The need to oppose chemical abortion
We must protect babies at the very earliest stages of life, which bans on surgical abortions do not protect.
In the spring of 1998, IU Students for Life picketed the IU Health Center because the center (funded by a mandatory student fee) distributed chemical birth control. IUSFL (now going by Students for Life at IU) was raising an issue few pro-life people - and fewer politicians - were willing to address then or now: The abortifacient action of chemical birth control. It is this action of chemical birth control that led IUSFL to adopt the slogan that we protect life "from fertilization to natural death" instead of from conception to natural death.
Chemical birth control works in a few ways: It inhibits ovulation and makes it more difficult for sperm to reach the egg. But it also has another action, which is what we objected to back then: It prevents the fertilized egg from attaching to the wall of the uterus. The "embryo" then dies as it is denied the nutrition and shelter it needs to grow.
I put embryo in quotes because the most common argument for "abortion rights" is dehumanization of the unborn baby. Abortion is like cutting fingernails, or the unborn baby is a parasite on the level of a tapeworm. By using "embryo" instead of "baby," we think of a single cell, not a human person. But at the moment of fertilization, a new human life is formed that, while he resides in his mother's body, he is completely district from the mother's body. When Scripture tells us in the Sixth Commandment that we are not permitted to commit murder, there is no exception for the size of the person killed.
Yes, I know that there are pregnancies that are naturally aborted, sometimes without the mother ever even knowing she was pregnant. That does not give us the moral right to use chemicals that we know create an environment that kills a newly-formed baby who is, like every other man or woman ever born, made in the image of God. By the "logic" of using natural spontaneous miscarriages to justify abortion, deaths by cancer or heart disease can be used to justify drive-by shootings. The fact of natural death does not justify murder, and such arguments should not be taken seriously.
It was a landmark moment for human rights when the abominable Roe v. Wade decision from 53 years ago yesterday was overturned in 2022. We should be thankful to President Trump that three of the five votes to overturn Roe were from justices that Trump appointed. But while many states (including my home of Indiana) have moved to ban surgical abortion and have saved thousands of lives, chemical abortion remains untouched and no politician has shown the intestinal fortitude to protect babies from chemical abortion. That needs to change, and we need to pressure our leaders to protect the most vulnerable among us. We should have faith that God will release us from this judgment and give the civil magistrate - and the Church - the courage and conviction necessary to protect all unborn babies.