The horrible crime of abortion

On March 4, 2024, France became the first country in the world to explicitly enshrine in its Constitution the right to abortion—in other words, the right to kill a defenceless human being — after a vote of 780 parliamentarians (deputies and senators) in favour and 72 against. On this occasion, French President Emmanuel Macron declared: "France has today become the only country in the world whose Constitution explicitly protects abortion (or the 'right to voluntary termination of pregnancy,' as they say in France) in all circumstances, and we will not rest until this promise is fulfilled everywhere in the world."

Today, abortion is trivialised, as if it were a simple, benign surgical operation. And yet... In the eyes of God, to declare the freedom to kill one's child as a right is certainly a crime that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, and entails great punishments for countries that allow it.

For those who still have doubts about the violence and horrific crime that is abortion, here is the testimony of Abby Johnson, the former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas for eight years, who left her job in 2009 and became a pro-life activist after seeing how an abortion was carried out. Her memoir, Unplanned, has been adapted into a film in 2019:

On September 26, 2009, Abby was asked by a doctor to attend an ultrasound-monitored abortion. The procedure was performed on a woman who was 13 weeks pregnant. Abby watched the screen as the baby fought for its life and tried to move away from the instruments used by the doctor. At that moment, she knew she could no longer pretend that this was not a human life.

"When the doctor came in, he told me, to my great surprise, that it would be safer if he could see what he was doing when he performed an operation. He said he would show me what an ultrasound-guided abortion looked like. My job would be to hold the probe over the woman's abdomen so that the doctor could, in his words, "visualize his target".

"The doctor began the procedure. He inserted the suction tube, which had not yet been switched on. When he touched the baby, the baby gasped; it began to move and gesticulate its arms and legs, trying to move away from the suction. I stood there, stunned and incredulous. I saw this child dismembered in its mother's womb. I'll never forget what the doctor said next, "Beam me up Scotty." The last thing I saw was a spine twirling around in the mother's womb before succumbing to the force of the suction.

"The screen went black, and I knew the abortion was over. I had just witnessed a death. I had just witnessed a human response, that survival reflex that exists in all of us. I realised at that moment that Planned Parenthood had lied to me (by letting me believe that the unborn child was not a human being, but just a mass of cells, and that abortion was therefore not the murder of an innocent child)."

These were the words of Saint Teresa of Calcutta in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1979, when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize:

"The greatest destroyer of peace today is the cry of the innocent unborn child. For if a mother can murder her own child in her womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other? Even in the Scripture it is written: "Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you, I have carved you in the palm of my hand." (Isaiah 49:15-16.)

"But today millions of unborn children are being killed. And we say nothing. In the newspapers you read numbers of this one and that one being killed, this being destroyed, but nobody speaks of the millions of little ones who have been conceived to the same life as you and I, to the life of God, and we say nothing; we allow it…

"And so today, let us here make a strong resolution: we are going to save every little child, every unborn child, give them a chance to be born. And what we are doing, we are fighting abortion by adoption, and the good God has blessed the work so beautifully that we have saved thousands of children, and thousands of children have found a home where they are loved, they are wanted, they are cared… Today, I ask His Majesties here before you, all who come from different countries, let us all pray that we have the courage to stand by the unborn child, and give the child an opportunity to love and to be loved, and I think with God's grace we will be able to bring peace in the world."