For about the last ten years our parish has displayed pro-life crosses during Respect Life month. Almost 4000 white crosses are neatly laid across the lawn to symbolize the unborn children killed each daily by abortion. Signs on the lawn display messages that help witness to the tragedy and call society to a better way. Thousands of people see the display daily; confessions, even a conversion, have been attributed to it. Unquestionably, it is a very impressive display.

But not all people like it, and they make their displeasure known. We’ve seen the one-finger salute, and it was not an index finger pointed Heaven-ward. A lady yelled that we should care for foster kids. She didn’t wait for a response, but two couples in our group have adopted five children. It’s pretty much the same stuff year after year.

But a comment this year really intrigued me. A driver yelled, “Hey, the war is legal!” Maybe he thought that our display was a statement about Iraq. But it really doesn’t matter because he was right. The war is legal.

It’s the longest war in our history. It was declared by a Supreme Court decision—Roe v. Wade. For almost 35 years, we have waged war on our children. Our supposedly kid-friendly country has killed over 48.5 million children. They were to be our past, present, and future. Artists and plumbers and firefighters. Dead. Priests and sisters, bus drivers, and doctors. Dead. Musicians, nurses, teachers, bricklayers, and pilots. All dead. They had no defense. With abortion, they never do.

So what’s the reason for this war against our own kids? Some claim that it’s about “reproductive rights” or the “right to control our bodies.” But haven’t we always had the right to reproduce? Before legalized abortion, was any state trying to stop its citizens from reproducing? Isn’t a whole pre-Roe generation named after a population explosion—the baby boomers? Family sizes have greatly shrunk, not increased, since Roe. So “reproductive rights” is can’t be it.

And it can’t be as simple as the right to control our bodies. We submit to the control in many ways. We do not allow indiscriminate drug use. We don’t allow acts of prostitution. We require children to have vaccinations. We even require military service, sometimes to the last full measure. We’re not going to war over that “right.”

In the end, those who want this war say that it’s about “freedom of choice.” But they never allow themselves to utter the words we need to hear to understand the real point of this war. They want freedom, not to procreate a child, but to kill it. But in any ordered society, can the killing of a defenseless, innocent unborn ever be a freedom? We do not the “freedom” to violate other moral law. Thankfully, we do not have a freedom to lie or cheat or steal. Why in Heaven’s name would we want a freedom to kill?

We need to be careful about our definition of freedom because some will be called to die for it. In 1915, John McCrae published his haunting ode to friends fallen in World War I:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields.

In battlefields all over the world, our brave mean and women have died the defense of freedom. If those dead could talk, how many would say that they sacrificed everything others so that others may kill an unborn child?

If we are ever going to end this war, we need to be honest about what we are doing. And we need to understand that life is a gift of God, not something that we can claim as our own, and not something to be discarded for reasons of our own—however tragic they may be.

One of our lawn signs proclaims the words of Pope John Paul II: “A nation that kills its own children is a nation without a future.” It is not a catcall. It is a right-on prediction of things to come if we cannot figure out how to end this war.

We are killing our nation’s children.

We are killing our nation’s soul.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics. He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they raise their six kids.

© 2008 Paul V. Esposito. Culture of Life. Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is freely granted.