On this festive occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Human Life Review, it is right and just that we send up thankful prayers to all the prolifers here in America and abroad who have helped to sustain a movement dedicated not just to unborn life but to what St. John Paul II hailed in Evangelium Vitae as the “civilization of truth and love, in the praise and glory of God, the Creator and lover of life.” Let us therefore thank the late great James P. McFadden, the founder of the Human Life Review, who had the prescience to know that the fight against abortion would be a long, long fight, for which his review would act as both battle cry and billet. Let us thank Maria McFadden Maffucci, the editor-in-chief, and Anne Conlon, the editor of the Human Life Review. These are the old campaigners who through havoc and hazard have kept alive the fire of our fight. We should particularly thank those unbiddable prolifers who are now behind bars for witnessing to the “civilization of truth and love” in a country whose governors have become as tyrannical as they are barbarous. Let us speak their names as we would speak the names of a sacred litany, for theirs is a self-sacrificing witness that unites us all to the communion of saints: Lauren Handy, Jonathan Darnel, Jay Smith, John Hinshaw, William Goodman, Joan Bell, Paulette Harlow, Jean Marshall, Heather Idoni, Herb Geraghty. Let us commemorate the vital converts to our cause: Dr. Bernard Nathanson (1926-2011), the abortion doctor of many years in New York and the architect of the American pro-abortion lobby, who became one of the most ardent and heroic of prolifers; and the great English defender of life Aleck Bourne (1886-1974), who, despite initially agitating for the legalization of abortion, went on to become a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.

I thought of Bourne the other day when I was on the telephone with my good friend John Smeaton, another prolifer eminently worthy of celebration, who for many years led the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and now heads up the Voice of the Family, which is keeping the pro-life cause alive not just in the United Kingdom but Europe as well. I first met John at a book signing for my Culture and Abortion (2013) at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall. After giving a brief speech thanking those who had been kind enough to attend, I huddled with my publisher Tom Longford of Gracewing, who turned to me and said, in a gleeful stage whisper, that we had hit the jackpot: “John Smeaton bought 30 copies of the book!”

Here was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and John and I have remained compadres ever since. On one of his forays to New York, John and his lovely wife Josephine joined me for dinner at Antonucci, my culinary home away from home, and there we had a most impassioned pro-life chinwag. What I have always admired about John is that he was born to champion the unborn. He is the reverse of the summer soldier. He goes the long haul. One could never imagine him saying with Falstaff: “Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.” No, John has given all his fame for the battle for life, for the salvation of souls. His commitment to the cause of life is as stalwart as that of another legendary prolifer, Father Richard John Neuhaus, whose rousing words remain the marching orders of prolifers around the world: “Whether, in this great contest between the culture of life and the culture of death, we were recruited many years ago or whether we were recruited only yesterday, we have been recruited for the duration.” Fifty years is a fair duration.

When I think of John, I think of someone who both knows the pro-life mission inside out and has spent his entire adult life defending and advancing it in the most practical and faithful ways possible. “The aim of the pro-life movement and the reason for its existence,” he recently declared, “are to oppose and to defeat the idea, which dominates virtually the entire world, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived; and to create a society in which God’s law, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is not only written into national and international law, it is also upheld and energetically defended by our fellow citizens.” John also realizes that in prosecuting the pro-life cause, we are necessarily sworn to oppose a wide range of related evils, including contraception, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, and sex education, that undermines parents as the primary educators of their children, “all of which,” John recognizes, “serve to undermine the inviolability and value of human life.”

That John does all he does for the Voice of the Family in solidarity with our heroic jailed prolifers is clear from another answer he gave in a recent interview. “The pro-life movement,” he reminded his readers, “is a counterrevolutionary movement and, in order to achieve its aim, its members must be prepared to become not only saints—which everyone is called to be—but martyrs, which opponents of abortion and evils related to abortion are called to be. And even without being martyred, we must joyfully embrace a spirit of sacrifice in order to work towards our goal.”

When United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced 76-year-old Joan Bell to over two years incarceration for protesting the infanticide of a notorious abortionist in Washington, DC, and the condemned lady left the courtroom praying aloud the Magnificat, the world was given an unforgettable example of precisely the joy John has in mind. This is the true “special relationship” between America and Great Britain. It is not merely a relationship between politicians. When someone once asked Cardinal Newman what he thought of politics, he would only answer that “to touch politics is to touch pitch.” No, the special relationship is not between politicians: It is between prolifers—though we do have a few politicians who put their prolife convictions before their political interests. And John is one of the most laudable proponents of this special pro-life relationship.

