Category: Ministry

Recovering the Inherent Value of Human Life in a Postmodern World

In today’s public discourse, equality is frequently affirmed as a moral ideal. Yet how that ideal is applied can vary widely. From questions surrounding life’s beginning and end to debates about identity and medicine, deep tensions have emerged in our cultural understanding of what it means to be human. This essay offers a gentle but clear reflection: Can we still affirm equal dignity for all persons—consistently, coherently, and compassionately? Drawing from science, reason, and widely shared ethical principles, this is not an argument of ideology but of conscience.

Introduction

Modern societies often expect public moral debates to proceed without reference to religious belief. This approach, commonly described as pluralistic or secular, is intended to create fairness in diverse cultures. Yet even on this shared ground, we face unavoidable questions: Why should any human life be protected? What does it mean to be a person? What makes some actions right and others harmful?

Beginning from reason and shared civic assumptions, one finds that the case for the inherent value of every human life is not only defensible—it is profoundly humane. This essay traces that case from life’s earliest beginnings through questions of dignity, autonomy, and identity.

Human Life Begins at Conception

Biological science consistently teaches that human life begins at conception. At the moment of fertilisation, a distinct organism comes into being with its own genetic identity, oriented toward development as a human being. A 2018 study surveying over 5,000 biologists—representing a range of worldviews—found overwhelming agreement with this conclusion¹. Even prominent atheist thinker Richard Dawkins has acknowledged this biological fact².

The moral debate, then, is not over when life begins, but when it should be protected. Some argue that viability, consciousness, or independence should determine moral status. Yet these criteria are variable and fragile. They might exclude newborns, those with dementia, or the comatose. A consistent and inclusive ethic begins by recognising that if someone is human, their life merits protection—not because of what they can do, but because of who they are.

Dignity Is Not Earned—It Is Inherent

The cornerstone of modern human rights is the affirmation that every person possesses inherent dignity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with this premise: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”³. International covenants uphold rights as flowing from this dignity, not granted by governments or earned by abilities⁴.

This vision implies that human worth is not contingent on usefulness, awareness, or status. As ethicist John Tasioulas explains, dignity is not a reward for virtue or competence, but a condition of simply being human⁵.

This matters greatly. When we begin to ration dignity based on characteristics or capacities, we create hierarchies of humanity. History shows where that path leads. To protect the vulnerable, society must begin with the presumption that every human life—regardless of condition or circumstance—has equal moral worth.

Abortion Is Not Healthcare, Nor Is It a Reproductive Right

Public discussions often frame abortion as “healthcare” or a “reproductive right.” These labels, however, obscure more than they clarify.

Healthcare exists to heal disease and preserve life. But pregnancy is not a disease, and a fetus is not a tumour. Abortion ends a biologically healthy process and terminates a distinct human life⁶. It is not morally or medically neutral. For many women, abortion is followed by grief, regret, or emotional trauma. Research shows increased risks of depression, anxiety, and even suicidality following abortion⁷.

The term “reproductive right” also misleads. Reproduction has already occurred by the time a woman is pregnant. What’s at issue is not fertility control, but ending an already-conceived life. This distinction is crucial for ethical clarity.

A more compassionate framework would provide women with real alternatives—financial support, emotional care, and community resources—so that no woman feels she must choose between her child and her future.

The Body and the Question of Identity

Another cultural trend is the detachment of personal identity from the body. In abortion, the fetus’s body is treated as irrelevant. In gender ideology, one’s own body may be seen as an obstacle to identity. In both cases, biology is made secondary to subjective feeling.

This produces contradictions. A fetus may be regarded as a baby if wanted, or as medical waste if not. A minor too young to consent to a tattoo may be permitted to undergo irreversible procedures to alter sex characteristics. These are not edge cases—they are increasingly embedded in policy and practice¹³.

A more coherent anthropology sees the human person as a unity of body and soul, or body and mind. Our bodies are not accidents to be overcome; they are part of who we are. Respecting the person means respecting the whole person—body included.

The Tyranny of Choice

Modern moral discourse often treats autonomy as the supreme good. But freedom requires more than choice—it requires truth. A good choice presupposes some objective difference between good and evil, helpful and harmful.

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, once said, “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother”⁹. But this formulation elevates choice above the thing chosen. It risks overlooking the rights of those who cannot choose—the unborn, the elderly, the dependent.

