No one knows “the designs of God for life,” says Raymond Arroyo, and that includes women facing unplanned pregnancy.
“We should be very careful when we make these life and death decisions either at the start or the end of life,” the author and broadcaster told a pro-life audience in Vancouver.
Arroyo was guest speaker at the Life Canada annual dinner, where he shared stories of women who on the surface would have seemed ideal candidates for an abortion.
Facing serious abuse, illness, or poverty, the women chose life, delivering babies who went on to have a monumental impact on the world: entertainer Judy Garland, EWTN founder Mother Angelica, and Mattie Stepanek, a young poet, peace advocate, and motivational speaker who appeared frequently on Oprah before dying at the age of 13 and whose canonization cause has been opened.
“You don’t know what those (unborn) lives are meant to be,” Arroyo told the audience at Vancouver’s Pinacle Hotel. “You may be nurturing the next peacemaker, or poet, or the next spiritual leader, or the next singer who will bring us songs to uplift our spirits in dark, dark times.”
Those dark times include 21st-century Canada with its wide-open abortion policy.
“I have to say I was unaware until I started reading how very dark the cause of life is here in beautiful Canada,” Arroyo said, noting Canada “opened the floodgates” of abortion in North America in 1969, ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion.
After 50 years of abortion in Canada, he said, “astoundingly there are no restrictions; there are no laws limiting or regulating the practice.”
“There’s a spiritual and temporal price to pay for this maddening death all around us,” he said. “Our countries are hanging in the balance.”
Abortion has had a “devastating” impact on society. “Not only here … in the United States as well and all around the world, objective reality is slipping away,” as abortion defenders in the media have planted “ideas and ways of living that frankly were unfathomable just a few decades ago.”
As a writer, Arroyo said he is disturbed that language is manipulated and the truth of abortion hidden like “a contagion around the world in newsrooms” that use phrases like “termination rights” or “reproductive rights.”
Because abortion is treated like “clean, well-scrubbed homicide,” it has become “part of our DNA.”
By redefining abortion and using terms like “emergency contraception” to describe abortifacient drugs, overall abortion numbers appear to be falling, he said. “What they mean is an abortion cocktail, where you flush your offspring … out of sight, out of mind.”
When the in-vitro fertilization industry is included, with as many as a million embryonic lives frozen in time, it’s apparent Father Richard John Neuhaus was right in saying “abortion is the decline of human significance.”
“Abortion has downgraded and degraded all of us, no matter our age. Our value is dropping every day.”
Arroyo praised Life Canada as “a huge source of hope” at an “important moment for all of us … 50 years into this very dark moment.”
He praised the organization for “embracing the entire natural cycle of life and trying to preserve it at both ends, because the frail elderly and sick are also being targeted for early termination.”
“Thankfully, you and Life Canada are trying to restore sanity throughout this broken culture on the front lines. You are offering educational possibilities, you’re offering assistance to the frail elderly, to mothers in desperate need and their precious children honestly.”
“God does raise up the lowly and he does cast down the proud,” he said, then quoting Mother Angelica, whose biography he wrote: “‘God chooses little things to do big things,’ she used to say say, and Life Canada is one of those little things doing very big things.”
He said a similar message came from Blessed John Henry Newman, who will be canonized in Rome Oct. 13. “‘God has created me to do some definite service for him; he’s committed some work to me that he has not committed to another; I have my mission.’”
Arroyo closed with several reasons for hope, saying young people are increasingly embracing a culture of life, with majorities of baby boomers, millennials, and Generation Xers agreeing abortion is wrong.
“So many young people now understand the fallout of abortion because they’re the survivors.”
He cited Life Canada survey results showing only 16 per cent of Canadians support the current abortion lawlessness, and only eight per cent support late-term abortion. A Knights of Columbus poll found 65 per cent of Canadians, including those who identify as pro-choice, want to see abortion restrictions.
“There’s an opening there; there’s a softening there, an awareness that this is not like getting a tooth extracted.”
“It’s a dawning awareness.”
