I just returned from a prayer rally at the abortion clinic where late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart started today. Hundreds of pro-lifers from around the area came out to witness to the sanctity of human life and to expose the evil practices of this abortionist to the local community. Local clergy from many Christian traditions came to lead us in prayer and to stand for life. I was especially proud that about half of our county’s Catholic homeschooling group was in attendance.

My wife, who has prayed the Rosary in front of this clinic almost every Friday for the past four years, was asked to speak at the rally. She has been begging God to shut down this clinic for years and when she first heard that Carhart was coming, her initial reaction was to wonder if God was hearing her prayers. But she quickly realized that this might be exactly how God works a miracle: by Carhart coming, now everyone in the community knows about the clinic and many are outraged and want it to be shut down. After she was finished speaking, Reverend Patrick Mahoney, a national pro-life leader who organized today’s rally, said, “Thank you for your service Suzan – and now the cavalry’s coming!”

One of the interesting things about today’s rally is that it was discovered that the board which supervises the office complex in which the clinic resides was having their regularly scheduled meeting at the same time as the rally. There are businesses in the office complex who are outraged that this barbaric practice is taking place there, and many other businesses just don’t like that there will be controversy there, which is bad for business. Hopefully today’s rally let them know what a bad idea it is to have an abortion clinic as one of their businesses – both morally and economically.

Please pray that there will be a constant and large pro-life presence at this clinic until it is finally shut down.

Some pictures from the rally:

Pro-lifers listen to the speakers

Pro-life leaders speak to the rally

Lining the sidewalk in front of the clinic

Hundreds pray in front of Carhart's clinic

To follow the efforts to stop Carhart’s Maryland practice, go to www.kickoutcarhart.com.

The other day I noted that notorious late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart will begin performing late-term abortions in Maryland starting next week. I noted that “late-term” usually refers to any abortion after 20 weeks. But how late in a pregnancy will Carhart and other abortionists perform abortions? This can be a confusing question to answer – even my original post incorrectly stated that only a very few abortionists performs abortions after 20 weeks.

Over the years, many publications, both pro-life and mainstream, have noted that there are very few abortionists who perform late-term abortions. Usually, three men are mentioned: George Tiller of Kansas (now deceased), LeRoy Carhart of Nebraska, and Warren Hern of Colorado. Sometimes also Martin Haskell of Ohio will be mentioned, as he is the man who popularized the gruesome D&X abortion procedure known as “partial-birth abortion”. However, this small number of men, as GetReligion recently noted, seems to conflict with the reality:

I had happened to read a link to a much more recent survey than the 2001 cited by Stein in his reports last year. It appeared at the pro-life news site LifeNews. It cited a 2008 report, based on 2005 data, from The Guttmacher Institute. That institute used to be Planned Parenthood’s research arm, although it’s now independent of the country’s largest abortion provider. Anyway, the 2008 study indicates that they found 1,787 abortion doctors. Only 20 percent offer abortions after 20 weeks gestation, and only 8 percent offer abortions after 24 weeks. I think the earliest a baby has survived is around 21 weeks gestation…

So that means that some 350 doctors perform abortions after 20 weeks and more than 140 perform after 24 weeks.

What is even more confusing is that media reports suggest that Carhart himself doesn’t perform abortions after 24 weeks. An article this week in the Baltimore Sun noted,

In a 2009 interview with Newsweek, [Carhart] said that he does not perform elective abortions past 24 weeks into a pregnancy, when a fetus has a good chance of survival.

So, what is the truth? Do only a handful of abortionists perform late-term abortions, or do hundreds? Does Carhart perform the later late-term abortions, or doesn’t he? As is usual in the abortion debate, getting to the truth means translating euphemisms and digging deeper than most mainstream media reports will dig.

The reality is that Carhart and Hern (and Tiller before his death) are willing to do abortions throughout the full term of a pregnancy, even into the third trimester (i.e. after 28 weeks). Most abortionists who perform late-term abortions will only do them during the second trimester, often making their cut-off around 26 weeks. But Carhart and Hern have no such restrictions. This statement might seem to contradict the quote from the Baltimore Sun above, but we need to look at it more closely:

In a 2009 interview with Newsweek, [Carhart] said that he does not perform elective abortions past 24 weeks into a pregnancy, when a fetus has a good chance of survival.

