Speaking October 16 to the Food and Agriculture Organization on the occasion of its 80^th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV observed that 673 million people go to bed each night without eating.  Another 2.3 billion cannot afford adequate nutrition.  That’s 36% of the people living on the earth.  The Pope called that phenomenon  as “a clear sign of prevailing insensitivity, a soulless economy, a questionable development model and an unfair and unsustainable system of resource distribution.”  Almost two out of every five human beings being hungry tonight “is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical shame.”

Speaking October 22 on the fifth anniversary of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a political statement declaring that abortion is not an “international human right,” New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith discussed the global promotion of the abortion drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol.  Mifepristone blocks progesterone, without which the uterine wall breaks down, preventing implantation of the fertilized ovum.  It also blocks other hormones that promote growth of various organs, including the lungs, digestive system, and kidneys in the unborn child.  Without implantation, the fertilized ovum’s own nutrient resources are soon exhausted and it does not acquire oxygen from its mother.  Without organ development, the nutrients and oxygen are not optimally used.  Because of those actions, the unborn child dies.  Misoprostol completes the process by inducing uterine contraction to expel the dead baby.  Put simply, the abortion pill is a do-it-yourself miscarriage.

Smith, however, focused on the function of mifepristone.  By preventing implantation and thus depriving the developing child of nutrition and oxygen after its initial cellular resources are expended, mifepristone induces death essentially by starvation and suffocation.  Pro-abortionists dislike such characterizations, branding them as “medically inaccurate and intended to provoke strong emotional reactions.”  It’s the same line that tries to redefine the early beating fetal heart as “electric cardiac activity,” intended to tamp down any strong emotional revulsion about stopping it.

What else would you call making it impossible for a living organism to acquire necessary nutrients and/or properly make use of them except “starvation?”  What else would you call cutting off access to an oxygen supply except death by suffocation?  While these functions are specific to the stage of the unborn child’s development, they are still the basic human functions of oxygenation and nutrition, i.e., feeding.  In normal human development (i.e., pregnancy and post-pregnancy) these things happen and are expected to happen.  Mifepristone stops them from happening.

Consider histotroph.  It’s been colloquially called “womb milk” because until the embryo can draw sustenance via the placenta, this is its source of nourishment during a period of intense growth.  Mother’s blood pressure through the placenta could dislodge an embryo that is implanting, which shows the maternal body cares for the pregnancy.  Dislodging that embryo, either by sloughing off the uterine lining and/or changing hormonal balances to prevent production of necessary nutrients for the growing baby, is exactly what mifepristone does.

Which is why right-to-life advocates have spoken about its “starvation” of the child.

The contrast is striking.  When the Pope denounces almost three billion people going to bed hungry, many – including the elites – will listen.  When the abortion pill effects embryonic death by hunger, many – including the elites – will defend and even propagate it.

FAO may not have been the right venue to talk about the abortion pill, but I would like to hear Pope Leo XIV complete his condemnation of hunger by talking about hunger in the womb.  Some Vatican types might not want to “embroil” the Pope in such polemics but, as I’ve indicated, depriving a living organism of necessary nutrition is starvation.  Let’s talk about it!

Let’s talk about it for two reasons:

First, the abortion lobby does everything it can to avoid talking about the how of abortion, preferring to sanitize their gruesome work with medical euphemisms.  Blocking access to nutrition and oxygen can’t be called starvation.  Stopping heartbeat – a heartbeat begun at six weeks that might extend for 100 years – is not stopping a beating heart.  Injecting digoxin into a third trimester beating fetal heart to stop it (and avoid the pesky legal problem of being born alive) is “fetal demise.”  And there’s “no such thing” as “partial-birth abortion,” even if the fetal body is sufficiently externalized to pierce and vacuum out the brain to allow total removal.  In the abortion arena, a little honesty goes a long way.

Second, the Pope has recently injected himself into the prolife debate in trying to redeem retiring Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich’s attempt to marginalize the preeminence of the right to life by giving a ‘lifetime achievement award” to retiring pro-abortion Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin.  Asked about the controversy, Leo sought to invoke Cardinal Bernadin’s “seamless garment” of life by noting that, important as abortion is, there are also other “pro-life” tests, like one’s position on capital punishment or immigrant treatment.

Those of us who reject the “seamless garment” approach argue, among other things, that its practical effect is to marginalize the preeminence of abortion as the most commonplace and directly lethal act in the culture of death.  It seems to serve as an excuse to tolerate, if not defend abortion, as long as one totes up additional points on the “other” issues.

Well, then, on “seamless garment” grounds, I would like to see the Pope and other bishops talk about hunger not just as it relates to the almost three billion born human beings who will go to sleep tonight without being adequately fed but also the millions of babies that will die worldwide today of hunger because their mother took mifepristone to eliminate them.  I want to suggest that those clerics will perform an enormous job of “bearing witness” and changing the discussion by raising peoples’ – including mothers’ – consciousness about just what the “abortion pill” implies.  I want also to suggest that, given the ongoing effort to redirect the abortion industry from surgical to pharmaceutical formats, the “signs of the times” suggest this is the moment to speak out.

Because if we want a unified view of life, we should have a unified view of what threatens life and, in that ranking, hunger is pretty much near the top.