Tens of thousands of Americans make their way to Washington, District of Columbia, on or around January 22 each year to participate in the annual March for Life on the anniversary of the tragic decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
Although I found the mood to be much too celebratory the last few times that I participated in the March for Life, I always marveled at the sacrifices made by so many thousands of people, sometimes number up to a quarter of a million (the mainslime media have never reported the numbers accurately), to travel overnight on buses from places as far away from the nation’s capital. This year's march, which takes place five days later than usual because of President Donald John Trump's inauguration a week ago today and the subsequent anti-life, anti-family "women's march" that took place the day after, Saturday, January 21, 2017, the Feast of Saint Agnes, may draw close to half a million people because of the enthusiasm for the new president and his efforts, assesed critically in Sober Up, part nine, and it is sure to draw more media attention because Vice President Michael Richard Pence will make history by being the first president or vice president to actually show up and speak in person at the rally before the march.
Many come from as far Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota to be a physical presence in opposition to a Supreme Court decision that was made in defiance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and which is without foundation in a proper understanding of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America. Most of those who march come from the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states, producing a remarkable site of a steady stream of buses of all makes and models along the Interstate 95 corridor.
The March for Life is something of a foretaste of the General Resurrection of the living and the dead in that many of those who participate are united in a common cause with others from whom they are estranged, something that is particularly the case with Catholics at this time of apostasy and betrayal. A lot of those who one sees along the way are the battle-scarred veterans of Operation Rescue and/or have been in the front lines of being a peaceful, prayerful presence in front of abortuaries for decades now.
Many of these brave souls have been arrested and/or manhandled and harassed by the police in spite of various decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America upholding their "freedom of speech" under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Some have spent time in jail. Others run crisis pregnancy centers or staff houses for unwed mothers. A lot of the marchers have adopted children. Additionally, thousands of the Catholics, thinking that that the counterfeit church of concilairism is the true Church and that is liturgical rites are valid, make an all-night vigil before what is purported to be Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament in the Crypt Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Unfortunately, of course, false hope is provided them at the rally on the National Mall prior to the March for Life by a parade of conciliar “bishops,” each of whom speaks about “respecting life” when they promote doctrines that are offensive to the Most Blessed Trinity and thus injurious to the eternal good of men as well as the temporal common good of their nations.
That is, each of the conciliar “bishops” who will speak today mandate explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments in full violation of Pope Pius XI’s absolute prohibition of this as contained in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929. Each of the “bishops” who will speak today promote “natural family planning,” which is nothing other than a supposedly “Catholic” form of birth control to limit the size of families (for a review of this issue yet again, please see Forty-Three Years After Humanae Vitae, Always Trying To Find A Way andPlanting Seeds of Revolutionary Change, Jorge Puts On His "Catholic Hat"? Don't You Believe It and "Rabbits" to Jorge, God's Blessings to Pope Pius XII). With one or two exceptions, most notably “Bishop” Thomas Tobin, the conciliar “bishop” of Providence, Rhode Island, who has written strongly worded commentaries against pro-abortion Catholics in public life, most of the “bishops” who will speak today at the rally on the National Mall prior to the March for Life are guilty of being weak-kneed and tongue-tied when it comes to dealing with pro-abortion and pro-perversity Catholics in public life. Moreover, all too many of these “bishops” have been active enablers of pro-abortion, pro-perversity Catholics in public life by means of the late Joseph “Cardinal” Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life,” a false moral teaching that conflates the absolute inviolability of innocent human life with the lives of criminals found guilty of heinous crimes after the administration of the due process of law and while denouncing all wars in se as opposed to “life principles” even though God Himself has sanctioned just wars in defense of His Holy Name, the rights of Holy Mother Church and the freedom of her children.
