Caesar’s Thumb Now Available

Nicholas Windsor’s Caesar’s Thumb from the December issue is now available online. Subtitled “Europeans should not forget their most pressing moral issue: abortion,” it begins with a survey of the moral and other accomplishments of Western civilization, but continues:

Is it still possible then that we can point to anything of any real significance that had been overlooked, anything dangerous smuggled into this new phase of history that has caught us unawares? I would say that this is indeed the case, and I would like to focus especially on a matter and a practice that constitutes the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life: the abortion of our unborn children.

This is a historically unprecedented cascade of destruction wrought on individuals: on sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, future spouses and friends, mothers and fathers—destroyed in the form of those to whom we owe, quite simply and certainly, the greatest solidarity and duty of care because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans. All else that we concern ourselves with in the lives of human beings derives from the inescapable fact that first we must  have human lives with which to concern ourselves. By disregarding this self-evident fact of the debt owed immediately to the unborn—which is to be allowed to be born (and let us not forget that all of us might have suffered just the same fate before our birth)—humanity’s deepest instincts are trampled and shattered.