Pope Leo XIV spoke at the Food and  Agriculture Organization in Rome October 16, decrying the continuing prevalence of global hunger.  The pontiff noted that hunger or inadequate nutrition affects nearly three billion of the eight billion people on Earth, insisting that modern technology has made such suffering unnecessary.

Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey spoke at the fifth-anniversary commemoration of the Geneva Consensus Declaration in Washington on October 22, decrying the proliferation of prenatal hunger.  The congressman discussed how the first of the two drugs used as the “abortion pill” works: It starves the embryo.  Mifepristone blocks progesterone, whose absence causes the uterus to slough off the lining it prepared for implantation of the continued pregnancy.  Without that endometrium lining, the embryo cannot develop normally.  The drug also inhibits other hormones responsible for embryonic organ development, like lungs and digestive organs.

Putting it bluntly, by rendering the maternal body hostile to continued pregnancy, mifepristone essentially starves and suffocates the embryo to death.  At that point, the second drug, misoprostol, is taken to induce contractions and delivery of the dead embryo — i.e., a do-it-yourself miscarriage, generally in the privacy of your bathroom.  Home alone.

Pro-abortionists don’t like to describe how abortion procedures operate in ordinary language because when they do, most people are revolted.  It’s why even though there is a heartbeat in an unborn child by six weeks, we’re told it’s just “electrical cardiac activity” (like the kind in you that can be monitored on an ECG).  It’s why in third-trimester abortions, a lethal dose of digoxin — a cardiac drug — is injected off-label directly into the fetal heart.  It induces what abortionists like to call “fetal demise” (AKA “death”) while ensuring that no baby is born alive, forcing the kinds of “discussions” ex–Virginia governor Ralph Northam dispassionately spoke of as being conducted with the mother about the newborn’s fate.  It’s why abortionists deny such a thing as a “partial-birth abortion,” even though it’s performed by partially delivering the child, then piercing the base of its skull to vacuum out its cranial content (AKA “brain”), the collapsed head now allowing full delivery.

The operation of mifepristone is relevant because there is very much a movement afoot to transition the abortion industry from a surgical to a pharmaceutical footing.  If many abortions occur early in pregnancy, abortion drugs give an extra layer of invisibility to the process.  Physicians need not attend patients, and clinic overhead costs decline.  Complications (it’s been reported that about 11% of pharmaceutical abortions involve them) are shifted to the patient and other doctors, masking statistics about abortion specifically.

But the most important question here is how mifepristone ends the baby’s life.  It does it by starvation, by depriving the baby of nutrients and oxygen and inhibiting his biological development better to use them.

I raise this because it seems that not all hunger is created equal.

Retiring Chicago archbishop Blase Cupich set off a firestorm in September by announcing that he would give a “lifetime achievement” award to retiring Illinois Catholic Democrat Senator Dick Durbin.  Durbin’s pro-life voting record has been 0% for at least the past ten years, according to the National Right to Life Committee.  In defiance of the 21-year-old policy statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops against honoring pro-abortion politicians, Cupich pressed on with plans to fete Durbin, generating unprecedented public rebukes from several Catholic bishops.  In the end, Durbin withdrew from receiving the award.

Asked to comment on the Cupich-Durbin scandal, Pope Leo XIV seemed to try to bridge the controversy by invoking another former Chicago archbishop’s theory, Joseph Bernardin’s “seamless garment of life.”  According to Bernardin, discussion of “pro-life” issues should be expanded by including issues like social policy, anti-poverty programs, opposition to the death penalty, and now immigration when considering a politician’s “pro-life” bona fides.  Critics of the “seamless garment/consistent ethic of life” theory (this author included) say it is an excuse that gives pro-abortion politicians a pass by equating those other issues with abortion, even if the latter is far more immediately and commonly lethal than those other issues (except capital punishment).  The Bernardin seamless garment seems to play into the riposte of pro-abortionists, who dismiss concern for the unborn by claiming that pro-life persons “don’t care about life after birth.” 

Admitting unfamiliarity with details of the Cupich-Durbin controversy, the pope suggested considering broader issues — e.g., a pro–death penalty politician is not “really pro-life,” while one who approves of America’s “inhuman treatment of immigrants” may not be “pro-life.” 

Taking the pope at face value, the call is clear: If we are to speak of hunger as a human crisis, we must speak of all hunger — from the child in a famine zone to the famine zone in the womb.  If we want a unified view of life, we should have a unified view of what threatens life, and in that ranking, hunger in any form is near the top.  Only then can our “seamless garment” of life be truly seamless.  Hunger, in any form, is a tearing of relationship: between mother and child, between rich and poor, between humanity and the created order that sustains us.

Catholic social teaching has long insisted that the right to food and sustenance is inseparable from the right to life itself.  If hunger in the world is, as the pope said, “a historical shame,” then the deliberate induction of hunger in the womb must be recognized as part of that same moral disorder.  For the pope to address hunger comprehensively — including the hunger in the womb — would be a powerful “speaking of truth to power,” a bold but coherent witness challenging the mainstream narrative now being formed as the abortion industry tries shifting to the pharmaceutical.

Image via Picryl.