The Church's Role in Preventing Abortion

Matthew Meritt, writing at Crisis Magazine notes that The Small Choices Come First before a young woman ponders having an abortion.

That’s the abortion issue in a nutshell. It manifests in the skirmishes of seemingly small choices in each life that lead to a frightened, lonely girl who faces a decision that seems to have no easy choice. Sin is like that—it lulls a person along in a crowd and abandons her when the consequences are too big to escape.

But if the arena is the human heart, then the Church should enjoy homefield advantage because, as Pope St. John Paul II said, God’s moral law is inscribed there, “valid and current in every time and place.”

That lonely girl’s battles were fought in her heart, and with the forming of her imagination, well before her unplanned pregnancy, as she went along with the crowd, seemingly befriended but really alone.

Was the Church “accompanying” her—or the boy who was to become the father of her unborn child?

Meritt makes a good point, that the poor girl and the boy who got her into trouble had committed many sins before she got to the point where she felt the need to have an abortion. The church has a role, if they will take it up, in preventing the need for abortions as much as ensuring that these children are born rather than being thrown away. Pray for the unborn.