Abortion as a French Constitutional Right: A Christian Response

'Let us abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan.' And, as usual, France leads the way, just as it did in 1789.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

Let us abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan.

The scenes from Paris this week were remarkable. In the parliament at Versailles, the new constitutional amendment that enshrines adults’ licence to kill human babies, either by the use of toxins or by dismembering them and crushing their skulls, was greeted with a standing ovation by politicians. Cheers, laughter, and music were heard throughout Paris as people celebrated this new constitutional ‘right,’ which hitherto had been in law since 1975, but was not something that had defined on paper the French State as such. 

It is very important for Christians to understand what the political arena is, and why the things we see happening in our age are happening at all. According to Christianity, the world belongs to the devil as his principality (Jn 14:30), all the powers and kingdoms of the world belong to him (Matt. 4:8-9), and as the “god” of this world, as St. Paul calls him (2 Cor. 4:4), he demands worship and sacrifice. To me, the cheers, the partying, the lit-up buildings throughout the French capital and no doubt elsewhere in the country looked, in essence, a lot like a liturgical offering. The devil is scandalised by the union of spirit and flesh in human nature, he hates the Incarnation by which God divinised human nature—soul and body—and thus he seeks to alienate us from our own bodies and warp human nature which has become an icon of God Himself. The devil rejoices in the tearing of human flesh. And just as he did when he was known as Baal, so today he seeks the violent death of babies by those entrusted with their protection, to be a sacrificial offering to him and a recognition of his supremacy in the world.

The Christian response to this evil is not to reject the world and run to the hills, but to capture the world from Satan and offer it to God. For this reason, the Christian apostolate entails the discipleship of nations (Matt. 28:19). The Christian religion and the mission to establish Christendom are, then, inseparable. A great risk comes with the discipling of a nation, however, for if a people later retreat from Christendom and place themselves back under the devil as his subjects, they will become something entirely different to what they were before their evangelisation. Prior to its discipleship, a nation possesses prevenient graces in anticipation of the Gospel. Once a nation becomes an apostate—as France did at the dawn of modernity—by so doing it imitates the devil, rejecting the life of grace, and falling not from light into the shadows, but into utter pitch darkness. As C.S. Lewis wrote in a 1953 letter to his friend Don Giovanni Calabria:

They neglect not only the law of Christ but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft and other crimes which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans and the Barbarians have themselves denounced. They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state. ‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.

And, if a nation were to lose not only grace but any grasp of the natural order of things, what would it look like? If a nation lost not only its sense of obligations towards a revealed Creator but even towards mere natural justice, what would we see? In short, if a nation did not simply become pagan, but overtly satanical, what signs would we behold? 

Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. Pre-Christian man inordinately favoured the flesh and its impulses, whereas post-Christian man sees the body as a problem to be corrected by technology. We want to ‘support’ women, but we’re always coming up against the irritating fact that they have female bodies, so we ‘support’ them by sterilising them and then telling them that mothers are weak and strong women kill their offspring so that they can be useful to wealthy men. The modern age may value ‘freedom’ above anything else, but in many ways, it sees the chief means to achieve freedom to be the tearing of human flesh. Perhaps, then, it is time to abandon our embarrassment about giving to this epoch its proper name: the final reign of Satan.

Interestingly, when the constitutional amendment was proclaimed in the parliament at Versailles, and France’s political class leapt to their feet to applaud it, it was announced that this amendment was for the purpose of sending out a “universal message” to “the women of the world” that France would “always move forward by their side.” But the rise of abortion politics in the modern world precisely reveals that this world cannot tolerate women as women. The modern world, which conflates ‘progress’ and ‘production’ as somehow synonyms, herds women into the competitive workforce, thereby re-forming them as interchangeable units of utility identical to their male counterparts. They must consume toxins to make sure their reproductive systems malfunction so that there is a lower risk of pregnancy (the occurrence of which would certainly identify them as different to men). If a woman does become pregnant, she must be able to kill the baby within her. Thus, the entire paradigm eliminates our capacity to treasure women as women.

