote is embedded in a paragraph where he or she quoted the great apologist G. K. Chesterton who wrote: “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
So without being able to give credit where credit is due, we can say that this writer went on to take Chesterton’s observation and conclude “And that God—the God who is big enough to speak all of that [just the part of the universe we know about] into existence and hold it in the palm of his hand—says you matter to him. He says I matter to him.”
Can there be a more bedrock pro-life conviction than that every life matters? That lives are not disposable based on some sort of sliding scale, whether that be “wantedness” or “quality of life” or some such nonsense?
If they are not scoffing that anyone could believe something so preposterous, the pro-abortion mind experiences a kind of brain freeze. Their default position includes there are so many people in the world (a canard that is far less impressive now that many nations are approaching negative population growth); people, including youngsters, die from accidents (as if deliberating taking a life and inadvertently taking a life are two sides of the same coin); this is merely/only/just a “religious” tenet (as if anything any position that originates from, or draws additional strength from a religious impulse, is automatically suspect), etc., etc., etc.
Our unyielding belief that every single life matters means that pro-lifers are immune to the eugenics temptation which underlies the anti-life ethos and which rears its ugly head in many guises.
You matter, I matter, we all matter just … because … we … are.