‘It’s my own body’

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

I JUST find it extremely unbelievable that some women, in justifying their so-called right to abort their babies, would say,

“It’s my own body,” as if to say it’s none of your business to meddle in their choices. So, back off!

I don’t know exactly what kind of reasoning that is, what the basis is. We all know that everyone of us has a body and that we can use it in any way we want, but obviously under certain conditions and with laws and standards to be observed.

There are things that we can do with our body that are legitimate and moral, but there also are things that we should not do with it, because they are illegitimate and immoral. To mutilate it without good reason, to expose it indiscriminately to all kinds of danger, for example, definitely are things that we should try to avoid.

Obviously, when a woman is pregnant, she should take great care that her pregnancy is not put in danger in any way. What she has in her body, in her womb, is not just food that she has to expel at a certain point. It’s a fetus, a baby in the making, a human person. It’s not just a pile of cells that one may remove if she wants.

Sad to say, many pro-abortion women try to redefine what a fetus is. They say it’s not a human person, because it is not yet out of the womb. It’s still part of their body, as if trying to say that the fetus can be considered an unwelcome growth in their body, a tumor that can and should be removed.

Nowadays, there are already some of them, now backed by politicians, who say that they also have a right not only to abort a baby while inside the womb, but also to practically kill the baby just out of the womb. This is really a demonic reasoning.

Some of them rationalize their position by saying that it is better to abort a baby than to add more problems in our society by letting the baby to be born. Again, this is difficult to see where this kind of reasoning is coming from.

I know of great persons whose mothers were asked to consider aborting them when they were still inside their mother’s womb for one reason or another. But their mothers refused. And, thank God, they are a great blessing to all of us. The singer, Andrea Bocelli, is one of them.

Of course, it goes without saying that everyone also gives problems to us, something that we should not be surprised about, since this has always been the case even during the time of Adam and Eve.

But we can also find solutions other than killing them.

If we allow killing babies not only inside the womb but also already outside of it, what would prevent us from killing other people considered to be problems to us, like the old people, those with disabilities, and others whom we may consider as useless?

Abortion is like positioning ourselves in a slippery slope to worse things.

I believe the main problem here is that people are losing the sense of sin because they are alienating themselves from God. They are making themselves their own God, the ultimate author of what is right and wrong.

This is what St. Pope John Paul II once said about this sad phenomenon: “The current tragic situation… is largely due to the loss of the sense of sin… Consciences must recover the sense of God, his mercy, of the gratuitousness of his gifts to be able to recognize the gravity of sin which sets man against his Creator.

“Personal freedom should be recognized and defended as a precious gift of God, resisting the tendency to lose it in the structures of social conditioning or to remove it from its inalienable reference to the Creator.”

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Directing our consciousness. We have to give due attention—and care—to our sense of consciousness. We should not just allow it to flow in any way. We need to direct it, we need to shape it, we need to fill it with something that should be appropriate to us as persons and as children of God.

We cannot allow our consciousness to be empty and passive, simply waiting for things to happen. We cannot allow our consciousness to be simply at the mercy of our bodily and worldly conditions. It has to transcend this dimension of our life, using of course our spiritual faculties of intelligence and will, and always asking for the grace of God.

In fact, the ideal is that our consciousness should always be engaged and excited, animated and stimulated by something that sparks it into the dynamic of love.

We should not allow our consciousness to be bored or languishing in a state of ennui. As much as possible, it has to be active all the time. Resting, as when we go to sleep, or when we fall unconscious due to sickness, is not actually knocking off our consciousness.

It is bringing it to another state where the mind disengages itself for a while from the bodily mechanisms and the physical world, but still maintains its contact with its life source—our spiritual soul, which properly speaking should be animated by the spirit of God and not just any spirit.

As articulated by St. Augustine, our usual problem is that while God is always with us, we are not always with him, in the sense that we tend to ignore him. We can never be without God. Our life is not simply a product of all the biological, physical, social elements. It is first of all maintained and supported by God, its creator, and that is for always.

Let us remember that in our most ideal and ultimate state of life where we are supposed to be face to face with God, the only thing that will function in us will be our consciousness. Everything else will be kind of sublimated into it. Our bodily functions, while remaining physical and material, will be spiritualized.

This, of course, is difficult to imagine. That is why we have been warned that “eyes have not seen, nor ears heard, what God has prepared for those who love him,” referring precisely to how things will be in our ultimate state of life.

But we can get some idea of this spiritualized body when we consider the resurrected Christ, our way, truth and life, the pattern of our humanity and the savior of our damaged humanity. The resurrected Christ had a body as attested to by the testimony of St. Thomas the doubter. But in one of the appearances of Christ before his apostles, his body managed to enter the room even without opening the door.

We need to realize that the proper state of our consciousness is when it has God as its primary object of awareness.

Otherwise, it will be looking for something else, or failing in that, it will just be languishing and putting itself at the mercy of whatever would excite it, and these will just be worldly things.

Obviously, to be always ware of God in our consciousness would require the grace of faith that is actually given to us in abundance. We just have to correspond to that grace by making many acts of faith, hope and charity. These little ejaculatory prayers are like little pieces of fuel that will keep our presence of God from dying. They in fact help in making for a big bonfire of presence of God all throughout the day.

It’s about time that we examine more deeply how our sense of consciousness is and do something about it to conform it to its proper state.

E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com