All humans need love, and trust. They need to trust each other in order to share the same living space.

The problem with love and trust, of course, is that they are scarce. Not having enough love and trust for everybody they meet, individuals need structures within which to express and receive both. Some of these structures are natural (e.g. the family), others are man-made (e.g., clubs, congregations... companies).

This is where social liberalism finds the enormous hurdle it cannot overcome.

I prefer to define ‘social liberalism’ as that political ideology that seeks to ‘liberate’ the individual from the constraints ensuing from belonging to a group, and this through the direct intervention of the State. One example is State-sponsored ‘freedom’ from the so-called ‘patriarchal family’.

(Never mind that this narrative is clearly flawed, as there is no real patriarchy. All intelligent men listen to their wives. The dim ones don’t, and end up courting trouble at home. Men and women who don’t listen to their equally intelligent partner ultimately harm their children, and that is as dim-witted as can be.)

Liberalism needs the ‘atomised’ individual – an individual who belongs to no structure, apart from the multicultural State or, nowadays, the market.

The individual is ‘freed’ from family ties, but also religious and even national ties. He or she floats about, responding to the demands of an omnipotent, fluid market.

Not even company loyalty remains a top priority – the new culture seems to favour employees who continuously flit from one job to another, using one company job as a trampoline to spring to the next.

This atomisation leads to depression.

A few years ago, The New York Times published an article called ‘Why Conservatives are happier than Liberals’. The article echoed research that has been going on for a number of years and consistently produces the same result: liberalism is related to depression.

In 2014, the Journal of Applied Psychology published a paper called ‘The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals’ (available online).

Whereas abortion is one of the accepted tenets of modern-day liberalism, holding liberal values is related to depression

One of the conclusions was that “measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher subjective well-being, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism coincided in higher subjective well-being”.

This should serve as backdrop to the concerted, aggressive pro-abortion media campaign we are currently witnessing.

A commissioner from the Council of Europe and an unknown lady claiming to be from a strange association called ‘Catholics for Choice’, have recently set out to convince the Maltese public that abortion is a human right and that it’s okay for Catholics to abort. (Former member of the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly Michael Asciak has argued that the commissioner is probably breaking council rules.)

Giovanni Bonello has already clarified that abortion is not a human right; others have made clear the real Catholic position on abortion.

So there’s no need to repeat what has already been said.

However, it is worth underlining that whereas abortion is one of the accepted tenets of modern-day liberalism, holding liberal values is related to depression.

Abortion defies both love and trust. It annihilates the maternal bond of love and the bond of trust there should be between father and mother, by removing the father from the equation.

A culture in which abortion is legal and therefore easily available, makes (decent) men paranoid. (The less decent ones follow another set of rules.)

But it makes women paranoid too.A Romanian friend married to a Swede once told me how when she informed her husband about her first pregnancy and he didn’t suggest an abortion, she was a tad surprised and only then concluded he was a decent man. The liberal ideology behind this short anecdote is shocking.

Bonds of love and trust add value to life, and help avoid depression. By normalising abortion (in the name of free choice, feminism, and other abstract ideological terms), a culture devoid of love and trust has been engendered in the West.

Considering abortion and the other negative aspects of liberalism, one can only invite pro-abortion preachers to go preach their deadly gospel elsewhere.