Anyone still doubting whether slopes are in fact slippery either hasn’t been for a walk around Colley Hill in February or has failed to notice the response this week to a 44-year-old woman jailed for taking abortion pills to kill her unborn baby at 32-34 weeks pregnant. The proverbial camel’s nose went under the tent in 1967 and it’s a one piece camel trying to get in. But will we let it?
As Catholics we hold that life begins at conception. The Catholic Church uses the term pre-eminence to describe the highest form of moral truth in a hierarchy of moral truths. It is a term used exclusively for the horror of abortion. Catholics who claim to be pro-life but who want abortion to be legal under the current stipulations are especially heinous since they take the approach of being personally convinced that there is an innocent person hiding behind a tree, but seek not to stop others shooting towards it anyway.
Secular folk may be somewhat less culpable in their support for abortion since they fail to see that life begins at conception. To them the early embryo doesn’t look enough like a human being to trouble their consciences, but as the weeks go by there remains an uneasy worry that abortion might just amount to murder. For this reason, most are comfortable with the law as it is or would prefer to see the term limit reduced.
What this case has revealed is the disconnect between ordinary people who retain some common (natural) sense about human life and extremists who plan to use this tragic case to lobby for removing what the World Health Organisation calls “unnecessary policy barriers such as limits on when during pregnancy abortion can take place”. This Saturday a protest will take place at the Royal Courts of Justice where those who failed Carla and Lily Foster will call for a reform to the law that would remove the 24 week upper limit.
We are now seeing the flower of the seed that was planted almost 60 years ago and it looks a lot like infanticide.
Though there is no appetite in this country to see such a change in law, yet again a loud minority of fanatics are attempting to corral others into adopting the same liberal vision as them. They are following the words of Flannery O’Connor who said:
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax…when it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem is that the people shouting and using startling figures to bring about their vision are not those who truly care for freedom, but those who seek to shackle us in the chains of moral depravity and self-deception. A person of basic decency and intellectual honesty would never approve of abortion, let alone late-term abortion. What has happened and will continue to happen if the ordinary man does not fight back is what Ramesh Ponnuru describes as a “deep corruption of conscience”.
The results of such corruption are becoming clearer each day. Only a deep corruption of conscience could outlaw silent prayer and call for the right to kill babies, criticise religious schools for passing on their faith whilst forcing children by threat of punishment to celebrate bodily mutilation, tear down a national flag and replace it with a flag of pride. People are getting tired of being bullied by these dogmatic bigots, so attached to their cause that they have failed to notice what ordinary people up and down the country have noticed.
“Lily was 8 months old. She was fully formed, sentient, capable of feeling pain,” says Dr Calum Miller, ethicist, philosopher and medical doctor. “She was viable and could have survived outside of the womb. She did not have a disability, her mother’s life was not at risk. She was aborted – killed – at home with no medical supervision. If they listened to the many medical professionals who opposed abortion pills by post for safety reasons, baby Lily might still be alive and her mother might not be in jail. The pro-abortion lobby did this, they are to blame.”
They are tough words but in their truth are more in step with the common man than the lies of the abortion lobbyists. Scores of people are coming out of the woodwork to share stories of their own premature birth and the births of their children. I too have such a testimony as the child of a mother born in 1935 weighing no more than a bag of sugar. In 2008 I discovered that I had a first cousin who had been given up for adoption in 1967 (the year abortion was legalised) by my uncle and aunt who were themselves hippy kids at the time. He has become a journalist with the New York Times (which I don’t hold against him) and wrote a piece about finding his birth parents, which you can read here. In it he said, “I thanked her, as delicately as possible, for letting me live”.
I share these stories, as others have shared theirs, not to make it all about me, but because it is all about me, and you and all of us. Our eyes are not completely closed, our ears are not completely covered. If we don’t want a fanatical minority to dictate the rules, then we have to make our voices heard. We all have skin in this game. Let’s work together to keep the camel out, and as Catholics let’s do all we can to convince our brothers and sisters that his nose has no business under the big tent either.
(Photo: Getty images)
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