Equality doesn’t even enter into it. The unborn child is not a member of society.
It depends on how you define “neighbor”. Jesus was asked this question. You might want to read his answer.
True story. Years ago I was in my office at work and I received two calls in close succession. The first was from my doctor, confirming that, yes, I had a low survival rate form of cancer. The second regarded my son, who was a high risk pregnancy and is severely devolopmentally disabled. The principle at his elementary school called to tell me personally that they had fired his one on one aide for physical abuse.
I walked down the hall way and told my business partner I needed to go home. He didn’t argue, he just asked me if we should cancel a conference call that had taken weeks to arrange and involved a bunch of people on different continents. I asked if he could cover for me, and he agreed, but asked me to have one of the project engineers also attend to help with certain types of questions.
I walked down the hall to one such person’s office, a well educated woman in her mid thirties making what would now be a six figure salary. When I asked her to attend a conference call in the afternoon, she got a panic stricken look. She then explained to me that she had to leave work early. I must have had a twisted look on my face, because she went on to explain that she needed to spend more time with her dog. The dog had been spending a lot of time with her boyfriend and she was worried that “he might like him more than me”.
I must admit, I was briefly consumed with a feeling of rage, but then I recalled having a similiar feeling involving a cat and my sister when I was 3 or 4. I told her not to worry about it, went back to my own office, and got down on my knees and thanked God for all the blessings in my life. Including not being half way through life’s normal journey and worried about the fealty of my dog (who, BTW, has since passed, but worshipped me for no other reason than I routinely was the one to feed and walk her).
By secular standards my son could not compete with the lady in question in any the ways we normally use for gauge ‘success’. But there is no doubt in my mind that, simply by the virtue of freely giving love and being loved in return, he was and is a more successful human being.
One recurring theme in the Gospels is that all our earthly distinctions are largely meaningless. Fertilized egg, convicted felon, ruler of an empire… We are all unique creations of a God who can, and does, love us each infinitely. It is a simple rule of mathmatics that you cannot make meaningful comparisons when both terms include infinite values.