This also applies to assisted suicide. Proponents argue that ending one’s life is a matter of personal autonomy. But research from jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal shows many people are motivated not by physical pain, but by fear of being a burden or by loneliness¹¹. Lord Sumption, speaking from the UK Supreme Court, warned that legalising assisted suicide may impose social pressure on the vulnerable to “do the decent thing” and opt for death¹².

True autonomy includes the freedom to live without coercion—whether economic, social, or medical. Compassion means accompanying those who suffer, not eliminating them.

A Question of Coherence

What binds all these trends together is a growing incoherence in how society defines and defends human life. A fetus lacks rights because it cannot speak for itself; an elderly person seeks assisted death for the same reason. A child is deemed too young to drink, vote, or marry, yet considered old enough to redefine their biological sex.

Such contradictions suggest that our ethical frameworks are being shaped more by ideology than by principle. If rights are grounded in feelings, utility, or social acceptance, then they can be withdrawn just as easily. Human dignity becomes conditional, not universal.

To remain just and humane, society must rediscover a consistent principle of equal worth—one that applies regardless of age, ability, desire, or circumstance.

Conclusion: A Shared Foundation for Human Worth

This essay has appealed not to religious doctrine but to reason, science, and conscience. It has sought to show that the inherent value of every human life is not a sectarian belief, but a foundation of civil society.

We may differ on many matters, but we can agree on this: every human being matters. Equality means more than fairness—it means recognising the profound worth of every person, especially those with the least power or visibility.

To recover that truth is not to impose faith, but to restore humanity. And in doing so, we reclaim the forgotten premise of equality—the only one on which a just and compassionate future can be built.

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Footnotes
¹ Jacobs, S. (2018). Contemporary Biological Views on When Life Begins. University of Chicago Survey.
² Richard Dawkins, interview with Brendan O’Connor, RTÉ Radio 1, March 2012.
³ United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1.
⁴ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Preamble.
⁵ Tasioulas, J. (2013). “Human Dignity and the Foundations of Human Rights.” In Understanding Human Dignity, British Academy.
⁶ American College of Pediatricians. (2017). “When Human Life Begins.”
⁷ Reardon, D.C. (2002). “The Aftermath of Abortion: A Review of Psychological Effects.” The Linacre Quarterly, 69(1), 29–41.
⁸ Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.
⁹ Sanger, M. (1920). Woman and the New Race. Brentano’s.
¹⁰ Anderson, R. T. (2015). Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. Regnery Publishing.
¹¹ Oregon Health Authority. (2023). Death with Dignity Act Annual Reports.
¹² Sumption, J. (2014). UK Supreme Court Judgment in R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice.
¹³ See e.g. California Penal Code §187(a); contrast with permissive state abortion laws.

Originally published on Selsey Substack

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“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3)

This week, the United Kingdom has crossed a dreadful moral threshold. In the span of just a few days, Parliament has voted first to decriminalise abortion—effectively permitting self-managed termination of life in the womb up to birth—and then to legalise so-called “assisted dying,” a misleading phrase for what is in truth state-sanctioned suicide. Two votes. One message: life is no longer sacred.

When legislators permit the destruction of the most vulnerable—the unborn child, the despairing sick, the elderly whose existence has become burdensome—they do not merely alter policy. They strike at the heart of justice itself. The right to life is not one among many rights—it is the ground upon which all others stand. Without it, the edifice of rights becomes a hollow facade, masking cruelty with euphemism.

The Illusion of Compassion

It is claimed, in both cases, that these measures represent progress—greater autonomy for women, greater dignity for the dying. But autonomy cannot mean the right to destroy another, nor can dignity be made dependent upon the absence of suffering. To offer death as a solution to distress is not compassion; it is surrender. It betrays a society that has forgotten how to suffer with, how to love, and how to protect.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that human law derives its legitimacy from the natural law, which is itself a participation in the eternal law of God.¹ When a human law contradicts the natural law—when it permits murder under the guise of mercy—it is no true law, but rather an act of violence cloaked in legality.

And as Pope Pius XII solemnly declared:

“The life of one who is innocent is untouchable, and any direct attempt… to kill… is a violation of one of the fundamental laws without which secure human society is impossible.”²

The votes cast in Westminster this week were not victories for justice, but capitulations to despair.Subscribed

Death by Emotionalism

The culture of death in Britain was not ushered in by force of logic, constitutional principle, or sober legal debate. It was won—decisively—through emotional manipulation. The parliamentary votes that removed legal protection from the unborn and invited suicide into the framework of care were secured not by reasoned argument but by the power of sentiment, tears, and selective storytelling.

In place of philosophy, we were given pathos. In place of principle, personalities. Members of Parliament stood not to defend justice, but to emote. And those who dared to speak of moral absolutes or natural law were treated not as defenders of tradition, but as heartless ideologues resisting “progress.”

This is not lawmaking. It is theatre.

One need not deny the suffering of individuals to see the danger in allowing public policy to be dictated by feeling. Compassion is not the enemy of justice—but sentimentality often is. For sentimentality demands outcomes that feel good rather than ones that are good, and it sacrifices the unseen, the unborn, and the inconvenient at the altar of emotional relief. In the absence of objective moral standards, emotion becomes tyrant.

The great irony is that modern man, having prided himself on “rationalism,” now makes law by anecdote and weeps his way into barbarism. As Pope Pius XII warned:

“It is not emotion or feeling that guides to the truth, but reason enlightened by faith.”³

And yet, it was the secular philosophers themselves who paved the way. David Hume famously wrote:

“Morality is determined by sentiment… Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular.”⁴

A culture that accepts such a premise will eventually legislate on the basis of tears, not truth.

The sanctity of life is not subject to public sentiment. The right to live is not decided by polls, headlines, or individual hardship. Yet this week, Britain proved that enough tears in a Westminster chamber can wash away centuries of moral consensus and jurisprudential restraint.

Death is now defended not by argument but by appeal to emotion. And so, once again, as in the twilight of Rome and the decadence of every fallen age, man exchanges the truth of God for the lie of his own feelings (cf. Rom. 1:25).

Our Failure to Embrace Suffering

At the heart of both these votes—abortion and assisted suicide—lies a deeper spiritual crisis: our culture’s utter inability to make sense of suffering. In casting off the Cross, we have lost not only our theology of sacrifice but also our capacity for endurance, for compassion rightly ordered, and for hope that transcends pain.

We do not suffer well because we do not know why we suffer.

Modern man, having severed suffering from redemption, now seeks only to eliminate it—no matter the cost. But where suffering cannot be eliminated, the sufferer is. What cannot be fixed is discarded. What cannot be explained is hidden. And so the unwanted child and the despairing patient are treated not as persons to be loved, but as problems to be solved—by termination.

This is not love. It is spiritual cowardice.

Our ancestors knew suffering as a school of virtue, a mystery to be united to the Cross, and a means of purifying the soul. The saints called it a blessing. The martyrs bore it as witness. Christ Himself sanctified it, not by erasing it, but by embracing it. “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:8).

But in a society that worships control, comfort, and autonomy, suffering is seen only as an indignity—a failure of systems, a defect of life. And so we flee from it. We medicate it, mask it, and ultimately legislate it out of existence. What remains is a culture too fragile to face sorrow and too sterile to bring forth joy.

Until we recover the truth that suffering can be redemptive, we will continue to kill those whom suffering touches most. A nation that cannot suffer cannot love.

What Remains of Human Rights?

The very notion of universal human rights is grounded in the premise that life has intrinsic value—value not conferred by health, autonomy, or utility, but by the simple fact of our shared humanity. When society begins to assign worth based on perceived quality of life, it begins to dismantle the foundation of justice itself.

The early Fathers knew this. St. Gregory of Nyssa insisted that “the murder of a man is the greatest of crimes, for he bears in himself the image of God.”⁵ Tertullian, facing a pagan culture that practiced infanticide and abortion, declared: “He who will one day be a man is already one.”⁶

Our modern culture has reversed this. Those most obviously human—the child whose heartbeat can be heard, the patient whose voice has grown weak—are redefined as burdens, liabilities, problems to be managed. Their deaths are facilitated not in secrecy, but under the protection of law.

The Apathy of Apostasy

There is a silence more dangerous than outright heresy—a silence that clothes itself in reasonableness, civility, and theological ambiguity. It is the silence of apostasy, not declared but lived: the practical abandonment of the Gospel in order to preserve comfort, reputation, or relevance. This is the silence that now dominates much of Christianity in Britain.

While Parliament was debating whether to permit the killing of the unborn up to the point of birth, and the deliberate facilitation of suicide in the name of compassion, where were the voices of Christian leaders? Where was the Church’s sacred duty to “preach the word… in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2)? A handful spoke, and fewer still protested. Most remained hidden—paralysed by past failures, afraid of media backlash, or cowed by secular expectations of religious “neutrality.” This is not humility. It is abdication.

