Across the Western world, the Culture of Death is expanding its borders, casting its grim shadow across an ever-growing population of weak, vulnerable, and disabled peoples. Norway is proposing to expand abortion to include babies up until 18 weeks gestation; Denmark has just done the same. After Poland’s legislators voted down a plan to legalize abortion, the nation’s rogue coalition government simply changed the rules by fiat to facilitate feticide anyway. France made abortion a “constitutional right” earlier this year. The UK government is fast-tracking a vote on assisted suicide, which was rejected by Parliament nine years ago. The list goes on.
It was predictable that as the West advanced into the post-Christian era, prohibitions on killing human beings rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic would fall away. Westerners no longer have a basis for believing in the ‘sanctity of human life’ because they no longer have a basis for the sanctity of anything. Academics and medical professionals now make the case for the pre-Christian practice of infanticide openly, and explicitly cite residual Christian values as the only reason we have not yet embraced it. As Louise Perry, who is reluctantly “pro-choice,” observed in her First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing”:
The legal status of abortion is at the center of the contemporary culture war because it represents the bleeding edge of dechristianization. When pro-life and pro-choice advocates fight about the nitty-gritty of abortion policy, what they are really fighting about is whether our society ought to remain Christian. Most people who describe themselves as pro-choice have not really thought about what truly abandoning Christianity would mean—that is, truly abandoning Christians’ historically bizarre insistence that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” But there are a few heralds of repaganization who are willing to be confidently and frighteningly consistent.
The French philosopher Chantal Delsol concurs with this analysis. But they are certainly not the first. Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the greatest Christian journalists of the 20th century, believed that the acceptance of abortion signaled the death of the West. Muggeridge died on November 14, 1990, and he lived long enough to see the Culture of Death take root. He is best-known (to those who still remember him) as a writer, TV personality, and in his later years, an eccentric but brilliant Christian apologist. But Muggeridge was also a pro-life activist and sought to defend the pro-life cause at every opportunity, including speaking at right to life marches in London and across the UK.
Many veterans of the Canadian pro-life movement remember the Muggeridge family as comrades during the early days of the fight against abortion—Malcolm’s son John and his wife Anne Roche, who lived in Toronto, were avid supporters. Two of Malcolm’s grandsons, Peter and Charles, wrote for the pro-life newspaper The Interim. John was an editorial advisor to LifeSiteNews and a senior editor of the New York-based Human Life Review. Kitty Muggeridge, a brilliant writer in her own right, lived in Welland, Ontario with her son and daughter-in-law after Malcolm died until her own death in June 1994.
Malcolm Muggeridge toured around Southern Ontario during the 1970s, giving lectures night after night to packed-out theaters on the sanctity of life and the existential threat of abortion. The second Festival for Life in Ottawa in 1977 featured Muggeridge as a keynote speaker; he also visited St. Catharine’s Right to Life in October 1978, speaking on “The Slippery Slope” at the Thistle Theatre at Brock University, discussing the slide from contraception to abortion on demand. Muggeridge marshalled all of his oratory powers to urge audiences to oppose abortion in whatever ways they could.
Muggeridge (along with Everett C. Koop) also wrote one of the afterwords to President Ronald Reagan’s slim 1984 book Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation, the only anti-abortion polemic written by a sitting head of state. Muggeridge often condemned abortion on TV and in print, but perhaps the most succinct summary of his views—still so applicable today—was first published in the London Sunday Times. It was reprinted in 1975 in the Human Life Review, and prophesied what de-Christianization would mean for the unborn:
Our Western way of life has come to a parting of the ways; time’s takeover bid for eternity has reached the point at which irrevocable decisions have to be taken. Either we go on with the process of shaping our own destiny without reference to any higher being than Man, deciding ourselves how many children shall be born, when and in what varieties, which lives are worth continuing and which should be put out, from whom spare-parts—kidneys, hearts, genitals, brainboxes, even—shall be taken and to whom allotted.
Or we draw back, seeking to understand and fall in with our Creator’s purpose for us rather than to pursue our own; in true humility praying, as the founder of our religion and our civilization taught us: Thy will be done.
This is what the abortion controversy is about, and what the euthanasia controversy will be about when, as must inevitably happen soon, it arises. The logical sequel to the destruction of what are called “unwanted children” will be the elimination of what will be called “unwanted lives”—a legislative measure which so far in all human history only the Nazi Government has ventured to enact.
In this sense the abortion controversy is the most vital and relevant of all. For we can survive energy crises, inflation, wars, revolutions and insurrections, as they have been survived in the past; but if we transgress against the very basis of our mortal existence, becoming our own gods in our own universe, then we shall surely and deservedly perish from the earth.
He was right, and he was one of a handful who saw the future with great moral clarity. Muggeridge was one of those prophets cursed to see many of the tragedies he warned of come to pass. The bodies of aborted babies are now pillaged for spare parts, which are used in hideous Frankenstein experiments in our finest universities. Euthanasia victims can be killed in ways that allow for their organs to be harvested and transferred to those with ‘lives worth living.’ Every Western nation is in desperate need of babies; every Western nation kills its own children in staggering numbers and with stunning brutality.
