Why Focus on Life Issues?

When people wonder why pro-lifers seem so focused on the life issue, seemingly ignoring other issues, I think of the way I described it to a like-minded pro-lifer this past weekend.

Imagine seeing someone being threatened at gun-point, and also seeing two people who appear hungry and homeless who are at half the distance as the person with the gun.  I would hope people would try to do what is needed to prevent someone from being killed, and then go back to help the others.

Pro-lifers are the type of people who take action to protect the person whose life is directly threatened.  Some people might take direct action, while others might simply call the police.  But we take action one way or another.  We recognize the urgency and the need to stop people who have the intention of ending human lives.  But after addressing the most pressing needs, we can go back and help others with less pressing, but still important needs.  We also note the magnitude of abortion, which takes more lives each year than anything else in our nation.  Like any subset of society, we all have a variety of interests and concerns.  So we don't just care about one thing, and yet the other things we care about vary greatly.

If we wanted to attack the character of people accusing us of being so focused on this worthy cause, we could easily cause the conversation to erupt.  All we would have to do is escalate things by saying something about how they must not care if people die.  We know it does no good to attack the character of others, nor is it respectful.  Let's stick to the issue at hand and have more productive dialogue.

It's not all about the numbers, but numbers are staggering

Who would ever think society would slip so far as to require decades of arguing to convince people that killing innocent children is not a good thing?  Who would ever imagine people could spend their lives working jobs to counter the messages of an industry that's built upon spreading the culture of death?  We admire the people who make such a commitment.  We need to prioritize the pro-life issues, especially abortion.  As time passes, we have more threats to the dignity of human life.  Mother Teresa was right about the way a culture that accepts abortion will soon fail to protect life at other stages.