This can't be right.

The bus was quite full when it stopped at the terminus. I sat waiting until I could stand and saw a woman holding her baby struggling to get off. From the window I saw her older son get off first and she handed the baby to him while she got her bags off. I saw the son take the baby like a doll, innocently put it on the ground and turn to help his mother. To my dismay I saw the baby roll over so that its face was in a puddle. No one noticed except me and I couldn't say a word.

I woke up in dismay. Why couldn't I yell out and warn them? I tried to convince myself that the 'baby' really was a doll, but failed.

Before going to bed I'd seen a disturbing video of a diner in a Chinese restaurant tucking into a fish that was clearly still alive. But that was nothing compared to another where the meal was an aborted baby; gravy and all. Another report spoke of a Chinese doctor who regularly ate tiny foetuses “for her health; they'd be thrown away anyway”.

Were these pictures and stories true or manipulated to shock the viewer? Was the report of that doctor's 'vitamin supplement' just an urban myth? If the aim was to shock me, shock me into what? Was it some anti-Chinese propaganda to demonstrate what a dreadful, primitive, cannibalistic culture was China and that Obama should be confronting them, not doing business with them?

For me, though, real or false, they and my dream have brought me face to face with the knowledge that I'm keeping silent when atrocities as bad as anything the Nazis were responsible for are now being commited on the innocent with impunity. What is the legal nicety that distinguishes eating a foetus from using one for stem cell research? 'They'd just be thrown away'. One apparently is a food supplement; the other promises a cure for many intractable diseases. So was it logical to be upset by one and not the other? Why did I want to vomit at the sight of a tiny baby on a dinner plate and not by the thought of a baby's brains being sucked out during a partial-birth abortion?

Why? Because one is hidden behind the clinical screen of a doctor's surgery or research laboratory; the other stares us in the face and we can't ignore it. I know that there's an argument about when human life starts but I'm not convinced that any of us can say without a shadow of doubt when that is. Amnesty, which I support in other areas of its work, dares to use “Protecting the Human” as it's motto, while advocating abortion rights.

With over 1,000 terminations each year in Finland and hundreds of thousands elsewhere, abortion is seen as a human right. I (and many others) have been conditioned by the drive to self-assertion, a twisted concept of human rights. There is no such thing as community, argued Margaret Thatcher; only individuals. And so I decide what's good for me and (we don't quite say) 'to hell with the rest'. 

Men won't even bother to argue the case; a woman claims that it's her body and it's no one else's business what she decides what to do with it. “If I want to marry and have children I will; and if I want to stay single or have a lesbian relationship I know many a man who'd oblige to satisfy any maternal instincts. If the pregnancy's inconvenient for my career I'll abort it. And, by the way, haven't you noticed, my mother is getting to be such a nuisance in her old age? She often doesn't recognise me anyway. She already thinks she's a burden so she'll agree to our assisting in her suicide all right. We can put her money to such better use.”

Is that an exaggeration and none of us is like that? Maybe. But if I throw away the whole concept of a God who's created me, and think that I'm just the inevitable product that's evolved from something that crawled out of the mud; that I survive or not by competing, by my self-serving 'selfish gene', why should I not behave in some measure like that caricature?

But, you say, human beings are not like that? There's something else; something good in us; we're repelled by evil; we love and we love being loved; we need others and will even die for them. We're drawn to beauty. We delight in a baby and want to build a better world, a society where that new human being can thrive and be loved and love. 

Yes. And why are we like that? Because of God, and Jesus who shows us what God is like. Not self-serving, but self-giving and we were created to be like him.

There's only one body of people, the Pro-Life movement, that's not afraid to talk about these things and to take a stand publicly, and be condemned for doing so. There's only one church, the Catholics, who are doing so. The Roman Church has gone wrong many times and I, for one can't accept some of its doctrines. But I don't know of any another body of God's people standing up against what can only be called the diabolical?