The other day my friend, Cal Thomas, (Tribune Media Services) had an interesting editorial in the Naples Daily News about Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law.  His piece focuses on a 53 year old Oregonian man with prostate cancer and no medical insurance.  The state has decreed that his chemotherapy would be too expensive for them to pay, but they would cover the cost of physician-assisted suicide.

This story confronts us with the ultimate consequences of secularizing sex.  Of course, there is no obvious reference to sex in this man’s dilemma.  However, it does reveal the state’s conclusion that some human lives are not worth saving.  How has this secular view of human life gained such a high level of legal recognition in our country?

One legal tab behind which such an inhumane conclusion hides is Roe v. Wade.  This law transforms human life into the property of the woman whose body carries it.  Only a tiny fraction of abortions are related to the physical survival of the mother.  Almost all of them have to do with wanting to be rid of an inconvenience, embarrassment or, even worse, a liability.  Animal rights advocates have gained more legal protection for an unborn sea turtle than our law provides for an unborn human being.  

If a mother carrying a child is criminally or accidentally injured and loses a child she wants, then those responsible for the child’s death can be prosecuted for murder or wrongful death.  However, if she doesn’t want her child she can destroy the child under the protection of the law right up to the last month of her pregnancy.  

What has brought us to this place?  The secularization of sex.  We have become a nation that values sexual pleasure more than we value human life.  We have made sexual orgasm a highly-prized form of adult entertainment, rather than a treasured pleasure between husband and wife.  The ultimate consequences of such moral erosion is seen in the way Oregon is dealing with their uninsured cancer victim.

How can we regain our respect for human life?  Parents must begin teaching their preschool children that pleasant sexual feelings are God’s way of helping us look forward to growing up, gettng married and having children…in that order!  Healthy sex education leaves a child never remembering a time in thier life that sexual pleasure was not associated with marriage.  Abortion and physician assisted suicide are the ultimate outcome of placing more value on sexual pleasure than we do on human life.  What do you think?   rddobbins@gmail.com