Massachusetts is once again expanding the legal boundaries of abortion. But behind the weeks, exceptions, and slogans lies a question that comes before all the others: what is it whose life is being ended?
Massachusetts is once again expanding the legal boundaries of abortion.
For those who support these measures, it is a matter of autonomy, access, and medical freedom. For those of us who defend human life from its beginning, it means something very different:
The circumstances under which the law permits the deliberate termination of a human life before birth are being expanded.
But perhaps we have spent too long arguing about weeks, exceptions, and boundaries.
Before asking when an abortion may be performed, we must answer a much more fundamental question.
WHAT IS IT THAT DIES?
Biological reality is the starting point.
What develops inside the mother's womb is a living human organism at a prenatal stage of development.
Zygote, embryo, and fetus are terms that designate different stages of that development, just as newborn, child, adolescent, and adult designate later stages.
None of us suddenly appeared during childbirth.
The adult who reads these words today is the result of a continuous process of development that began long before he or she could speak, think, remember, or survive independently.
Therefore, the fundamental controversy should not be whether it belongs to the human species. The real question is this:
If we are dealing with a living, developing human being, what characteristic would it have to lack in order to lose the most basic right we recognize in other human beings: that no one should deliberately end its life?
Size? Age? Degree of development? Consciousness? The ability to feel? The ability to survive independently? Being wanted?
Every answer requires us to justify why that particular characteristic—and not our human condition—should determine who deserves protection.
Biology tells us what is there.
The moral question is what we owe it because it is there.
MASSACHUSETTS: THE BORDER MOVES AGAIN
Massachusetts has once again expanded the legal window for abortion, including beyond 24 weeks.
The boundary moves again: greater decision-making latitude and fewer specific restrictions.
From a pro-life perspective, this means expanding the circumstances under which the law permits the deliberate killing of human beings before birth.
But it would be a mistake to think that our problem begins at 24 weeks.
It does not begin when the child can survive outside the womb.
It does not begin when the child reaches a certain size.
It does not begin when its appearance makes it easier to recognize it as one of us.
It begins with the existence of the new human organism.
That is why Massachusetts should not lead us merely to ask:
“How long will they allow abortion?”
The truly difficult question is:
Why should there be a stage of human life during which deliberately ending that life is considered a right?
AT 24 WEEKS, THE CONTRADICTION BECOMES VISIBLE
Imagine a child born extremely prematurely.
Doctors and nurses rush to save the child. An incubator maintains the baby's temperature. A ventilator may help the baby breathe. The parents watch every movement.
Every hour matters.
Every gram gained is celebrated.
And medicine is right to fight for that child.
Advances in neonatal medicine allow some babies born at around 24 weeks to survive.
Now imagine another human being of a similar gestational age who remains inside the mother.
What has changed in that human being's nature?
Its location.
Birth changes many things, but it does not create our humanity.
The child who leaves the womb was already human before leaving it.
We may employ extraordinary human and technological resources to save one child while the law permits, under certain circumstances, the deliberate termination of another human life that remains inside the womb.
The legal situation changes.
The location changes.
The individual's human nature does not.
And although late abortions may constitute a small proportion of the total, that does not resolve the problem.
Statistics answer:
How often does it happen?
They do not answer:
What is happening?
The rarity of an action does not determine whether it is just.
But neither should we make the opposite mistake and focus only on late abortions. If the individual we observe at 24 weeks is human, that same individual was also human weeks earlier.
Size does not confer dignity.
Neither does age.
WHAT ABOUT EXTREME CASES?
Rape, incest, abandonment, poverty, illness, and devastating diagnoses.
It is easy to write those words. It is much harder to live through those realities.
A woman who has been raped deserves justice, and her attacker deserves the full weight of the law. A sick mother deserves the best medical care available. An abandoned woman needs material, psychological, and family support. A family facing a terrible diagnosis needs counseling, medical care, and, when appropriate, perinatal palliative care.
There is nothing pro-life about abandoning a woman in such circumstances.
But tragedy changes the circumstances; it does not change the nature of the child.
The father's crime does not make the child guilty.
Poverty does not make the poor person less human.
A disability does not erase dignity.
Neither does illness.
We must also distinguish between deliberately causing an abortion and suffering a spontaneous pregnancy loss.
One thing is being unable to save a life.
Quite another is intending to end it.
