‘It’s my own body’

By: Fr. Roy Cimagala

I JUST find it extremely unbelievable that some women, in justifying their so-called right to abort their babies, would say, “It’s my own body,” as if to say it’s none of your business to meddle in their choices. So, back off!

I don’t know exactly what kind of reasoning that is, what the basis is. We all know that every one of us has a body and that we can use it in any way we want, but obviously under certain conditions and with laws and standards to be observed.

There are things that we can do with our body that is legitimate and moral, but there also are things that we should not do with it, because they are illegitimate and immoral. To mutilate it without good reason, to expose it indiscriminately to all kinds of danger, for example, definitely are things that we should try to avoid.

Obviously, when a woman is pregnant, she should take great care that her pregnancy is not put in danger in any way. What she has in her body, in her womb, is not just food that she has to expel at a certain point. It’s a fetus, a baby in the making, a human person. It’s not just a pile of cells that one may remove if she wants.

Sad to say, many pro-abortion women try to redefine what a fetus is. They say it’s not a human person, because it is not yet out of the womb. It’s still part of their body, as if trying to say that the fetus can be considered an unwelcome growth in their body, a tumor that can and should be removed.

Nowadays, there are already some of them, now backed by politicians, who say that they also have a right not only to abort a baby while inside the womb, but also to practically kill the baby just out of the womb. This is a really demonic reasoning.

Some of them rationalize their position by saying that it is better to abort a baby than to add more problems in our society by letting the baby be born. Again, this is difficult to see where this kind of reasoning is coming from.

I know of great persons whose mothers were asked to consider aborting them when they were still inside their mother’s womb for one reason or another. But their mothers refused. And, thank God, they are a great blessing to all of us. The singer, Andrea Bocelli, is one of them.

Of course, it goes without saying that everyone also gives problems to us, something that we should not be surprised about, since this has always been the case even during the time of Adam and Eve.But we can also find solutions other than killing them.

If we allow killing babies not only inside the womb but also already outside of it, what would prevent us from killing other people considered to be problems for us, like the old people, those with disabilities, and others whom we may consider as useless? Abortion is like positioning ourselves on a slippery slope to worse things.

I believe the main problem here is that people are losing the sense of sin because they are alienating themselves from God. They are making themselves their own God, the ultimate author of what is right and wrong.

This is what St. Pope John Paul II once said about this sad phenomenon: “The current tragic situation…is largely due to the loss of the sense of sin…Consciences must recover the sense of God, his mercy, of the gratuitousness of his gifts to be able to recognize the gravity of sin which sets man against his Creator.

“Personal freedom should be recognized and defended as a precious gift of God, resisting the tendency to lose it in the structures of social conditioning or to remove it from its inalienable reference to the Creator.”

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com