Life Is A Good and a Sign of His Presence

At our pro-life group at Church we are studying John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae/The Gospel of Life. Why should we respect and promote life? Because life is itself a good that God created.
Here's a snippet from Chapter 3.

"Life is always a good. This is an instinctive perception and a fact of experience, and man is called to grasp the profound reason why this is so.

Why is life a good? This question is found everywhere in the Bible, and from the very first pages it receives a powerful and amazing answer. The life which God gives man is quite different from the life of all other living creatures, inasmuch as man, although formed from the dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7, 3:19; Job 34:15; Ps 103:14; 104:29), is a manifestation of God in the world, a sign of his presence, a trace of his glory (cf. Gen 1:26-27; Ps 8:6). This is what Saint Irenaeus of Lyons wanted to emphasize in his celebrated definition: "Man, living man, is the glory of God".²³ Man has been given a sublime dignity, based on the intimate bond which unites him to his Creator: in man there shines forth a reflection of God himself."

This should be required reading for every Christian. The entire encyclical can be found here. Thank God for popes like JP2 and B16. Between the two of them they have left us enough writings to last a lifetime of study. Some predict that the waves created by JP2's Theology of the Body alone are yet to be felt and will make their presence known for the next hundred years of Church history.