“MY BODY, MY CHOICE”
A woman's body belongs to her.
But her child is not an organ of her body.
The child is inside her and depends upon her to an extraordinary degree, but dependence does not mean identity or an absence of dignity.
A newborn is completely dependent on others. A person with profound disabilities may depend on others throughout his or her entire life. An elderly person with dementia may require assistance even to eat.
We do not conclude that the greater the person's dependence, the lesser his or her right to live.
We should uphold precisely the opposite principle:
The more vulnerable a human being is, the greater our obligation should be to protect that person.
Why should that principle be reversed before birth?
WHAT ABOUT THE WOMAN?
This is a necessary question.
There are women terrified by a pregnancy. Poor women. Abandoned women. Women who fear losing their education, their jobs, or the future they had imagined. Women facing illness and terrible diagnoses.
They matter.
A society that calls itself pro-life and then abandons the mother has understood only half of its obligation.
We must accompany her, provide material assistance, hold the father accountable, facilitate real alternatives, improve adoption processes, and provide medical and psychological care.
And that responsibility does not end with birth.
But the question “What about the woman?” has another dimension that we almost never hear:
What about the girls who never had the chance to be born?
Among aborted human beings there are also female human beings.
Where do they stand when we speak about women's rights?
A little girl who dies before birth will never march for her rights. She will never vote. She will never attend university. She will never discover what her vocation might have been.
We will never know whether she might have become a doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist, religious sister, entrepreneur, mother, or simply an ordinary woman who would have loved and been loved.
But she did not need to become any of those things to have value.
Her dignity did not depend on what she might one day have been able to do.
It depended on who she was.
The mother matters.
The daughter matters too.
The human response should not be to pit one against the other, but to say:
“Your life matters. And your child's life matters too. We will abandon neither of you.”
NEITHER WANTED NOR UNWANTED: HUMAN
One child may have been awaited for years. Another may arrive unexpectedly.
One may be conceived in a stable home. Another may be conceived under terrible circumstances.
One may be given a name from the moment of the first ultrasound. Another may be regarded as a problem from the very beginning.
But the wanted child and the unwanted child do not belong to different species.
Another person's wishes may change the child's circumstances.
They cannot change the child's human nature.
If our dignity depends on someone wanting us, considering us convenient, or authorizing our existence, then we do not possess genuine rights.
We have permissions.
And whoever grants permission can also withdraw it.
That is precisely why human rights exist: so that the dignity of the weak does not depend exclusively on the will of the strong.
“ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE”
It is a common slogan in our time.
But no slogan can replace a question:
Health care—for whom?
The mother is a patient. Her health matters. Her life matters. Her suffering matters.
But within her there is also another living, developing human being.
We can change laws and alter the words with which we describe a reality.
What we cannot do is alter that reality through language.
A law can declare an action lawful.
That does not automatically prove that it is just.
Legality and morality have never been synonyms.
If they were, there would never have been an unjust law that needed to be changed.
THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS
That is what makes Massachusetts relevant.
We do not need to imagine conspiracies or attribute hidden motives to everyone who thinks differently.
It is enough to observe the result:
The legal boundary is expanding again.
And when a boundary moves, we must ask who is left on the other side.
At six weeks, the human being is tiny. At twelve weeks, more developed. At 24 weeks, its capabilities are different. After birth, the child will depend completely on others.
Size, abilities, appearance, and degree of dependence change.
What remains is the continuity of the same developing human organism.
That is why the question does not end in Massachusetts.
Nor at 24 weeks.
Nor at 12.
Nor at six.
It ends with a question our generation must answer:
If we know that it is alive and we know that it is human, what circumstance can make it just to deliberately end its life simply because it has not yet been born?
The woman deserves our help.
The mother deserves our protection.
The victim of violence deserves justice.
The sick woman deserves the best medicine possible.
The mother facing a devastating diagnosis deserves support and compassion.
And the human being who depends completely upon her also deserves protection.
Even if that human being is small.
Even if sick.
Even if conceived under terrible circumstances.
Even if no one expected that child.
Even if that child cannot yet speak.
Because human rights acquire their deepest meaning precisely in the face of the human being who lacks the power to demand them.
The mother matters.
The child matters.
A truly humane society should be large enough to defend both.
We should not require a human being to first become large, strong, independent, or wanted before recognizing that this human being is already one of us.
RMO
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