Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who just made deeply troubling comments on abortion, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who just signed the country’s most radical abortion law, have been the subject of intense ire in recent days. The outrage is coming not just coming from “radical” pro-lifers, but people from across the political spectrum.

Why? Because virtually no one but the far left believes it is morally acceptable to allow infants to be murdered seconds before birth, or to be left to die after delivery at the behest of the mother.

Yet the nation has been shocked by radical left’s boldness in their mission to define preborn human beings as disposable non-persons. Where is this evil coming from, and how do we stop it?

The Slaughter of the Young and the Elderly

Abortion and infanticide have historically been common practices. In the first century AD, infanticide was a common and culturally accepted practice across the world. The murder of infants was a regular occurrence in Europe into the Middle Ages and beyond, despite being condemned by both church and state.

The practice was not confined to the desperate, illiterate, impoverished masses, as if “enlightened” thinkers knew better. The Twelve Tables of Roman Law, admired by Cicero, contains the command that, “A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed.”

Likewise, the wealthy first century Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote, “We doom scabby sheep to the knife, lest they should infect our flocks. We destroy monstrous births, and we also drown our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed; to separate what is useless from what is sound is an act, not of anger, but of reason.” This from a Stoic, who supposedly believed virtue to be the highest good. Notably, Seneca was Nero’s tutor.

Infanticide was an acknowledged option for any child who was deformed, sickly, of uncertain paternity, the wrong sex, or simply unnecessary to the household. Aristotle, revered by many a university professor, wrote that, “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared,” and “if any people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practiced on it before it has developed sensation and life.”

The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans all practiced child sacrifice to appease their gods. The Chimú civilization, located in what is now Peru, sacrificed more than 140 children at one time some 550 years ago. The children’s chests were slashed open, presumably to remove their hearts.

The citizens of the powerful ancient city Carthage in Phoenicia ritually sacrificed their infants. Archaeologists believe the preferred age of sacrificial infants was less than three months old. According to the writing of early AD Greek biographer Plutarch, “But with full knowledge and understanding [the Carthaginians] offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds.”

The residents of the broader region of Canaan (late second millennium B.C.) were condemned numerous times by the ancient prophets of Israel for their child sacrifice. The prophet Jeremiah, in his judgment against apostate Israel, foretold that the valley of Hinnom, where the Israelites were sacrificing children to Baal, would be called “the valley of Slaughter” (Jeremiah 19:5-6).

Evidence for both ritualistic and utilitarian murder can be gathered from around the globe. In times of famine, the Inuit would abandon the elderly (both with and without consent) or dispense of them by quicker means. The Bactrians of ancient Persia were reported to have fed their sick and elderly to dogs trained especially for this purpose. Nearby cultures were supposed to have had similar senicidal customs. Among the Massagetae, Herodotus wrote that, “Human life does not come to its natural close with this people,” but that the people sacrificed their elderly, boiled their flesh, and ate it.

Not every single community on earth had such evil practices, but the embrace of death as the first solution to a family or tribe’s problems has been wickedly banal, historically speaking.

Judeo-Christian Morality Has Saved Us from Much Evil

Northam’s endorsement of infanticide by exposure is only shocking because we have lived in a rare cultural moment in which infanticide is considered abhorrent. This extraordinary development is no accident. A sense of morality about life and death is not the product of evolution over the last 2,000 years. Rather, humanity’s progress out of death culture is due to nothing less than Judeo-Christian influence.

As formerly mentioned, the Christian God condemned child sacrifice through his prophets; Israelites were specifically commanded not to kill their children. The concept of bloodguilt is found throughout the Old Testament, even in cases where death was seemingly accidental.

Murder was an abomination. The blood of Abel, the first recorded murder victim in the Bible, “cried out” to the Lord from the ground. The gravity of taking a human life was no less firm among the followers of Jesus, who consider the Hebrew scriptures the word of God. As the gospel spread, so did the idea that all human life is precious.

The belief in the sanctity of life overrode even the commonly accepted practice of abortion. Contrast the evil of Aristotle’s belief with what Tertullian, an early church father, wrote in “Apologia”: “In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the foetus in the womb…To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.”

Elsewhere, he wrote: “Thus, you read the word of God, spoken to Jeremias: ‘Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee.’ If God forms us in the womb, He also breathes on us as He did in the beginning: ‘And God formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.’…Was it, then, a dead body at that stage? Surely it was not, for ‘God is the God of the living and not the dead.’”

As Tertullian recounted, believers in the early church would search through the heaps of refuse in Roman cities and rescue infants from among the refuse and broken pottery. There is archaeological evidence to support the fact that infants were thrown in the trash or into the sewer, sometimes deliberately killed instead of being out left to die by exposure. That children should never be trash was a revolutionary concept in the early centuries after Christ.