John is also crystal clear about two major changes that have taken place in the pro-life movement in the United Kingdom. Fifty years ago, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children had cordial relations with the medical profession; Sir John Peel, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians, assured the prolifers of the society that “it would be extremely interested in sending a representative” to serve on one of their committees. Now that cordiality has vanished. The medical profession in the UK, as in America, is in lockstep with a political establishment hell-bent on treating abortion, as the former president of the Royal College told the Daily Mail in 2017, as no different from such routine procedures as removing a bunion. Bans on health professionals’ right to conscientious objection to connivance in abortion and euthanasia have been the natural corollary of the medical profession’s truckling to state opposition to all pro-life activity, including the protesting of abortion outside abortion clinics. Another major change has been what John refers to as “the ever-increasing curbs on the freedom to spread the pro-life message either to schools or universities.” The assiduity of the cancel culture has become the bane of prolifers throughout the UK and Europe, as well as the United States, though pro-life ingenuity will need to continue to find ways to baffle such cancellation. To borrow a phrase of Martin Luther King which Fr. Neuhaus would memorably repurpose for the pro-life movement: “We shall overcome.”

One irony that John points out with respect to the founding of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children at the Wig and Pen Club in the Strand on January 11, 1967, is that at first the society made it their policy to exclude Roman Catholics. Jews and Quakers were asked to participate but not Catholics. Why? As minutes of one of the society’s first meetings record: “After discussion it was agreed that the climate of opinion did not yet allow Roman Catholics to be asked on to the Executive: prejudice was still such that if one were to join, the Society would be labeled a front organization for the Church of Rome.” To make matters worse, Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster (1963-1975), agreed with the society. “It would probably be best, as Catholics,” the cardinal relayed to a Catholic doctor at the time, “not to make too much of a fuss, as this would be likely to increase support for David Steel [the author of the Abortion Bill decriminalizing abortion] And anyway, we shouldn’t worry too much: ‘the Doctors won’t let it happen.’”

Obviously, the poor cardinal had much too much confidence in the fealty of doctors to the Hippocratic Oath. It is true, as John fairly admits, that when the cardinal spoke against abortion he did so absolutely—upholding the irrefutable reality that “the killing of a fetus is a form of homicide”—but his failure to urge millions of his co-religionists at that time to oppose Steel’s bill almost certainly secured its passage. Another irony of this unfortunate episode was that, over time, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children would become predominantly Catholic—its members overwhelmingly made up of the same good people whom the cardinal and the society’s founding members thought beyond the pale of membership.

Yet another change has emerged facing the battle for life in the United Kingdom, and that is the alliance of Church and State in support of compulsory sex education in schools—education which includes not only pro-abortion but anti-family content. John rightly points to the disastrous assertion of the Synod on the Family (2015) as a dire milestone in this unholy alliance. Paragraph 58 of the final report of the Synod stated: “The family, while maintaining its primary space in education cannot be the only place for teaching sexuality.” This was in stark contradiction to what Leo XIII (the pope who gave St. John Henry Newman his red hat) had upheld in his encyclical Sapientiae Christianae (1890), which is as compelling today as it was when it was first promulgated. “By nature, parents have a right to the training of their children, but with this added duty that the education and instruction of the children be in accord with the end for which by God’s blessing it was begotten. Therefore, it is the duty of parents to make every effort to make absolutely sure that the education of their children remain under their own control.”

If any of my readers are tempted to regard these matters as merely sectarian, they should recall how the FBI treated parents who objected to the highly objectionable sex education being taught their children without their parents’ consent or even knowledge in public schools: They treated them as domestic terrorists.

Now, John is aware that there are wonderfully good pro-life colleagues convinced that the Church should stay out of the pro-life movement, but he cordially begs to disagree. Why? “Pro-life organizations,” he holds, “need urgently to be reinforced by the prophetic and unequivocal voices of bishops throughout the world faithfully preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ for two reasons: one, because without Christ we cannot do anything; and two, the full Gospel message about the truth and meaning of human sexuality— teaching which is also part of the natural law written on all human hearts—is nowhere more fully spelt out than in the teaching of the Church.”

To meet his secular critics halfway, John quotes the English poet John Milton, who wrote in his glorious poem “Lycidas”: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed”—to which he adds: “The hungry sheep are all around us

. . .” They need feeding with the Truth without which there can be no happiness here or beyond here. And so John Smeaton concludes his summons to his fellow prolifers: “Now is the time for Catholics and pro-life people of all faiths and none to proclaim the whole truth about the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family.”

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Human Life Review, I salute my dear prolife friend from across the pond. Dear John, thank you for your great fidelity to the cause of life so vital to the well-being of both our countries. Let our special pro-life relationship continue to prosper, even if against the most daunting of evils. Let our Anglo-American efforts continue to protect our children, born and unborn, and restore the “civilization of truth and love.”

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Original Bio:

Edward Short is the author of several studies of St. John Henry Newman. Newman and His Critics, the final volume of his much-acclaimed Newman trilogy, will be published in the fall of 2024. Lord Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s biographer, hailed Edward Short’s most recent book, What the Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews as “beautifully written,” “brave,” and “wise.”