Forum: Capital punishment and abortion: Do we promote life while imposing death?

By Bishop Blase Cupich | Friday, February 02, 2007

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Every age presents the world with specific challenges to the dignity of the human person and invites societies to come to understand the rights of men and women in new and deeper ways. In the 18th century, advocates of the democratic impulse brought to the world a richer understanding of the political rights of every human person and a recognition that political legitimacy lies not in the rights of kings, but in the consent of those who are governed. In the 19th century, human societies grappled with the achievements and horrors of industrialization and came to understand that economic progress should be measured not by the sheer production and accumulation of wealth, but rather by how societies use that wealth for the betterment of their people. In the 20th century, the world had to confront the face of totalitarianism and recognize that individual rights could not be surrendered in the name of ideological purity, whether that purity be Nazism, Communism or Fascism.

As we stand at the threshold of the 21st century, the pre-eminent moral challenge facing our own age is the defense of the sacredness and value of every human life. Everywhere we turn, we encounter mounting efforts to treat the lives of men and women as mere means to larger and more important goals. We see global markets developing for the sale of vital human organs by those driven in the desperation of poverty to risk death in order to provide food and shelter for their families. We see in our own land a dominant cultural ethic which asserts that the lives of unborn children have no sanctity when weighed against the wishes and needs of their pregnant mothers. Increasingly, we see nations across the globe embracing policies regarding the end of life which are based upon the proposition that those in declining health are less worthy of continuing on this Earth; in the Netherlands, the so-called right to die has become for many an obligation to die in order to spare their children emotional stress and financial burdens. We are told that life in its earliest stages of human development is to be subordinated to the needs of scientific experimentation and that the sacredness of human life must take second place to the need for medical progress. And in terrorism, we see the chilling assertion that it is legitimate to kill innocent men and women in furtherance of politics, power, religion and revenge.

In the face of such manifold threats to the sacredness of human life, our elected representatives are debating the issues of abortion and the death penalty. Without question, the moral weight of these two issues differs greatly, since abortion involves the taking of innocent human life without any regard for due process. Yet, the convergence of these debates provides us with an opportunity to recognize how these two issues rest on the common claim that the right to life is universal and God-given. The assertion that every human life has an inherent and inalienable value will only be strengthened if we as a state apply this principle to the morality of defending both convicted criminals and the lives of the unborn.

Even if it does not intend to do so, a state that opts for the use of the death penalty inevitably weakens the ability of its citizens to defend the sacredness of human life against all of the threats that imperil life in the present day. Such a state has implicitly accepted the proposition that the right to life is, after all, contingent, rooted not in the free and absolute gift of a sovereign God, but in the discernments of relative worth by human society.

When addressing the life issues of abortion and the death penalty, our elected leaders are in a position to help our citizens appreciate that the value of every human life rests not upon an individual's quality of life or age or moral worth. Rather, it is based upon the transcendent identity which is God's greatest gift. In a word, when we protect the sanctity of life for the least worthy among us, we surely witness to the need to protect the lives of those who are the most innocent and the most vulnerable.

This Journal Forum piece was based on an article written by Bishop Blase Cupich for America magazine(americamagazine.com). Excerpts used with permission.