The Siege of Life: Legal Violence and Human Dignity
José Manuel Fernández Outeiral
Abortion and War: Two Faces of the Same Barbarism
The world has become accustomed to death. Wars no longer
shock us. Abortion has become a right. In both cases, life is sacrificed under
the weight of arguments that conceal something darker: indifference,
utilitarianism, and collective blindness.
We are told that abortion is a private matter, a woman’s
right. We are told that war is a geopolitical necessity. But what if both are
symptoms of the same moral collapse?
Abortion kills the weakest. War kills the youngest. Both are
orchestrated and legitimized by systems that exalt freedom while trampling on
the essence of life.
In 2023 alone, there were over 73 million abortions
worldwide — more than all the war deaths of the entire 20th century. And yet,
the majority of these were not due to rape, danger to the mother, or fetal
malformation. They were due to social, economic, or personal reasons. In other
words: convenience.
When society accepts that human life can be interrupted
before birth, it opens the door to other forms of extermination. It is not
surprising, then, that the same cultures that defend the right to abort also
support wars under the guise of humanitarianism or economic interest.
The issue is not legal or political. It is spiritual. The
soul of humanity is sick. It confuses progress with destruction. It calls
freedom what is in fact a brutal form of domination over the most fragile.
Abortion is not only a feminine issue. It is also a
masculine one. A man who abandons the woman he impregnated, who refuses to
assume his responsibility, is complicit in the death of that child. The
legalization of abortion has also legalized irresponsibility.
And when irresponsibility becomes law, life becomes
disposable. We see it in embryos and in bombed children. We see it in pregnant
women who are pressured to abort, not for freedom, but for fear and social
isolation. We see it in politicians who sign decrees with a pen dipped in
blood.
Where is human dignity? Where is the sacredness of life? Has
science, with all its data and algorithms, replaced the wisdom of the heart?
They say that to speak against abortion is to return to the
past. But perhaps the past — that past in which life was revered, children were
welcomed, and death was mourned — was more human than this sterile,
technological, and anesthetized present.
No war is justified if it annihilates the innocent. No
abortion is dignified if it suppresses a heartbeat. Every argument collapses
when faced with the silence of a truncated life.
This is not a matter of religion, but of truth. Not of
ideology, but of humanity. A civilization that devours its own offspring will
not survive long. The earth does not tolerate spilled blood forever. There are
invisible laws, deeper than human laws, that govern life and its destiny.
Let us not fool ourselves: the enemy is not in a distant
country or a backward belief. The enemy is within. It is the system that turns
murder into law. It is the society that has forgotten how to love.
To defend life is not fanaticism. It is the last act of
resistance in a world that slides, blind and smiling, toward its own abyss.
A civilization that denies the soul cannot truly defend life.
If you’ve read this far, you already feel it. The true war
is not outside. It is within each of us.
And the first victory is to say: enough.
This is the article published in Spanish:
When a society stops recognizing that life is sacred from its origin, it does not progress: it regresses in consciousness and evolution. Barbarism does not always act with bombs… sometimes it is practiced in silence, with white gloves and legal backing.
We live in an era where information flows constantly. Images of destruction in Gaza, the bombings, mutilated children, murdered men and women, cities reduced to rubble—these circulate with a force that shakes collective conscience. War, as a response to war, is presented to the world as a perpetuated horror. And rightly so, the media denounce it. They speak of pain, suffering, and barbarity. As a society, we call ourselves civilized and we also say: "This should not be happening."
But there is another silent war, spread across the planet, that receives no daily headlines or images of mangled bodies. It is a war waged inside clinics, operating rooms, and legal offices. A war not fought with helmets or machine guns, but with surgical gloves and laws that sanction death. That war is abortion.
The Philosophical View: Life as a Universal Value
From Plato and Aristotle to Confucius, Buddha, Spinoza, Kant, and Tolstoy, life has been regarded as the most fundamental good. For many of these sages, life is not a biological accident, but a sacred opportunity to develop virtue, attain truth, or realize the Self.
For Socrates, it was better to suffer injustice than to commit it. For Kant, no human being should be treated as a means, but always as an end. For the Stoics, every living being participates in the universal reason—logos. And for Eastern philosophers like Buddha and Lao Tzu, life is a precious manifestation of the cosmic principle that must be respected and protected.
When a civilization degrades human life to a matter of convenience, it breaks with that millennia-old tradition of wisdom. Far from being a form of liberation, abortion becomes an active denial of the most universal ethical principles.
The Religious View: All Life Is Sacred
The great religions of humanity—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—all affirm, from different angles, the sacredness of life.
From any serious religious perspective, abortion is not a morally neutral choice—it is the deliberate elimination of a life in formation.
How Many Die in Wars? How Many from Abortion?
The death toll from armed conflicts, while shocking, is far surpassed by the number of abortions performed each year worldwide. According to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 73 million abortions occur annually. That’s over 200,000 human lives eliminated every day.
To compare: the war in Syria has caused around 500,000 deaths since 2011. The conflict in Ukraine, tens of thousands. The war in Gaza since 2023 has resulted in over 30,000 deaths. And abortion? Over 70 million in 2023 alone.
If the death of innocent civilians in war is a moral and political scandal, why is the legalized death of millions of unborn human beings not seen the same way? What is the essential difference between a child killed in a bombed school and one eliminated in the womb?
Unequal Worlds: Abortion and Development
Another dimension rarely discussed is the inequality between countries in terms of access to contraception and sex education. In regions with extreme poverty, limited education, rigid patriarchal structures, and scarce medical resources, many women face unwanted pregnancies without the means to prevent them or support to deal with them.
