I have always taken a fetal rights approach to the pro-life effort. I assert that every human life, including that of the unborn, is intrinsically good.
But the contraceptive mentality takes the opposite view: that new life is a bad thing; a disease to be protected against.
And when that preventative measure fails, that "evil" must be eliminated.
This article explains it.
There is only one way to reduce abortion, and that is to reduce its cause, which is in the contraceptive mentality. And the contraceptive mentality can be reduced only by recognizing that procreation is good and by repudiating the attitude that endorses the violent negation of that good. It is surely illogical and unrealistic to try to establish a truly humane civilization where every human being has a right to live by beginning with the idea of reducing abortion, and remaining unconvinced that the natural and procreative consequence of sexual intercourse is a real good. We cannot restore the moral health of civilization merely by eliminating something that is bad; we can restore it only by loving and embracing what is fundamentally good. We begin to build a humane civilization not backwards from the charred remains of a burned-out civilization, but forwards from the realization that new life is a great good. The Russian existentialist philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev is right when he says, "If there were no child-bearing, sexual union would degenerate into debauchery."25 It is precisely the possibility of invoking new human life that raises sexual intercourse to a suprapersonal, transcendent level and gives to the married couple a focus for their commitment that is truly theirs and not something that belongs exclusively to one or the other.
Let us express it in another way. It is far more logical and realistic to revolutionize society by teaching men to be virtuous, since virtue is a perfection of something natural, than it is to effect the same revolution by being indifferent to virtue and trying to suppress the evil consequences of men's vices through technological interventions. This is not to say that virtue or civilized society come easily; in fact, their achievement demands the development and pooling of every gift men have (and then some). But it is to say that it is the only way that is logical and realistic. It was the essential insight of Huxley, Orwell, and others that the amoral technological approach produces a dehumanized social nightmare.
