Voice of the Family

A LAY INITIATIVE FORMED TO DEFEND

CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

Religion and the abortion campaign (3)

By Ann Farmer   |   2 July 2025

This is the fourth of a twelve-part series, which began with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (1).

The driving force behind abortion is population control, an attack on the Biblical injunction “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28); and although the atheistic Karl Marx was a fervent anti-Malthusian, Western Marxists no longer oppose population control, provided it is presented as “the right to choose”. Christ taught that “the meek shall inherit the earth” — a truly radical pledge, and a challenge to the Darwinistic privileging of the strongest; meanwhile the Marxist, while making a similar although secular pledge, believes that the meek are exploited by Christianity, which encourages them to postpone their just rewards to a fabled afterlife. Marxists believe the meek should instead be encouraged to overthrow an oppressive capitalist system, but when in the mid-20th century the appalling outcomes of Communism in Eastern Europe became all-too-visible, and the Western working classes lost faith in the heaven-on-earth promised by Communist collectivism, Western Marxists lost their faith in what had been seen as the “inevitable” revolution. Instead of relying on the masses to overthrow capitalism, they turned to overthrowing the masses, distracting from the crimes of Communism by critiquing the “crimes” of the capitalist system — much easier to do in a democracy than under Communism, where freedom of speech is non-existent.

More recently, Western cultural Marxists have put their faith in “diversity”: relentlessly emphasising the “oppression” of various minorities; this approach could be seen as an implied criticism of “the tyranny of the majority” as against the claimed “equality” of communism. The “majority” is of course the foundational idea of democracy, and in fact the Communist ruling classes enjoy privileges not shared by the ruled classes, who are all equally poor. Such ideas have fed into “wokeness”, an outlook embraced with religious fervour but with all the hallmarks of a heresy, since the “woke” emphasis on “pride” and “self”, while seemingly aimed at liberating “the meek”, instead enslaves them to their own weaknesses and the whims of the strongest.

Another movement seemingly captured by cultural Marxism is environmentalism, a movement originating in right-wing thinking in the early twentieth century and strongly influenced by eugenics population control.1 After the Holocaust, and with the forced sterilisation of the poor in India and elsewhere, population control became controversial on the Left;2 but the 1960s and 1970s brought terrifying predictions about food and natural resources “running out” by the year 2000. When these warnings failed to materialise, attention switched to terrifying predictions about global warming; and when these failed to materialise, to terrifying predictions about climate change.3 Throughout, human beings have been portrayed as an existential threat to the planet, with (demonstrably untrue) warnings about wildlife “running out”.4

Once again, population control has emerged, despite the fact that worldwide, birth rates are declining as women postpone childbearing, aided by contraception and abortion; the rise in population is chiefly the result of people living longer,5 the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. The UN — the “trusted brand” for human rights — has led the way, most recently by promoting “comprehensive sexuality education” to children, with its emphasis on non-reproductive sex. Coupled with “progressive” calls for “the right to die”. To Chesterton this approach recalled “the madness of the Manicheans” in which suicide was seen as “good because it is a sacrifice”, and “sexual perversion” as good “because it produces no life.”6

Marxists, although still wary of overt population control, have thrown their weight behind the “green” religion in order, seemingly, to highlight the “damage” done by capitalism to the Planet; indeed, one commentator has described environmental activists as “watermelons”: “green” on the outside, “red” on the inside.7

While Christians would maintain that as God’s creation, our earthly home should be protected and respected, few would argue that for this reason, God’s innocent creation, the unborn child, should be sacrificed. But with the earth itself apparently under threat, “green” ideas have gained traction; for many, “Planet worship” has replaced orthodox religion. Exporting “family planning” has acquired a virtuous sheen, justifying Western intervention in poor countries, their social affairs and their resources, because after all it’s “our world” — and more ours than theirs. Interestingly, eugenicist Malcolm Potts blamed “Christendom” for the post-War “population explosion” and the much-maligned British Empire for preventing the spread of birth control, “because as colonial rulers it prohibited, rather than assisted, family planning”; Potts insisted that abortion be available in the developing world to give couples “choice”; that birth control could precede development and bring down birth rates.8 Now, neo-colonialistic population control has full left-wing approval, providing it is presented as “female empowerment”. Under the not-so-new religion of “the planet”, the new fascists of Left and Right, with anti-Christian support, will ensure that the poor and the meek never do “inherit the earth”.

The pro-life movement is authentically supportive of the poor and weak, and while enjoying significant input from secularand Jewish groups,9 it is predominantly Christian in composition. The atheistic promoters of abortion, while happy for prominent Christians like Joe Biden to erroneously claim that abortion is in line with Christian teaching, are also happy to stigmatise opponents of abortion as “religious extremists”; meanwhile, the extremism of the anti-religious agenda — and abortion itself — remain unexamined by the opinion-forming classes and the uncurious mainstream media.