But in developed countries—where all family planning methods, comprehensive sex education, social subsidies, and medical services are available—abortion cannot be justified as an inevitable result of hardship.
In those countries, abortion often becomes a tool of convenience, an easy way out, a choice backed by laws that dehumanize what happens in the womb.
A Silenced Reality: Abortion and Maternal Death
In many developing countries, abortion not only ends an unborn life but also endangers the mother's life. In fact, unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality. Women, often lacking access to contraception and education, face unwanted pregnancies in dire conditions.
But this should not serve as a justification to universally legalize the elimination of human life. On the contrary: these women should be the first to be protected and educated—not pushed toward procedures that also harm their physical and mental health.
When developed countries argue that banning abortion would result in more female deaths, they ignore a basic truth: pregnancy today is perfectly preventable with available methods. To deny that is to suggest that humans have no control over their actions—as if we were neither rational nor responsible—and that is unacceptable for a society that claims to be civilized.
Europe and Spain: Legality vs Humanity
Europe, so vocal about human rights and democratic values, has turned abortion into a near-sacred right. In countries like France, Belgium, or Spain, laws are enacted not only to permit abortion but to shield it from any objection. In Spain, since the 2010 reform and more recently with the 2023 law, abortion is allowed without justification up to 14 weeks of gestation, and in certain cases up to 22 weeks.
These laws enshrine the woman’s right to choose, as if—except in cases of abuse, coercion, or genuine ignorance—she bore no responsibility in preventing pregnancy. The legislation deliberately ignores the prior ethical dimension: to act responsibly before conceiving life, rather than granting an absolute right to end it afterward.
Abortion is protected as a civilized advancement, while its true nature—the interruption of a human life at its most vulnerable stage—is silenced. The discourse is reversed: what is tragedy is called a right; what is conscience is called oppression.
Let us not forget: the man is not exempt. The responsibility for conception is shared. But the woman bears the greatest ethical, emotional, and physical burden. Therefore, turning abortion into a "right" without demanding prior responsibility is a double injustice: toward the child… and toward the woman herself.
Moreover, man cannot behave like certain male animals that vanish after mating. A human being is not just a biological body; he is an incarnate soul, with consciousness, duty, and dignity. Man is not just male—he is father. And as such, he has a moral duty to sustain the life he helped create.
The Trivialization of Sex and the Degradation of Life
We live in a society that calls itself civilized but has turned sex into an absolute right, stripped of all spiritual, emotional, or transcendent meaning. In the name of freedom, purely instinctual, animalized sex is exalted—without responsibility or awareness.
And the result? When life naturally arises from that act, it is eliminated. The right to sex without consequences has been imposed—culturally and legally—over the right to life. As I have explained in my work on love and sexual energy, sex is far more than fleeting pleasure: it is a sacred force of creation, union, and surrender. Reducing it to entertainment or consumption empties not only the soul but also ethics.
A society that protects sex but discards life is profoundly confused about what “progress” means.
Owner of the Womb… or of the Other Being?
The phrase “my body, my choice” begins with a bodily truth but ignores a fundamental reality: within that womb lies another body, another human being with its own genetic code, its own heartbeat, its own interrupted future.
No one denies that a woman has rights over her body. But the embryo or fetus is not an organ, nor an extension of the uterus, nor a tumor to be removed. It is a distinct, vulnerable being—not chosen, but existing. Deciding over it is not an act of freedom, but the assumption of power to end the life of one who cannot defend itself.
It’s as if someone said: “This house is mine, so I have the right to decide whether the baby inside lives or dies.” Ownership of the space does not grant ownership over the life it shelters. Biology does not lie: pregnancy is not part of a woman’s body—it is the gestation of another person within her.
She did not choose him, but he chose her. And for those with a spiritual view, that is no coincidence—it is bond, destiny, a call to love.
A Culture That Trivializes Life
What both horrors share—war and abortion—is a common root: the denial of the value of human life. One through armed action, the other through clinical action. In both, life becomes something disposable, conditional, subject to decisions that do not belong to it.
From the Eastern spiritual perspective, especially in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, life does not begin with birth nor end with death: the soul (ātman) is eternal and seeks to reincarnate to evolve. In that context, parents are not creators of life but intermediaries: portals through which a soul longs to return to the material world to continue its journey.
Abortion, then, not only eliminates a biological life in formation—it interrupts the soul’s deep longing to incarnate. A destiny is frustrated, a spiritual possibility diverted. From that view, to abort is not merely to end a pregnancy but to close the door on a soul that has chosen to materialize in a new life with purpose.
We have learned to be outraged by bombs, but not by scalpels. We are shaken by the death of children in Gaza, but not by the death of millions of invisible children in the womb.
There is no true civilization unless human life is sacred from its beginning to its natural end.
Conclusion: Legalized Barbarism
If a society calls it progress to eliminate the weakest in the name of freedom, then it is not a civilized society. It is a technical, legalistic society that has replaced compassion with convenience, and conscience with comfortable silence. Abortion is not just a personal drama. It is an institutional, systematic, and global crime. If the media spoke of it with the same intensity they speak of wars, we might begin to awaken from this moral anesthesia.
There is no true peace without love for life. And there is no love for life if it is not defended from its very origin.
Peace to all — from the beginning of life to its final breath.
Sources and resources used:
-
World Health Organization (WHO): global abortion estimates (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/abortion)
-
Guttmacher Institute: global and regional abortion statistics (https://www.guttmacher.org/)
-
UNHCR, UN, and Red Cross: death tolls from recent armed conflicts (Syria, Ukraine, Gaza)
-
Spanish abortion legislation: Organic Law 2/2010 and Organic Law 1/2023
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario