When I read the news that a large majority of Irish voters, in every county save Donegal, had voted to legalize abortion I was stunned. I’m a lover of Irish history. I’m stirred by 500 years of struggle against religious oppression.

So I wondered: Can I even listen to those powerful ballads again? Or have today’s Irish voters made songs like “The Foggy Dew” and poems like “Easter 1916” just meaningless strings of words?

I think of the thousands who died during the Famine rather than “take the soup” offered to those who’d abandon their faith. Are voters saying they died for nothing? For a slightly more musical accent in which one speaks the Queen’s English? And defends British-style lax abortion laws? (Except of course in Ulster. There the unborn are still protected. There the Orange Order spoke out against repealing the 8th, while Pope Francis didn’t.)

Worse than Cromwell. Worse than the Famine.

In one year, Irish doctors will kill more Irish children than Cromwell ever did. How many years before the death toll exceeds that of the Famine? Except that no foreigner will be in the least to blame. The blight that has stricken Ireland is one that calcifies the heart. Irish hearts, as it long ago hardened the hearts of so many Americans.

In one year, Irish doctors will kill more Irish children than Cromwell ever did.

I speak from bitter experience.

My Pearl Harbor Moment … and Yours

My struggle against abortion began with a phone call. I was a 17-year-old soldier in basic training. I’d dropped out of high school and enlisted. Why? To support my Irish-American high school girlfriend, Katie, who was carrying our child. A friend summoned me to a payphone. On a crackly line, I heard Katie uncontrollably sobbing. She couldn’t manage a word.

Then her father grabbed the phone. “I found out about your little ‘secret,’ and it’s GONE!” I later learned he’d dragged her for a third-trimester abortion at Chicago’s Masonic Hospital. He probably didn’t mention it to his good friend, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Katie later told me what the abortionist had said to her: “By the way, you had a little girl.” Her name is Jessica.

I wasn’t a Catholic or even a Christian. I knew nothing of politics. But I knew what a child was. That our child deserved protection. It was only after that phone call that I even found out about abortion on demand. That any child, through all nine months, could be killed. For any reason. Anywhere in America. (Make no mistake, that’s what happens de facto in Britain. And now will happen in Ireland.) The unborn have less legal protection than lambs reared for slaughter — who must be destroyed humanely.

The same American pro-choicers who cheered the end of the 8th Amendment? Over here, they fight against bills that account for fetal pain and suffering. Or protect unborn babies from dying for the “crime” of being a girl, instead of a boy. Their slogan: “Abortion on Demand, Without Apology.” That is what you are in for.

Are Human Beings Just Pleasure/Pain Robots?

St. John Paul II warned us in one of the last things he ever wrote, Memory and Identity. We face a stark choice between worldviews. A Culture of Life sees every human person as the sacred image of God, whom Jesus became man to save. The Culture of Death sees us as pleasure and pain machines, who wink out at death. For decades, most of the West has been embracing the Culture of Death, while clinging to little shards of the Culture of Life. Human rights. Justice. Mercy. These have no place in the new utilitarian order. You will see them disappear, one by one. They will die like flowers of a plant whose roots were cut.

The Culture of Death can’t last, since it’s built on a void. But as it slides toward oblivion, it can take many good things with it. It has taken much of America, killed off a third of our last generation. It has flattened our birth rate and chilled our souls. That’s what it does. And what it will now do to Ireland.

My soul weeps for the women who will follow this phony “freedom” to destroy their very own children. For the men who will use it to exploit women and discard them. That rots the soul. The Harvey Weinsteins of Ireland just won the most valuable weapon in their arsenal: The power to hand some abused woman a check and tell her “Get rid of it.” Remember that the most effective pro-choice advocate in American history was Hugh Hefner.

Waking a Sleeping Giant

That phone call I got at Fort Benning, Georgia, struck me like a Pearl Harbor: A sudden, bloody, unprovoked attack on the defenseless. But it roused me as that attack once awakened my nation. It drove me into a lifetime of human rights activism, from the abortion clinics of the U.S. to the killing fields of Sudan. I’ve produced movies, given thousands of speeches, and written a book promoting the Culture of Life. It’s called The Race to Save Our Century.

I pray that the Irish people see quickly the horror this vote unleashes. Those who would occupy Ireland, pillage her, and strip her of her faith learned over 500 years how fiercely the Irish resist. May the same courage that kept alive the spark of freedom in a small, invaded island steel your hearts today and tomorrow.

Let the Resistance begin.