Uncle Screwtape Proposes Celibacy (and Abortion)

When C.S. Lewis first published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, legal abortion was still decades away, but it’s not hard to imagine how Screwtape and his cadre of demonic tempters would have salivated at the prospect. You mean “civilized” men and women will hire greedy profiteers to cut their unborn babies to pieces—all in the name of equality?! Yes, please! If you’ve never had the pleasure (and pain) of reading Lewis’ masterpiece, by all means start with the original and circle back. It tells the tale of a senior devil giving counsel and rebuke to a junior tempter. And don’t forget his follow-up, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” Published in 1959, it is a shockingly prescient read in 2023. Here’s Screwtape’s demonic advice on bringing the Western world to its knees:

"Democracy" is the word with which you must lead them by the nose… You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name…

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U.S. Abortions Increase for Fourth Straight Year in Final Year of Roe

I’m going to tell you today what the Centers for Disease Control won’t announce for another 10 or 11 months. It’s not good news. America’s abortion rate and abortion total rose for the fourth straight year in 2021—which was the final year of Roe v Wade. There’s some hope that the fall of Roe last June will have reduced total abortions in 2022—at least marginally, but we probably won’t know that for at least another year. As I’ve lamented before, the dearth of timely and reliable statistics makes abortion even harder to combat. By the time a trend emerges, it’s already 2-3 years behind us. 

As you may already know, there are two sources for abortion data in the United States—and neither offers complete results. The CDC publishes an abortion report each year, typically 23 months after the fact, but they don’t include abortions from California, Maryland, New Hampshire, or most of New Jersey. Those states don’t collect and report abortion…

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There is No Brave New World Without Abortion

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. His onetime pupil George Orwell published 1984 in 1949. Three quarters of a century later, their chilling visions of the future retain tremendous cultural cachet—and rightly so. They offer warnings that grow more relevant with each passing decade, but how many people have actually read them (or even know they exist)? It's much easier, after all, to describe something as "Orwellian" than it is to sit down with Nineteen Eighty-Four—and much simpler to stream a cinematic adaptation than it is to turn the pages of a 90-year-old book. These tendencies, of course, are two of the very things each classic warns against—if only we'd take the time to read them. Those in the know have a vague sense that both works warn of oppressive authoritarian futures, but what good is such knowledge if we can't recognize the specific threats? Not much, so I'm going to I.D. one of those threats for you. A big one. It's called abortion.

Brave New World and 1984 both present futures run by bloated totalitarian governments that have sacrificed freedom…

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The Estate of Baby Villegas, Deceased

What would you do if your ex-wife hired someone to kill your baby daughter—and succeeded? What if the evidence was irrefutable, but the law failed to bring criminal charges against any of the acting parties? What if you believed in the rule of law and were unwilling to take it into your own hands? Would you perhaps bring a lawsuit against those responsible for your child’s death—in an effort to find some measure of justice and spare others the same fate? And would anyone begrudge you if you did? 

The hypothetical scenario I’ve just described actually belongs to Mario Villegas—formerly of Arizona. I stumbled upon his plight recently via a Rolling Stone piece, but the author had zero sympathy for this grieving father. Instead, she criticized him for not accepting his wife’s child-free “vision of her future.” The reason, of course, is one you’ve likely guessed. Villegas’ baby had yet to be born when her life was violently ended via Click here to read the rest.

There’s Nothing Scientific About The Left’s Religious Devotion to Abortion

One of the most useful myths in the “pro-choice” arsenal is the assertion that any effort to curb abortion is mere religious overreach. CNN trotted it out a few weeks after the Dobbs verdict—in an article penned by senior writer Eliott C. McLaughlin. His essential complaint was that Justice Samuel Alito—writing for the majority—replaced Roe’s term “potential life” with that used by the Mississippi legislature: “unborn human being.” This may seem like a “semantic argument,” McLaughlin mused, but “experts say it’s anything but.” Who are these experts? The article offered up just one: the Reverend Rebecca Todd Peters.

Alito didn’t write God or Christianity or Bible anywhere in the opinion, but his justification is a veiled “religious narrative,” said Rebecca…

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What Has Abortion Ever Done for the Black Community?

Less than 30 minutes after the Supreme Court finally admitted that there is no constitutional right to abortion, President Obama called the ruling a political attack on “the essential freedoms of millions of Americans.” What essential freedoms were under attack? Actually, there was only one—though the former president is loathe to call it by name. I’ll say it for him: abortion. It’s the essential freedom that didn’t exist until a half-century ago and was only enshrined because seven activist judges manufactured a constitutional pretext for the dismemberment of tiny human beings. Don’t let 44 fool you. The Roe reversal was not a political attack on freedom. In returning abortion to the jurisdiction of individual states, each state was given more freedom, not less. And we the people now have opportunity to vote on abortion at the ballot box and with our feet.

Despite the incongruity of President Obama’s…

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