Leftists And So-Called Christian Leaders Embrace Abortion As ‘Sacred’ – The Federalist

Readers may find below descriptions of child sacrifice disturbing.

As the Supreme Court deliberates on the right to life in Dobbs v. Jackson, the pro-abortion crowd is getting more and more defensive and some of the most vicious attacks are from those who claim to be in the church.

Last September, the House of Representatives considered a bill to effectively solidify the national right to abortion access, which San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone called something one would expect from a devout Satanist, not a devout Catholic. He added: This proposed legislation is nothing short of child sacrifice.

Naturally, the pro-abortion crowd didnt take kindly to this admittedly provocative language, eliciting comments from, among others, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (a lifelong professed Catholic). But based on how many pro-abortionists talk about abortion, perhaps Cordileone isnt far off.

In a Feb. 5 article in The Washington Post, Rev. Kaeley McEvoy at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ in Bethesda, Md., discussed her thinking on abortion. When she and her boyfriend got pregnant together, the very first place they went was a cathedral to pray but not for grace to persevere through an unplanned pregnancy. No, McEvoy actually called a doctors office while inside the place of worship to schedule an abortion. When other visitors to the cathedral tried to enter a small chapel where McEvoy was on the phone, the boyfriend turned them away, declaring: Something holy is happening here.

Among the pro-abortion crowd, abortion is increasingly no longer described as a necessary evil, but holy. The Post suggested McEvoy views it as a social and theological good. In a November sermon, McEvoy told her congregation that she never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood. At a January event addressing a group of abortion access activists meeting in a D.C. church, she reiterated: Something holy is happening here, friends.

McEvoy is not alone among clerics in this sentiment about abortion. Presbyterian minister Rebecca Todd Peters in an October USA Today op-ed wrote: I did not make my abortion decisions despite my Christian identity and faith, but rather because of it. Rabbi Rachael Pass in a September article claimed her abortion during rabbinical school was a blessing and a sacred choice. Everything about her experience, Pass observed, from the timing of the accidental conception to the decision and procedure itself was brimming with my Jewish practice, learning and living.

Similar language can be found in less explicitly religious fora. A December article by Rae Guerra-Lorenzo on the Planned Parenthood website asserted that abortion is sacred, because womens reproductive health is sacred. I am here because of abortionsomeone down the line of ancestors knew when it was and wasnt time for expanding their family, she continued. My own children are here because of abortion.

An article at the libertarian Ayn Rand Institute called abortion a secular sanctity, and explains that abortion allows women to protect whats sacred about life.

It is a curious, if rhetorically clever, reversal on the oft-quoted pro-life lines that every child is a blessing and that every human life is sacred. It is not the conception of human life and bringing that baby into the world that is a sacred blessing, they say, but the elimination of that organism in the womb that is the truly holy act.

Wrapping abortion in the language of faith and sometimes even specific religious traditions would seem to suggest that such persons view it as an actual manifestation of their religious belief. As people of faith, we abort, they seem to say.

In that respect, we can better appreciate Cordileones comments, which orient us to the ubiquity of religiously motivated child sacrifice across much of the ancient world. Ancient sources including Cleitarchus, Porphyry, Philo of Byblos, and the Book of Kings describe the Canaanite groups of the Levant regularly performing child sacrifice in attempts to placate various divinities.

Their cousins the Carthaginian civilization defeated and destroyed by Rome during the Punic Wars sacrificed children as offerings to their gods. The Quran also mentions pagan Arabians sacrificing their children to pagan gods.

Nor was this practice limited to the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin. The Aztecs of present-day Mexico sacrificed thousands of people, including many children, to the god Huitzilopochtli in their capital at Tenochtitlan in order to bring good weather for their seasonal crops. An archeological site in Peru recently uncovered 140 children ritually sacrificed in what appears to be a single ceremony the historical event occurred around 1450 A.D. and involved ripping the childrens hearts out. Ritual killings of children still occur in Uganda today.

Undoubtedly the practitioners of ritual child sacrifice across practically every human continent believed their act to be a holy one. The child must die, they believed, for the survival of their society: a sacred rite for the wellbeing of mothers, fathers, and the broader civilization.

Of course, the vast majority of the pro-abortion camp does not believe the organism inside the mothers womb is a human life it is only a chia seed-size embryo, as feminist columnist Monica Hesse recently called it, or a clump of cells, as they often tell us. Most who promote and procure abortions have not yet descended into actually using the bodies of the unborn in religious rituals to appease their gods although fetal tissue research, used as it is for the secular, utilitarian gods of science and progress, gets us pretty close.

But the language of the pro-abortion movement, especially among those who wear clerical garb and use religious honorifics, should give us pause. Even if they cloak that life in the womb with the language of embryo, cells and fetus, it is quite another thing to label its destruction holy and sacred.

It is, after all, life, a living organism. Something living and growing is destroyed for the sake, so they say, of the mothers life and wellbeing. A sacrifice is made, which, its advocates say, is cause for celebration. But that is not a holy thing. It is horrific.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelors in history and masters in teaching from the University of Virginia and a masters in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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Leftists And So-Called Christian Leaders Embrace Abortion As 'Sacred' - The Federalist