There have been 10 million abortions in the UK since 1967 and 43 million abortions in the US from Roe-Wade (1973) to 2021. WHO says that around 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide each year. WHO calls abortion a “common health intervention.” It says that six out of ten of all unintended pregnancies end in an induced abortion. Its website makes this statement: “Lack of access to safe, timely, affordable and respectful abortion care is a critical public health and human rights issue.” By “human rights issue” it refers to a supposed right of a woman to abort her child, not the right of the child to live.

We could go on and on about statistics and the euphemistic language in which the issues surrounding abortion is frequently couched by its supporters, and we could wring our hands in horror and outrage in response. We can even berate the politicians and judges who betray the dignity of their office by promoting and defending the fake laws and the fake right to abortion. The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that a feminist in Paris who pretended to abort Jesus on the altar of a Catholic Church during a carol service in 2013 was wrongly convicted of a crime by the French courts, because she was said to have been exercising her freedom of expression.

But St. Paul makes it clear to us in today’s First Reading that, behind all such justifications of objective evil, it is not human beings we are really fighting, be they judges, politicians or medics. Our real enemy are the “the Sovereignties and the Powers who originate the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens.” Human beings have been seduced into thinking that the darkness of abortion is an enlightened expression of personal autonomy. But to cast abortion as a human right is essentially to say that murder is a human right. The darkness, of course, covers the disturbing bluntness of saying that by using smooth equivocations (“reproductive health”, “termination of pregnancy”, etc.), that is lies. In fact, abortion is at root a lie. It’s the denial of the truth of the child’s human existence, the denial of the duty to welcome and protect that life. And because the abortion liars know that to define the foetus as a child is ultimately rooted in God, then the lie becomes exponential and has to either deny God or to deny that God creates life at conception.

The lie is also to deny and eliminate the responsibility of those who conceived the child, however difficult or challenging that may be. It also extends to denying that sexual relations are created by God for the purpose of being open to the new life He may wish to give as their result. The culture of deceit is like a suffocating network of saying no, no, no to the will of God for sex, for marriage, for life and for death. In this question, the darkness originating from the Evil One has hypnotized our culture into the make-believe that we can simply eliminate from reality the will and the power of God so as to replace it with the destructive will and power of man, goaded on by the demonic illusion that he can overrule God himself. And what does Satan want from this: human liberation? human self-fulfilment? human happiness? Of course not! What he wants is human destruction. And the destruction he wants is not first of the child in the womb, because these children are innocent and beyond Satan’s power. What he wants is the destruction of the human beings who promote abortion, whose minds he has darkened and whose souls he wants to enslave to his own rage at God, his own jealousy of God, his own need for God not to exist. The victim of abortion is not primarily the child, but those who promote it as a human right, who deliberately choose it as a sign of modernity and emancipation.

We know, of course, that behind every abortion there is most often a tragic human situation; we know that many women and girls find themselves under duress of one kind or another to go ahead with it. God in his mercy sees that and will judge accordingly, and we must do all we can to help and heal them. But what of the abortion industry, of the political machinery that exalts it and of the judicial institutions which sanction it? What are we to make of a US President who says that, if his party gets the House majority in the forthcoming elections, he will make it his first priority to restore and even enhance the provisions of Roe-Wade by making it the law of the land? What are we to make of the proposal in our own Scotland to jail protesters against abortion for up to eight years because they seek to exercise their freedom of expression to favour life?

Sadly, it has to be said that the darkness originating in the powers of evil appears to have engulfed the minds and hearts of many across the world, whether it be due to political correctness, or to godless ideology, or motivated out of the fear of losing their job or their circle of friends and acquaintances. We seem to have reached the point where no amount of effort to dialogue and discuss, to convince and to beseech has any chance of success. Darkness does not just make people blind, but also deaf.

So, what is left for us to do? Let me paraphrase St. Paul: “Stand your ground, with truth buckled round your waist, and integrity for a breastplate, wearing for shoes on your feet the eagerness to spread the gospel of life and always carrying the shield of faith so that you can use it to put out the burning arrows of the evil one. And then you must accept salvation from God to be your helmet and receive the word of God from the Spirit to use as a sword. Pray all the time, for an end to abortion, for the change of heart of those who promote it, praying in the Spirit on every possible occasion. Never get tired of praying for the mothers and fathers who abort and for those who encourage them; pray for the opportunity to open your mouth and speak without fear in favour of the mystery of life and the gospel of life. Be ambassadors of life and pray for the courage to speak as boldly as you ought to in proclaiming the gospel of life, even if it means being put in chains.”

Truths relating to the beginning and end of human life, of sexuality and marriage and of the maleness and femaleness of human beings are the building blocks put in place by God himself to form the basis of human life and society. Today, these truths are under vicious attack and to they are where the Mystery of Christ’s truth and light needs to be shone most brightly. In His great mercy may that light dispel the darkness which envelopes our times so that human life from conception to natural death may be everywhere respected and defended.