The essay addresses several questions on how Church teaching can “provide a deeper, positive vision of the human person and of the natural right to life” and how Catholics can demonstrate that this right “relates in turn to other goods that society values and must protect” and what obligations “pro-life advocates [must] accept for the defense of human life across its various dimensions.”
According to the authors, society’s “failure to affirm the dignity of human life at all stages” and the “systematic refusal to consider unborn human life with sufficient honesty” has led to “a corrupting influence even on the most tangential of goods.”
The authors state that respect for human life is the “necessary foundation” for broader rights, such as “autonomous freedom, education, and health care, the care for the poor, and the cultivation of learning and of the arts.”
The “systematic refusal to consider unborn human life with sufficient honesty,” they write, “has in turn affected academic freedom, artistic realism, religious consensus, and our prospects for political peace in numerous adverse ways.”
“A human society can only create an adequately just social order and inclusive common good if it first recognizes the intrinsic natural dignity of every human person,” the essay says.
“This dignity is given by God and by our created nature; it is not conferred by social convention or the mere legal apparatus of the state. For these and other reasons, the Catholic Church is committed to the civic legal protection of innocent human life from conception to natural death as an exceptionless norm.”