[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 15]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 23416-23417]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              LORD NICHOLAS WINDSOR URGES NEW ABOLITIONISM

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, December 21, 2010

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I rise tonight as former and 
incoming Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Human Rights Committee to ask 
my distinguished colleagues of the House to take a few moments to read 
a brilliant, incisive, extraordinarily well written defense of the 
child in the womb by Lord Nicholas Windsor of the UK, great grandson of 
King George V.
  Calling the abortion of unborn children ``the single most grievous 
moral deficit in contemporary life,'' he appeals to conscience and 
admonishes us to the ``greatest solidarity and duty of care because 
they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans.''
  Lord Nicholas notes that ``permissive abortion is a fact of life so 
deeply embedded and thoroughly normalized in our culture that--and this 
is the most insidious factor in that normalization--it has been 
rendered invisible to politics in Europe. Even mentioning it has become 
the first taboo of the culture.''
  And how can that be?
  Lord Nicholas faults ``determined campaigns of propaganda at the 
outset to harden consciences, and gradually to enforce a conformism 
that fears to question what is said to be a settled issue.''
  Settled? Not here in the U.S., Madam Speaker, and hopefully not for 
long in Europe either.
  On what he calls a ``moral world turned upside down,'' Lord Nicholas 
says, ``the greatest irony may be that a broad consensus exists, in a 
highly rights-aware political establishment, in favor of one of the 
gravest and most egregious abuses of human rights that human society 
has ever tolerated. Didn't Europeans think they could never and must 
never kill again on an industrial scale? What a cruel deceit, then, 
that has led us to this mass killing of children . . . .''
  ``This is the question of questions for Europe;'' he writes, ``the 
practice of abortion is a mortal wound in Europe's heart.''
  And he goes on to persuasively advocate for a new ``abolitionism'' 
for Europe akin to the movement to abolish slavery. But the notes are 
ever mindful of the need to meet the needs of women: ``The task for us 
is not merely to abolish. We must also creatively envisage new and 
compelling answers to the problems that give rise to this practice . . 
. .''
  A brilliant essay. A must read for those who treasure and promote 
human rights. And equally applicable to us--in the United States--which 
mourns, or will mourn someday, killing over 53 million children by 
abortion since 1973.

Lord Nicholas Windsor Warns Europeans Not to Forget Their Most Pressing 
                         Moral Issue: Abortion

                   [From First Things, Dec. 1, 2010]

                       (By Lord Nicholas Windsor)

       At the close of the last century, as the reckoning was 
     drawn up in Europe for the actions and reactions of the 
     twentieth century, could we not have been forgiven for 
     tending a little toward the view that we had, after 
     everything, acquitted ourselves rather well? Hadn't we a long 
     list of accomplishments to admire in the years after 1945? We 
     had expunged Fascism, at immeasurable human cost, and we had 
     made profound reparation for its effects. We had washed our 
     hands of colonialism and vastly improved the material lot of 
     the poor in our own countries. We had built robust 
     democracies and welfare states and novel institutions in 
     Europe to defuse nationalisms and guarantee peace among 
     former belligerents. We had advanced the rights of women--
     indeed, the whole spectrum of rights. We had won the Cold 
     War.
       Much more could be added, I think. Poised just then before 
     the new millennium, seeing what vast work had been done in 
     our societies, mightn't it have seemed quite possible that 
     the greatest moral cancers in our civilization had been at 
     least contained and possibly eradicated? Hadn't history, at 
     least this moral cycle of history, really reached an end?
       In the decade since the turn of the millennium, the 
     cultural mood has been less happy, for a variety of reasons. 
     Even at its most confident, however, the West generally 
     recognized that some work remained to be done. So, for 
     example, the position of the poorest in the world, it is 
     held, will gradually and continually improve if enough effort 
     is made, not least by the developed world. For the mitigation 
     of global warming and climate change, political determination 
     will suffice to alter the carbon-hungry lifestyles that cause 
     the problem.
       The point here is that moderate political activity is 
     believed to be the sort of thing required to address these 
     problems, and there is a reasonable degree of optimism that 
     such political activity will be usefully brought to bear, 
     without the need to resort to force.
       A remaining category of problems still to be dealt with 
     could be bundled together as ``Rogue Regimes, the Taliban, 
     and al-Qaeda.'' This category rightly causes public alarm and 
     engenders calls for robust and, where necessary, lethal 
     response. But these are not threats that appear existential 
     and have not as yet provoked a real sense of public crisis. 
     Neither have they brought about mass political action in the 
     West. They are still, I believe, seen as problems that will 
     ultimately be solved, or at least kept at bay, without huge 
     social upheaval on our home soil and certainly with nothing 
     like the warfare resorted to by previous generations.
       Is it still possible then that we can point to anything of 
     any real significance that had been overlooked, anything 
     dangerous smuggled into this new phase of history that has 
     caught us unawares? I would say that this is indeed the case, 
     and I would like to focus especially on a matter and a 
     practice that constitutes the single most grievous moral 
     deficit in contemporary life: the abortion of our unborn 
     children.

