“We like to think that we’re quite close to the ancient world, that they were really just like us,” said Oxford ancient history lecturer Josephine Quinn in 2014, talking about Carthaginian infant sacrifice. The “truth is,” she continued, “that they really weren’t.” 

While true that even some contemporary cultures (e.g., the Taliban) are alien to us, never mind B.C.-era, North African pagans, we may have a bit more in common with the Carthaginians than the academic thinks. Those ancients, after all, sacrificed babies because they wanted better lives. The common explanation for their bloody habit, said Quinn, was “that the gods ‘heard my voice and blessed me.’” Today’s infant sacrifice is likewise driven by a desire for “better lives,” though the god worshiped isn’t Ba’al Hammon but materialism, hedonism, and “self-ism.”

This “religious” zeal is on full display in the response to the new Texas prenatal infanticide law. Having taken effect September 1, it essentially bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detectable (at approximately six weeks’ gestation). Making it unique — and possibly allowing it to get around the flawed Roe v. Wade decision, say analysts — is that the law doesn’t permit the Texas government to enforce it. Rather, “private citizens may bring a civil enforcement action against someone who performs an abortion in violation of the law or assists someone in obtaining an illegal abortion,” writes the Daily Signal. It’s apparently effective, too: National Review reports that prenatal infanticide mills have, as of this writing, been scared straight and that “much of the machinery of abortion” has “ground to a halt in Texas.” Critics lament that with the law prohibiting 85 percent of prenatal infanticide, many “clinics” (i.e., killing centers) will be forced to close. To abortionists this is a matter of profit, after all, not principle. 

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