Transcript of a reflection given at a memorial service for the unborn, January 22, 2006, on the 33rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. Held at Mt. Angeles Memorial Park in Port Angeles, WA, and sponsored by the Knights of Columbus.

We are here to remember; but this is an unusual memorial service: we are in the cemetery; but none of those we mourn are buried here. There are no headstones to mark their graves; they have no names, no dates of birth.

Worldwide, abortion has claimed almost one billion human lives—the equivalent of ten thousand Hiroshimas—far more than Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung combined.

At the March for Life last week in Olympia, there were a few counter-protesters. I saw one woman holding a sign that said, “My Body.” What a tragic mistake. A woman carries her child within her body, but her child is not her body.

There is a sad irony here. A few decades ago, if a man beat his wife, and the police were called, they would not interfere. “A man’s home is his castle,” after all, and what right does society have to tell him what to do in his home?

But a woman is a human being, not a piece of her husband’s property. And an unborn child is also a human being, not just an unwanted growth in the mother’s body.

Frederica Mathewes-Green once observed that, “There is tremendous sadness, loneliness in the cry, ‘A woman’s right to choose.’ No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Why do women feel so trapped? If you knew nothing of human biology, you could listen to most debates about abortion and never realize that men are involved in any way. We talk about the woman’s body, the woman’s right to choose: but what about the father?

Women almost never choose abortion when the father wants their child, and wants to help out. Yet we hardly ever speak of the absent or unsupportive father when we talk about abortion. All too often, women demand the “right to choose” because of men who will not take responsibility for their choices.

As Christians, we do not believe our bodies are our own; they are created in God’s image, they have been redeemed at great price, and they are the temples where God’s Spirit dwells. But in our culture, this truth has been sadly neglected: it is hardly ever preached on Sunday morning, and seldom practiced on Saturday night.

The bodies of the children whom we remember today are not here. Yet we hope that, rejected in this world, they have found Christ’s peace in the next.

No words we can say can do justice to their loss; nothing we can do will bring them back to life. But we can commit ourselves to building the culture of life, a culture in which their younger brothers and sisters will have the chance to live.

There are many ways to build this culture: we can take our arguments to the public square, pushing for pro-life legislation and for the confirmation of pro-life Supreme Court Justices. We can be more personal, trying to convince our friends and family members of the importance of the pro-life cause. Or we can give to crisis pregnancy centers, and other charities that provide services to women who choose to keep their child.

But I want to leave you with a reminder of an all-important, but often forgotten way to build the culture of life: fidelity, in our daily lives, to the truth that the human body was not made for the sexual immorality that so often precedes abortion.

We must commit ourselves to learn from Christ the true dignity of the human body, to teach our culture what we have learned, and to live by what we teach. Our society will learn greater respect for the dignity of the unborn when men and women learn to respect the dignity of each others’ bodies.

[To read a longer speech that expands on these themes, see Men and Abortion, delivered at the Symposium on Life Issues, March 25, 2006, at St. Monica's Parish on Mercer Island.]