The slaughter of the innocents in Ukraine and Europe
16 March 2022
by Roberto de Mattei
The war that the Russian President Putin has waged in the heart of Europe is intensifying with its burden of pain and death.
The Corriere della Sera of 10 March dedicated its first page to the destruction of the Mariupol hospital, showing maternity and paediatric wards bombed by the Russians. The images of the effects of the missile operation were tragically articulate. Videos were shared in WhatsApp, Telegram and Viper groups. The shockwaves caused by the missiles went through the hospital from side to side, the walls were demolished, the rooms devastated, cots and beds thrown everywhere. Not all patients died, but one can imagine what it means to survive in such conditions. Many women were in hospital so as not to risk giving birth underground, without a doctor to assist them; however, the maternity ward also became a target for bombing.
Why is the world moved by this? Because those affected are civilians, who are innocent victims of the war; and among these victims, the weakest and most innocent are children. Children carry the memory of previous generations in their blood and, in their eyes, the hope of a future that cannot be seen yet. It is therefore right that the world is moved. But why is the world not moved by the millions of children who are victims of abortion every year all over the world? These children are also innocent victims, but neither Corriere della Sera, nor any other newspaper, dedicates the front page to them. On the contrary, on 9 March, the World Health Organisation (WHO) asked to make it easier for women to access abortion and family planning services. On 19 January, at the plenary assembly of the European Parliament, the French president Emmanuel Macron called for abortion to be included in the European Constitutional Treaty. On 8 March, the Mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, ordered the removal of posters of the association Pro Vita, simply because the slogan of the billboard campaign was: “Power to women? Let them be born.”
Abortion is the killing of an innocent human, now legalised by the state. In Italy, the estimated number of victims since 22 May 1978, the day of the approval of the abortion law, exceeds six million. Six million little human beings who have not been allowed to see the light because they have been dismembered or poisoned in the womb of their mothers, by their own mothers, with the authorisation and support of the state. In what capacity do politicians, newspapers, intellectuals who are in favour of abortion protest against the atrocities against children committed in Mariupol?
This incoherence does not justify either the bombing of civilians or the Russian invasion, which is an act of aggression against a sovereign state and is therefore an unjust war, in all its expressions. It should also be remembered that Russia is the first country in the world to have completely legalised abortion in 1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, and it is still a country that recognises abortion as a woman’s right. Abortion is still a social scourge in Russia, even though Putin has tried to curb it to increase population growth. Stalin did so before him in 1936. The Russian president, like Stalin, understood that abortion is not compatible with a policy of imperial expansion, even through war, and Putin has planned a future of war for his country and for Europe. But war is the punishment of the peoples who choose to self-destruct, violating the natural law. The road that is being travelled today by both Russia and the West leads to war, not peace, because no true peace can be established without respect for the natural order. This order, willed by God, requires always and in every case, the protection of innocent human life.