By Clement Harrold

January 17, 2026

Human beings are special. While pretty much everybody still acknowledges this truth, secular society finds it increasingly difficult to explain why it is true.

Sure, human beings enjoy exceptional intelligence. Our rationality, combined with our physical dexterity, allows us to become great artists, craftsmen, engineers, and more.

But what about the many human beings who are defective in these areas, such as infants, the disabled, and the elderly? What makes a four-week-old embryo or an ailing dementia patient equally as special as Elon Musk or Usain Bolt?

The Basis for Human Dignity

For the modern secularist, the only real answer to the foregoing questions is “nothing,” which is why our society increasingly adopts a two-tier approach to human dignity:

• Tier 1: healthy human beings who have already been born
• Tier 2: unborn children (especially those with disabilities); human beings facing incurable and debilitating physical or mental illness

In practice, neither of these tiers is watertight. For example, if a tier 2 human being is especially valued or wanted by a tier 1 human being, then he or she might be elevated to the ranks of tier 1. When a famous celebrity chooses to become a parent, for example, her unborn child is celebrated and protected. But if the same celebrity conceives a child accidentally and decides she wants an abortion, then her unborn child remains definitively in tier 2.

Dehumanization can also occur in the other direction. In wartime, for instance, human beings who would usually be treated as tier 1 might be relegated to tier 2. After all, it’s hard to maim, torture, or kill someone you regard as fully human; far easier to regard them as subhuman, and then do with them as you wish. 
 

Contrast all this with the biblical vision of humanity. Psalm 8 invites us to marvel at the remarkable dignity God has bestowed on human beings: “Yet you have made him little less than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor” (8:5). The psalmist can say this with confidence because he knows that of all the creatures on earth, only human beings have been created in God’s image and likeness (see Gen 1:27; cf. 9:6).

From this it follows that human dignity is not based on mutable characteristics like strength, power, health, or intelligence. Instead, human dignity is based on the immutable fact that every human being is made in the image of God. When the rubber hits the road, this is the only principle that guarantees the rights of the most vulnerable among us.

From a Christian perspective, the embryo in the womb, no less than Elon Musk, is a human person with an immortal soul destined to glorify God and reside with Him in perfect happiness forever. Simply by virtue of his or her conception, even the smallest unborn child was made to be little less than the angels.

The Sanctity of Weakness

An important consequence of a properly biblical anthropology is that Christians are committed to building a world where power is placed in the service of the weak (cf. Mk 9:33-35). Someone who came to realize this through his reflections on the Blessed Virgin Mary was the noted Irish historian William Lecky (1838–1903). Though not a person of faith, Lecky saw the enormous cultural significance of showing devotion to Our Lady:

The world is governed by its ideals, and seldom or never has there been one which has exercised a more profound and more salutary influence than the mediaeval conception of the Blessed Virgin. For the first time woman was elevated to her rightful position, and the sanctity of weakness was recognised as well as the sanctity of sorrow. No longer the slave or the toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and of sensuality, woman rose in the person of the Virgin Mother into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had no concept.

In virtually all pre-Christian cultures, both women and children were regarded as having less dignity and value than adult men. Since men are physically stronger, it was simply assumed that society ought to revolve around them.

When Christianity came on the scene, it challenged these assumptions. Here was a religion that went out of its way to extol the status of the poor and the downtrodden: “he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree” (Luke 1:52). Since its earliest days, Christianity has stood up for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, including the unborn.

Abortion has always been the antithesis of the Gospel message, precisely because it so clearly embodies the domination of the strong at the expense of the weak. Indeed, abortion takes our most foundational philanthropic instinct—a mother’s love for her child—and creates a hideous inversion whereby the most frail and dependent human being imaginable is now classified as a parasite deserving of violent extermination by the very adults who ought to love him or her the most.

Such barbarism is diametrically opposed to Christianity. Whereas our world enjoins selfish adults to live however they please, even at the expense of their own children, the Gospels teach us to imitate the God of the universe, who so longed to redeem His puny creatures that He got on His hands and knees to wash their feet before getting on a cross to save them from their sins. 
 

Child Sacrifice & Divine Justice

The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once observed, “Everywhere outside of Christianity the child is automatically the first to be sacrificed.” This was certainly the case in the pre-Christian world, where not only child sacrifice but also exposure and other forms of infanticide were commonplace. Time and again, the Old Testament rails against these “abominable practices” and warns of God’s impending justice (see Dt 18:9-13; 2 Kgs 17:15-17; Ps 106:34-39; Wis 12:3-7; Ez 20:30-32).

Yet Balthasar’s chilling maxim also holds true in our own post-Christian society. Instead of butchering our children before graven idols, today we butcher them out of sight in the sterile operating room of an abortion clinic. Abortion, moreover, is merely the most egregious of the many ways in which our culture sacrifices children on the altar of convenience.

Through the proliferation of pornography we sacrifice children’s innocence; through no-fault divorce culture we sacrifice their family life, the integrity of their home, and their innate sense of stability and belonging; through IVF and surrogacy we sacrifice their relationship to their own mother or father; through the madness of LGBT propaganda we sacrifice their self-identity; and through secular materialist ideology we withhold from them the most precious gift any human being can possess: friendship with God and the knowledge of being loved by Him.

Every one of these crimes bears the mark of the “murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) who seeks in every age the destruction of the family and the holocaust of children. It was he who incited Pharaoh to put to death the Hebrew baby boys; it was he who moved Herod to slaughter the male infants of Bethlehem; and it is he who lies behind the widespread exploitation of children in our own day.

Those who cooperate with Moloch’s designs will share his fate soon enough. For each of us, the day is approaching when God will call us to give an account for everything we have done here on earth. The late U.S. Congressman Henry Hyde once reflected on what that final reckoning will entail:

When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God—and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world—and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, “Spare him, because he loved us!”

All of us will feel spiritually naked when we stand before our Maker. In that moment, we shall realize the special love God has for all His little ones whom we must imitate if we wish to enter the kingdom of heaven (see Matt 18:3). And perhaps we shall also see more clearly than we do now the hidden ways in which children, both born and unborn, offer to the Eternal Father an unending hymn of angelic praise: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth! Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted by the mouth of babes and infants” (Ps 8:1-2).
 

Further Reading

Stephanie Gray Connors, My Body for You: A Pro-Life Message for a Post-Roe World (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2024).

Tim Staples, Behold Your Mother: A Biblical and Historical Defense of the Marian Doctrines (Catholic Answers Press, 2017).