It should, of course, be cause for celebration: this month, The Interim newspaper will enter its fifth decade of publication. And, to a certain extent, congratulations are due—we need to honor the generosity of donors and advertisers, the efforts of our reporters, columnists, and editorial staff, and, above all, our intelligent, passionate, and longstanding readership, without whom our words would have no audience. Anniversaries are occasions to pay debts of gratitude, and we take special pleasure in acknowledging all of the many dedicated and visionary readers and writers, staff members and supporters, who have made our publication possible over the years.
But the need, itself, is regrettable. We wish that we could conclude the work of chronicling a cruel and inhuman age; we wish that the sad task of documenting Canada’s barbarity to its most vulnerable members was no longer necessary. We long to publish our last issue with a headline that would blare: “AT LAST,” announcing the arrival of legal protection of the unborn. Sadly, we have no prospect of sharing that issue any time soon.
What we have is the meantime, “the interim,” the in-between time of working and waiting and witnessing to the better, saner days to come. In time, we will tell the story of the great reckoning that awaits us, the long and painful “truth and reconciliation” that an era of legal infanticide will require. For now, we must content ourselves with the assembly of the counter-archive, collecting the narratives and analysis that will prove to our future judges that the madness was not universal, that there were heroes willing to work on behalf of the most vulnerable, that it was not the whole world that became inhuman and obtuse.
The wind has been sown, and the inevitable harvest of the whirlwind awaits. The West’s self-inflicted wounds which legal prenatal infanticide have caused will become an increasingly obvious source of chaos and disorder, and geostrategic rivals like Russia and Red China will exploit the civic strains that societies with below-replacement-level birth rates endure—tensions with which they themselves are all too familiar.
No special powers of prognostication are needed to see that untold crises lie ahead. As demographic growth crests and then falls, the engines of world economies will splutter and seize, and resources will dwindle for reasons which are precisely the opposite of the ones postulated in the preposterous Malthusian fever dreams of overpopulation. We will see, in our time, not a world with too many mouths to feed, but too few hands to sustain the edifices built over centuries.
In those dark days, the bright light of little children will shine; they will finally be seen as the blessing that they always are. In the time of these approaching disasters, we are confident that the West will remember the legacy of virtue which it has squandered so thoughtlessly in the post-War prosperity of the 20th century. Just when it seems that the world is coming to an end, another end will come: the cessation of the toleration of abortion’s brutality. On that day, The Interim will tell the story of our culture’s conversion. Until then, we accept, with humility, our calling to cry in the wilderness, urging repentance for such an enormous sin.
