(LifeSiteNews) — Motherhood and medicine are both uniquely sacred, and both can change hearts, minds, and the spirit of entire nations.
A mother’s tenderness for her child is a unique act of self-giving love. She and the father – in an act of creation with God Almighty – have brought forth the child from “nothingness.” As Pope St. John Paul II said at the dawn of the new millennium, “Every person’s history is written first of all in his own mother’s heart.”
The practice of medicine is the unique gift afforded to physicians and nurses to care for the sick. It may be as dramatic as saving the life of a patient against the odds, or as simple as caring for the terminally ill. Neither end of the spectrum has preeminence over the other; the fundamental commission is to care for the patient. The skill of medicine is acquired through years of study and practice, at great personal sacrifice, with the goal of helping others in need.
How can both these noble professions, motherhood and medicine, uniquely suited to represent and improve every aspect of our physical and spiritual life on earth, become twisted into exact opposites of their true and God-given purposes? It is not hard to understand that unnatural deviations in motherhood or medicine bring catastrophic societal consequences very quickly. The primacy of well-formed motherhood is innate to our human understanding. And medicine’s importance to a stable culture is taken for granted. As A.C. Ivy, chief medical advisor at the Nuremberg Trials, stated, “One cannot conceive of a sound society with medicine that does not have a sound moral philosophy.” Abortion is so contrary to the spirit of medicine that Hippocrates banned it in his Oath of Physicians in the fourth or fifth century B.C.
And yet for decades we have schizophrenically ignored the fact that abortion is the willful murder of an innocent human life. We know it is so, but we are averse to calling it what it is. But the horror is far worse in view of the reality of what motherhood and medicine truly are. Motherhood and medicine are unparalleled in their ethereal, incomprehensible, and eternal goodness. The profession of motherhood and the profession of medicine are both uniquely sacred. This is what makes abortion even worse than “simple” murder – it distorts motherhood and medicine into something unrecognizable and horrific.
Why does Satan hate motherhood so much? At least one reason must be that it is creative, for motherhood is the creation of new human life. Venerable Cardinal József Mindszenty (1882-1975) spoke eloquently on the beauty of motherhood in this “creative” vein. And the cardinal’s sufferings and trials gave him a different perspective and an insight that many in Western culture have lost.
Cardinal Mindszenty was imprisoned by the Hungarian Nazi Party in WWII for speaking against fascism and the persecution of Jews. He was released with the fall of the pro-Nazi government in 1945. A few years later, in 1948, he was arrested for treason against the Communists, tortured, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison and took refuge in the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years, and then was recalled by the Vatican to Vienna. His words on motherhood are inspiring and remain a Mother’s Day favorite:
The Most Important Person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral — a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body. . . The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation… What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother?
Certainly, these eloquent sentiments of Cardinal Mindszenty give some insight into the emotions that another priest, Fr. Joseph Mohr, must have experienced on a beautiful winter evening when he saw the tender love between a mother and her child, and was so inspired that he wrote the lyrics to “Silent Night.” That story is well worth pondering.
Although medicine is similar to motherhood, it cannot lay claim to the “creation” aspect of the latter. But in terms of devotion, self-sacrifice, and empathy, it should be a close second. Jesus, after all, is the “Great Physician,” the “Great Healer,” par excellence. How many times in the gospels did He heal the physically disabled, the blind, the deaf, the lepers, the terminally ill, the mentally ill, and those possessed? Jesus is the gold standard to which medicine should aspire. Nathan Greene’s 1990 painting of Jesus guiding the hands of a surgeon in the operating room has inspired me personally. How many times have I said a silent prayer before, during, and after difficult surgeries?
Satan knows the power of motherhood and medicine – and he hates them both. There is nothing that suits Satan’s purpose more than taking two of the most beautiful professions and distorting them into a bizarre, demonic child sacrifice, a twisted form of religion. Look at the Church of Satan: it sought a religious exemption to continue the practice of abortion in its religious rituals. Listen to the demonic wails emanating from rabid proabortion fanatics: they would have no hesitation in murdering prolife advocates if they could get away with it.
Scripture mentions child sacrifice. The primary idols of the Old Testament included Baal, Ashtoreth, and Moloch, and the Israelites were forbidden to worship any of them. The most notorious, however, was Moloch. The idol was a large bronze figure with a human body and the head of a bull. Child sacrifice was made to Moloch to secure prosperity and honor for the person making the sacrifice or for the people at large. The figure’s belly was a furnace which was heated until glowing. At the climax of the pagan ritual, an innocent infant child was tossed inside and incinerated. Leviticus (18:21, 20:1-5) condemns the evil practice of Moloch worship and warns of the destruction of those who engage in it. Nevertheless, in a period of apostacy, King Solomon ordered the erection of pagan temples, including to Moloch (I Kings 11:7). His people sacrificed their own children to the demonic god in the fire (II Kings 16:2, 17:7, 21:6, 23:10). Jeremiah 19:5 describes Baal worship, which also included fiery child sacrifices, and equates Moloch worship with Baal worship (Jeremiah 32:35).
