Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. "Those Unwanted Elements In The Human Race"

“It is not only that in generalized opinion these attacks tend no longer to be considered as “crimes”, paradoxically they assume the nature of “rights”, to the point that the State is called upon to give them legal recognition and to make them available through the free services of health care personnel. Such attacks strike human life at the time of its greatest frailty, when it lacks any means of self-defence. Even more serious is the fact that, most often, those attacks are carried out in the very heart of and with the complicity of the family—the family which by its nature is called to be the ‘sanctuary of life’” (no. 11). — John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, March 25, 1995. When one re-reads Blessed Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on life, he needs to keep these statistics in mind:

Since 1980, some 1,295,830,000 abortions were performed throughout the world. That is about one-seventh of the present world population. In this context, the famous phrase, “I feel lucky just to be alive!” takes on new meaning. The number of abortions per year in the world is between forty and fifty million. That is, in six or seven years, we kill roughly the population of the United States. Since Roe v. Wade (1973), some 56 million abortions took place in America. 

Two sorts of reaction to such numbers occur. One is of horror and sadness that the human race, with so little stir, could allow and even approve this holocaust. The other is that this massive killing is what human beings “do,” so it must be all right, a part of their nature throughout the world. We have too many human beings for the planet to support anyhow. The sooner we rid ourselves of any notion that we cannot eliminate those unwanted elements in the human race politically judged to be unwanted or unnecessary the better.

Link (here) to the full article by  Fr. James V. Schall, S.J, entitled, On the Dignity of Human Life