By Larry Craig

Two days, two entirely unrelated stories in the paper, but then maybe they are related.

Recently, the Chicago mayor was talking about the need to give children love and support from the earliest ages to keep them from going into a life of violence and crime.

Now the Illinois attorney general tells us that we must be vigilant to protect our right to kill our children before they are born.

He didn’t word it like that. But then words are important to shape the way we think about things or to frame an argument.

Reproductive choice is just that: the right to kill our children before they are born, and having that as an accepted norm in society.

This raises two immediate questions: What exactly are we killing? And does the worth of this thing we are killing depend on what others decide it should have?

For all the history of Western Civilization, except for the last several generations, we have always recognized human beings, even before they were born, as beings made in the image of God and by God.

Human life is valuable, even apart from any value that we might give to it. Having children was always considered a privilege, an honor, and a duty. Yes, an enormous task, but one in which every human being was expected to participate.

We treat our children as disposable. Their birth is not important in itself, only if we want it to be. And I think that whole thinking permeates throughout our society. Maybe not overtly, but it’s there.

We don’t speak of the image of God anymore, because that is religious. But what does that leave us?

We are just animals. Children are like pets. As long as we feed them and clothe them, anybody can take care of them while we live our lives.

Going back to the problem of violence. When people commit violence against other people, it’s because they have no value of the importance of that other human being.

I submit there is a direct correlation. People can commit violent acts for many reasons, but at bottom there is just no respect for life.

To value abortion as a right cheapens life. Children don’t have a right to life. Life is then not an inherent right; it’s not even a right at all. We shouldn’t really be surprised when people take the lives of other people intentionally. Life isn’t sacred anymore.