In this, of course, the statist-leaning, "seamless garment" "bishops" of the counterfeit church of concilairism in the United States of America have had a vital ally in the person of the Argentine Apostate, who is too busy trying to "save the planet" from "climate change" to say anything other than a few perfunctory words now and again about the "sanctity of life," although he rarely uses to the word "abortion." Such perfunctory words will be read today on the Capitol Mall in Washington, District of Columbia, by the president of the United States Conference of Conciliar "Bishops," Daniel "Cardinal" DiNardo., the conciliar "archbishop" of Galveston-Houston, Texas.
Alas, a series of articles written four years ago (Forty Years Of Emboldening, Appeasing And Enabling Killers--see also part two and part three) dealt with this sorry record of coddling pro-aborts.
The sorry but predictable outcome of the counterfeit church’s coddling of those who support baby-killing has been the emboldening of the statists in the false opposite of the naturalist “left,” the Democratic Party, into becoming completely hardened in their support for a whole panoply of moral evils. Careerists of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” who belong to the other major organized crime family of naturalism in the United States of America, the Republican Party, have learned full well that there is no “price” to pay from the conciliar “bishops” or from most of their supporters for either abandoning any verbal recognition of the horrors of the daily slaughter of the preborn and/or providing little crumbs now and again to show that “something is being done” when all that is being done is to provide a record of meaningless Congressional votes that comprise the phony “pro-life scorecard” put out by the National Not-So-Right-to-Life Committee (which takes no stand against contraception and supports the direct, intentional killing of the innocent preborn as a matter of principle, not as matter of making a concession in a piece of legislation that might not have any other chance of passing).
Most of the members of Congress who speak at the rally before the March for Life will highlight the fact that they passed a bill to defund Planned Barrenthood at the end of 2015 and seek to do so again, this time with the backing of the new president, although they will not mention the fact that they chose not to force a government shutdown over the matter in December of 2015 by backing President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro into vetoing the entire budget bill.
Instead, of course, they punted, knowing full well that the pro-abortion, pro-everything evil Obama/Soetoro would veto a "clean" bill, which is why then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) did not filibuster it. Although more will be said about the defunding of Planned Barrenhood this year if such a bill is passed as a way to amplify what I wrote eighteen months ago in Shifting Funding From One Evil Organization To Many Others, suffice it for the moment to note that many supposedly "pro-life" members of the United States Congress now consider the defunding of Planned Barrenhood as the "gold standard" of what it is to be "pro-life," thus relieving themselves of any real effort to restore full legal protection to the innocent preborn, who are being killed by the scores of thousands every day by chemical means and at least 3,700 every day by surgical means.
Mrs. Judie Brown, the president and founder of the American Life League, recently wrote about the continued betrayal of the continued betrayal of the preborn by Congressional Republicans who make "exceptions" to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment's prohibition against the direct, intetional taking of an innocent human life as a matter of principle, not that of legislative expediency:
It is time to stop the silliness. It is time to get real. It is time to understand that because we are defending defenseless preborn children, we cannot ever agree to a compromise which condemns certain babies to death.
The pro-life movement, in large part, began compromising from the early days. When I was a neophyte and working under Mildred Fay Jefferson, MD at the National Right to Life Committee, I began hearing things that greatly concerned me. I was introduced to a red line that differentiated pro-life ethical principles from political realities—or so I was told by some.
At that time, and until his death, I was a huge fan of Father Paul Marx, OSB. He wrote many commentaries explaining the truth to his flock. In his very last one he wrote about the problems with certain birth control chemicals and devices having the potential to cause abortion. In an article entitled “Prophecies of Humanae Vitae,” he wrote:
Contraception's destruction of the integrity of the marital act—as unitive and procreative—has dire consequences for society and for our souls. Contraception, in other words, is a rejection of God's view of reality. It is a wedge driven into the most intimate sphere of communion known to man outside of the Holy Sacrament of the Mass. It is a degrading poison that withers life and love both in marriage and in society.
As we know, contraception can cause an abortion. In addition, the contraceptive mentality leads to abortion. This is why pro-life Americans must hold the line, never agreeing to support even one abortion whether in the realm of politics and legislation or in the public square witnessing to the sanctity of human life.