In a post-Christian society, the secular mindset no longer regards most sexual acts and lifestyles as immoral, the crucial question being whether they are legal; in the year after abortion was legalised, campaigners Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms — also historians of the abortion movement — acknowledged that illegal abortion had not been widely practiced, and that legal abortion was not instantly embraced, stating: “In shifting the balance from illegal to legal, medical termination of pregnancy will also cross the line from unethical to ethical, and from generally not done to generally acceptable.”10 This thinking explains the long-running campaign against laws governing public morality. In the humanist view, if acts are legal, they are acceptable; “positive” laws — as opposed to “natural law” — can mean whatever their framers want them to mean.11 But as with underage sexual relationships, even if certain things are still illegal, the law is simply ignored — until, presumably, it can be argued that “public opinion” has “moved on”, and that the law should “keep up” with it. Ignoring the law in this particular case has been encouraged and even facilitated by the State, most notoriously in the decades-long, country-wide scandal of organised sexual abuse of underage girls, underpinned by state provision of abortion — a scandal still ongoing.12

At the other end of life, when suicide was de-criminalised in 1961, assisted suicide remained illegal; arguably, this “strict safeguard” enabled the passage of the law, and the campaign driving the latest attempt to legalise it, which may well succeed where previous attempts have failed, has relied heavily on implying that to die a natural death is undignified and often painful. Morality has been trumped by legality;13 for “practical” and “compassionate” reasons, in going from illegal to legal, abortion has gone from plain wrong to a right. As will be seen regarding the Sexual Revolution, post-Christian paganism, with its emphasis on “Do what thou wilt”, has transmuted into a kind of Satanic enmity against virtue, innocence and human helplessness: while having pretensions of compassion, it begins with freedom and ends with death, going from liberty to coercion, from choice to eugenics. Unsurprisingly, self-declared Satanists are now claiming abortion as a sacrament in their “religion”, and have even opened their own abortion “service”.14

Sex itself has become a religion to some, and interestingly, the market in personal hygiene products has exploded alongside a decline in the age-old religious desire to be cleansed from moral impurity; tellingly, however, that other new religion, the worship of “health and safety”, does not extend to sexual relations — apart, that is, from preventing the “risk” of new life.

We may sometimes feel that the Christian worldview is dying — indeed, some reports in recent years seem to support this view, and although its decline is clearly connected to the deliberate side-lining of Christian teaching in schools,15 it seems that the old blasphemy law was abolished,16 only to be replaced by new (unwritten) blasphemy laws against “woke” priorities, including silently praying for an end to abortion and/or offering humane alternatives to needy pregnant mothers. But as Chesterton observed, although Christianity’s end has often been forecast, reports of its death are always premature, “for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave”.17 Modern secular religion simply leads to the grave, with no prospect of anything beyond; and as long as Christians continue to promote justice, peace and life, their message of hope over despair will triumph over the doom-laden message of secular hopelessness.

According to the feminist narrative, however, the abortion campaign pioneers fought bravely against “Church and State” in demanding “the right to choose”, struggling against the anachronistic but powerful and misogynistic Catholic Church and its “useful idiots”, the lay Catholics who, they claimed, were mere “slaves of superstition”. But in an age in which, as historical eugenics becomes increasingly controversial, the eugenics beliefs of certain left-wing individuals are excused because such ideas were merely “of their time”, it is interesting that in 1930, the “outdated” Catholic Church roundly condemned eugenics,18 well before the eugenics extermination programme of the Nazis.

Nearly a century later, the timeless teaching of the Church still compares favourably to that of the secular world; but while some now worship sex, the environment and diversity, “scientism” has become a new religion for others, with adherents claiming that the Church has always been “against science” — as usual, against actual historical evidence of the religious influence on scientific developments — not least, Gregor Mendel’s on genetics.19 And while continually admonishing us to “follow the science”, the self-defined “scientists” ignore science regarding the biological differences between male and female, the reality of the declining birth rate and, most especially, the humanity of the unborn, leading to aborted babies being flushed into the sewers and children being surgically mutilated in line with the religion of sexual diversity.

In contrast, the Church continues to hold human life and human sexuality sacred, and moreover insists that the protection of innocent human life is vital to civil society, stating in the Catechism: “The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation”.20 A world that is not safe for the unborn and indeed the newly born is a world that is not safe for anyone. One does not have to be Catholic and to believe in Original Sin to appreciate the effects on our uncivil society of withdrawing protection from the innocent — one need only glance at the daily news.

This series will continue next month with “The politics of abortion (1).”

