This last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block the “Texas Heartbeat” law, which bans the murder of unborn children after they are six weeks old in the womb. Thanks be to God. The Wall Street Journal views this abortion law as fundamentally flawed and certain to be overturned in the future (“Texas’s Abortion Law Blunder,” September 3, 2021, WSJ, A14). Christians are thankful that a measure of respect for life protected by God’s Commandment, “Thou shalt not murder,” will save the lives of numerous children, whose mothers submit their lives and consciences to civil law, if not God’s.

This war against the little ones has been waged from the founding of the world. The devil’s enticement of Adam and Eve led to their fall into sin, corruption, death, and damnation. God united His Word of promised salvation with His Word of reproductive generation, so that through a Child the devil’s reign of death would be undone, and righteousness and life would flourish.

That the Savior would come as a Child, that the Eternal Son of God would take on flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary has led the devil to hate all children, to seek their extermination, to possess legislators to make “laws” that promote the murder of unborn children. For the devil, the unborn infant is the image of the Christ Child in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He must be killed. The demonic foe is possessed toward this end.

So when a child is preserved in the womb—which the Texas law guards—the devil is incensed, but Christians rejoice. They remember the original Labor Day—when the Blessed Virgin bore the Savior of the human race. Every child’s birth echoes the joy of that first Labor Day, and speeds the day when all labor shall cease, when we shall lift up our eyes and see our Redeemer, and the war against the little ones—who belong to Christ and who image Christ—shall come to an end.