Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. – John 15:13 NIV

The 1973 Supreme Court ruling for Roe v. Wade declared the abortion of a fetus legal across all 50 states in the U.S. But before the issue was brought to the Supreme Court, a few states had already legalized abortion. (See here).

What Roe v. Wade did was make abortion legal across the board, taking from states a decision that should be made at a local level. It was a great example of federal overextension into the everyday lives of citizens.

However, women would travel hundreds of miles to kill their fetus. Women wanted abortions for the same reason people want to take their own lives with permission from the government: autonomy.

So it’s no surprise that the battle for choice has come this far.

Abortion as a constitutional right was creeping into the minds of women — and men — across the country. It was the next step in promoting free sex. Free from natural consequences for men and women alike.

In the same way, the movement for physician-assisted suicide is being propagated as a choice of autonomy. The right to die is an evasion of natural consequences of being human.

What both movements fail to understand is that what they’re trying to avoid is an opportunity to love radically. Love in its truest sense of the word: sacrificing one’s self for the good of another.

Society encourages wounded women in crisis pregnancies to brush an abortion under the rug and run from the further trauma they’ve been pressured into. All this rather than running to that traumatized mother with arms wide open in support of her dignity and her pregnancy.

Similarly, the culture of death encourages physician-assisted suicide upon those who have, in their core, lost hope in true goodness. Take these pills, they say. No need to be a burden on your family. — Why isn’t their family supporting them through their darkest hours instead?

Because we’ve lost all sense of sacrifice. We are too comfortable with being comfortable. We cannot consider that maybe putting ourselves aside for the sake of being present in someone’s suffering can be good for them, and ultimately for us.

History’s greatest heroes, the world’s greatest saints, the person whom you’ll always remember as the one who loved you best. Their virtue was not autonomy for the sake of their own good, but the good of those around them.

If we tried a little harder to love a little better. What a different world this would be.