12\/20\/2010 – Hilary White –
\nLegal abortion is \u201cthe single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life\u201d and its proliferation will exact an as-yet unknown social price for the countries that have adopted it, said Lord Nicholas Windsor, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe granting to ourselves of the right wantonly to kill, each year, millions of our offspring at the beginning of their lives: This is the question of questions for Europe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe practice of abortion is a mortal wound in Europe\u2019s heart, in the center of Hellenic and Judeo-Christian culture.\u201d <\/p>\n
With legal abortion all but ubiquitous, Lord Windsor wrote in the U.S. religious journal First Things, mothers have the power of the emperor\u2019s over the lives of their children: \u201cCaesar\u2019s thumb is up, or Caesar\u2019s thumb is down. And when it comes to exporting this idea, we do it with zeal and determination through such institutions as the United Nations and the European Union.\u201d<\/p>\n
He asks what the ultimate cost to a society that has \u201cplaced this fearful act at its center – consciously approving, even celebrating, its own most egregious moral failing\u201d will be.<\/p>\n
The great irony, he said, is that Europe\u2019s highly \u201crights\u201d conscious political and social atmosphere, \u201cis in favor of one of the gravest and most egregious abuses of human rights that human society has ever tolerated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDidn\u2019t Europeans think they could never and must never kill again on an industrial scale?\u201d<\/p>\n
Lord Windsor points to the reduction of poverty in the 1st world, the growth of women\u2019s and minority rights, the end of colonialism and the relatively peaceful end to the Cold War, but says the threat of abortion has \u201ctaken us unawares\u201d and overshadowed these accomplishments. Even the threat of Islamist terrorism does not qualify as so deep an \u201cexistential\u201d threat as abortion.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll else that we concern ourselves with in the lives of human beings derives from the inescapable fact that first we must have human lives with which to concern ourselves.\u201d In disregarding the right of the unborn to be born, he said, \u201chumanity\u2019s deepest instincts are trampled and shattered.\u201d<\/p>\n
Windsor compared abortion to slavery as a great moral and social evil that calls for a \u201cnew abolitionism for Europe\u201d before it is too late. Britain\u2019s birth rate is higher than most European countries, but remains below replacement level at 1.9 children born per woman. Recent statistics have shown, however, that the country has one of the highest rates of abortion in the EU, especially among younger women.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a historically unprecedented cascade of destruction wrought on individuals: on sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, future spouses and friends, mothers and fathers – destroyed in the form of those to whom we owe, quite simply and certainly, the greatest solidarity and duty of care because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Windsor is the cousin of Queen Elizabeth and had been 27th in line of succession for the British throne. He made headlines in 2001 when he was received into the Catholic Church. British law still prohibits a Catholic from becoming king or queen. He studied theology at Oxford University and is patron of the Right to Life Charitable Trust.<\/p>\n
A century ago, he said, nearly global legal abortion was no more than an \u201cimplausible glimmer\u201d in the eye of the most progressive of social activists. Now, abortion is so \u201cdeeply embedded\u201d in the political and social life of Western nations, it is almost invisible as a political issue in Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven mentioning it has become the first taboo of the culture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For most people in Europe, abortion \u201cimpinges little\u201d on the public mind. This \u201chardening of consciences\u201d was the result of a deliberate campaign of propaganda that has gradually enforced \u201ca conformism that fears to question what is said to be a settled issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Legal abortion has been chosen and maintained, he said, for the \u201cbenefits\u201d that it has created: \u201cSo much else can be chosen in a given life if the option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably available. So many intoxicating freedoms are newly established, if only abortion is never again denied to women and to men.\u201d<\/p>\n
HT: LifeSiteNews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 12\/20\/2010 – Hilary White – Legal abortion is \u201cthe single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life\u201d and its proliferation will exact an as-yet unknown social price for the countries that have adopted it, said Lord Nicholas Windsor, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, this month. \u201cThe granting to ourselves of the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[85,43,72,15,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-abortion","category-family","category-leftism","category-moral-issues","category-sanctity-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}