Note the word “elective”. What that means is that Carhart will perform abortions up to 24 weeks for no reason at all – just ask for it, and he’ll perform it. However, Carhart’s website states that he offers:

Providing:

Medical Abortions

• Elective Surgical 1st and 2nd Trimester Abortions up to viability
• Advanced Gestation Abortions for Maternal and Fetal Indications

Note the second type of abortion he provides: “Advanced Gestation Abortions for Maternal and Fetal Indications”. What does that sentence mean? It means that he will provide abortions at “advanced gestation”, i.e. the third trimester, as long as there is a reason. But what kind of reason would be accepted as legitimate? That is all based on the judgement of the abortionist himself, which in practice means any reason at all is acceptable.

If the child has Downs Syndrome, that would be a “fetal indication”, thus justifying a third-trimester abortion. If the mother has a health risk from the pregnancy, that would be a “maternal indication” justifying an abortion after 28 weeks. In fact, if the mother felt that she was not able to have a baby, that too could be a “maternal indication” that Carhart could use to abort a baby in the third-trimester of pregnancy. In other words, Carhart will perform abortions throughout a pregnancy for any reason – or no reason – whatsoever. This sets him apart from even the vast majority of late-term abortionists. (And note that Maryland has one of the most permissive abortion laws in the country, so all of this is “legal”).

If you live in the DC area, please consider coming to a prayer vigil and protest being held at Carhart’s new abortion facility in Germantown, MD on Monday, December 6th (Carhart’s first day on the job and the feast of St. Nicholas – the patron of children) at 11am. Contact me if you want further details.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!
St. Nicholas, pray for us!

Most pro-lifers know that Roe v. Wade made abortion legal throughout the 40 weeks of pregnancy in this country. What many pro-lifers don’t know is that there are very, very few doctors who will perform late-term abortions, which is typically defined as abortions after 20 weeks. [Update: see this post.] George Tiller was one of the few, but he was killed last year. Another is LeRoy Carhart, who is based in Nebraska and tried unsuccessfully to revive Tiller’s Wichita practice. He has recently run into problems in Nebraska, as they have implemented a law to make late-term abortions illegal.

In response Carhart has announced that he will be opening two late-term abortion clinics in Iowa and the Washington, D.C. area.

The D.C. clinic will be in Germantown, MD – only minutes from my house. Carhart will be using an existing abortion clinic – Reproductive Health Services – for his practice. For the past few years my wife has organized the only prayer group that goes to this clinic to protest, and usually that group only consists of her and my five children. I hope and pray that more people will now join her to plead with heaven to stop this barbaric practice from continuing here in the D.C. area.

If you are interested in joining her in praying regularly in front of this place of murder, please let me know.

What an amazing story. This is faith in action (and note that he makes only $180/month!):

There are many Catholic families out there who are adopting children in danger of abortion – please consider helping them by donating to Little Flowers Foundation.

H/t: Byzantine, TX

One of the biggest battles in the war against legalized abortion is breaking down the walls of euphemisms and secrets regarding this horrific procedure. Very rarely in the abortion debate does anyone actually talk about abortion itself. Too many people think of abortion as simply one political issue among many; as such, it is often included in discussions as innocuous as beautifying local parks or educating children. Yet every abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent baby.

Back in 1992 a pro-life Indiana man named Michael Bailey discovered that federal law mandates that TV stations must air the ads of any candidate for Congress, no matter what those ads show. Believing that many people were “pro-choice” because they didn’t recognize the great evil of abortion, Bailey decided to run for Congress in order to show pictures of aborted babies on television. Surprisingly, he won the Republican primary and gained national notice for his campaign (he ultimately lost the general election in a landslide).

