The question is presumably in response to a couple of quotes from Msgr Phillip Reilly which I posted there earlier today. This was the question (my response follows.)
just-slightly-insane asked you:Abortion has existed for thousands of years (in ancient times, women used to ingest large quantities of certain herbs, which would induce a miscarriage), yet it has never led to any sort of a "culture of death." So what makes you think that's a possibility at all?
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The wilful death of an innocent person is not only a cause of the Culture of Death, but a fruit of that Culture. Murder, War, Prostitution and Slavery have also all existed for thousands of years and are all both fruits and causes of the Culture of Death.
The difference between then and now - though admittedly, where the change occured is a blurred period of decades or centuries - is that, save at the end of various civilisations, it has never been thought a decent, humane, fair or reasonable thing to intentionally destroy the life of another huaman being. This is particulalry so if that person had done no wrong to another.
A culture which accepts an inherrent moral evil as its norm is already one of Death, rather than Life. A culture which accepts multiple inherrently moral evils is one that has been totally swept up in a Culture of Death.
It is important to note that the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death have been competing world-views since the first decision mankind* ever made. That is to say, when we chose to disobey the Natural Law - the Law that is "written in the heart of every man and woman" (Evangelium Vitae, n 29) - we turned away from our natural end and became teleologically disordered.
In not being ordered toward our natural end or goal, we necessarily became ordered towards a certain [type of] death.
In short, it is not abortion as such that has lead to the Culture of Death that we are currently deeply immersed in. However, abortion, the killing of a unborn - and therefore totally innocent - human being for the well-being and/or comfort of another, is "the final nail in the coffin of the Culture of Life, so to speak," as Msgr Reilly once said to me.
As Mother Teresa said at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast in the USA, "[T]he greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.
And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"
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*mankind, still not a misogynistic was of saying 'humanity.'
