Here’s a fact for people looking to move to Colorado. It’s one of the main reasons why some people might wish to live there, especially if they happen to be poor and pregnant. Which means, of course, they’ll probably seek an abortion at some point. So long as it doesn’t cost too much, that is.

Well, they’ve certainly come to the right place. Thanks to 60% or more of its most enlightened citizenry, abortion in Colorado is now seen as a matter of basic health care, a constitutionally protected human right to which everyone is entitled — yes, even people who have no money.

So, who’s going to pay for all this? The non-poor, of course, will be expected to pick up the tab, and why shouldn’t they? What could possibly be more important than ensuring safe, legal and efficient means for disposing of unwanted children?

And cheap, too. One ought to be fiscally responsible about these matters, which, in the case of Colorado, is now uppermost in their minds. That’s because, on a cost-benefit basis, everyone now sees how much cheaper it will be simply to kill the child in the womb rather than try and give birth to the baby in a hospital. Not to mention the endless expense of looking after the child once it’s born. What huge savings that will bring to hard-working taxpayers! Haven’t they got enough to pay for already? Plus there’s the satisfaction of thinking they’re doing something wonderfully generous and humane. A win-win situation, you might say, for everyone.

Well, perhaps not for the child, who, at the cost of its life, will have to pay for all this progress. 

Anyway, that’s how House Speaker Julie McCluskie explained things shortly after getting it all passed into law. Speaking before reporters, fresh from her legislative victory, she put it very simply: “Ultimately,” she said, “we do achieve a cost savings because of the averted births that will not take place.” 

Ah, yes, of course. When blank extinction is on offer, who would want to choose existence? Good heavens, why has it taken so long to see the connection? What better way to prosper a people’s future than to prevent too many people from showing up to claim it? Especially the wrong kind, that is. Why else are Planned Parenthood offices located in poor neighborhoods? Besides, If having kids is not cost-effective, and killing them is, why should low-income women be saddled with the expense of having to raise them when an entire state could pitch in and just make the problem go away?

Consider, too, the possibilities of applying so sound a principle to other areas of life. Why not, for example, using the same logic, proceed to kill off the old and the infirm? Not without the consent of their caregivers, of course. This is not Nazi Germany, after all. And so, just as mothers should not be coerced into executing their unwanted children, so too children, burdened with the care of their unwanted parents, ought not to be forced to kill them either. 

But if they wish to do so, why not? Why not, then, a massive euthanasia program, which we package not as killing on an industrial scale but simply as a happy death for great numbers of unhappy people? Makes perfect sense, especially given the higher financial investment so many children are forced to bear in trying to care for their aging parents. And so, all at once, the case for elder destruction becomes even more compelling than abortion. Using a cost-benefit calculus, it really is a no-brainer. 

So, what’s stopping us? Why not across-the-board liquidations of the useless and unwanted? If you can obliterate life in the womb, why not life in the nursing home? Who says A has got to say B. Why not eliminate those adjudged to be incurably ill, retarded or simply depressed? If life brings so little joy or meaning to those who suffer, what could be kinder than to kill them? Just think of the monies not spent keeping people alive who, having already put in their innings, should be ready to peg out anyway.

The trouble with thinking like that, of course, is that before you know it, you’re racing so fast down the slippery slope that when you hit bottom it’s time for you to die. When it comes to nihilism, who isn’t next? I mean, if you can kill someone, why not anyone? Why not you?

“Either life is always and, in all circumstances, sacred, or intrinsically of no account,” says Malcolm Muggeridge, who learned the lesson from Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who spent her life loving the poor, seeing in them the very countenance of Christ. “It is inconceivable,” he added, “that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.” 

If a mother can kill her child, contracting the services of a doctor to enable her to do it, what is to prevent another child from contracting those same services in order to kill her? Not only are we helpless at the beginning — we are no less so at the end. Between womb and tomb, it is only the witness of love that keeps any of us alive at all.

“You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas,” complained an exasperated Lord High Chancellor of England named Cardinal Wolsey. “If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint. … With a little common sense,” he added ruefully, “you could have made a statesman.” It was that “moral squint” that allowed More to see into the heart of things, not just seeing “facts flat-on,” but in the light of truth, which, for the martyr and saint he would shortly become, bore a unique and unrepeatable name, Jesus the Christ. And because it is Christ we are to see in everyone we meet, including the unborn child, every life is sacred, a blazing sacrament being we need not only to defend but to take delight in.

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,” the poet Hopkins tells us, 

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through men’s faces.

So, listen here, Colorado. You really must try and come up with a better reason to entice people to live in your state. Maybe all those mountains. Why, even I might be tempted …