On Abortion and Democracy

Opinion polls have consistently shown that the majority of Irish people are pro-life. But even if the reverse were the case, and the majority supported the pro-choice position, this would not then make such an attitude right.

The democratic will of a people, while important, can never be an absolute determiner of right and wrong.

Hitler was voted into power by democratic means. Slavery existed in democracies both ancient and modern.

Unless a democracy has a natural law foundation guaranteeing the rights of its citizens, those rights can never be secure. Indeed when a state rejects or abrogates a spiritual or transcendent basis for human rights those rights become subject and subservient to the will of the people, or the will of those who are able to exercise enough influence over the democratic institutions. This leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

Yet most people consider democracy and totalitarianism to be mutually exclusive, almost as if the presence of one guarantees the absence of the other. But they are answers to two different questions: democracy answers the question, "In whom is the social political power to be located?" whereas totalitarianism answers the question, "How much power are the social political authorities to have?" The answer given by modern democracies is total power, power to redefine human life, to reshape human thought and even human nature itself.

This is the chilling underlying idea that motivates the repeated calls in the media for successive governments to legislate for abortion and to support embryonic research.