The fourth century Roman emperor Constantine, who is generally believed to have converted to Christianity and was at the very least influenced by it, considered infanticide a crime. Later, Emperor Valentinian, also a professed Christian, officially outlawed the practice by requiring that all children be reared.

Since that time, the belief that God made man in his own image and set him apart from the rest of creation for communion with his creator, that he is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and that therefore God’s prohibition against murder is to be upheld, has been the basis for the protection of human life.

Christianity Deeply Shaped the Early Days Of America

Infanticide was outlawed in colonial America. The earliest recorded execution for infanticide was in 1648 in Massachusetts. Similar court cases from the 17th and early 18th century are found in Maryland, Maine, Virginia, and New York. Abortion was also a prosecutable offense. Between 1670 and 1807, there were 51 convictions of infanticide in Massachusetts.

The seriousness with which our forefathers considered the murder of children was not due to the influence of the “great” philosophizing of Aristotle, Seneca, or Cicero. It was due to the Christian faith. It is Christians who have historically run orphanages, adoption agencies, and pregnancy clinics. It is Christians who advocate most fiercely for heartbeat bills and abolition. It is Christians out on the sidewalk, day after day, begging women not to kill their babies and offering to connect them with church members who are willing to adopt. Christians take seriously the biblical command to “look after the orphan and widow in their distress.”

Where the kingdom of God* invades, death flees, both spiritually and physically. Where populations dwell in spiritual darkness, death finds favor. How can I know this for sure? How do I know our contemporary revulsion toward infanticide is not simply the result of human “progress” over the last two millennia? Because when Christianity is aggressively suppressed within a culture, as it has been under Communist and Socialist regimes, society chokes on the stench of death.

Recent Godless Regimes Did Not Value Human Life

Adolph Hitler’s genocidal socialist regime* practiced the euthanasia of “life unworthy of life” and murdered about six million Jews. Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had no qualms with mass starvation. A quarter of the Cambodian population died under Pol Pot. Altogether, godless collectivism led to the deaths of about 100 million people in the 20th century. Karl Marx’s philosophy implicitly assumed that some segments of the population must be “left behind” in the march toward utopia.

American culture has stood in stark contrast against this backdrop of death and misery, and it’s not because Anglo Americans are inherently better than any other people group. It is because this nation was founded on Christian principles, namely that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. First among those rights is life. The principles of Christianity have been deeply formative to American culture. Restraining evil and promoting prosperity bound us together with a common creed.

But as we are now witnessing, that influence is fading. Majority support for legal abortion has been steady for decades, and millennials are just as supportive of it as the previous two generations. We are less religious than ever, and it is no coincidence that the godless are some of the biggest proponents of late-term abortion and infanticide. Those who profess Christianity and publicly bless abortion clinics do so against the core teachings of their own faith––it is not an intramural dispute, but an aberration.

What we are seeing now is a return to a world that does not know God and does not want to know God. This is the consequence of our detachment from Christianity and its moral system. The truth is that you do not attain a culture where human life (albeit born life) is almost universally cherished without the knowledge of the one true God.

As the Apostle Paul reiterated from Old Testament writers: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God…Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

The fact that we are surrounded by a wealth of resources and still 13 percent of all pregnancies in America and 28 percent in the state of New York end in murder should tell you something. This is not a matter of inequality of rights between the sexes or inequality of resources. It is a matter of the heart, and a heart without God is “desperately wicked.” The god of Progress has led its worshippers to embrace death as easily as the Canaanite gods that surrounded the people of Israel.

Where idolatry is not directly involved, a perceived lack of resources has, for millennia, been the excuse to choose death, not the reason. In such a wealthy and technologically advanced society, it is perhaps more obvious a truth now than it was 2,000 years ago, but the truth has always been there.

*I am not talking about the political Christendom of Europe and the Crusades. I am talking about the spiritual kingdom of God as referred to by Jesus and the New Testament writers.

**Before you tell me, “Hitler was a Christian!” watch this video of a “Christmas tree” with a Swastika suspended over the top. Hitler also is reported to have said, “I’ll have my reckoning with the church. I’ll have it reeling on the ropes.” The Nazis who surrounded Hitler deeply hated Christianity and wanted to see it destroyed.

(For more from the author of “Infanticide Is the Historical Hallmark of a Pagan Culture” please click HERE)

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Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., kept his word Monday evening, coming to the Senate floor and giving all 100 U.S. senators the opportunity to condemn infanticide. The opportunity was declined by Senate Democrats.

Sasse asked for unanimous consent to proceed to a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would protect infants born alive after attempted abortion procedures by requiring doctors to provide medical care to those — I must stress this — born-alive infants. Without these protections, an infant who survives an abortion procedure may be left to die on the table in a state like New York, where late-term abortion up to the point of delivery is now legal if an abortionist says it is necessary to “protect the mother’s health” or that the fetus is not “viable.”