Even more surprisingly, that law has not changed in the intervening years. So another pro-lifer is running for Congress, this time in Washington, DC, in order to use this law to allow her to run TV ads depicting unborn babies who have been killed by abortion. Considering that in DC more pregnancies end in abortion than birth, this education of the reality of abortion is of vital importance. (Interesting side-note: YouTube is under no such constraints to allow such ads, and they have banned them from their site).

Here are the ads:

It has been shown over the years that when women see pictures of this nature they are more likely to choose life for their children. Please pray that hearts are converted and babies saved because of these commercials.

Note: I have no idea who Missy Smith is or her stand on all the issues. This post is not an overall endorsement of her candidacy, just support for letting the truth about abortion become known far and wide.

The latest line of battle in the war against unborn life is to discredit crisis pregnancy centers and to place onerous regulations on them in an effort to shut them down. Fortunately, some pro-lifers are doing something about it. A friend sent me this information about a worthy organization:

The Vitae Foundation (Vitae) is a not-for-profit, tax deductible organization focused on using research-based educational messaging to restore the sanctity of human life value as a core belief in the American culture.  A key tool of the Vitae strategy is to use mass media to distribute its educational messages (television, radio, buses, subways, billboards, internet, etc.)  Since its inception, Vitae has used mass media in over thirty states and seventy media markets as well as several foreign countries.  Vitae is willing to offer assistance to groups and organization that wish to “partner” in joint ventures to support the culture of life.

Vitae was founded by Carl Landwehr from Jefferson City, MO.  Since we are bombarded with messages in the media all day long, he wanted to find a way to brand “Life.”  He contracted a very successful consumer psychologist, Dr. Charles Kenny, to study what motivates the abortion-minded woman.  This led to the research results entitled, “Abortion – The Least of Three Evils.”  It was from this research that Paul Swope based his article in “First Things.”

I have attached the research of Dr. Kenny (Abortion_-_The_Least_of_Three_Evils) and the First_Things_Article.

I also attached a copy of the bus posters in the DC buses.  There are currently 4,400 posters in 200 buses in DC.  We hope to have the same posters in Baltimore by the end of October –please pray!  Vitae also just ran a subway campaign in New York City; it generated over 8000 calls and over 4000 “turn around’s.”  Chris Slattery came to report these statistics at Vitae’s Benefit in DC, Thurs. Oct. 7.

The pregnancy centers in Baltimore have increased their staff and are ready save lives. I still need to raise $5,000 in order to launch the bus campaign by the end of this month. The cost of a child’s life?…………Priceless.

Please consider giving to them: Vitae Foundation.

This interview with Fr. Benedict is a few years old, but well worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet. Fr. Benedict talks about his involvement in the civil rights movement, the future of the United States, Mother Teresa and other topics.

Sometimes it feels like abortion has become so much a part of our culture that it simply can’t be overcome. Even we pro-lifers can succumb to the thinking that legalized abortion is here to stay.

But making an acceptable practice in our society unthinkable is possible. Just take a look at this 1950′s commercial as Exhibit A:

Recently the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was asked in an interview a number of “hot button” questions, especially in regards to homosexuality and the episcopacy. For those blissfully unaware, the Anglicans are currently debating whether practicing homosexuals can be admitted to the priesthood and episcopacy. Most of his answers were confusing and unclear, but one in particular stood out:

He was asked, does the Archbishop hope that one day gay bishops can have partners?

And what was the answer given by Archbishop Williams? “Pass”. That’s right, he gave an answer most likely to be heard by a timid poker player with a bad hand. Can anyone imagine such an answer being given by Pope Benedict, or any pope for that matter?

But there is a certain refreshing honesty in his answer, even if it is terribly weak and scandalous. The fact is that there is no way to know what the future holds for Protestantism (and the Anglicans, if they are anything, are Protestant) in regards to faith and morals. So it is always an open question as to what the Anglican church will one day allow, including opening practicing homosexuals as bishops.

