April 6, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Xavier Dor, the heroic French pro-life doctor who founded a public prayer movement for an end to the crimes of abortion and for their reparation, died in the early afternoon on Saturday, April 4. Dor, 91, was hospitalized last Tuesday, after having received the last rites in his Paris home. He died peacefully, after many years of complete dedication to the cause of the “little ones” who are massacred in their mothers’ wombs.
I was able to speak with Doctor Dor over the telephone on Tuesday. He sounded happy and serene, speaking clearly and in a way forcefully, telling me of his joy at having been able to receive the sacraments that same morning.
“Oh, I am so happy; I am so glad,” he said — words that came all the more easily to him since he often used them.
He also sounded eager for pro-life work to continue.
His four children have asked for all those who knew and appreciated Xavier Dor and his work to join a “confinement rosary” on Sunday, April 5 (at 11:45 Paris time if possible).
Xavier Dor was a medical doctor specializing in embryology. He had traveled extensively, in particular in Africa. He refused to subscribe to the myth of Africa’s “overpopulation,” calling it an “empty continent” whose extraordinary resources are not being used while its people need them.
Dor founded his association, “SOS Tout-petits” (SOS Little Ones) in 1986, eleven years after abortion was made legal in France. He organized many peaceful and prayerful demonstrations in abortion departments of French hospitals and clinics.
His actions were always totally nonviolent. The mainstream media would call the small groups composed of Dor and his companions — including a remarkable old lady who had saved many Jews in Occupied France during the Second World War — “anti-abortion commandos,” in the hope of making their activities seem criminal. But despite efforts on the part of law enforcement, it was impossible to sanction him because he was breaking no law.
In 1993, a law known as the “Loi Neiertz” was adopted in France, qualifying “hindrance to abortion” as a penal offense carrying a fine and a prison sentence, in order to make sanctions possible against Dor, who was already an elderly man with poor eyesight and the gentlest manner.
He would be condemned to fines eleven times and was even sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment. He served several weeks before being liberated in 1996 when the sentence was commuted, distributing many Miraculous Medals of Our Lady to his prison mates and the personnel.
On a personal note, I remember having been asked by Dr. Dor to join him in a café near his home shortly before his prison sentence was handed down. He took me and a photographer in a taxi to the nunciature in Paris so we could witness his request for political asylum. We had to wait a long while in the reception room of the nunciature before an embarrassed representative came to explain that it would not be possible to allow him to stay.
Dr. Dor never stopped organizing and joining prayer demonstrations throughout France. He was convinced that legal abortion is not only a tragedy for all those involved and a personal crime, but “a crime against God,” an expression he used as the title of the book he wrote in 1998.
In the book, he wrote that the total death count due to abortion and abortifacient methods will never be known but was certainly much higher than the official numbers suggest — between 180,000 and 230,000 abortions each year, according to official statistics in France — because of widespread use of chemical contraception and IUDs, whose main or secondary mode of operation is to impede implantation of the fertilized egg, the earliest stage of human development. Dor evaluated the total number of abortions, including these very early ones, at at least one million per year in France.
A devout Catholic, Xavier Dor would always join the yearly March for Life in Paris, but his group always followed the main body of the March at some distance in order to pray publicly in reparation for the crimes of abortion.
Dor was also sensitive to the destructive work of Freemasonry, which has publicly admitted its involvement in the promotion of the culture of death, through the preparation and support of divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex “marriage” laws in France.
He organized several prayerful demonstrations over the last years near the “Grand Orient” Lodge in France and would often tell how he once spoke with a Freemason during an “open door” day there. During the conversation, his interlocutor recognized that for the Freemasons, progress could come about only through “transgression.”
In these last years, Dor also focused on the French Planned Parenthood Association (Mouvement français du Planning familial), which is not involved, as in the United States, with directly procuring abortion and offers women medical consultations in view of abortion in the French national health care systems along with help to go abroad when there pregnancy has exceeded the limit of 12 weeks’ gestation, after which abortion is no longer legal in France.
Dor was fined 5,000 euros plus a suspended fine of 5,000 euro in 2014 for having spoken with a woman in the common staircase of the apartment building in central Paris where Planned Parenthood has its main offices. He gave her tiny knitted baby shoes and a Miraculous Medal, urging her not to have an abortion. The Paris Court of Appeals condemned him for having exerted “moral and psychological pressure” in order to dissuade her from killing her own child. This is considered the penal offense of “hindrance to abortion,” which was added to the Neiertz law shortly before the incident. Ironically, it was never proved that the woman was actually pregnant or that she ever had or intended to have an abortion.
Xavier Dor will be widely remembered in pro-life circles as a kind, smiling, soft-spoken, and gentle man who was good to friends and enemies alike. His movement never counted more than a few hundred protesters during public prayer demonstrations, but they clearly interfered with the progress of the culture of death. The special laws adopted against them; the multiple proceedings that were launched against Dor; and the hostile, sometimes even savage media coverage of his life-saving work showed how important it was.
