Francisco Javier Pérez Latre,, Professor of Communication School
A difficult but necessary discussion
In recent months, discussion on life has returned to the center of public opinion in full force. This is good news, because the issue is crucial to the community. It is necessary to keep this decisive conversation alive and avoid a news blackout. It is also necessary to rescue reason, bringing ideas to a discussion often plagued by propaganda and disqualifications. Unfortunately, the conversation about life has been of a low intellectual level (on both sides). By now, we know the effects of the declining birth rate, which has triggered a demographic bomb and deepened the crisis of the welfare state, which does not seem to be able to cope with population pyramids and macroeconomic data like the current ones. Surprisingly, the political class looks the other way. We are already suffering the effects of the crisis of motherhood, with the epidemic of loneliness that inevitably accompanies it. Russia and China, the pioneers of abortion implementation, are already beginning to review their policies.
Moreover, the struggle for life can be a struggle for nature, an ecological cause. We live in an artificial world, which wants to impede the natural course of things with artifacts and drugs of all kinds subject. The growth of technology, which brings so many benefits, has not been accompanied by the growth of humanity. Ecological sensitivity has helped us to respect nature more and that has been a great advance. Except when it comes to the culture of life.
On the other hand, women who are able to have children live in a climate adverse to motherhood, with strong pressures from their environment. This is why it is necessary to defend those who want to become mothers and remove obstacles in their way. Things have changed: abortion used to be taboo. Now, the taboo is parenthood. Abortion is not only a women's problem. It is also a problem of men who run away and do not want to be responsible for their lives.
These and other arguments of the pro-life movement deserve a slower analysis. Its best ally is science, which, with the advances in prenatal diagnosis, sample the creatures with clearer profiles every day. The defense of life is presented as something obscure, conservative and outdated. But the cause of life is the cause of the future of humanity. It is possible that abortion is not so much a sign of progress as a legacy of the 20th century, the century of the atomic bomb, experimentation Genetics and world wars.
If it overcomes its divisions and improves the quality of its speech, the pro-life movement can be a valuable coalition for the community: people of all religions or no religion who want to preserve human and civil rights; protect the defenseless, the disabled and the marginalized; work against human trafficking or the exclusion of the elderly with euthanasia; against the death penalty, torture, terrorism and other forms of violence. The right to life, to all life, is the first of human rights.
Welcome to discussion of these last weeks. But it has to be a real discussion , without disqualifications or threats. It is a difficult discussion , but necessary. As Pope Francis has written, the unborn children want to be denied their human dignity and do with them whatever they want, taking their lives and promoting legislation so that no one can prevent it.