This was the crisis that led to my own conversion to Catholicism. As a young Evangelical Christian, I was fervently pro-life. I recognized the intrinsic dignity of the unborn and I knew that no church that claimed Jesus as Lord could support the legalized killing of these precious children. Yet the denomination in which I had been raised – United Methodism – had in fact begun to support legalized abortion. This was a primary reason I decided to search for a new church family. I found a number of Protestant denominations that were strongly pro-life, but I was unable to commit to them because of this lingering question: how could I be sure that these denominations would not one day change their teaching regarding abortion? After all, one hundred years ago the Methodist church was strongly pro-life and had eventually changed its position, so who is to say that the Southern Baptists could not eventually do the same? And if a denomination can change its position on the fifth commandment, everything and anything is up for grabs.

This left me with quite a dilemma. During this time I went to one of my Catholic friends and I asked him, “How can you be sure that the Catholic Church will not change its teaching on abortion (or anything related to faith and morals) one day?”

He simply replied: “It won’t. I just know.”

This answer rocked my world – not because of the words, but because of the way he said them. He knew. The look on his face was one of utter confidence and peace. It was as sure to him that the Catholic Church would not change their teachings in faith and morals than it was that the sun would rise tomorrow. I was a bag of insecurities and confusion regarding my own churches, but here was this person who would never have to worry about where to find the Truth. What a refreshing way to live!

So I exchanged my “bad hand” of insecurity about the future to the Royal Flush of the Catholic Church and her consistent teachings. I put my faith in the rock which Jesus established and on which a Church would be built that the gates of hell would never overcome. A rock that will never  “pass” when asked a question about faith and morals.

If you counted up all the other “patient” deaths he has caused, he should get about 5,000 years in prison:

Mass. doc gets 6 months in abortion patient death

BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP) — A doctor was sentenced Tuesday to six months in jail after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the case of a woman who died after he performed an abortion on her.

Dr. Rapin Osathanondh was sentenced in the 2007 death of 22-year-old Laura Hope Smith. He pleaded guilty in a Massachusetts court Monday, just as his trial was about to begin.

Smith was 13 weeks pregnant when she went to see Osathanondh for an abortion in his Cape Cod office. She was pronounced dead later that day.

Prosecutors charged Osathanondh with manslaughter, alleging that he failed to monitor her while she was under anesthesia, delayed calling 911 when her heart stopped, and later lied to try to cover up his actions…

Osathanondh, 67, who is originally from Thailand, had been licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts since 1974.

He did not speak in court Tuesday, but his lawyer, Paul Cirel, said Osathanondh had expressed “most profound remorse and regret for Laura Smith’s death.”

Cirel said Osathanondh came to the United States in the 1960s and had performed thousands of safe abortions before Smith’s death.

“This is regrettably — terribly — the one complication, the one problem that ever came up in his practice,” Cirel said.

No, Mr. Cirel, I’d say there has been more than one “complication/problem” in his practice over the years.

I have often commented that one of the most powerful pro-life activities we can undertake is to pray in front of abortion clinics. It takes the battle to the heart of darkness and exposes the light of Christ on it. So I am very pleased to see that Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo, North Dakota is encouraging his priests to schedule time for such activities in the coming month:

A bishop already known for his pro-life activism is taking the further step of exhorting his priests to pray outside the state’s sole abortion clinic.

“The 40 Days for Life North Dakota campaign will soon begin again, running from Sept. 22 through Oct. 31,” Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo wrote in a recent letter to priests. “I know what a busy time this is for you in the parishes, yet I ask that you schedule one more very important thing on your calendar: your hour of prayer outside the abortion facility. I encourage you to tell your parishioners when that hour will be so that they may join you, or pray in union with you from wherever they may be at that time.”

Read his letter to priests here.

Let us all make an effort to go to an abortion clinic soon and pray in front of it. Also, be sure to pray for Bishop Aquila and all bishops!

God bless Linda Gibbons:

Linda Gibbons is explaining why she has decided to refuse bail and spend the past 550 days in prison instead of opting for freedom. We are at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, an hour west of Toronto, sitting on beige plastic chairs around a small beige table. We are in a secure room and there are guards outside. It is just a precaution but at 62, and prematurely frail, Ms. Gibbons poses no physical threat.

