By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Countries in the European Union confront serious challenges as winter approaches, with security and energy issues foremost among them. Yet the European Parliament can’t seem to shed its obsession with abortion.
Indeed, it’s kind of embarrassing.
In June of last year, Predrag Fred Matic, a Member of Parliament for Croatia, presented what has come to be known as the “Matic Report.” The document describes abortion as “essential healthcare,” and declares that violations of “sexual and reproductive health and rights” are “a form of violence against women and girls.”
Addressing the right of medical personnel to refuse to participate in murder, Matic says “No Way!” Such refusal constitutes “denial of medical care,” according to the report, which was adopted in Plenary Session by a vote of 378 to 255, with 42 abstentions, on June 24, 2021.
Prior to the vote, Matic said, “Tomorrow is a great day for Europe and the entire progressive world. Tomorrow we decide on positioning Europe as a community that chooses to live in the 21st or the 17th century. Don’t let history remember us as the latter ones.”
One gets the impression that Matic’s “modern” Europe must not only allow abortion, but support it with zeal. The combinations are curious: While doing nothing to address the evaporating birthrate in their own countries, many EU members send millions in aid for “population planning” to sub-Saharan Africa.
Meanwhile, they welcome immigrants from Muslim countries by the millions.
While these modernists stumble in a decadent stupor into the cold future, reality is knocking on their door. Turkey’s strongman Recep Erdogan recognizes all too well that demography is destiny, and he says so quite plainly. Western Europe has hosted Turkish workers for well over half a century, and today it is home to millions of Turks. So while Erdogan tells his countrymen in Turkey to have at least three children, he tells those living in the EU to have “at least five.”
At the rate things are going, if Europe embraces Matic’s “modern” 21st century, by the post-modern 22nd century there might not be many Europeans at all.
No matter, Matic’s spirit persists: Last July, in a spiteful move, the abortion-addicted EU Parliament passed a resolution condemning the United States, attacking the Supreme Court’s June ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
The Parliament “strongly condemns once again the backsliding in women’s rights and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights taking place globally, including in the U.S.,” it read.
Behaving like a run-of-the-mill D.C. lobbying firm, the European Parliament “supports, likewise, the calls for the U.S. Congress to pass a bill protecting abortion at [the] federal level.”
Had the Parliament paused to deliberate thoughtfully (which it didn’t), this rude intrusion into the internal affairs of a friendly and benevolent country might have been put in the bottom drawer. Members might even have pointed out that every single member country of the EU has more stringent abortion laws than those advocated by Joe Biden, indicating that supporters might have betrayed their constituents back home.
But the Left in Europe, like its ideological comrades in the United States, has repeatedly sought to make the “human right to reproductive health and abortion” a requirement under EU and international law. So far that effort has failed.
Hungary Grows, The EU Groans
The European experience seems to imply that support for abortion is linked, not altogether invisibly, with support for mass immigration.
So it’s no surprise that the EU Parliament routinely hectors prudent countries that encourage larger families while taking strong measures to limit immigration.
In fact, such limits are imposed precisely to conform to EU’s laws inside what is called the Schengen Zone.
But what’s the law to the Left? In Europe, immigration advocates assail supporters of the rule of law with the same fervor displayed by their U.S. comrades, including our Catholic hierarchy in its secular persona.
The demographic winter in the EU — the absolute collapse of birthrates throughout the region — leaves the EU with no other option other than to open its doors to endless waves of immigrants, law or no law. Hungary is the rare exception, encouraging population stability and growth by supporting families with significant government incentives and benefits.
So the EU Parliament abortion volcano has erupted once more.
On September 13, the Hungarian Minister of the Interior, Sandor Pinté, signed a decree amending Hungary’s Law on the protection of fetal life. As if on cue, the European Parliament immediately approved a report declaring that Hungary is no longer a full democracy and that the rights of its citizens are under threat. The resolution concocts a fictional category — Hungary is now a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” — and authorizes the Parliament’s entire bureaucratic apparatus to interfere with the normal functioning of Hungary’s institutions, including the country’s access to European funds.
Will Hungary relent? Doubtful. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and pro-life President Katalina Novak are far ahead of their EU colleagues whose heads have long been buried deep in the sand regarding the population crisis in which the whole of Europe is mired.
Unless Europe and the rest of the West seeks to perish by its own hand, it is best that they change course and work to restore the virtues inherited from Christendom, based on recognizing the family as the fundamental building block of society and preserving its primacy as the foundation of civic virtue.
FBI Targets Catholics, Bishops Strangely Silent
There’s an ill wind howling from Joe Biden’s FBI towards Catholics, and apparently our beloved shepherds do not have ears to hear.
While Joe’s Junta uses hundreds of subterfuges to harass and intimidate its political foes, its hostility towards pro-lifers is truly historic. Its latest moves constitute a threat to every American.
As soon as Garland’s Goons knock on your door, it doesn’t matter how innocent you are. You’re going to need a six-figure down payment for legal fees if you don’t want to rot in the basement of an American Lubyanka.
Where is the voice of our shepherds? Sure, they have their reasons to fear the thugs as well, but why should that stop them?
Well, bishops in dozens of states are still under investigation for covering up the scandals. And Nancy Pelosi could shut the water off at the federal trough that funds their secular NGOs.
And then there are those 87,000 new IRS agents. . . .
Pope Francis and America’s bishops have abandoned Cardinal Zen to the ChiComs. Have they abandoned us as well?
Ah — they might abandon the faithful, but not their beloved illegal aliens.
Florida is flooded not only with Hurricane Ian, but with illegals. When the governors of Florida and Texas invited a few dozen of them to accept a free ride to the elite compound of Martha’s Vineyard, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller fumed.
“To use migrants and refugees as pawns offends God, destroys society and shows how low individuals can (stoop) for personal gains,” he wrote.
How obtuse can our shepherds be? The laity of Texas and Florida might respond, “To use migrants and refugees as cash cows to bring in hundreds of millions for the USCCB’s secular ‘charities’ offends God, destroys society and shows how low individuals can (stoop) for personal gains.”
And say — just how “offended” is the Texas hierarchy, anyway?
We repeatedly asked Helen Osman, director of Communications for the Texas Catholic Conference, if she could provide any record of a Texas bishop condemning the Coyote Cartels that are making tens of billions of dollars trafficking drugs, children, guns, and illegal aliens. We have received no reply at press time.
Will at least one good bishop in Texas condemn them?
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