Particularly striking was seeing the Eiffel Tower lit-up with the following words: “My body, my choice.” These words, like the word ‘abortion’ itself, are clever in their deceptiveness. It is a slogan that can be shouted and seemingly smacks of progress. How could anyone possibly argue with it? After all, it’s her body, and she needs to decide what to do with it. But of course, a body is not a possession. Throw all your possessions into a fire, and if you include your body among them, you will find there’s no longer a you at all. By our bodies we are related to the world and the people in it, with all the obligations that this entails. The most intimate of such relations is undoubtedly that of the emergence of another body within one’s body. And that perhaps is why the slogan “my body, my choice” is so deceptive, because the body with which abortion law is concerned, and whose violent destruction it routinely permits, is not the body of the person doing to the choosing at all. Were it her body, she would be the one being dismembered and having her skull clamped and crushed. 

Like so much in the modern world, whether it be ‘love is love,’ or ‘trans people just want to exist,’ or ‘my body, my choice,’ what we have here is something that can be chanted and yelled to avoid articulating the reality of what is being referred to. Such deception must be deployed if ‘progress’ is to continue, for the realities that these slogans orbit are so wretched and repulsive that they amount to the stuff of Dr. Mengele’s dreams.

Three miles away from the half-burned Cathedral of Notre Dame, a closed off blackened remnant of a dead civilisation, consecrated to the virgin who fled to Egypt to protect her baby, the killing of babies was celebrated into the night at the Eiffel Tower. Jubilations erupted around that great metal spike built “in gratitude,” as Eiffel himself put it, to the French Revolution and the modern age it inaugurated. Here, at this shrine to ‘progress,’ people hugged each other and partied to honour their country for being partly defined by its commitment to the violent murder of human babies.

Iam not writing to encourage any pro-abortion readers to rethink their position. Even those ‘on the fence’ are not my main concern here. Those who think abortion is a ‘complex issue’ have completely failed to understand the political debate surrounding abortion. The parliament at Versailles did not think it was a ‘complex issue,’ nor did the people partying in the streets on the parliament’s announcement. Abortion politics is about ‘progress,’ and in the modern epoch, the more disembodied we are, the more atomised and alienated we are, the more interchangeable and utilisable we are, the more depersonalised and objectified we are, so too the more we are, as the left-winger’s cherished saying goes, “on the right side of history.” And for this reason, real marriage and the natural family will always undermine modernity, and hence cannot be tolerated, let alone treasured. Modernity must emancipate us from, as Simone de Beauvoir pithily put it, “menstrual slavery.”

For the readers of The European Conservative, however, it is probably time to rethink what we mean by the current ‘emerging conservative alliances’—of which the National Conservatism movement and ARC, for example, have made much use. Open your eyes: in France, the so-called ‘far-right’ Rassemblement National and Reconquete supported the constitutional enshrinement of abortion. If you are a Christian, then those parties are your enemies and should be condemned by you as such. After all, we cannot criticise the UK Conservative Party for all its progressivism and then support such parties on the Continent despite their progressivism. Those who traditionally called themselves ‘conservatives’ are being made hypocrites by so-called ‘conservative parties.’ A radical response is required—something quite different to that to which we’ve grown accustomed. 

Conservative or ‘right-wing’ politics cannot treat issues like abortion as ‘areas of reasonable disagreement.’ If it is now somehow ‘conservative’ to exercise indifference towards the killing of babies, or indeed to outright support such murder of the innocent, then to hell with conservatism—literally. Let me be clear: I would rather progressives increased their global usurpation until we are all living under a single tyranny of interminable ‘progress’ than watch Christians support and advance the false witness of a pro-abortion political ‘Right.’

It grieves me to say it, for I was formed in the crucible of Burke, Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortes, Le Play, and other such critics of modernity who really believed that political successes were possible in the modern age. Indeed, I have always believed in throwing oneself into the political struggle, and that in the end conservatives may win out as modernity eats itself. But I now see more clearly than ever that the political changes we witness are mere intimations of a much deeper battle over the territory of the human heart, a conflict which rages on between the Principality of Satan and the Kingdom of Christ. 

The conservative-liberal, Right-Left divide means almost nothing now. There are those in the Principality of Satan and those in the Kingdom of Christ, and that is now the only division that has satisfactory explanatory power. Of course, there are those who have yet to pick a side, but no one can remain neutral for long in such a conflict. As we come to realise that politics is no longer about the good of the polity, but is the mere expression of a battle between the children of Satan, who wage war on human nature, and those of the God who so loved human nature that he assumed it into his divine personhood, we will have to adopt a completely different approach to our engagement with the ‘political struggle.’ It will likely mean not choosing to be campaigners and activists, but crusaders and martyrs.