What about Soulmates?

Random thought of the day:
I've often heard fellow pro-lifers like to say things "There would be a cure for cancer, but we aborted the person who would have discovered it."

I understand the sentiment of the argument, but I don't know that's quite how these things work. I'm not sure that scientific progress depends exclusively on some kind of vocation-driven providence. That is, I don't think God sits around hiding cures for horrible diseases from people who are searching for them simply because someone else was murdered.

On the other hand, if you are a particularly romantic person and believe that there really is someone special for you out there, that relationship seems far more vulnerable to something like death.

What if some of these lonely souls and broken marriages are due to the fact that the personalities that would have best complemented a spouse were lost to death? Whether or not abortion has deprived the world of medical knowledge, abortion has surely deprived women of their future husbands and husbands of their wives.

Comments

[Cornelius]

I have to admit this one doesn't make much sense either. It seems to presume abortion is outside of God's providence. One might as well say I would have met my soul mate but I spent the night in the lab instead of socializing with some colleagues and missed out on meeting her as a result. The odds of meeting your soulmate seem to be close to zero without Providence. Unless you suppose one's social calendar is affected by providence and death, or a particular type of death is not, one can not argue that death has prevented anyone from meeting their soul mate.

To put it another way, God knows who will be aborted before they get aborted and as such still has a great plan.

[PeterTerp]

For starters, I don't think the idea of "soulmates" is any kind of dogma for Catholics. This falls more under the category of speculative meditation than theological certainty.
That being said, it seems like you are describing an ancient Greek sense of destiny more than a Christian sense of Providence.

According to the view of Providence described in the comment, those who die are victims of not having any purpose to fulfill...or at least any important enough purpose, as if God lets death occur only to the people who aren't going to play special roles in His big movie.

Rather, what I'm suggesting is that free will allows us to destroy God's original plan, leaving us to the mercy of God's Providence to somehow correct the situation in a new or different way. That's the story of the Fall.

Granted, God might intervene in the case of some individuals to preserve them from death at a particular moment. That's God's business.

But I have a hard time thinking that any human being is really just an extra in the cast and therefore an acceptable casualty...or that Providence works in such a way that those who are aborted weren't really meant for anything better in this life.

Sin "misses the mark" and offends God because it disrupts God's plan for us (which is to be with Him and thus experience fullness of love and joy).

...now I'm just recalling a scene in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength in which the protagonists discover that they were supposed to be parents of the new King Arthur, but missed their opportunity because they refrained from having procreative relations too long into their marriage.