One of Canada’s longest-serving anti-abortion protesters no longer thinks of being locked up as anything out of the ordinary.

Since Aug. 30, 1994, when a temporary injunction was placed around several abortion clinics in downtown Toronto at the request of the provincial Attorney-General, Ms. Gibbons has been arrested roughly 20 times and has been behind bars eight of the past 16 years — more time than Karla Homolka.

She served an earlier six-month stint for a protest in front of a Morgentaler clinic in 1992.

Her most recent stint behind bars began in January 2009. Instead of standing back the required distance from a clinic as her fellow protesters had done for years, she once again walked within the forbidden bubble zone.

She held up a sign that showed a drawing of a baby that read: “Why Mom, when I have so much life to give?”

If she would only comply, Ms. Gibbons could be out on $500 bail in mere days, thereby breaking her tortuous 16-year cycle of arrest and imprisonment. But until the injunction is quashed, she will refuse bail, insisting that would be “compromise and complicity with evil” and, to her, unthinkable.

To those inside Canada’s anti-abortion movement, Linda Gibbons is a quiet hero whose sacrifice is to be admired.

“I didn’t have the courage to break the injunction,” says retired high school teacher John Bulsza, of London, Ont., who was named in the original injunction in August 1994. “Everyone of us should have protested with her and this case would be history. She’s our Gandhi and we’re letting her take the fall for the rest of us.”

To her detractors, though, she is a self-aggrandizing pain in the ass who has no respect for the rights of others. They see nothing honourable in her commitment to the cause. She is simply another self-delusional fanatic with a martyr complex.

“What people like her do is creepy,” says Celia Posyniak, an abortion clinic director in Calgary. “They don’t even have to say anything. It’s intimidating just to have someone standing there.”

“Why is it acceptable to intimidate women making a personal and legal decision?”

Continue reading…

Satan’s greatest success is not when he gets someone to do something that they know is immoral; it is when he gets someone to do something immoral and be convinced that it is not wrong. In the first case, the person can come to repentance and ask for forgiveness, but in the second case they do not even acknowledge they need to repent of their actions.

Such is the case today with artificial contraception. When you take a step back and think about it, it is unbelievable (and diabolical) that just 100 years ago every practicing Christian, no matter their tradition, would acknowledge that artificial contraception is immoral. But today, almost none do; artificial contraception is as normal as cell phones and McDonald’s. As an Evangelical Christian, I never once gave a thought to the morality of using artificial contraception; to me that would be as silly as contemplating the morality of using a fork instead of my hands to eat. This is still the situation in most of the Evangelical world (and scandalously much of the Catholic world as well).

But perhaps the tide is turning:

(RNS) Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute laugh.

As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor’s degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.

His book, “The Christian Case Against Contraception,” was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.

In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.

No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they’ve used at least one method of birth control.

The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).

“People are no longer … thinking about it,” says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue.

“People don’t even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it.”

For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.

Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.

That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.

Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.

“It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty,” says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Official Mormon teaching through the late 1960s was against birth control. But by 1998, the church’s General Handbook of Instructions made it clear that only a couple can decide how many children to have and no one else is to judge.

There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches—the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

To separate the two functions of marital intimacy—the life-transmitting from the bonding—is to reject God’s design, Paul VI wrote.

“The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman,” Humanae Vitae proclaimed.

Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: “God himself is love, and it’s the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn’t express love. All it expresses is physical attraction.”

Continue reading…

Some people criticize Natural Family Planning (NFP) as just “Catholic birth control.” It is fundamentally no different, according to critics, than condoms, birth control pills, or other means to prevent pregnancy. These are obviously people who have never actually used NFP in their own lives, for if they did, they would know how different it really is.

The great thing about NFP is that using it helps one to recognize the great gift of marital sexuality as well as the great blessing of children in a marriage. Whereas artificial birth control focuses exclusively on preventing the natural consequence of sexual relations, NFP helps a couple focus on the two primary purposes of sexual relations: procreation and marital unity. This often leads them to a deeper marriage and a greater openness to children – and even a greater appreciation of the Catholic Church, as can be seen with this couple:

Couple credits NFP for changed worldview

Chris and Christelle Hagen weren’t Catholic when they decided to use natural family planning instead of artificial birth control.

