Respect for Life Begins with Respect for Creation
The problem isn’t using creation, but treating creation as something worthwhile only insofar as it can be used.
By Clare Ath, Co-Founder and President of Vita et Terra
Three years ago this month, the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion to the American people in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It was a momentous legal victory, the culmination of decades of prayer, sacrifice, and perseverance by the pro-life movement.
And yet abortions are rising.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, there has been a year-over-year increase in abortions since the Dobbs decision, with an estimated 1,126,000 abortions in 2025.
Why? The law changed, but the culture did not. Americans finally have the power to restrict abortion, but we don’t because we have a culture that treats all life, and creation in general, as disposable.
The late Pope Francis described this as “throwaway culture,” a mode of existence that treats everything from human beings to the natural world as commodities, welcomed when useful and discarded when burdensome. In our age, almost nothing has value in and of itself. Instead, everything is raw material: worthwhile only insofar as it can be consumed to “add value” to my life, trashed when it is used up.
We see this everywhere. Generations before us made furniture that would last a lifetime. Today, we trade out our couches and dining sets as often as we move apartments. Clothes change with trends, cars change with income, and even friends change with interests. Much of this is driven by consumer demand, a quiet but relentless pressure to treat everything as temporary.
The result? At least in the natural world, it’s degradation. Americans generate nearly five pounds of trash per person per day, more than almost any nation on earth. China fills our oceans with plastic, Brazil levels the Amazon for cheap lumber, and everywhere you look, city centers are decaying at the same time we pave over farmland to create distant, hastily built subdivisions that will be obsolete (and in disrepair) in a generation. We have commoditized nature itself, treating mountains, forests, rivers, and soil not as gifts to be stewarded but as inputs to be processed.
Of course, it is good to cultivate the land and to build value out of raw materials. Stewardship does not mean stasis, and the great wonder of humanity is that we are capable of creativity. The problem isn’t using creation, but treating creation as something worthwhile only insofar as it can be used.
Infused with this utilitarian mentality, it’s no surprise that we have commoditized people too. If the natural world is mere raw material, why should a child be any different? Children interrupt careers, strain budgets, demand sacrifice. If they are evaluated within a cost-benefit calculation, for many, abortion becomes a logical conclusion.
Yet children are more than dependents. They are the future stewards of everything we claim to value. The forests we conserve, the rivers we restore, the farms we cultivate, these are not ends in themselves. They are an inheritance. A society unwilling to welcome future generations will eventually lose interest in preserving a future for anyone.
This is why abortion and environmental degradation are not separate problems. They are symptoms of the same worldview, a failure to recognize that some things possess value beyond their usefulness to us. Both emerge from a culture that struggles to receive life and creation as gifts rather than products.
When we learn to see a forest as more than timber, a river as more than a resource, and a child as more than a lifestyle calculation, we begin to recover something modernity has lost: gratitude. Stewardship begins with recognizing that what we have received is not ours to consume, but ours to cultivate and pass on.
Every conservation effort is, in some sense, an act of faith in future generations. We preserve wilderness because we hope our children and grandchildren will one day walk beneath those trees. We protect farmland because we want future families to be nourished by its harvest. We restore rivers because we believe those who come after us deserve clean water and places of beauty that have not been diminished by our neglect. Conservation is not merely environmentalism. It is a form of love for people we have not yet met.
The two commitments rise and fall together. A culture that learns to welcome a child, with all the inconvenience and upheaval that entails, is practicing the same fundamental act as the farmer who plants trees whose shade he will never sit under, or the conservationist who restores a river she will never fish. Both are refusing the throwaway logic that would reduce the world to what it can do for me, right now.
To protect a forest is to believe in the child who will one day walk through it. To welcome a child is to believe the forest is worth protecting. Neither act makes sense in a throwaway culture. Both become natural in a culture of gratitude.
That is the culture we must build, not through legislation alone, but through the slow, patient work of learning to receive life, in all its forms, as a gift worth keeping.
Clare Ath is the Co-Founder and President of Vita et Terra, a conservative Catholic environmental nonprofit that champions care for creation
These are the very views of St Francis of Assisi. At 800 years since his death, care for creation still is and will always be a core value of the Franciscan Order and those of us Catholics that celebrate what Francis stands for.
I grant that we live in a throwaway culture of sorts. But I actually think you have this backward and that care for creation in many cases justifies abortion in many contexts. And I agree that the moral logic rhymes with that of the environment, but specifically about the role of human consciousness in relation to creation.
Specifically, this: "The two commitments rise and fall together. A culture that learns to welcome a child, with all the inconvenience and upheaval that entails, is practicing the same fundamental act as the farmer who plants trees whose shade he will never sit under, or the conservationist who restores a river she will never fish. Both are refusing the throwaway logic that would reduce the world to what it can do for me, right now."
The farmer "plants," and the women "restore," but the childbearing woman does nothing, is not allowed to act with regard for the future because there is a principle, mistaken as doctrine, operating now to say that she cannot. Her capacity for reason ("I cannot afford this right now") in her specific context is suspended because of some notion of the good operating now, which disallows her from making inferences about the future, which is what separates us, according to Aquinas, from animals.
Which is to say, the equivalent moral situation to "a culture that learns to welcome a child, with all the...upheavals that entails," is not the farmer or riparian restoration specialist who are agents acting now with reference to the future (i.e., exerting their God-given capacity for reason) but instead—especially if acting primarily based on church doctrine—is instead more equivalent to the wilderness activist who believes that to "clean up the river" is to unjustly intrude on some separate domain that should be left to pursue its own pure sacred telos. This same wilderness activist then councils their audience that they must just bear the burden of the pollution.
Whether it's a child or a river, one cannot reasonably say, at the same time, our sexual and family culture—that is, the culture that leads to unwanted conception in the first place—or our river is in an unhealthy, polluted state and then deny the reasonable attempts of everyday humans to address the consequences (i.e., children who cannot be cared for and rivers that are filled with arsenic).
Abortion and especially the American abortion debate aside, what does your Catholic doctrine teach about the role of reason and human consciousness in the world, both in regard to intraspecies affairs and interspecies affairs? Why are we allowed to manipulate trees and rivers with projections of the future in mind but cannot exert that same agency when it comes to our kin?