One of the books I assign to high school students is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir about Wiesel’s experiences during World War II, when he was a prisoner at Auschwitz. To prepare ourselves for the novel, my students and I watched a moving documentary and interview Oprah Winfrey conducted with Wiesel at the Auschwitz prison grounds. The pictures, videos, and stories stilled my students into a horrified silence. At one point, Ms. Winfrey asked Wiesel about a particular spot and to check with him about what occurred there, 
she listed whom they killed: babies and mothers. Wiesel added to her list, “and old people.” Then he , Winfrey, my students, and I stared at the spot in sad reflection.
Shortly thereafter this question occurred to me: is our culture doing any different? We have altered the timing and the methods, but still we kill the weakest among us.
To stick with the theme that our pastors have chosen for this month, I thought I would use for our newsletter excerpts from the recently published document “That They May Have Life,” written by a group called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. I encourage you to click on the title to read the entire document. It is a reminder about why it is important to care about abortion laws and an articulation of the most salient arguments for preserving life. Reading it will make us wiser as we engage the world in a conversation about the things that matter most.
Regarding the talk about separation of church and state:
Whatever is meant by “the separation of church and state,” it cannot mean the separation of public life and public policy from the deepest convictions, including moral convictions, of the great majority of a nation’s citizens. . . . There is no more inescapably public and political question than who belongs to the polis of which we are part.
Regarding the argument that a fetus is only a potential human:
It is false and pernicious to claim that the unborn child is, at early stages of development, only a potential human being. No life that is not a human being has the potential of becoming a human being, and no life that has the potential of becoming a human being is not a human being.
Regarding the danger of the rational argument for abortion:
In the present state of our tragically disordered law, citizens are given, in the case of abortion, a private “right” to kill those who are too young, too small, too handicapped, too burdensome, or, for whatever reason, not “wanted.” When this “right” and the lethal logic that supports it is established in law, there is no principled reason why it should not be applied to the “unwanted” at any point along life’s way, as advocates of eugenics, euthanasia, and assisted suicide logically contend.
Regarding the importance of being a bold witness of Christ and his Gospel:
Our society’s drift toward a culture of death will not be arrested and reversed without a bolder and more persuasive witness to the gospel of life centered in Jesus Christ who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Whatever our cultural circumstance, whatever the ebb and flow of political and legal fortunes, our first duty is evangelization: to share “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2) the good news of the unsurpassable gift of eternal life, beginning now, in knowing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
May we boldly glorify Christ with our actions on this issue.