Christelle was initially attracted to NFP for health, not moral, reasons, she said. At first, Chris was surprised she didn’t want to use birth control pills, but he was happy to oblige.

Now, 13 years into their marriage, the Hagens, members of St. Michael in Stillwater, say using NFP has positively affected not only Christelle’s health, but also the way they view their marriage, intimacy and children.

NFP also opened the door to the couple’s exploration of the Catholic faith, and their eventual conversion to Catholicism from the Evangelical faith in 1999, said Chris, 34.

Learning to trust

Unlike contraception, which uses barriers or hormones to prevent the marital act from producing life or, in some cases, can act as an abortifacient, NFP ensures the couples’ marital act is always open to life. When a couple does not want to become pregant, they abstain from sex when the wife is fertile.

According to the Catholic Church, NFP is the only moral way to regulate pregnancies.

Christelle, 37, first learned of NFP while living with a Catholic family after college, and she explained it to Chris, whom she was dating. They made a decision to use NFP after they married.

But, out of fear of pregnancy, the Hagens used condoms during their honeymoon. A few nights later, however, they had a spiritual experience — something Chris said is difficult to describe.

“We both felt an intense amount of fear, we felt very vulnerable, and we both had the sense — we were experiencing this at the same time — that it was because we were using condoms,” he said.

They didn’t use a condom after that night and tried better to trust God, they said.

Their Evangelical church didn’t teach contraception was wrong, and initially, the Hagens thought that, while it was wrong for them, contraception wasn’t wrong for everyone, Christelle said.

They eventually changed their minds. Chris was persuaded by the fact that no Christian denominations approved artificial birth control until the 20th century. Although Christelle had already changed her mind, a miscarriage eight months after their wedding confirmed her beliefs, she said.

“That experience for me was really a turning point emotionally for NFP, because I realized more of what was at stake with sexuality — that it had incredible power to it, the power to create life, and after that, I’ve never looked back,” she said.

They started to teach NFP, which they did for eight years as a couple through Couple to Couple League. When Chris became too busy to co-teach, they retired from Couple to Couple League, and Christelle focused on her growing interest in childbirth and parenting.

Practicing NFP deepened their appreciation for children, they said, and today they have four, ranging in age from 2 to 9.

Continue reading…

God bless Archbishop Francisco Gil Hellin of Burgos of Spain:

Archbishop Francisco Gil Hellin of Burgos warned this week there is no right to kill an innocent human being and therefore no obligation to obey to the new law on abortion. Rather, “direct opposition without distinction” must be mounted, he said.

“Let’s be clear: this law is not a law, although it is presented as such by some politicians and lawmakers.  It is no law because nobody has the right to take the life of an innocent human being. For this reason it is not obligatory.  Moreover, it demands direct opposition without distinction,” the archbishop said in a letter.

He underscored that reason cannot recognize abortion as a right because it constitutes the killing “of a person who is not guilty.”  “The right of a person to exist who has already been conceived, although not yet born, is not a belief stemming from any religion.  One does not need to be a believer to hold that an innocent person has the right to be defended and respected in his or her integrity.  Common sense dictates that one cannot take a human life in order to solve another problem or to “get money or votes,” he said.

The archbishop went on to say it is a “fallacy to assert that this law was passed by a majority in Parliament and that it represents the will of the majority of citizens, or if the Constitutional Court upholds it, that opposing it would be disobedient and would warrant sanction.”

“The fallacy consists in giving politicians, judges or citizens a right they do not have.  And nobody has the right to legislate the killing of an innocent person,” Archbishop Gil Hellin said.  He urged Spaniards to help all mothers who are in difficult situations and to support motherhood “with all the means at our disposal” in order to “halt this plague of abortion that, in Spain alone has already destroyed more people than all those who live in the cities of Zaragoza, Cordoba and Burgos.”