But here we are in 2017, and once again proposed legislation is out there that contains language that protects the act of aborting children in cases of rape and incest or “in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.”
The problem with such language is not easy to see these days, because for more than 16 years legislative proposals like the Hyde Amendment have included such exceptions. In the intervening years these words outlining which babies can be killed under the law have only become more engrained in the lexicon of “pro-life” politicos. But no matter how you say it, a baby will die if any exception is carried out in practice.
In other words, pragmatism or political expediency are code words for defining language that results in death for some babies.
So the question before us is really quite simple: Should we accept the pro-life status quo or should we sound the alarm over and over again until people begin to see the truth for what it is? The answer is simple: We can never settle for any abortion for any reason. And it is our job to help others see this truth.
Abortion kills a human being—a person just like you and me. No abortion is ever acceptable.
One of my early mentors, Professor Charles Rice, once wrote on the topic of exceptions and the humanity of the preborn child. He stated, “As a non-person the unborn child has no more constitutional rights than does a goldfish or a turnip.”
And when allegedly pro-life proposals move forward with language that permits the killing of the preborn in certain cases, aren’t we legally agreeing that the preborn child is not a human being in all cases—and in fact in some cases is no more valuable than a goldfish or a turnip?
I hope not, but the exception language says yes! To this we must say NO!
Let us make a renewed vow to focus attention on the humanity of the preborn baby from his biological beginning without ever agreeing to the killing of even one of them. Each is a person; each is an individual; each baby deserves to live!
We must give each baby a voice. We must protect each and every one. And we must end this ongoing betrayal of our preborn brothers and sisters. (New Congress Continues Old Ways to Betray Babies.)
Not even the new president is truly "pro-life," athough he does not realize that he is not.
Why should he?
Most of his advisers do not understand that gravity of directly intending to kill an innocent human being, which is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeanc.
This is why it is good yet again to provide some historical perspective to explain what led up to the decisions of the Supreme Court in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on Monday, January 22, 1973, and what has happened in the forty-two years thereafter.
It Didn't All Start With Roe v. Wade
No, the move for decriminalized baby-killing by surgical means started in earnest in the early-1960s as a result of the "Thalidomide babies," that is, those babies born with birth defects as a result of their mothers having taken the drug Thalidomide to help them with their morning sickness during pregnancy. It was, as Dr. Doris Graber pointed out in a very matter-of-fact way in her Mass Media and American Politics text, in 1963 that the phenomenon of the "Thalidomide babies" produced calls for "therapeutic" surgical abortions to be made "legal."
The anti-family movement, which started with efforts on the part of Masonically-controlled state legislatures to liberalize existing divorce laws in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, gained great impetus with Margaret Sanger's Birth Control League in 1919 and numerous organizations devoted to "eugenics" in the 1920s, some of which were successful in convincing state legislatures ton enact mandatory sterilization laws for criminals and the retarded (once again, thank you states' rights). That anti-family movement, which comes from the devil and is designed to lead souls to Hell for all eternity as social order is disrupted as a result of the breakup of the family, had been given its "wedge" issue as a result of the Thalidomide babies, giving its leaders a "cause" to try to open the legal floodgates to surgical abortion-on-demand to complement the chemical abortions being produced by the "pill" and other abortifacient contraceptives. Indeed, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists issued a statement in 1965, shortly after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), that declared in a most positivistic manner that drugs that stopped the life of a child after fertilization but before implantation in a mother's womb were to be called "contraceptives" instead of "abortifacients."
As I have noted in many other articles on this site, Roe v. Wade did not "start" the genocide of the preborn in this country that has taken over fifty million innocent human lives since 1965. The move for the decriminalization of surgical baby-killing began at the state level (so much for demigod of states' rights) as pro-abortion leaders such as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of the National Repeal of Abortion Laws (now called NARAL-Pro Choice), and Lawrence Lader and William Baird, among others used the existence of various "exceptions" in abortion legislation then on the books as the means of "liberalizing" "access" to baby-killing for all women in all circumstances. The move for decriminalized baby-killing under cover of law started at the state level, moving into the Federal court system only when pro-death advocates believed that it was propitious for them to challenge the laws of those states which prohibited or restricted "access" to baby-killing.
