According to media portrayals, pro-life men and women who attend prayer vigils outside abortion facilities are religious lunatics, a quaint hangover from the Middle Ages when burnings at the stake were considered light entertainment – a twelfth-century Netflix minus the subscription fee.

It takes some effort to fish for the LEAST obvious answer to the question of why abortion increased by 19% in the space of twelve months in Scotland.

Daniel Frampton, blogpost. There is something especially unmanly about a man who supports abortion rights. It isn’t only that to support abortion today is just too easy – and it is easy, especially for a young person subject to the pressure of their peers, and at a university.

Given the many divisive issues currently shaking the United States, including its president, the abortion debate might not seem so obvious or pressing, though it is just as bitter. The 50 million lives lost to abortion since the infamous Roe v Wade decision in 1973 is a frightful statistic that, despite the current situation, ought to give us some pause for thought.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the noted English don and author of The Lord of the Rings, wrote that, as “a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic”, he did “not expect “history” to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory”. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings is, in part, a meditation on what may be dubbed Tolkien’s theology of the “the long defeat” – a theology that pro-lifers must themselves embrace, as an informing pro-life ethic, if we are to work towards “final victory”.

The English Catholic author G. K. Chesterton was one of the great pro-life advocates of the twentieth century in more ways than one. Although he might appear something of an antique figure in 2020, his values and pro-life message, which he lived every day, have much to say to us now.

It might surprise some to learn that one of the great works of twentieth-century war literature carries a pro-life message. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61), set at the time of the Second World War, is a neglected work, no doubt, compared to the author’s most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, but it might just be Waugh’s masterpiece.