Abortion, infallibility and the 'safer course'

Are you infallible?

Are you infallible in your belief that the child in the mother’s womb who is about to be killed is not a human being?

As I watch and listen to the protests, and to the assuredness of the pro-abortion press, my thoughts recur to Blaise Pascal’s “Wager.”

Pascal was a French philosopher and theologian, as well as a famous mathematician and physicist. Today, he is perhaps best known for “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal argues that all human beings wager, by the way they live their lives, that God exists, or doesn’t exist.

Pascal argues that a rational person should live his life as though God exists. If you do, you will incur, at worst, a finite loss. You will deprive yourself only of one or more of the fruits of the deadly sins: illicit sex, ill-gotten gain, or worldly power.

If, on the other hand, God does exist, you stand to receive the joys of eternal life if you have led a life pleasing to God, or eternal damnation if you have lived a life that displeases.

So, as you take your pro-abortion stand, would you not be wise to ask yourselves the following questions?

Is there a God?

If so, does he reward good and punish evil? Forbid us to kill? Command us to “Love one another?” Tell us that human beings are created in his image and likeness?

If so, at what point does God think that the embryo-fetus-child, is a human being? If at conception, what is your liability if you kill it? If at 15 weeks, what is your liability if you kill it?

If God exists, what if God believes that killing the embryo-fetus-child is murder, even if you don’t?

I have always known that I am not infallible. While I do not know the precise instant when God considers the embryo-fetus-child to be fully human, I choose to wager that there is a God. For that reason, and because I believe he has said, “Thou shall not kill,” and commanded that we shall “Love one another,” I believe abortion to be a moral wrong. In that, I think I am not unlike Abe Lincoln who said that he believed “slavery to be a moral wrong.”

Am I infallible on the matter? No. Am I willing to risk an eternity in Hell for taking the innocent life of an unborn child, except in the gravest of circumstances? No.

I am, however, morally certain that the embryo-fetus-child is fully a human being the moment it can reasonably be expected to survive outside the womb — even if medical care is needed.

But I have also written before of the importance of act consistently with one’s own well-formed conscience. Given, however, what appear to be consistent divine and secular proscriptions against killing the innocent over the history of mankind, coupled with Christ’s command to love one another, the taking innocent life, but for the gravest of reasons, seems utterly inconsistent with acting consistently with a well-formed conscience. It you love your neighbor, can you kill him? Popes, theologians and catechists say, “Rarely, and only for the gravest of reasons.”

In the matter of taking human life, medieval popes, theologians and philosophers consistently counseled, as Pascal suggests, “take the safer course.”

In fire-arms safety training, you are taught that while you may truly believe you are killing in “self-defense,” your jury may think "murder.” When you abort a child believing you are justified, Pascal warns that you may be second-guessed by God.

Copyright 2022, John Donald O'Shea

First Published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on May 29, 2022