It is useful to review some of the history of decriminalizing surgical baby-killing under cover of civil law prior to Roe v. Wade. Those who contend that the "people" in the various states have the "right" to determine whether to permit or prohibit surgical baby-killing would have no problem with the pre-Roe legislation, nor would they be bothered by the fact that many states have "trigger laws" in effect to "protect" baby-killing in the event that Roe v. Wade is reversed at some point by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
The State of Colorado was the first to "liberalize" its existing legislation, doing so in 1967:
The pre-Roe abortion statute was based upon § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code. Under the statute, an abortion could be performed at any stage of pregnancy (defined as “the implantation of an embryo in the uterus”) when continuation of the pregnancy was likely to result in the death of the woman, “serious permanent impairment” of her physical or mental health, or the birth of a child with “grave and permanent physical deformity or mental retardation. An abortion could be performed within the first sixteen weeks of pregnancy (gestational age) when the pregnancy resulted from rape (statutory or forcible) or incest, and the local district attorney confirmed in writing that there was probable cause to believe that the alleged offense had occurred Pursuant to Roe v. Wade, the limitations on circumstances under which abortions could be performed and the requirement that all abortions be performed in hospitals were declared unconstitutional by the Colorado Supreme Court in People v. Norton.Enforcement of the statute was not enjoined.
The pre-Roe statute has not been repealed, and would be enforceable if Roe v. Wade were overruled. The broad exceptions in the statute, however, in particular the exception for mental health, would allow almost all abortions to be performed. Colorado, Life Legal Defense Fund.These links no longer work. This site appears to be the current source for the information that used to appear at Life Legal Defense Fund.
The State of California, then headed by Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan, followed suit in 1967, passing the Therapeutic Abortion Act, has long been a haven for baby-killing:
The pre-Roe abortion statutes were based upon § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code. The California Penal Code prohibited abortions not performed in compliance with the “Therapeutic Abortion Act” of 1967, and made a woman’s participation in her own abortion a criminal offense (subject to the same exception). The Therapeutic Abortion Act authorized the performance of an abortion on a pregnant woman if the procedure was performed by a licensed physician and surgeon in an accredited hospital, and was unanimously approved in advance by a medical staff committee. An abortion could not be approved unless the committee found that there was a “substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother,” or that “[t]he pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.” An abortion could not be performed on grounds of rape or incest unless there was probable cause to believe that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. No abortion could be approved after the twentieth week of pregnancy for any reason.
In a pre-Roe decision, the California Supreme Court declared substantial provisions of the Therapeutic Abortion Act unconstitutional on state and federal due process grounds (vagueness). Sections 274 and 275 of the Penal Code were repealed in 2000, the Therapeutic Abortion Act was repealed in 2002. None of these statutes would be revived by a decision overruling Roe v. Wade. Abortions could be performed for any reason before viability, and for virtually any reason after viability.
Finally, regardless of Roe, any attempt to enact meaningful restrictions on abortion in California would be precluded by the California Supreme Court’s 1981 decision in Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights v Myers. In Myers, the state supreme court struck down restrictions on public funding of abortion on state constitutional grounds (privacy). In the course of its decision, the court stated that under the privacy guarantee of the state constitution, “all women in this state–rich and poor alike–possess a fundamental constitutional right to choose whether or not to bear a child." California, Life Legal Defense Fund
The State of Oregon, whose Masonically-controlled state legislature once compelled the attendance of all children of school age in state-run schools, effectively prohibiting parochial and other privately-run schools from operating (a law that was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925), passed its own pro-death legislation in 1969:
The pre-Roe statutes were based on § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code. The statutes allowed an abortion to be performed before the one hundred fiftieth day of pregnancy when (1) there was “substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy [would] greatly impair the physical or mental health of the mother,” (2) “the child would be born with serious physical or mental defect,” or (3) the pregnancy resulted from felonious intercourse. After the one hundred fiftieth day, abortion was permitted only if “the life of the pregnant woman [was] in imminent danger.”
