ROME — Pope Francis says in a new book that anyone who truly cares about the environment will necessarily be opposed to abortion.
“If you think abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty are acceptable, your heart will find it hard to care about the contamination of rivers and the destruction of the rainforest,” the pope states in his new book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. “And the reverse is also true.”
“So even while people will argue strenuously that these issues are different in moral terms,” he continues, “as long as they insist that abortion is justified but not desertification, or that euthanasia is wrong but polluted rivers are the price to pay for economic progress, we will remain stuck in the same lack of integrity that put us where we are now.”
The pope was arguing for “an ecological conversion” capable of saving humanity “not only from destroying nature but from destroying itself.”
“Integral ecology,” the pontiff insists, is “an ecology that is about much more than caring for nature.” It is also “about caring for each other as fellow creatures of a loving God, and all that this implies.”
“While many will be irritated to hear a pope return to the topic, I cannot stay silent over 30 to 40 million unborn lives cast aside every year through abortion,” Francis writes. “It is painful to behold how in many regions that see themselves as developed the practice is often urged because the children to come are disabled, or unplanned.”
“Human life is never a burden. It demands we make space for it, not cast it off,” he continues.
“Abortion is a grave injustice. It can never be a legitimate expression of autonomy and power,” he writes. “If our autonomy demands the death of another, it is none other than an iron cage.”
“I often ask myself these two questions: Is it right to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it right to hire an assassin to resolve a problem?” he adds.
Pope Francis has often registered his firm condemnation of abortion as a grave injustice, calling it a “scourge” on society that follows the code of the “mafia.”
“The degree of progress of a civilization is measured by its ability to protect life, especially in its most fragile stages,” he has said.
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