Notes

  1. See: Bramwell, A., Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1989). ↩︎
  2. See: Greer, G., Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (London: Picador, 1984); Kasun, J., The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles2/RayEugenics.php ↩︎
  3. See: Booker, C., The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with ‘climate change’ turning out to be the most costly blunder in history? (London/New York: Continuum, 2009). ↩︎
  4. Crockford, S. J., Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception (Library and Archives of Canada, 2022). ↩︎
  5. Regarding UN Population Projections, see: https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/un-population-projections-see-global-fertility-decline/
    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext
    https://mercatornet.com/23-countries-will-lose-half-their-populations-by-2100/65204/
    In 2022, statistics in the UK revealed a future population composed of fewer children than older people, with serious implications for the nation’s tax revenue and consequently expenditure on health, education and pensions. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationprojections/bulletins/nationalpopulationprojections/2020basedinterim
    In 2021 the UK faced a ‘baby shortage’ as the total fertility rate per woman fell to half of post-War levels – from 1.58 in England and Wales, down from a post-War rate of 2.93, while Scotland’s decline was even sharper, declining to 1.29. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/09/21/uk-facing-baby-shortage-as-fertility-rate-falls/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20210921
    In 2019, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that nearly half of women turning 30 were childless; in comparison, 38 per cent of their mothers’ generation and just over one-fifth for their grandmothers’ generation (born in 1961 and 1934 respectively) were childless at age 30; separately published ONS figures showed that the average age of first-time mothers ‘hit a record high’; according to Amanda Sharfman of the ONS’s Centre for Ageing and Demography, commenting on the latest figures: ‘“Average completed family size has been falling since the cohort of women born in 1935 and has been below two children since the late Fifties cohorts”’; following a low point of an average of 1.89 children born to women from the previous two years’ cohorts, ‘“we see a slight rise to 1.92 for women born in 1974. We continue to see a delay in childbearing, with nearly half of the women who were born in 1989 remaining childless by their 30th birthday compared to one in five in their grandmothers’ generation.”’ She added that ‘“with women born in 1995 showing lower levels of fertility in their 20s compared with previous cohorts”’, the ‘“fertility patterns of women born more recently indicate that this trend is likely to continue”’ (‘Half of women turning 30 are now childless, says survey’, Telegraph, December 5, 2020). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/04/almost-half-women-turned-30-last-year-childless-ons-finds/
    This was in the context of a worldwide population decline. https://www.lifenews.com/2021/05/24/world-experiencing-massive-population-decline-ghost-cities-closed-maternity-wards-empty-schools/] but the emphasis continues to be on controlling births, an approach favoured by wealthy “philanthropists”,[https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/why-is-bill-gates-so-obsessed-with-abortion-and-contraception-it-started-with-his-father/ ↩︎
  6. Chesterton, G. K., “Why I am a Catholic” (first published in Twelve Modern Apostles and their Creeds (1926), reprinted in the Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. III (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), in The Chesterton Review, Vol. XLVIII, Nos. 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2022, p. 332. ↩︎
  7. See: Delingpole, J., Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your children’s Future (London: Biteback Publishing, 2011/2012). ↩︎
  8. Potts, M., Selman, P., Society and Fertility (Plymouth, Devon: Macdonald and Evans, 1979), p. 311. ↩︎
  9. https://secularprolife.org/blog/
    https://jewishprolifefoundation.org/
    https://www.liveaction.org/news/jewish-pro-life-foundation-abortion-anti-jewish/ ↩︎
  10. Hindell, K., Simms, M., ‘How the Abortion Lobby Worked’, Political Quarterly, Vol.39, 1968, pp. 269-270. ↩︎
  11. John Horvatt II, ‘Why the Left Hates and Is Terrified by Natural Law’, Tradition, Family, Property, May 1, 2023. https://www.tfp.org/why-the-left-hates-and-is-terrified-by-natural-law/?PKG=TFPE3076 See: Finnis, J., Natural Law And Natural Rights (Clarendon Law) (Clarendon Law Series) (USA: Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩︎
  12. See: Woodhouse, S., Just a Child: Britain’s Biggest Child Abuse Scandal Exposed (Chichester: Bonnier Books Ltd., 2018). https://www.gbnews.uk/news/revealed-senior-rotherham-councillors-knew-and-stayed-silent-about-towns-grooming-gangs-scandal-exclusive-in-depth-investigation/439769
    https://gript.ie/telford-how-pc-culture-prolonged-the-sex-abuse-of-british-girls/?ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_17_2022_13_19_COPY_01) ↩︎
  13. “A fundamental (and faulty) premise of liberalism is that people should do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. Under these conditions, all legal acts, whether virtues or vices, are considered morally neutral — one having just as much value as another. Liberalism may have other economic and political manifestations, but the ultimate goal is to create a man-centered culture that maximizes individual freedom.” (John Horvat II, “The Death of Live-and-Let-Live Liberalism”, Tradition, Family, and Property). ↩︎
  14. Micaiah Bilger, “Satanic Temple Opens New Abortion Clinic to Kill Babies in Ritualistic Abortions”, Lifenews, February 1, 2023. ↩︎
  15. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, in delivering the keynote speech at the 50th anniversary of the Religious Education Council, “stressed the importance” of Religious Education, saying that it is ‘“the one place in the curriculum’ where young people can discuss their ‘philosophical, religious, and moral’ questions” (“Children’s Commissioner for England calls for better support for RE in schools”, Premier Christian News, May 4, 2023). ↩︎
  16. In England and Wales, the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. ↩︎
  17. See: G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1922). ↩︎
  18. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, Paras. 68-71. ↩︎
  19. See: Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon Books Ltd., 2017); Sheldrake, R., The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (London: Coronet, 2020). ↩︎
  20. See: Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon Books Ltd., 2017); Sheldrake, R., The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (London: Coronet, 2020). ↩︎

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