A little orphaned macaque named Punch has drawn affection from people across the world. He was abandoned after birth at Ichikawa City Zoo near Tokyo, was given a stuffed orangutan to help him cling and feel secure, and then became widely known through videos showing him dragging, hugging, and sleeping beside the toy. Now zoo staff say he is gradually using the plush less as he begins climbing on other monkeys, sitting with adults, and receiving grooming and affection from the troop. The response has been so intense that the zoo had to limit viewing time and ask visitors for quiet, while the IKEA orangutan plush linked to his story has sold out in some places.
That global reaction tells us something important about the human heart. People still feel tenderness toward the weak. People still feel grief when they see a small creature pushed aside. People still feel protective love when innocence suffers. In other words, compassion for the vulnerable has hardly vanished from the human person. That matters very much, because it means the moral problem in our age is deeper than emotional and intellectual numbness alone. People still know how to feel pity and to think compassionately; they simply have learned to direct that pity and compassion in selective and distorted ways.
Scripture helps us understand why. Man is made in the image of God (see Gen. 1:27). Therefore, every human being carries a dignity that is given, received, and sacred. Likewise, Psalm 139 says, “Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb” and again, “Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance” (vv. 13, 16). The child in the womb is therefore neither a project nor a possession nor an inconvenience to be managed. The child is someone known by God, willed by God, and loved by God.
Here, then, is the contradiction that should trouble every conscience. A society can weep over an orphaned baby monkey, and that compassion is good. Yet that same society often shrugs at the destruction of human children in the womb. In fact, the World Health Organization says around 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide each year—a staggering figure, revealing a moral disorder reflected in law, medicine, media, and daily speech. When a culture can rally itself around a tiny animal in distress and then refuse the claims of its own unborn human sons and daughters, the issue is hardly a lack of feeling. The issue is a corrupted moral imagination.
That corruption is learned. It is taught through slogans, repeated through entertainment, normalized through policy, and defended through public shaming. St. Paul says that even the Gentiles show that “what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness” (Rom. 2:15). In plain terms, God has left his moral testimony within man. Therefore, when people instinctively feel compassion for Punch, they show evidence of that deep witness. They reveal that the vulnerable still call forth mercy from the human heart. Consequently, indifference toward unborn children is the fruit of a culture that has trained people to suppress what they know innately.
The abortion issue reaches far beyond politics. It is a spiritual crisis. It is rebellion against God, rebellion against the truth of our own nature. A child in the womb is living, growing, distinct, and human. Many people even admit as much. Nevertheless, they still defend the killing. That is why this issue carries such terrible gravity: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isa. 5:20). Once a people learns that exchange, its institutions begin to rot.
Will Durant captured that pattern with painful precision: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.” Chris Hedges, writing from a very different tradition, still saw a similar truth: “Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension . . . cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse.” Those words fit our age disturbingly well. A culture that severs compassion from truth soon turns savage, packaging savagery in the language of care.
Selective mercy eventually devours society, too. Once the smallest human life loses protection, every other claim to dignity grows weaker. If worth depends on size, strength, wantedness, convenience, or autonomy, then dignity has already been reduced to a shifting social contract. Under that system, the elderly will suffer, the disabled will suffer, the poor will suffer, and eventually everyone will suffer. The gospel offers a radically different ground for human worth. Christ took flesh. The Son of God entered the womb of the Virgin Mary. The Incarnation forever sanctified human life from conception onward. The unborn child matters because Christ has joined himself to human nature.
The Christian claim gives us the pathway forward: neither rage nor contempt, but conversion. People whose hearts ache for Punch already possess a doorway through which truth can enter. Their compassion is a starting place. Their tenderness can become a bridge. Their sorrow for a vulnerable animal can help them recover sorrow for vulnerable children. Therefore, Christians should treat this story as an opening for dialogue. We can say, gently and firmly, that your compassion is good, your instinct to protect is good, and your grief over innocence in danger is good. Now let that mercy become consistent. Let it reach the baby in the womb as well.
Jesus says, “Whatever you did to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). The unborn are surely among “the least of these.” They have no vote, no wealth, no voice in the public square, and no power to defend themselves. Yet God sees them and loves them. He knows them by name before the world ever knows they exist. Christian witness in this age must recover that truth with patience, courage, and hope.
So yes, compassion for this little monkey is a beautiful thing. A civilization can survive when it can still love the weak. A civilization collapses when it teaches itself to love sentiment while rejecting truth. The gospel alone can heal that fracture, because the gospel alone reveals both what man is and what man is for. In Christ, compassion is purified, truth is restored, and the vulnerable are received as gifts rather than burdens. That is the corrective our culture desperately needs, and that is the road by which mercy may yet be taught to love rightly again.