One would think that such disrespect for innocent infant human life would be soundly condemned by any rational person, but apparently some of the Israelites – God’s own chosen people – justified the practice. “How could they have done such a thing?” we might ask. But we need only to look at our own culture. Moloch is no longer called by his pagan name but given the feel-good honorifics of “choice” and “reproductive health care.” In an apt comparison with another kind of evil, Winston Churchill compared Hitler to the pagan god: “[Hitler] had conjured up the fearful idol of an all-devouring Moloch of which he was the priest and incarnation.” Not too long from now, historians will look back on abortion in our time and ask, “How could they have done such a thing?”
Child sacrifice is apocalyptic, signifying the great and final battle. The Book of Revelation Ch. 12 describes this epic battle, which began with nothing less than a struggle over a pregnant woman and her imperiled child:
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads…The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who ‘will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.’ And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne…Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray… Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.
Although several explanations exist for the identity of this “woman” (with no answer being necessarily mutually exclusive of the other), the simplest for Catholic sensibilities is that the Woman of the Apocalypse is the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was pregnant, she gave birth to a son destined to rule the nations, and Satan wanted to kill Him. In fact, Herod did try to kill him in early childhood in the “Massacre of the Innocents.” The furious, threatened king of Judea decreed that all male children in Bethlehem and the region who were two years old or younger be killed. But Jesus, having fled into Egypt with Mary and Joseph, were spared.
Is this epic cosmic battle the litmus test for the angels in heaven? Satan did not want to serve but to be served. He wanted humans to worship him, not God Almighty. And he even wanted the child-sacrifice of Jesus Himself.
Does it seem hysterical for us to compare modern abortion practices to the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, or child sacrifices to Moloch? If so, then we are in good company, because the American Medical Association (AMA) itself once made that comparison. As I noted in an earlier essay for LifeSiteNews, the AMA in their 1871 Report of Criminal Abortion spoke of the spiritually demonic and sacrificial nature of abortion:
[Abortionists] seem impatient for the sacrifice…Mark the monster as he approaches his work!…Does he measure the extent of the foul deed he is about to commit?…it is a murder, a foul, unprovoked murder; and its blood…will cry from earth to Heaven for vengeance…this crime in all its hideous deformity…the horrid crime of foeticide…an enemy to the human family, as dark and as malignant as the spirit that sent it.
We have heard…much of barbarous nations where human victims were offered in sacrifice…we seldom…think of the sacrifices offered by our modern high-priests, the abortionists…where human victims are daily sacrificed.
It is increasingly obvious that there is something unhinged about the bloodlust and wide-eyed fanaticism that occultists have for abortion. Is an avowed witch, warlock, or outright satanist ever pro-life? I think the proportion of lottery winners in the general population would exceed the proportion of occultists who would defend the unborn.
A woman’s body in Western mainstream has in many ways become an ideologic altar for satanic sacrifice. The womb can no longer be safely presumed to be a life-giving sanctuary but often becomes an altar of ideologic death hailed as “women’s rights.”
Satan has a penchant for turning the sacred upside down, twisting it into something unrecognizable. That is the definition of sacrilege, and that is why abortion is worse than simple murder. In deforming things into their exact opposite, Satan makes evil “good,” and good “evil.” Satan likes imperfection, so “6” is his number. The hour Christ broke the shackles of Satan was 3:00 in the day; Satan’s hour is 3:00 at night. Desecrating consecrated hosts – the real Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ Himself – is used in the twisted “black mass” of satanists. But in Satan’s upside-down world, perhaps nothing is more satisfying than turning new human life into an offering of death. It is an intentional and demonic mockery of the sacred.
