When life upon birth becomes expendable, subject to force, punishment, neglect, and death so long as it serves “law and order,” “national security,” or political convenience—when you can be shot by the police state, executed by the police state, starved, surveilled, displaced, raided, abused, or discarded by the police state—and this is treated not as a moral failure but as policy and doctrine, then you’re not dealing with a government that is truly pro-life. We see it in a system that celebrates the sanctity of life before birth while expanding the machinery of death after birth—through executions carried out in the name of justice, militarized policing carried out in the name of order, indefinite detention carried out in the name of security, shoot-first enforcement regimes that treat civilians as threats rather than human beings, and endless wars driven by greed, profit and ego. State-sanctioned murder in the form of the death penalty is perhaps the clearest example of the government playing god: a system that asserts the moral authority to decide when a human life is no longer worthy of existence, despite well-documented errors, racial disparities, and irreversible consequences.
Author: John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
Published at: 2026-02-02 23:30:23
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