[[Page 23417]]

       This is a historically unprecedented cascade of destruction 
     wrought on individuals: on sons, daughters, sisters, 
     brothers, future spouses and friends, mothers and fathers--
     destroyed in the form of those to whom we owe, quite simply 
     and certainly, the greatest solidarity and duty of care 
     because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow 
     humans. All else that we concern ourselves with in the lives 
     of human beings derives from the inescapable fact that first 
     we must have human lives with which to concern ourselves. By 
     disregarding this self-evident fact of the debt owed 
     immediately to the unborn--which is to be allowed to be born 
     (and let us not forget that all of us might have suffered 
     just the same fate before our birth)--humanity's deepest 
     instincts are trampled and shattered.
       This was only an implausible glimmer in the eyes of the 
     most radically progressive thinkers and activists a century 
     ago. Today legal, permissive abortion is a fact of life so 
     deeply embedded and thoroughly normalized in our culture 
     that--and this is the most insidious factor in that 
     normalization--it has been rendered invisible to politics in 
     Europe. Even mentioning it has become the first taboo of the 
     culture.
       There are consciences in Europe, it must be stressed, that 
     glow white-hot for justice and strive continuously for this 
     darkest fact of our public life to appear in public debate as 
     clearly as it does across the Atlantic in the United States. 
     For most of our contemporaries, however, this is a matter 
     that impinges little. The effectiveness of determined 
     campaigns of propaganda at the outset to harden consciences, 
     and gradually to enforce a conformism that fears to question 
     what is said to be a settled issue, has worked wonderfully 
     well.
       And this enforcement of a new status quo succeeds so well 
     due, surely, to benefits enjoyed as a result--benefits of an 
     order that make acceptable even the killing of innocents, by 
     their protectors, on a scale that freezes the imagination. 
     How much then must depend on its remaining so, remaining 
     beyond question? This is the nub of that ideological word 
     choice. So much else can be chosen in a given life if the 
     option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably 
     available. So many intoxicating freedoms are newly 
     established, if only abortion is never again denied to women 
     and to men.
       But what of the cost? As with the cost of previous great 
     willful destructions of human life, of whole classes of human 
     life, the fact that it must and will be borne is a certainty, 
     whatever the nature and scale of it. Of course, in the first 
     order of consequences, the price paid by the victims is not 
     obscure: We must never forget that the heaviest price is paid 
     by those whose lives are not to be lived.
       In the second order of consequences, however, we must look 
     closely at the hidden burden faced by those, especially 
     mothers, who participate in these acts and the losses 
     affecting present and future society. How will a society 
     regard itself, or value its own distinctive culture, when it 
     has placed this fearful act at its center--consciously 
     approving, even celebrating, its own most egregious moral 
     failing? Will it have the confidence simply to regenerate 
     itself? To survive by producing the next generation of 
     children in sufficient numbers?
       I would like to emphasize that we must never mistake the 
     secondary effects of this moral enormity for the primary, as 
     this would surely be to instrumentalize the victims and fail 
     again in our duty of respect toward them. It would be an 
     absurdity such as if the real tragedy of the Shoah were felt 
     first of all to lie in the social consequences. No, what we 
     must first lament is the mass destruction of human beings who 
     had first been deemed worthless. The fact in itself is what 
     we must keep before our eyes, before and apart from our 
     regard to anything that may derive from it.
       We live in what is truly a moral world turned upside down, 
     and the greatest irony may be that a broad consensus exists, 
     in a highly rights-aware political establishment, in favor of 
     one of the gravest and most egregious abuses of human rights 
     that human society has ever tolerated. Didn't Europeans think 
     they could never and must never kill again on an industrial 
     scale? What a cruel deceit, then, that has led us to this 
     mass killing of children, for a theoretical greater good, 
     which in this case is simply the wish not to be bound by a 
     pregnancy unless it is fully and freely chosen and which, 
     outside of that parameter, is declared, by fiat, to be null 
     and void.
       The sophistry is overwhelming: If I choose and desire my 
     child, then ipso facto I have granted it the right to live, 
     and it will live. But the inverse is equally the case, by 
     means of nothing more or less than my choice: Caesar's thumb 
     is up, or Caesar's thumb is down. And when it comes to 
     exporting this idea, we do it with zeal and determination 
     through such institutions as the United Nations and the 
     European Union.
       The granting to ourselves of the right wantonly to kill, 
     each year, millions of our offspring at the beginning of 
     their lives: This is the question of questions for Europe. 
     The practice of abortion is a mortal wound in Europe's heart, 
     in the center of Hellenic and Judeo-Christian culture.
       Having so recklessly carried this poison out of the 
     twentieth--the ugliest of all centuries--let us, for the sake 
     of all that has been good and beautiful and true about the 
     culture of the West, be clear that there is an urgent moral 
     priority here. Call it a ``New Abolitionism for Europe''--the 
     word abolitionism emphasizing the continuity between the 
     challenge faced now with the generational campaigns waged so 
     clear-sightedly in late-nineteenth-century America to rid 
     itself of the injustice of slavery. The abolitionists, I 
     believe, exemplify the courage and imagination required, even 
     if they do not provide perfect templates for what we face 
     now.
       This is a task that calls for a broader approach to the 
     safeguarding of life, as taught to us by those earlier 
     struggles to apportion value where it previously had not been 
     deemed to exist. We must re-enliven the valuing of life, and 
     this cannot restrict itself to the question of abortion, 
     despite its moral centrality. It must have regard to every 
     threat to the integrity of human beings, at all stages of 
     their being and in all circumstances.
       The task for us is not merely to abolish. We must also 
     creatively envisage new and compelling answers to the 
     problems that give rise to this practice, when the easiest 
     solutions may be destructive or distorting ones. And the goal 
     is that human life, without any exception, may be as 
     treasured and respected as the highest moral thought has 
     perennially called for it to be, and as our consciences 
     surely sound the echo.
       Author affiliation:
       Lord Nicholas Windsor studied theology at Oxford University 
     and is patron of the Right to Life Charitable Trust and the 
     Catholic National Library. Great-grandson of King George V of 
     the United Kingdom, Windsor is the first blood member of the 
     British royal family to be received into the Catholic Church 
     since King Charles II on his deathbed in 1685.

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