This Sunday is an important onelt is the Day for Life 2007 and hence an occasion for us to reflect on a profound enormity in our midst: ever more destruction, exploitation and trivialisation of human life. ever more arrogant disregard for the natural order, ever more eugenics-driven, immoral science, ever more erosion of our Judaeo-Christian inheritance. Much of this, including abortion up to birth of special-needs children, human cloning, embryonic stem cell research and now the production of part-animal, part-human hybrids, has been hastened by the would-be Catholic Tony Blair.
The Day is also an opportunity for us to give support now, and to pledge it for the future. to the pro-life cause, because this year the money collected is being shared between the Linacre Centre and prolife agencies: Cura in Ireland, the Cardinal Winning Initiative in Scotland and the national charity Life in England and Wales.
The idea of a Day for Life was first mooted at a conference in Rome in the early 1980s and commended by John Paul 11 in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae in 1986. After a false start in this country. the Day is at last focusing on pro-life issues in the strict sense, as Evangelium Vitae intended.
And in the nick of time: October 27 will be the 40th anniversary of the royal assent to the Abortion Act (which by then will have claimed over six and a half million victims). Shortly afterwards we will see the start of a furious battle in Parliament between those who promote the Gospel of Life and its most implacable foes. Pro-life MPs and peers are planning a major assault on abortionism, human embryo abuse and such things as the provision for lesbian couples of children who will know no father. The campaign will be fought outside Westminster as well as within it.
If the battle is to be won, hearts and minds have to be won first. The pro-life case is absolutely coherent and unanswerable. If only more people would stop and listen. That is why Life's nationwide educational programme is so important. It is reaching tens of thousands of young people a year. But the pro-life cause will finally convince only if we can show that we have the better way of responding to crisis pregnancy, infertility, disability and so on: a more civilised, life-embracing and life-enhancing way, a way that respects the inviolable dignity of all human life. That is why Life's pregnancy care service (especially the National Helpline and Life Housing) and the Life FertilityCare programme — which reach out to thousands of women a year and provide a loving, positive alternative to abortion and IVF — are equally important.
Alas, all this costs money. Big money. But on Sunday we all have a chance to contribute to this work. We trust our readers will be among the most generous donors.