Pursuant to Roe, most of these statutes were declared unconstitutional in an unreported decision of a three-judge federal court, and were later repealed. The pre-Roe statutes would not be revived by a decision overruling Roe v. Wade. Abortions could be performed for any reason at any stage of pregnancy. Oregon, Life Legal Defense Fund.
The State of New York passed legislation in 1970, albeit by one vote in the State Senate (cast by a Catholic, State Senator Edward Speno of East Meadow, Long Island, New York), to permit baby-killing through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.
The pre-Roe statutes allowed abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. After the twenty-fourth week, an abortion could be performed on a pregnant woman only if there was “a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life. In a pre-Roe decision, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the law brought by a guardian ad litem for unborn children The legality of abortion would not be affected by the overruling of Roe v. Wade. The pre-Roe statutes, which have not been repealed, allow abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. After the twenty-fourth week, however, abortions could be performed only to preserve the woman’s life.
Regardless of Roe, any attempt to prohibit abortion (at least before viability) in New York probably would be barred by language in the New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Hope v. Perales, a challenge to the New York Prenatal Care Assistance Program. In Hope, the court of appeals noted in passing that “it is undisputed by defendants that the fundamental right of reproductive choice, inherent in the due process liberty right guaranteed by our State Constitution, is at least as extensive as the Federal constitutional right [recognized in Roe v. Wade].” New York, Life Legal Defense Fund.
The movement to decriminalize baby-killing in the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen, started in the states, and it would remain perfectly legal in most of those states if Roe v. Wade, decided forty-two ago this very day, January 22, 1973, was reversed today. Only one state, Arkansas, has legislation in place that would ban all surgical baby-killing with no exceptions whatsoever. Another seven states (Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) would prohibit surgical baby-killing with the so-called "life of the mother exception." Those eight states represent a total of ten percent of the population of the United States of America. Surgical baby-killing would remain legal, both as a result of existing state laws and/or provisions or the decisions of various state courts, in forty-two states and the District of Columbia, meaning that the American slaughter of the innocent preborn via surgical means would be fully accessible to ninety percent of the American population. And those who think that entire generations of children who have been raised in the culture of ready access to contraception and abortion are going to have an "epiphany" during adulthood about the errors of their past training are not thinking clearly about the state in which we find ourselves at present.
Emboldening, Appeasing, Enabling Killers Since January 22, 1973
Indifference is what has characterized the past forty-eight years since state legislatures began to "liberalize" existing statutes concerning abortion and the past thirty-seven years since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade. Indifference.
There was even indifference on the actual day of Roe as two other events overshadowed the Supreme Court's decision: the death of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the announcement made by President Richard Milhous Nixon that a "peace accord" had been reached at the Paris Peace Talks between National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Alfred Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the representative of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Communist North Vietnam) to bring American involvement in Vietnam to a close while permitting North Vietnamese army regulars and Viet Cong guerillas (whose interests were represented Madame Nguyen Thi Binh) to remain in "enclaves" in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam,). These two events overshadowed the decision in Roe, which would lead to a period in American history with a casualty figure eclipsing that of the American dead in the Vietnam War by slightly under a thousand times.
Indifference will mark this day, at least for the most past.
The "mainstream" media will ignore or disparage the annual March for Life today, Friday, January 22, 2016, the Feast of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, as upwards of 200,000 Americans gather in the nation's capital for an event that has become much too celebratory over the years. We have nothing to celebrate. We have much to mourn as the American slaughter of the preborn continues on a daily basis, both by means of surgical and chemical abortions. We have much to mourn when one considers how indifferent most people, including most Catholics are, in the face of the daily slaughter of the preborn.