“Every senator will have the opportunity to stand for human dignity – to stand for the belief that, in this country, all of us are created equal,” Sasse said. “Because if that equality means anything, surely it means that infanticide is wrong. Frankly, this shouldn’t be hard.”

Sasse moved to pass this bill after Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, in defense of a bill introduced in his state similar to the New York law, suggested that a mother and her physician would have a “discussion” about what to do with an infant born alive after an attempted abortion.

“The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” Northam said.

Sasse said Governor Northam endorsed infanticide.

No euphemisms. No weasel-words there. Infants could kept comfortable and resuscitated. And also, baby girls could be left cold and alone to die.

Just a few years ago, the abortion lobby was really clear in its talk about hoping that abortion would be “safe and legal, but rare.” This was the slogan. Abortion would be “safe, legal, and rare.” Now we’re talking about keeping a baby comfortable while the doctors have a debate about infanticide.

That is what we’re talking about here on the floor tonight. We’re not talking about second-trimester abortion; we’re not having some big, complicated discussion about a mother’s reproductive freedom, as important as all those debates are. We’re actually talking about babies that have been born. The only debate on the floor tonight is about infanticide.

Sasse’s bill, cosponsored by 42 Senate Republicans, would require those physicians to save the life of the baby born alive. He pleaded with his Democratic colleagues, asking them not to object to his unanimous consent request.

There are only two sides of the debate on the floor tonight: You’re either for babies, or you’re defending infanticide. That is actually what the legislation is that’s before us.

Please don’t block this legislation.

Please don’t let Governor Northam define you. Don’t let an extremist pro-abortion lobby and pledge hold you hostage. Please don’t protect infanticide.

Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington stood in objection to the bill, claiming that infanticide is already illegal and accusing the Republicans of mischaracterizing Sasse’s bill.

“We have laws against infanticide in this country. This is a gross misinterpretation of the actual language of the bill that is being asked to be considered, and therefore, I object,” Murray said.

Murray is wrong, of course. As Sasse noted, the New York abortion law removed the protections for infants born alive during an attempted abortion. National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis points out that only 26 states have affirmative protections for infants who survive abortions. And it’s hard to understand how Sasse and others have “mischaracterized” his bill, which is only seven pages long and not difficult to understand. The bill states that Congress finds: 1) “If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws”; and 2) “Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care.”

Specifically, the bill Murray claims is grossly mischaracterized requires that a health care practitioner present when a child is born alive shall “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.” Then it requires that health care practitioner to take the baby to a hospital for further care. The penalty for failing to follow the law would be at least five years’ imprisonment. Additionally, the intentional killing of a child born alive would be prosecuted as murder.

The bill has a mandatory reporting requirement, so people working at an abortion facility would be required to report if and when an abortionist does not work to save the life of an infant born alive. The bill also gives a mother the legal right to sue if her baby is born alive and the abortionist did not follow this law, letting the child die.

And that’s it. What exactly is Sasse mischaracterizing? His legislation protects infants born alive after attempted abortions from being left to die and clarifies that killing such an infant is murder. It’s an infanticide ban, exactly as Sasse describes.

It’s Murray and the other Democrats defending or excusing Northam’s comments and the New York abortion law who are making a gross mischaracterization. This is not hard. They are defending and excusing the murder of children born alive. By blocking the bill, Murray and the Democrats who support her protected infanticide.

Now it is time to push for a roll call vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., promised this would not be the last time this bill is considered.

I’m proud to be a co-sponsor of @SenSasse’s legislation to protect the rights of all newborn babies. My full statement:https://t.co/17gEZl4ghX

— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) February 4, 2019

Speaking in support of Sasse’s bill, he said it is “harrowing” that this bill is necessary.

What could be more unanimous than this: That what medical professionals owe every single newborn American citizen, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, is attention and care — not neglect, and certainly not violence. Frankly, it’s harrowing that this legislation is even necessary. It was even more disturbing when, last week, a Democrat governor was unable to clearly and simply state that of course, these newborn babies have human rights that must be respected.

I’ve been co-sponsor of Senator Sasse’s legislation. And I hope that none of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle invent any reasons to block this request later today. That would make quite a disturbing statement. If they do inexplicably block Senator Sasse’s effort, I can assure them that this will not be the last time we try to ensure that all newborns are afforded this fundamental legal protection.

Likewise, Sasse promised to continue to seek a roll call vote on in the Senate on this bill. Every member of the United States Senate should go on record to oppose infanticide. This shouldn’t be a controversial position. It’s not a philosophical or scientific debate about when life begins. This is about little babies who are clearly, visibly alive and shouldn’t be killed or left to die. This is about what we, as Americans, are willing to do to protect those little babies.

Voters ought to know where their senators stand on opposing infanticide. The Senate must vote. (For more from the author of “Democrats Block Infanticide Ban, but It’s Not Over. The Senate Must Vote” please click HERE)

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