Evangelium Vitae and the culture of death today

As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of St. John Paul II’s landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae, it is instructive to reflect on the current breadth and depth of the culture of death referred to in that remarkable document. That culture has certainly been graphically exposed during this chaotic election year. The Harris-Walz platform unequivocally supports absolute reproductive freedom, even if it means allowing abortions very late in a woman’s pregnancy. Far too many Democrats celebrate abortion and are determined to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.

Kamala Harris, described by President Biden as “having the moral compass of a saint,” has been a strident supporter of unrestricted abortion rights throughout her entire political career. Both she and her running mate Tim Walz also favor permitting babies of botched abortions to be left to die after birth. Walz and Minnesota lawmakers changed the state law that required medical personnel to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” after a failed abortion attempt. According to the modified law, medical personnel must only “care for the infant who is born alive.” There is no longer a requirement to provide life-saving health care to this helpless infant.

This revised Minnesota law illustrates how the culture of death continues to evolve and deepen, while always spreading its malignant influence.

Catholic progressives often echo the “seamless garment” thesis once championed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in the 1990s. The Cardinal called for a “consistent ethic of life” and a broader attitude about respect for life. Thus, abortion is only one of many life issues that also includes capital punishment, war, extreme poverty, and environmental degradation. This philosophy has been revived in recent years, with many liberal prelates, including Cardinal Robert McElroy and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, proclaiming its merits.

Some Catholic supporters of Harris point out that while she may not have the right attitude about abortion, her message bears a similarity to Jesus’s ministry because of her sincere concern for the poor and those excluded by society. Behind the façade of these sophistic arguments, however, is the moral truth that abortion ignores in the most radical way the dignity of the human person at the inception of his or her existence.

Adding to the confusion is Pope Francis himself, who sometimes links the abortion issue with other social justice concerns. He has conflated ecological and pro-life issues because of their common root, stating that “the same indifference, the same selfishness, the same greed, the same pride, the same claim to be the master and despot of the world leads human beings on the one hand to destroy species and plunder natural resources and, on the other, . . . to no longer respect the right to human life from conception to its natural end.”

And, in a recent interview, he apparently affirmed the moral equivalence of the evil of abortion and the exclusion of migrants: ““Both [Harris and Trump] are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies…” However, while there is never a good reason to take an innocent human life, there may be morally sound reasons why a country cannot accommodate every migrant who seeks to cross its border (cf CCC 2241).

A different perspective is presented in Evangelium Vitae, which introduced the phrase “culture of death” to describe a sub-culture that is quite willing to endorse abortion and euthanasia. As the philosopher John Finnis has pointed out, the Pope’s strong language refers to a systematic and shameless willingness to treat some human beings as non-persons, to choose and intend to kill these human beings, and to legally protect and publicly promote those choices.

In the case of abortion, some individuals deliberately choose to bring about the death of a human being within the womb. Medical personnel who perform abortions exhibit a readiness to act or refrain from acting for the purpose of destroying a human person, while many others ensure that these actions can be executed with impunity. The result of such “systematically programmed threats,” is a broad and sinister “conspiracy against life” (EV 17). That conspiracy is grounded in an immoral impulse, fundamental to the abortion culture, to endow certain individuals with “absolute power over others and against others” (EV 20). Unfortunately, some persons become the absolute possession of other persons. Those who share in this perversity, including politicians who craft and ratify liberal, taxpayer funded abortion laws, must bear a measure of culpability for its disastrous consequences.

This systematic willingness to choose and intend the death of powerless victims that constitutes the culture of death makes the pro-life question unique among the full spectrum of ethical issues. Some individuals may have deficient ecological values or endorse an illiberal immigration policy, but they neither support the intentional termination of human life nor promote a bleak subculture that does so. They do not condone or rationalize these direct acts of violence against another human being. Contrary to the consistent ethic of life philosophy, it is perfectly valid to elevate the anti-abortion issue and give it the pre-eminence it deserves, because the intrinsic good of human life is directly and immediately at stake.

Defenders of the stance promoted by Harris-Walz are often unwilling to acknowledge that the lives being terminated are those of human persons. They also hasten to point out that very few abortions occur in the late stages of pregnancy. In her debate with President Trump, Harris herself disingenuously declared, “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion—that is not happening.” However, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that .9% of abortions occur after 21 weeks (the threshold for a premature infant’s survival outside the womb with medical care). And since there were 1,037,000 abortions last year in the United States, the .9% rate translates into over 9,300 abortions after the fetus is viable.

Even those who erroneously contend that the fetus is not a human being in the early stages of development (despite its unique human genome and active potency to know the truth and to make free choices) must acknowledge that every year thousands of babies are intentionally executed in this gruesome procedure.

There are multiple factors contributing to this burgeoning abortion sub-culture, this callous indifference to human life. But, according to John Paul II, at the heart of this tragedy is “the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism” (EV 21). In an aggressive secular society, many of those who profess belief in God are practical atheists because they live “as if God did not exist” (EV 22).

The loss of any intimation of the provident Creator’s wise design leads countless people to conclude that the life of a child in the womb is expendable. John Paul II explained that when we lose sight of the mystery of God, we also lose sight of the mystery of our own being and forget that life is a gift of the Creator who infuses the spiritual soul at the moment of conception. Along with this negation of transcendence, the secular mentality disdains “repressive” Christian morality and its ascetic character. On the contrary, practical atheism “breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism” (EV 23).

Hence, moral reasoning is based on pragmatic utility rather than respect for natural laws anchored in the foundation of our immutable human nature. The sanctity of human life is no longer an absolute moral value, since people assume for themselves the creative power to construct and affirm their own values. They create their own “moral truths” which were once attributed to God, and deny God His dominion over life.

An explicit attack on the right to life represents a direct and ominous threat to the entire spectrum of human rights. This is the moral vision of Evangelium Vitae, an encyclical that brightly illuminates the way out of the deep recesses of the abortion culture and its desolate nihilism.