I WAS taught and believed for a long time that what differentiated modern Western European culture from others was its Christian belief in the sanctity of life. This contrast was starkly illustrated by China’s brutal one-child policy, which started in 1980 and ended only in 2016, and then only to move to a two-child policy. The cruelty this inflicted on China’s millions did not bear contemplating. We were different, thank God, so I confidently thought. Today I am not so sure.
In the name of progress and personal autonomy this most fundamental of principles is step by step being abandoned by the West. Despite free and accessible contraception, designed to prevent unwanted babies or the need for abortion, abortion numbers have continued to rise and rise, even after the advent of the morning-after pill. In short, abortion has come to be an accepted and routine method of stopping pregnancy.
This has been accompanied by ever further demands to decriminalise abortion, and now in its totality. Extreme feminists and abortion rights advocates – most notably Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton who in 2016 campaigned for the ‘unqualified right’ to abortion which included ‘partial birth’ abortion – the right to late gestation or ‘abortion to term’ (euphemisms for killing a baby on the brink of being born) built into the law.
Despite the best efforts of the pro-life movement the United States is already an international outlier in allowing abortion more than halfway through pregnancy, putting it in the insalubrious company of North Korea and China.
Now the US state of Maryland has introduced a Bill that will in effect decriminalise neglecting newborns to death. Yes, you read that right. What this Bill would mean, set out in all its horror in a recent article in the National Review, is that a baby who survived an abortion could be left to die with no investigation and no penalty. It also effectively decriminalises death by neglect for the first 28 days of life without regard to abortion.
Further, to ensure that all this can proceed unhindered and without consequences, the Bill would authorise those ‘illegally investigated for causing babies to die by neglect to bring civil lawsuits’.
To me this represents a total corruption of Western thought and values. What morally is the difference between allowing people to kill babies – which is what this is – and instructing it? The effect is similarly brutalising, degrading and corrupting.
We have to pray that this Bill will be comprehensively rejected.
You can read the full article here.
