It is the best of times. At no other time in human history has there been less war or invasion, plagues or pestilence, slavery or poverty. There has never been more knowledge, education and instant availability of information literally in the pockets and at the fingertips of more people than there is now. We are empowered, free and masters of our own destiny. We are civilised and enlightened and the major problems which plagued humanity for millennia have largely been solved.

But it is the worst of times.

We boast of social progress from the pagan ignorance of slavishly worshipping idols crafted by human hands. Instead, we cast aside the lofty ambition of discovering natural law or objective Truth and claim that the morality of whatever is legislated is derived from the mere authority to legislate it. We are worshipping precedents & laws crafted by human hands as somehow holy or sacred. Regardless of all their other virtues or accomplishments, we pull down statues of slave owners who had the callousness of heart to treat any fellow man as mere property to be acquired or disposed of, ignorant of the infinite worth & inherent dignity of every living human. We stand in condemnation of those who barbarically cast their own babies into the fires of Molech in vain hopes of personal prosperity millennia ago. Discarding the progress of centuries before us, our social enlightenment has not progressed.

Once again we are barbaric, treating certain classes of human life as second class or worse, disposable property. We may not be able to hear the heart-breaking screams of newborn infants in the searing hot hands of a stone idol, but we are a society that deliberately terminates the lives of many, many more unborn children each year. As many living humans as fill the stadium for the AFL Grand Final each year are sacrificed in the sterile abortion clinics of Australia. We enjoy blissful ignorance of the actual procedures used to kill little humans and take comfort that surely no practitioner of the honourable trades of medicine or law would betray our trust in them to do no harm and defend the innocent. We actively censor and ban all knowledge of the fact that children are sliced and diced in the womb before being vacuumed out like garbage, or when more developed, have their skulls crushed and are torn limb from limb before the bloody gore is reassembled on a stainless steel surface to ensure no piece of this new person was left inside her mother.

There is no independent counselling for the poor women or girls who find themselves in incredibly difficult circumstances, no compassion for the numbers of them there without free choice but by the abusive coercion of their partner or parents or rapists. There is no informed consent with full disclosure of the many well documented risks, balanced presentation of the other choices she may prefer, or cooling off period to consider the weight of the consequences of termination of life. We lie without flinching when we call ourselves “pro choice” and offer no funding or encouragement for more than one choice. The manifest truth is we are only pro the abortion choice.

In Queensland, whose unaccountable government is currently railroading the parliament into grossly liberalising abortion, there are about 14,000 children killed every year in abortion clinics and a mere handful, not even a dozen, adopted by the many families desperately wanting a child, offering those unwanted by others a permanent, safe home with them. Qld offers no government support or services to pregnant mothers choosing to permit their babies to live with the choice of adoption. But the bad Jackie Trad abortion bill, already rejected twice and overwhelmingly opposed in polling, petitions and parliamentary submissions, ignores the needed solutions and seeks only to offer more children on the fatal altar of personal autonomy and prosperity.

Our social conscience has buried the objective reality of the science and the ethics which demand acknowledgement that every single successful abortion kills a living human and significantly harms his or her mother. We use confected outrage and evasive language to change the topic and camouflage the facts. We prefer to talk about secondary issues which require us to assume there is only a woman’s body and woman’s rights to be considered. But that assumption is grossly ignorant of the inescapable fact that science conclusively observes that every human life began at conception. From the moment the spark of life occurs, when sperm & egg fuse to create a new person, that embryo is human by species and living by scientific definition. The term fetus is not an escape from the inconvenient reality: its definition acknowledges it is a “little one”. Like a stowaway on a ship at sea, whether the passenger is there with or without permission of the captain of the vessel, the captain has a moral obligation to fulfill her duty of care to that person, little or large, until they can be delivered to a safe harbour.

It is said truly that in this age of information ignorance is a choice. Resources like AbortionProcedures.com fully empower us to be informed about the reality of what really goes on in first, second and third trimester abortions. I challenge you to open your eyes and watch all three and still insist it’s just a woman’s body, a woman’s choice. The lawyers and legislators who scorn the fight for the universal human right to life desperately try to hide the evidence of the humanity being rejected by even denying the mercy of pain relief for the little lives being extinguished in late term abortions, even though at the same stage of development children being operated on in utero would be given anaesthetic.

This article is based on a talk I recently gave to a group of Catholic students in Melbourne. Readers will note that, while pro-life apologetics is important, our spiritual basis must first be very firm before we engage in any form of activism. We must be very certain that God wants us to serve Him in pro-life activism and also be sure of the guiding principles we need to use in this work.