OP-ED: The other Christmas Story – When power fears children

"By the time the Christmas lights are taken down, the Church quietly observes a feast much of the modern world has forgotten: the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28)."

Source: Rawpixel

Author: Richard Dur

By the time the Christmas lights are taken down, the Church quietly observes a feast much of the modern world has forgotten: the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28). It commemorates the first state-sponsored massacre of children.

King Herod, alerted to the birth of a rival he could not control, ordered the killing of all infant boys in Bethlehem, an act of raw power defending itself against a perceived threat to its rule.

Before we reassure ourselves that this is a tale that belongs safely in the past – an ancient barbarism committed by a paranoid tyrant in sandals – we should pause. Babies are still violently destroyed, mostly in the womb before birth, but some, when born alive, are left to die outside it. Only the technology has changed. The spirit animating the act remains the same.

In Alberta, babies are sometimes born alive following later-term abortions and are left to die without active care. It is documented in hospital discharge records and quietly accommodated by Alberta Health Services policy. Certain infants born alive are met not with emergency care, but with what the bureaucracy chillingly calls a “non-interventional approach.”

In plain English: the child is left to die.

Herod, at least, was more direct.

The modern state prefers euphemism. We do not kill babies; we manage outcomes. We do not massacre the innocent; we anticipate live birth and plan accordingly. The effect is the same, even if the language is more carefully chosen - and more self-deceptive.

Perhaps the most unsettling part of this story is not that it is happening. It is that it is known to be happening.

In November 2000 – twenty-five years ago – Danielle Smith herself described the reality of late-term abortion practices as a Calgary Herald columnist. She wrote of babies delivered alive and then denied care. She named it plainly.

She knew then. She knows now. And she now occupies – like Herod – the position of authority that oversees this practice and has the power to end it. Yet the Alberta Health Services policies that permit what she herself once called a “horrific practice” remain in place.

Herod feared a child who threatened his throne. What do modern leaders fear? The same: discomfort, controversy, lost votes. The displeasure of a small but insistent ideological class that treats even post-birth death (killing) as an acceptable cost of abortion-on-demand. Are we really so hardened that we cannot even quietly revise policies that deny care to living, breathing infants outside the womb? It would seem so.

At least Herod acted openly. Today’s version works behind committees and carefully worded guidelines. Responsibility is dispersed. Language is softened. But the logic remains unchanged: when life becomes politically inconvenient, it must be destroyed—or quietly ignored until it passes.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents endures because it refuses to let power forget its victims. It insists on remembering them. Its force lies in its enduring relevance to the human condition.

Canada recognizes any baby born alive as a legal person. Yet Alberta’s health system maintains written rules that carve out an exception in practice—rules that suggest some lives, though legally human, are not worth the trouble of saving. Federal law already speaks clearly. It is provincial policy that refuses to listen.

At Christmas, we celebrate history’s most famous “problem pregnancy”: a child conceived amid scandal, born into poverty, of questionable paternity, without a stable home. The irony should give us pause. Two thousand years later, we sing carols about that child while ensuring that others are never allowed to grow up and unsettle the current arrangements of power.

Herod ultimately failed. His kingdom passed away, and his name became a byword for cruelty. By what measure will our regime be judged?

The Feast of the Holy Innocents endures because it tells a truth power would rather forget: the state is never more dangerous than when it decides who is allowed to live and who must die, and claims an authority it does not possess.

Learn more about the modern-day massacre of the innocents and the policies that permit it at LeftToDie.ca