When the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, the witches, warlocks, and satanists came forward in ever increasingly deranged manifestations. The Satanic Temple claims that it “can assert a religious liberty claim that terminating a pregnancy is a central part of a religious ritual that encourages self-empowerment and affirms bodily autonomy.” They declared that under the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” individuals practicing The Satanic Temple’s religious abortion ritual are exempt from abortion restrictions. They claim that the “ritual…sanctifies the abortion process by instilling confidence and protecting bodily rights…” On their own website, the Satanic Temple states that the “Satanic Abortion Ritual is a destructive ritual that serves as a protective rite. Its purpose is to cast off notions of guilt, shame, and mental discomfort…”
The satanic “participant” in abortion is encouraged to meditate on two specific tenets of the Temple. The first is “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” The other is that beliefs should correspond to scientific understanding, and that “One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.” It surely must occur to satanists that they are, in fact, violating their own principle when they claim adherence to “scientific facts:” embryology, genetics, and every yardstick of basic biology affirms in no uncertain terms that the newly formed zygote, from the moment of conception, is a new, unique, independent human. But, of course, the Luciferian concepts of “truth” are vague, malleable, and relative, and can certainly be independent of scientific realities. Lucifer, after all, has always been the “Great Deceiver.”
In a bizarre parody of religion, the satanists even include a “prayer” for their abortion ritual: “By my body, my blood. By my will, it is done.” The Satanic Temple’s motto “Thyself is Thy Master” certainly echoes Lucifer’s proclamation “I will not serve.” And satanists certainly feel it beneath their dignity to serve a crying, helpless baby. For them, killing a baby is, literally, empowering. The December 2023 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine even featured an article explaining the ritual. The unabashed, unholy abortion sacrifice has indeed become open and mainstream.
And if we ponder the situation with any honesty, we have reason to worry about the psychological manifestations to “ordinary” citizens. Someone once randomly asked me if I knew anyone who had committed murder. I was a bit stunned and embarrassed to have to answer yes. In the strict sense, I do know murderers, for I am acquainted with physicians and ordinary women and men who have been involved in abortion. But we usually don’t think of “murder” when we speak of abortion, although what else can the intentional and unprovoked killing of an innocent human person be called? What, then, happens to a culture in which, over the past 50 years, one-fourth to one-third of all women who became pregnant chose to abort their child? And, presumably, similar statistics apply to the men who encouraged or forced their partner to commit the termination. What happens to a society when a quarter to a third of its population are murderers of preborn children? Does it bring callousness, crudeness, overall disrespect for human life, and a mentality that if something or someone stands in my way, then killing is an acceptable option? Look at the daily news and ask how anyone could conclude differently.
Of course, the argument is made that abortion is not really “killing” because it is legal. Unfortunately for that rationalization, the Nuremberg Trials judging Nazi atrocities addressed this very question. Those atrocities were committed under the jurisdiction and mandates of the laws of the land, under the precepts of the government. But as the Chief Justice at the trials strongly opined, national laws are only authentic laws if they abide by natural laws, and moral laws of a higher order. There is a superior law that supersedes the mere laws of nations. Being “legal” does not make something “right.” It is the duty of ordinary citizens, soldiers, and their leaders not to engage in or accept laws that violate the supernatural law and voice of reason embedded our hearts. It is acceptance of the supernatural law that separates the human mind and morals from those of beasts.
In a sense, the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v Wade is a blow to the national psyche. But it is a blow that will hopefully “knock some sense” into our thinking. The highest court has said, in essence, No, you do not have a constitutional right to kill your own baby, and in fact you never did because Roe v Wade was wrongly decided in the first place. Wow, what a punch in the gut. Really, it seems that the only way to get around this psychological hurdle, this block in the road, is to admit that there is a problem and that a wrong has been committed, and to ask for forgiveness – the forgiveness that only Jesus can give. This is the only path to true and lasting healing.
At an individual level, groups such as Rachel’s Vineyard provide post-abortive healing. At a national level, repentance of the “sackcloth and ashes” biblical magnitude which spared Nineveh from destruction is long overdue. As the American Medical Association itself recognized, abortion is “the greatest curse which could befall the human family…It becomes a national sin, and national sins merit and may receive national punishments.” (LifeSite News Nov 17, 2023).
The noble professions of motherhood and medicine, both being uniquely sacred in the creation, defense, and nurturing of human life, should be at the forefront in the effort of healing our national sin.
Sources:
- Ivy A.C. “Nazi war crimes of a medical nature.” JAMA, 1949;139:131-35.
- Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty. “Mother.” https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/mother-11253
- Report of the Committee on Criminal Abortion. Transactions of the American Medical Association 1871;22:237-258. https://ama.nmtvault.com/jsp/PsImageViewer.jsp?doc_id=6863b9b4-a8b5-4ea0-9e63-ca2ed554e876%2Fama_arch%2FAD200001%2F00000022
- “The Satanic Temple Religious Reproductive Rights.” https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/rrr-campaigns
- “Cosmopolitan magazine publishes article promoting ‘Satanic Abortion Clinic’.” Life Institute, Dec 14, 2023.