The great apologist G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
Someone once sent me that quote as part of a larger essay in which the writer expounded on Chesterton’s insight. Alas I did not retain the author’s name. So….
Without being able to give credit where credit is due, this writer took Chesterton’s observation and concluded “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.”
I wonder, could there be anything that more fundamentally separates pro- and anti-life forces than the bedrock pro-life conviction 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 any other arbitrary and capricious line of demarcation?
To be fair, we shouldn’t expect that to register with our benighted opposition. The pro-abortion mind experiences a kind of brain freeze whenever you say this.
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They have no single default position in response, but many. They include that 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.
This bedrock principle protects us from a sliding scale approach to human life which, when embraced, always finds new categories of people whose lives don’t “really” matter.
As I once wrote for National Right to Life News [which you can now read online at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJan2014.pdf], “Our unyielding belief that every single life matters” means that “pro-lifers are immune to the eugenics temptation which rears its ugly head in many guises.
You matter, I matter, we all matter… just … because … we … are.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
