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January 7, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Following Pope Benedict’s Christmas and New Year statements defending the right to life and the value of the family, the Archdiocese of Mexico has issued an editorial in its weekly newspaper denouncing Mexico City’s pro-abortion politicians as “modern Herods” and “false liberals” who protect animals from abuse while permitting unborn children to be murdered.

“In this new Legislative Assembly many of those deputies returned who favor the culture of death in our city and are part of a conglomerate of false liberals who say that they protect life, including animal life, as a gift of the blatant ‘modern Herods’ on the very day of the innocents in which we remember the terror that was experienced in the times of Jesus with the annihilation by decree of newborns,” editorializes the archdiocesan newspaper From the Faith (Desde la Fe) in its January 6 edition.

The city’s elected representatives “not only do not rectify their perverse legislation, but take pleasure in unanimously approving the punishment of ‘animal mistreatment’ the newspaper states, noting that, although abortions after the first trimester of pregnancy remain illegal, they are only punishable with up to six months in prison, while abuse of an animal can send an individual to prison for up to four years.

The archdiocese’s strong statement, which has caught the attention of the city’s major media, is the second made by the archdiocese in the weeks following Pope Benedict XVI’s strong condemnations of abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and transgenderism during his Christmas and New Years addresses. 

“The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenseless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace,” said the pope. “Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unborn?”

Despite opinion polls indicating voter opposition, the Legislative Assembly of Mexico City voted in 2007 to legalize the killing of the unborn during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even going so far as to call it a “right,” and to provide abortions free of charge in the Federal District’s public hospitals.  Over 80,000 unborn children have died at the hands of abortionists since that time in the public system alone, according to official figures. Statistics remain unavailable regarding abortions in private clinics.

Thus far the country’s 31 states have resisted the push to liberalize their abortion laws. State laws permit the killing of unborn children in cases of rape, and in some instances include other exceptions, although approval of such abortions in practice virtually never occurs.  Since the passage of Mexico City’s law, 18 states have passed constitutional amendments protecting the right to life from the moment of conception, although the Supreme Court has recently come close to overturning such amendments as “unconstitutional.”