Culled from Zenit.org:
U.S. abortion law is extreme

There is a profound misunderstanding from which the public in general suffers about the extent to which abortion is legal and the reasons for abortion today. Most people don't realize that Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton made abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy for virtually any reason. U.S. abortion law is extreme, but most people don't know it.

People also misunderstand the reality of abortion practice today. The fact that almost half of all abortions today are repeat abortions is inconceivable to most people; abortions for health reasons or rape -- themes that appear so often in the public debate -- account for only a small fraction of abortions today.

Moreover, the false assumption that abortion is good for women has not been sufficiently challenged. The reality of abortion in our culture today is that women choose abortion as a last resort, not a free choice.

Women turn to abortion because they feel alone and helpless, or abandoned, or pressured by boyfriends or family members. Abortion is not the act of empowerment it was promised to be.

And on the reverse side of the coin...

Family Is Guard Against Dehumanization

"We insist on marriage as patrimony of humanity, but in addition to what the natural law states, for us, Christians, marriage is raised to the dignity of a sacrament," the cardinal said. "It is not about the defense of the family as a traditional and natural institution, but the raising of marriage to a divine plan."

In this connection, the experience of the Christian family becomes an evangelical witness. The Christian family is transformed into good news that must be proclaimed because of its beauty. This is a fundamental message of John Paul II's pontificate, who points to the family as Gospel."

Q: Why is Christian love good news?

Cardinal López Trujillo: Christian love expressed by the family is a love thatpreserves the freshness of the economy of redemption and full liberation.

Through the manner of understanding the family, filial love, and respect for life, flames can be lit that will illuminate and warm places that secularization has darkened and made to grow cold. Because of this, the first point of the new evangelization is to witness a faith that is capable of rekindling an environment, a culture, which otherwise is like cold lava. The Pope wishes the family to be the object of preaching, proclamation, evangelization.

Q: Will families be the missionaries of the third millennium?

Cardinal López Trujillo: Without a doubt! They have a purposive, respectful, but necessary mission. The world runs the risk of a new slavery: a world that does not see clearly that it is spiritually sick, which is unable to contemplate profoundly the beauty of life and, because of this, tends to dehumanization.

Dehumanization is one of the most negative aspects of secularization. Man, far from God, ceases to be genuinely man because the explicit love of God does not shine in his face. A favored way to humanize the world is the rediscovery of the family as source of real evangelization.

In this connection, I would like to underline how marriage has communicated in history respect toward the dignity of woman. There is nothing more anti-evangelical than to treat women as instruments, as things, as [a] sex market. These are dehumanizing ways that can be overcome by the constitution of families, where a woman grows in the meaning of her own dignity, daughter of God, wife and mother. Because of this, the family represents a solid obstacle to dehumanization.

The family must be the key concern of social politics

There must be collaboration between the Church and civil institutions, particularly in creating "a renewed awareness of the importance and sacredness of family ties, as well as the joy that accompanies the birth and education of children."

"The family founded on matrimony must be a privileged object of social politics," he [the pope] insisted.