The David and Goliath Principle Abortion and Spiritual Warfare David Elliot Originally published in Issue II of Vulgata,  November, 2001.

No generation of people ever wants to believe that their society is decaying like cancer or that unspeakable atrocities are taking place in their very midst.  A feisty clinging to a vague pretence of normality and the idea that everything is O.K. bores itself into our psyches with  mulish, unrelenting stubbornness.  When reports leaked out of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps hinting at the spilling of countless tons of innocent blood, the average European shut his ears incredulously and tried to shoo the whole idea into the woodwork, hoping the problem would simply vanish.  But it did not.  The consequences of Hitler's Germany having lived according to the ethics of a civilization of hyenas are only too well known, and the killing of six million people can never be undone, nor can wishing make it so.
If we take ourselves a little further back into history, to nineteenth century America, we find a nation living off the sweat of black slaves who, like the Jews, had been defined a "non-persons" by those in power.  In the 1857 Dred Scott decision the State argued against the emancipation of blacks, stating that "Although he may have a heart and a brain, and he may be human life biologically, a slave is not a legal person."  And "If you think slavery is wrong, then nobody is forcing you to be a slave-owner.  But don't impose your morality on somebody else!"  And:  "A man has a right to do what he wants with his own property."  Do these three arguments sound eerily familiar?  Far from having been consigned to the dustbin of regrettable history, they have been re-hashed by those favouring the choice to abort unborn babies in the arguments that: 1) Although a fetus may have a brain, a heart, and may be human biologically, it is still not a person.  2) If you think abortion is wrong, then don't have one, but don't shove your morality down other people's throats.  And 3) A woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body.
The devil, as has been rightly observed, does not have a sense of humour!

In each case humanity saw and lived to regret the grisly consequences of the "might makes right" ethic taken to its most insidious outworking.  In each case the State used patent sophistry to arbitrarily redefine exactly who does and who does not meet the criteria of human personhood (always when it would be most convenient to the State for a certain class of people not to be human beings).  But clearly this is dishonest and self-serving, and as lovers of humanity we must do all that we can to avoid such aberrations.  To do this we must begin by asking ourselves: are we to be servants of the Truth (and thus rational) or are we to try to make Truth serve us (and thus be rationalistic).  Honesty leading to justice is the fruit of rationality, but greed leading to victimization is the consequence of rationalization.  If we act out of the former, then we stand in the company of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and other luminaries (all of whom were Pro-life).  But if we act out of the latter, we find ourselves in company with Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mao-Tse Tung, and other monsters (all of whom were anti-life) - so let us choose our sides carefully, because ethics makes the strangest bedfellows of all.

No civilization in human history, even those (like the Phoenicians and the Aztecs) who sacrificed their children to demons, ever denied that the fetus was a human person, any more than it was denied that the infant, the toddler, the adolescent, or the adult were persons.  Each of these was rightly seen to be a different stage in the development of the same human being.  The 20th century, that is, the century which killed more human beings than have ever existed on this planet up until the year 1800, is unique and alone in this claim.  In fact, the only time it became an issue was when the Sexual Revolution hit in the 1960's and a back-up method of birth-control was called for by the titillated to shield them from the natural possibility of conception when contraceptives failed.  The U.S. Supreme Court, under considerable heat from radical feminists and moral liberals, soon declared the unborn baby a "non-person" and revoked the inalienable right to life it had always enjoyed.  The preborn, which for countless thousands of years in every race, culture, state, and religion, had always been considered a human baby, suddenly, in the wake of modernity's desire for it not to be a human baby, was "discovered" to be a mere blob of tissue.  One wonders whether this macabre specimen of conscienceless discrimination somehow gave thinking people's brains the slip or whether a whole generation just found the issue of infanticide too finicky a point to scruple over?  Either way, the only concrete result of these proceedings is that the blood of tens of millions of shredded babies now stains the garbage dumps of North America and we have been left in the wake of a society of sexual vampirism, a culture of death.

The sage pen of Shakespeare says to "Keep your bright swords up or the dew will rust them", and is rust not exactly what we have got?  The Catholic Church in First World countries has been rightly called "the sleeping dragon".  Well, now it is high time for the sleeper to awaken!  Of what use are the sermons of sunshine and upliftment from our Sunday pulpits urging us to neighbourly niceties if we stand idly by, our swords rusting in our sheaths, while millions of unborn children are sacrificed to the god of death each year?  Is that “love thy neighbour”?  How many babies must enter these death camps never to return and never to see the light of day, their precious lives snuffed out like candles in the wind, before we at last rise up and put an end to this evil?  It’s time that we reacquired our sense of moral outrage, that we said "Thus far and no further"!, since the cost of our silence is nothing less than death.

"But we can’t stop abortion" you may say.  "The politicians, educational institutions, and  media are all in the pro-choicers' back pockets".  That may be, but never mind it just the same.  All that means is that we can’t beat it on our own steam, but that’s just how God works.  He waits until it's technically impossible for his people to achieve victory and then he gives them victory anyway, so that no one will doubt that it is by His power that goodness triumphed (call it the David and Goliath principle).  For "It is not by might, it is not by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord" (Zech).  One might also add that it always seems darkest just before dawn, and surely the very paleness on the horizon speaks to us of the return of a blazing Sun?

God has given us our weapons in this war.  We have the Eucharist, the Rosary and other forms of sacrament and prayer.  Above all we have love.  Yes, love.  Not a tinny hocus-pocus of slush and sentimentalism or a romantic idyll of honey-coated emotions.  Not “luv” – pink hearts and longing sighs – but charity, the love that is God, is God.  Charity is the divine power that created the Universe out of nothing, sent Christ to Hell on the Cross for us, and fills our souls with an effervescent zeal to serve God and help neighbour.  We will not beat the culture of death with apologetic lances or toothy activism only, we will only beat it when we become saints.  To do that we must look to the Cross, to the two pieces of timber that lie at the heart of our Faith.  Gandhi said that he knew of no greater mystery in the world than the Cross of Christ, and those of us who are Christian should know that the ultimate solution to evil is written not on paper, but on wood.  If we take up our cross and embrace the mystery of self-giving, self-sacrificial love, we can end the injustice.  To do this, though, we have to roll up our sleeves, burst the bubble of our complacency and carry the torch of the Gospel into the moral ghettoes of the Pornotopia around us – a venture not possible if done by our own pygmy wisdom but one readily achievable if we are yoked to the will of God

There is now such a great need to bring the facts about abortion to Canadians.  In fact, the phalanx of the Pro-life movement in Canada (in my humble opinion) is called “Show the Truth”, and this is precisely what we must do.  Truth is like a lion, and if we will but let it out of its cage, its roar will set the rabblement of ignorance to flight.  Without this knowledge, however, we will not be able to repent and abortion unrepented of will be the skeleton that bursts our closet, since a nation that kills its own babies is a nation without a future.  Pope John Paul, the great Polish Bear, has already told us this, but so far we have been more interested in letting sleeping worms lie than in firing up our hearts to stop endemic injustice.  We mistakenly believe that we need abortion as a back up method of birth control to ensure our sexual "freedom", but this comes from a false definition of freedom as uninhibited indulgence.  Freedom is not the right to do whatever you want - that is just slavery to appetite - freedom is the ability to do what is right, and it exists solely for the sake of love.  It is only by submitting to Truth that we are made free.  If you are still not convinced of this:  try it and find true peace; for yourself, for your family, and for the world.