In a powerful Christmas Day message, Pope Francis condemned abortion, drawing parallels between it and the suffering of children in war zones and as refugees.
The head of the Catholic Church strongly denounced abortion, and the condemnation of abortion was unequivocal. He likened the act to murder, emphasizing the innocence of the unborn and described the killing of babies in abortions as a “slaughter.”
“How many innocents are being slaughtered in our world! In their mothers’ wombs, in odysseys undertaken in desperation and in search of hope, in the lives of all those little ones whose childhood has been devastated by war. They are the little Jesuses of today,” the Pope said.
Pope Francis condemned abortion repeatedly throughout 2023.
“You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end. It is not played with!” he told reporters in September.
“Whether it is the law not to let the child grow in the mother’s womb or the law of euthanasia in disease and old age,” he said, “I am not saying it is a faith thing, but it is a human thing: There is bad compassion.”
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Earlier this year, Pope Francis condemned killing unborn children and the so-called right to abortion.
The Pope tied the two together as joint evils and said ending the lives of babies before birth was a “tragic defeat” for their right to life.
“This is the baneful path taken by those forms of ‘ideological colonization’ that would cancel differences, as in the case of the so-called gender theory, or that would place before the reality of life reductive concepts of freedom, for example by vaunting as progress a senseless ‘right to abortion,’ which is always a tragic defeat,” the Pope said.
He urged European nations to instead focus their laws on the dignity of human beings and their inherent worth and value.
“How much better it would be to build a Europe centered on the human person and on its peoples, with effective policies for natality and the family — policies that are pursued attentively in this country — a Europe whose different nations would form a single family that protects the growth and uniqueness of each of its members,” the Holy Father said.
