France and abortion: an act of betrayal of the very essence of democracy

@ElentirENG ES 3·01·2024 · 7:01 0

This week, the French Senate gave a resounding answer to the question of whether democracy is in danger in Europe.

France: the definitive betrayal of Marine Le Pen and her party to the defense of life
The problem of whitewashing the Jacobin left and what happened in France in 1793

An infamous reform that turns a crime into a right

On Wednesday, February 28, the Senate voted in favor of including abortion as a right in the French Constitution , an initiative of the socialist Emmanuel Macron, which proclaims "the freedom guaranteed to women to resort to voluntary interruption of pregnancy", a cynical euphemism to disguise that Induced abortion is the act of killing a human being at the beginning of his life, and not because any religious leader says so: it is something that science has amply demonstrated.

What will be next, persecute those who affirm scientific evidence about the beginning of life at conception? Persecute doctors who refuse to betray their professional duty and do not want to participate in the act of destroying a human life?

All groups overwhelmingly supported this aberration

This infamous initiative was approved by 267 votes in favor and 50 against. You can check here what each group voted. There were 41 negative votes in the groups of Les Républicains, 7 in the Union Centriste and 1 in the Rassemblement des démocrates, progressistes et indépendants. However, all groups voted overwhelmingly in favor of this juridical and moral aberration which involves presenting the act of killing innocent and defenseless human beings as a fundamental right, when in reality what is has done is shield the violation of the most basic of human rights, which is the right to life.

The precedent of the Jacobin Terror that France seems to have forgotten

France has the unfair reputation of being routinely presented as the cradle of democracy. In any case, it is the birthplace of the guillotine and the Jacobin Terror, the first totalitarian regime of the Modern Age, which massacred tens of thousands of people for reasons politicians in 1793, just four years after the start of the French Revolution. That was a warning of how easy it is to turn a democracy into a tyranny, but once again people who forget their own history are risking repeating its most sinister episodes.

The reason for democracy: putting limits on political power

Democracy already existed before that dramatic historical episode whose whitewashing only contributes to fattening a historical lie. Since the Middle Ages there have been parliaments in several European countries. The oldest assembly is the Icelandic Alþingi (year 930). In the year 979, the Tynwald on the Isle of Mann was founded, which is the oldest assembly with continuity over time. In 1188, the Cortes of León, the first parliament in Europe itself, were founded in what is now Spain. The Cortes of the Crown of Aragon and the Cortes of Castile also emerged on Spanish soil during the Middle Ages.

The reason for being of those first medieval parliaments connects fully with the very essence of democracy: the limitation of political power and its subjection to rules that put a stop to the abuses of those who exercised the government of nations, abuses that were not exclusive to monarchies, as was soon seen in what was really the first modern democracy in the West, which was not France, but the United States of America, a nation that, unlike revolutionary France, never wanted to uproot its Christian roots, but rather based its desire for freedom on them.

No democracy is perfect, and US democracy experienced one of its most difficult tests with the abolition of slavery, an issue that ended up leading the country first to secession and then to a civil war. The cause of that conflict was that it is difficult to proclaim that we are all born free and equal if we do not recognize the rights of certain human beings, in that case the black slaves brought from Africa and their descendants, who were treated as articles of property, something purely nefarious.

A reform dangerously similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935

Democracy in the West experienced its second great crisis in the first half of the 20th century, when a democratic country, the Weimar Republic, succumbed to an aberrant discourse that affirmed that certain human beings lacked rights and that all barriers against abuses of power had to be removed to grant full powers to a single person, Adolf Hitler. After the disaster caused by Nazism, the world saw the need to proclaim clear limits to political power. This is how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article 3 states:

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."

With its vote this week, the Senate of France has broken down one of the dams of democracy in the face of abuses of power, believing itself to have the authority to take away the rights of certain human beings and even proclaim their elimination as a constitutional right. It is a betrayal of the very essence of democracy, an usurpation by the majority against the human rights of a minority that does not even have a voice to defend itself from that abuse. What the French Senate has approved is something that is dangerously similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, with which the nazis stripped German Jews of their most basic rights as human beings, turning them into people second class.

The effects of uprooting a nation's Christian roots

Finally, it must be noted that it is no coincidence that this happened in France, a country that has a regime that wanted to uproot the Christian roots of its nation and that later condemned them to ostracism, as if the fact believing in God and following Christ would make you suspicious. The reality is that without Christianity there would be no freedom, nor equality nor fraternity. It was Christianity that consolidated in Europe the idea that we are brothers and equals because we are all children of God. It is Christianity on which our freedom is based, defending free will and our ability to freely choose between good and evil, against modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Marx or Nietzsche who denied that faculty. .

It is no coincidence that in this increasingly materialistic and relativistic Europe, democracy is going into a tailspin, by dissolving its moral foundations. What immutable human rights can there be if everything is relative and if the majority assumes the authority to suppress them? What happened in France should serve as a warning to us, once again, that our democracy can disappear with the applause of the majority, as it already did in Germany in 1933 and in Venezuela much more recently. A democracy without limits in the face of abuses of power can end up becoming the worst of tyrannies.

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Original photo: Pxhere.com.