Indifference to the Proximate Root Causes of Abortion: The Overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King
More than the indifference over the daily slaughter of the preborn, however, is the indifference that even those who call themselves pro-life have about the root causes of how we have come to such a state of affairs as that most people in a nation that professes itself to be "civilized"--and deems itself to be judge of whether other nations in the world are "worthy" of being considered as "civilized" as itself--can go about their business each day without giving a single thought (and I mean not a single, solitary thought) to the outrages being committed against God and man by means of the slicing and dicing of innocent preborn children under cover of law.
Most pro-life Americans are so busy finding "political" and "legal" and "constitutional" "strategies" that they are totally disinterested in even learning about how we have arrived at this point in history. Most people prefer to believe in partial-truths about "activist" judges and "loose" constitutional construction, reacting with outrage when they are told that the real proximate cause for each of our social problems, including abortion, is the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century and the rise of anthropocentricity (a man-centered view of the world) associated with Judeo-Masonry and with the variety of naturalistic "philosophies" and ideologies that were spawned from the time of the so-called Age of the Enlightenment to our present day.
By Reason Alone One Can Come to Understand That Abortion is Forbidden by the Natural Law
It is therefore necessary on this forty-third anniversary of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wadeand Doe v. Bolton to examine some rather basic facts about the taking of innocent human life in the womb, which is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and can never be justified as belong to the province of the "people" to "permit" no matter what form of government under which they live.
One can come to a principled opposition to the taking of innocent human life on the basis of reason alone unaided by the light of the Divine Revelation that has been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church He Himself founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Some of the pagan physicians and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were able to conclude that the taking of innocent human life in the womb was prohibited by the precepts of the Natural Law. Hippocrates did so in his Hippocratic Oath, which was changed many medical colleges and universities in the 1970s and thereafter:
I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
The Roman playwright Juvenal, who lived in the early Second Century A.D. and was fierce hater of Christians, had this to say about the crime of the murder of innocent preborn children:
So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. Ancient History Sourcebook: Juvenal: Satire VI
Even a proto-feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first "women's rights" conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, referred to abortion as "disgusting and degrading crime," going on to write:
When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873, recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library.)
Yes, it is possible by reason alone to come to recognize that a child, an innocent preborn human being, is the natural fruit of human conjugal relations. It is an accident if one falls down a flight of stairs. It is an accident if the motor vehicle one is driving goes out of control on an icy road. It is not an "accident" if a child is conceived as the result of human conjugal relations. To invade the sanctuary of the womb, therefore, in order to suck out, burn, slice or otherwise destroy a living human being is opposed to the very laws of nature itself. And if the child inside a mother's womb is not alive, why is it necessary to kill it? As to the child's humanity, you see, even secular science has proved that every fertilized embryonic human being has a distinctive DNA of his very own that does not change over the course of his life. All that is added, physically and temporally speaking, is time and nutrition.
As I said to an abortion advocate in a debate at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on the Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, 1985:
"I will quit this debate right now if you can demonstrate to me which one of the cells in your body has a DNA structure different from the moment that you were conceived."
No true, objective biologist can deny the fact that a living, growing human being is created at the moment of fertilization. Ideologues can deny all arguments that can be advanced by means of reason and science, however, which is why arguing against abortion on the grounds of reason alone only takes one so far. Indeed, it is precisely because of naturalism that we have abortion-on-demand and in most other countries in the "developed" world today. Naturalistic arguments are not going to end abortion-on-demand, although the use of scientific facts and basic Natural Law reasoning can be useful as tools to help people to see through some of the illogic of the pro-death arguments. Such arguments are merely "building blocks," if you will, to lead people to accept the simple fact that it is God Himself Who has ordained these immutable facts of nature that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force or for their validity.
