I wasn’t always pro-life

I was never pro-abortion, a terrifying prospect, but I once thought it was something which was so terribly complex, and not at all “clear-cut.” A “gray area,” we sometimes say. Mind you, if asked, I would’ve said abortion was wrong, but I couldn’t have said why it was wrong.

Like ancients and medievals, I vaguely believed that, while life began at conception, such a hidden life was merely a potential person, not an actual one. I wouldn’t have used the crass Planned Parenthood talking-point, “just a blob of tissue,” but I might have entertained the idea that such a life was akin to a plant, which only later developed into a human person made in God’s image. Maybe I could say decisively that abortion was wrong after the woman felt the first kick (roughly about halfway through the pregnancy, around 20 weeks).

I was intentionally confused about embryology. I say intentionally because intellectually I knew that our genetic complexity, our DNA, is present in its entirety from the moment of conception. But I wanted to suppress this thought. To face it would be to confront why abortion was wrong.

So, suppress that thought I did, even into my graduate school days at Cambridge University. University culture, especially elite culture, encourages suppression as “mature circumspection.” I was doing everything “right” as far as our elites were concerned. I was “passing the test.”

In 2003, I saw my first 20-week sonogram. I watched my son living and active in my wife’s womb, reaching out to us from a place out of mind. It was a lateral blow, a fresh gust of reality knocking me off my carefully crafted middle-ground. It was the beginning of the end for my passivity on abortion.

I imagine there are many who continue to feel just as I once did. Good people, maybe even some truly virtuous people who maintain this same moral blindspot, aided by powerful ideologies that surround all of us, and tell us to put these moral goggles on to guard our freedom. But I also imagine they nevertheless have a quiet, often suppressed, gnawing sense that all of our casuistry is just camouflage for a terribly inconvenient truth that we find too terrible to face squarely.

I came to see that horrible truth, that this fetal violence we call abortion was entirely unjustified: killing the weakest, most vulnerable members of the human race. My own “conversion” to the right to life came with the terrible realization that I had been passive about the greatest social evil of our time. Only slavery comes close to comparing, and I believe future generations will one day judge us just as harshly, perhaps even more harshly, as we judge slave-owning generations. They will be right in their judgment.

This past week, millions marched for women. It was ostensibly an anti-President Trump protest that the partisan organizers sadly decided to make about “abortion rights,” excluding pro-life sponsors and marchers. I would have marched for my daughter and my wife had it been a march that truly was for women. But it wasn’t. It was a march for the same ideology that had kept me passive on abortion for so many years.

I’ve been marching for mothers and wives, for fathers and husbands, and for their sons and daughters, each human persons with all the genetic complexity and dignity of every other person from the very moment of conception. I march against an unjust law – which, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, is no law at all – made by men 44 years ago

I march in memory of the 57 million babies that have been dismembered in their mother’s wombs because we wear these moral blinders.

I march for everyone.

Indeed, no one is excluded from the March for Life, because it is truly a march for every human life. Stop being passive. Join the March For Everyone this Friday, Jan. 27, on the National Mall. I’ll be there with my son, and my students, and a new generation who are awakening from our national moral slumber.

Awake!

C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.