Secularisation has not simply removed the Church from public favour; it has exposed the frailty of our witness. The rise of a cold and calculating rationalism has persuaded many Christians that moral conviction must be shelved in favour of dialogical tone, or that faith is a private matter unsuited to the public square. But the apostles did not die to preserve pluralism. They preached a Gospel that was offensive, demanding, and utterly incompatible with the paganism of their day.

And now, as our nation slides deeper into a culture of sanctioned death, many who bear the name of Christ do so without the Cross. They want credibility without martyrdom, influence without confrontation. But the blood of the martyrs was not spilled so that bishops might take refuge in parliamentary neutrality, nor so that clergy might shrink from the controversy of truth.

The great failure of contemporary Christianity in the United Kingdom is not a lack of access to media, nor a shortage of theological resources. It is a failure of nerve. The fear of controversy has eclipsed the fear of God. And so we are left with polite press releases, sterile ecumenical handwringing, and a witness that says nothing precisely when it must cry out.

This is not the apostolic Church. It is the lukewarm Church which our Lord warns He will “vomit out” (Apoc. 3:16).

Now is the time for repentance—for a return to the boldness of the martyrs, the fidelity of the confessors, and the uncompromising proclamation of Christ’s Lordship over life and death. For if we will not defend the innocent, then we are no longer worthy to bear His Name.Subscribed

The Failure of the Secular Experiment

But as much as this moment reveals the failure of the Church to bear prophetic witness, it is just as damning a verdict on the secular experiment itself. For decades, the architects of modern Britain have promised that a society freed from religion would become more enlightened, more humane, and more just. What we see instead is a civilisation that has grown cold, frightened, and profoundly discompassionate.

The self-proclaimed humanists, atheists, and rationalists who led the charge for a post-Christian public square have not replaced the Gospel with moral clarity or courage. On the contrary, they have presided over a descent into utilitarianism, euphemism, and legalised abandonment. They have reduced compassion to consent, and justice to bureaucratic compliance.

It is no coincidence that in a culture which no longer fears God, death is increasingly offered as a solution. For when man exiles his Creator, he inevitably redefines himself—not as a being made for eternity, but as a biological organism to be optimised, managed, or extinguished. As Dostoevsky warned: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” But what secularists rarely consider is that when everything is permitted, compassion is no longer required.

Atheism promised emancipation; it has delivered moral paralysis. Secular humanism claimed to cherish dignity; it now permits the killing of the voiceless and the despairing. In the absence of God, man has become not sovereign but expendable. And those who once claimed the moral high ground now cower behind procedural justifications and speak in the sterile idiom of “personal choice.”

There is no moral courage in this. No prophetic vision. No love. Only silence, legality, and the efficient management of despair.

We were told that man could be good without God. But now, with God formally excluded from our laws and institutions, we are left with a society that has no coherent answer to evil, no consolation in suffering, and no defence of the innocent.

What Can the Righteous Do?

The Psalmist cries out: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3). It is a cry many faithful hearts now echo. But the answer is not despair. The Church must speak even more clearly, live even more sacrificially, and love even more fiercely. For in the words of St. John Chrysostom: “The greater the darkness, the more the light is seen.”⁷

We must become the sanctuary our society no longer offers. If Parliament will no longer defend life, then families, parishes, and faithful communities must become places where every life—weak or strong, born or unborn, joyful or suffering—is received as a gift from God.

To those now tempted to despair, I say this: do not give up. Do not retreat into bitterness or silence. Let this moment sharpen our vision and renew our mission. For we are not called to be conformed to this world, but to bear witness to a Kingdom in which death is defeated and life is sacred.

In this dark hour, we are called not to abandon the battlefield, but to remain—faithful, prayerful, unyielding. For the Judge of all the earth shall do right (Gen. 18:25), and the blood of the innocent cries out still.

And it is time—long past time—for orthodox Christians, like other religionists, to speak boldly once more into the public discourse. We are not second-class citizens. We enjoy the same civil rights and legal protections afforded to every protected characteristic: the right to speak, to believe, to worship, to live and share our culture without coercion or silence. The Christian vision of life does not demand the destruction of others—it seeks the common good and the supreme good of all.

Footnotes

¹ Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 93–95.
² Pius XII, Address to Italian Catholic Doctors, AAS 32 (1940), pp. 465–468.
³ Pius XII, Address to the International Congress on Psychotherapy, 13 April 1953.
⁴ David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751, Section I.
⁵ Gregory of Nyssa, De Hominis Opificio, ch. 5.
⁶ Tertullian, Apologeticus, ch. 9.
⁷ John Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Homily 23.

Originally published on Selsey Substack

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