Reason Only Takes Us So Far; We Need Divine Revelation as Taught by the Catholic Church
Yes, it is from Divine Revelation that we must oppose the evils of our day, including the evil of abortion, as we try to plant the seeds as the totally consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother for the conversion of men and their nations to an acceptance of the Catholic Faith as the one and only basis of personal and social order. All other "solutions" are really no "solutions" at all. They are illusions from the devil designed to distract people from the simple truth that it is a complete and humble subordination of all that we do, both individually in our own lives and collectively with others in society, to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself through His Catholic Church that we can root out sin and vice from our own lives and thus to ameliorate its effects in every aspect of the life of our nations.
The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity--the Logos, the Word--through Whom all things were made could have become Man in any way of His choosing. He chose to become Man by being conceived as a helpless embryo in His Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. Our Lord thereby placed Himself in solidarity with every child in every mother's womb no matter the condition of the conception and no matter the condition of the child conceived, whether "healthy" or suffering from some physical "deformity."
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is God. He is the Lord of history, knowing all things. He knew what would be happening in the world in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries as hundreds of millions of babies worldwide would be killed by means of chemical and surgical abortions. He was teaching while He spent nine months in the tabernacle of His Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb that an attack upon an innocent preborn human being is a mystical attack upon Himself:
And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me. (Mt. 25: 40.)
No one can say that he "loves" Our Lord but nevertheless supports His mystical destruction in the persons of preborn babies in their mothers' wombs under cover of law, whether by surgical or chemical means. Those Catholics who say that they are "good Catholics" who "love" Our Lord while supporting the destruction of the least of His brethren in the womb are supporting an indirect attack on the Incarnation itself. Our Lord chose to be the prisoner of Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb. He teaches us that each preborn human life is inviolable from any direct, intentional attack upon it. No human being, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any authority found in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law or the Natural Law to permit one single abortion, whether by chemical or surgical means.
Opposing abortion is as simple as saying: "God has given us His Fifth Commandment: 'Thou shalt not kill.' This is the end of the argument. Period."
Although various theologians over the centuries argued about when "ensoulment" takes place, such arguments are extraneous to the simple fact that an innocent human life never may be targeted deliberately as the first object of an attack upon it. Moreover, although Holy Mother Church has never defined "ensoulment" as such in a de fide manner as it relates to abortion, she has taught us that Our Lord had a true human nature hypostatically united to His Sacred Divinity at the moment of His Incarnation, that is, at the moment of His conception by the power of God the Holy Ghost. He had to have His Theandric soul at that moment, just as His Most Blessed Mother was preserved from all stain of Original and Actual Sin from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception in the womb of her mother, Good Saint Ann.
Pope Pius XI and Abortion
Noting the push of the anti-family movement in the 1920s that had resulted in laws in the United States and the Weimar Republic of Germany favorable to contraception and eugenic sterilization, as well as laws in the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic that permitted surgical abortion-on-demand and in Germany that permitted surgical abortion in cases where a mother's life was said to be endangered, Pope Pius XI wrote the following in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930:
But another very grave crime is to be noted, Venerable Brethren, which regards the taking of the life of the offspring hidden in the mother's womb. Some wish it to be allowed and left to the will of the father or the mother; others say it is unlawful unless there are weighty reasons which they call by the name of medical, social, or eugenic "indication." Because this matter falls under the penal laws of the state by which the destruction of the offspring begotten but unborn is forbidden, these people demand that the "indication," which in one form or another they defend, be recognized as such by the public law and in no way penalized. There are those, moreover, who ask that the public authorities provide aid for these death-dealing operations, a thing, which, sad to say, everyone knows is of very frequent occurrence in some places.
As to the "medical and therapeutic indication" to which, using their own words, we have made reference, Venerable Brethren, however much we may pity the mother whose health and even life is gravely imperiled in the performance of the duty allotted to her by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing with here. Whether inflicted upon the mother or upon the child, it is against the precept of God and the law of nature: "Thou shalt not kill:" The life of each is equally sacred, and no one has the power, not even the public authority, to destroy it. It is of no use to appeal to the right of taking away life for here it is a question of the innocent, whereas that right has regard only to the guilty; nor is there here question of defense by bloodshed agains