Gender issues, as I blogged yesterday, are one of the key areas where the battle is raging in today’s Western world. For instance, a major issue for the West in the past forty years has been the issue of hegemonic control of the body: do women have rights over their bodies to the point that they violate the rights of others, namely, the unborn that from time to time inhabit their wombs? The answer of the West has been a resounding yes. In making this affirmation, these nations think that they have liberated women from the patriarchal tyranny of past generations when men set the agenda for society without reference to women. To be sure, some of the patriarchy of the past was tyrannical. But the liberty the West is pursuing will prove to be a will-of-the-wisp, for in “freeing” women the West has been brutalizing and tyrannizing the unborn.
Is what the West is doing in this regard really any different from the genocidal “experiments” of the twentieth century carried out by the Turks on the Armenians or the Nazis on the Jews or the Serbs on the Bosnians? For these unborn are human beings and abortion is not about choice but about the snuffing out of tiny, helpless lives!
Here, there is a clear parting of the road. The Church and Western culture cannot walk together on this path, for Western culture has chosen the path of death, while the Church seeks to affirm life.