Editor's note. The following was entered into the Congressional Record yesterday by pro-life champion Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)

Madame Speaker:

I rise tonight as former and incoming Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Human Rights Committee to ask my distinguished colleagues of the House to take a few moments to read a brilliant, incisive, extraordinarily well written defense of the child in the womb by Lord Nicholas Windsor of the UK, great grandson of King George V. [This is found in the journal "First Things."]

The Lord and Lady Nicholas Windsor pose with Cardinal Commastri and sons Albert and Leopold during Leopold's Baptism in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Calling the abortion of unborn children "the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life," he appeals to conscience and admonishes us to the "greatest solidarity and duty of care because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans."

Lord Nicholas note that "permissive abortion is a fact of life so deeply embedded and thoroughly normalized in our culture that--and this is the most insidious factor in that normalization--it has been rendered invisible to politics in Europe. Even mentioning it has becomes the first taboo of the culture."

And how can that be?

Lord Nicholas faults "determined campaigns of propaganda at the outset to harden conscience and gradually to enforce a conformism that fears to question what is said to be a settled issue."

Settled? Not here in the U.S. Madame Speaker, and hopefully not for long in Europe either.

On what he calls a "moral world turned upside down, " Lord Nicholas says, "the greatest irony may be that a broad consensus exists, in a highly rights-aware political establishment, in favor of one of the gravest and most egregious abuses of human rights that human society has ever tolerated [abortion]. Didn't Europeans think they could never and must never kill again on an industrial scale? What a cruel deceit, then, that has led us to this mass killing of children…"

"This is the question of questions for Europe," he writes, "the practice of abortion is a mortal wound in Europe's heart."

And he goes on to persuasively advocate for a new "abolitionism" for Europe akin to the movement to abolish slavery. But he remains ever mindful of the need to meet the needs of women: "The task for us is not merely to abolish. We must also creatively envisage new and compelling answers to the problems that give rise to this practice…"

A brilliant essay. A must read for those who treasure and promote human rights. And equally applicable to us--in the United States--which mourns, or will mourn someday, killing over 53 million children by abortion since 1973.