A week ago today, the pro-life marchers in Washington D.C. made a powerful statement that the cause for the protection of innocent life will always live on. Two days from now, the singer Beyonce will take the halftime stage at the Super Bowl. And the interviews she’s given over the past week have been an even more powerful statement about the humanity of the child in the womb.
Beyonce lost a child to a miscarriage two years ago. Listen to her words describe the reaction she had…
“I was pregnant for the first time. And I heard the heartbeat, which was the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life.”
And then came the tragic ending…
“I flew back to New York to get my check up – and no heartbeat. Literally the week before I went to the doctor, everything was fine, but there was no heartbeat.”
Beyonce's experience in her tragic miscarriage demonstrated the humanity of the unborn child.
That sounds a lot like someone who was aware there was a child in the womb. I don’t know what Beyonce’s politics on abortion are, nor do I think it’s all that important. What I think is important here is the clear realization that one was not just carrying some bland extra tissue, the removal of which could be of no greater consequence than getting an appendix taking out. There was the clear realization that it was a child, a real life beating heart.
Beyonce’s story and her experience are testimony as to why the pro-life movement will never be just another political cause. Movements built around various causes like taxes, spending programs, whatever they may be on either side of the aisle might have their merits. But they aren’t powerfully rooted in nature itself, the way the reality of unborn life is.
It’s also further proof that the right to life is not just a “Catholic issue”, which involves “imposing your morals” on someone. If one was proposing a law requiring all people to fast on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, that would be the imposition of religion. But the experience of Beyonce with her unborn child demonstrate that one need not believe in the divine origin of the Catholic Church, the coming of Jesus Christ or even the existence of God Himself in order to recognize the dignity and inherent value of the child in the womb.
One need only listen to their heart—or as Beyonce demonstrated, to listen to the heart of the unborn child. And that heartbeat is louder than all the pro-abortion propaganda in the world.
Dan Flaherty is the author of Fulcrum, an Irish Catholic novel set in postwar Boston with a traditional Democratic mayoral campaign at its heart, and he is the editor-in-chief of TheSportsNotebook.com