Abortion is idolatry

Here's a speech I gave at the 40 Days for Life - Mid-point Rally in Ottawa:

If you've been following the news on the 40 Days for Life website, you'll have seen an article posted by Shawn Carney, Campaign Director of the 40 Days for Life in the US. He writes about abortion workers' peculiar view of the work they do. He describes a banner located just above the entrance to the Planned Parenthood facility in Virginia Beach, which reads: "Planning for Parenthood is Sacred Work".
I guess, depending on what one is worshipping, what one's worldview is, abortion can be considered sacred work.
One example of such a worldview is Warren Hern, an abortionist in Boulder Colorado and the author of a book entitled Abortion Practice which is used as a reference in medical schools for teaching the abortion procedure. A visit to his website www.drhern.com gives us quite an insight into his worldview.
Warren Hern believes that the human race is literally devouring the planet. Under the heading: Homo Ecophagus - The human species as a malignant process he lists a few of his works:
A 1993 article, in Current World Leaders, entitled: Has the human species become a cancer on the planet?: A theoretical view of population growth as a sign of pathology.
More recently, in 2008, in the International Journal of Anthropology, an article entitled: Urban Malignancy - Similarity in the fractal dimensions of urban morphology and malignant neoplasms.
In a 1990 article in the journal Population and Environment, titled : Why are there so many of us?  Description and diagnosis of a planetary ecopathological process, he describes the similarities he sees between urban growth and the spread of a cancerous tumour:

Because spectacular growth and invasiveness are outstanding characteristics of the human population, the similarity of the human species to a cancerous process comes readily to mind, especially to a physician. A schematic view of the growth of London from 1800 to 1955 looks like nothing so much as an expanding, invasive, metastatic, malignant tumor.

This abortionist's worldview would be laughable were it not for the dire consequences his thinking has for the unborn and also for the fact that it is being taken seriously in academic circles.
In yet another article, he takes pride in the efficiency of his abortion work:

One of the principal advantages of this procedure for patients, aside from safety, is the freedom from having to experienced (sic) unattended expulsion of a fetus that may or may not show signs of life. Delivery of the fetus or uterine evacuation is performed by the physician under controlled conditions.

Blessed John Paul II, in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, rightly identified the idolatry of efficiency as the foundation of the culture of death. He wrote: "This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency." (section 12)
G.K. Chesterton, in his book The Everlasting Man demonstrated how this cult of efficiency finds its religious expression. He stated,

To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. (Part 1, chapter 6)

He describes Phonecia as one such civilization:

The civilization that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. It (...) prided itself upon being very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look for immediate effects. (Part 1, chapter 6)

In (...)Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name Moloch. (Part 1, chapter 7)

Speaking about this false worship in various civilizations such as the Aztecs, Chesterton notes that there is a certain “anti-human antagonism”, even a “mystical hatred of the idea of childhood” in this idolatry. (Part 1, chapter 6)
Another fact of interest, the child sacrificing cultures seem to be mostly highly advanced and refined cultures, as is ours. For this false worship has not disappeared, it has been a constant throughout human history: Pharaoh's decree to kill all firstborn Hebrew males, Herod's massacre of the Innocents, the Aztec's continuous blood-shed to the deity with the unpronouncable name, the Canaanites and Phoenician sacrifice to Moloch and the Roman practice of infanticide, just to name a few.
Today, abortion is also considered a sacrament by its adherents. In 1992, French-Canadian author Ginette Paris, published a book entitled The Sacrament of Abortion. In it, she claims that abortion is a sacred act, a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis (known in the Roman empire as Diana). She ponders:

The same goddess thus offers protection and also death to women, children, and animals. Why these apparent contradictions ... personified in a feminine divinity? Is it a way of saying that a woman's protective power cannot function properly if she does not also possess full power, namely, the power over death as well as life? Her image belongs to us as well as to antiquity, because like all fundamental images of the human experience, which C.G. Jung called 'archetypes,' she never really ages but reappears in different forms and different symbols ... She encourages us to become more aware of the power of death, its inescapable nature, and its necessary role in a living ecology. Abortion is about love, life, and death.(p. 2)

Note here the parallels between her thinking and Warren Hern's extreme ecologism.
As can be seen by this book's product description on Amazon.com, this view of abortion as a sacrament has spread throughout the abortion industry.

Since its original publication, the book has been widely used in abortion clinics in Canada and in France and has even been given by some doctors to each and every women(sic) who had the procedure, along with pain killers. (Source)

There is an undeniable spiritual reality to abortion, infanticide and all human sacrifices that runs through human history and it hasn't disappeared, as Ginette Paris reminds us.
Fr. John Hardon told us that " behind the murder of unborn children is the superhuman mind and malevolent will of Satan and his minions. To know this is to also know that only divine power is a match for the demonic power behind abortion."
That divine power, that divine conquest of Satan and death happened at Calvary. There, Jesus-Christ, God Incarnate, offered himself as a perfect sacrifice. This divine sacrifice is the only hope for the human race. We are now at a crossroads in our country. Unless we as a society regain our collective sanity, we will continue along this path of self-destruction. Make no mistake, unless our culture radically turns towards the Triune God, it will sink into despair and destruction. The false gods are insatiable - sooner or later, they will consume their own worshippers.
Let us then turn our eyes towards Jesus-Christ, for He is our Strength. As we read in Psalm 121:

I lift up my eyes to the mountains; where is my help to come from?
My help comes from Yahweh who made heaven and earth.
May he save your foot from stumbling; may he, your guardian, not fall asleep!
You see -- he neither sleeps nor slumbers, the guardian of Israel.
Yahweh is your guardian, your shade, Yahweh, at your right hand.
By day the sun will not strike you, nor the moon by night.
Yahweh guards you from all harm Yahweh guards your life,
Yahweh guards your comings and goings, henceforth and for ever.