“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed true even from his own angle.” (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters)

You will recall my mention of a menacing piece of correspondence from Down Under—way Under, which recently came to my attention. What follows is another dispatch that has surfaced, bearing the scrawlings of that hellish mystagogue . . .

Dear Swillpit,

Your latest report on the American front contained an item that is sure to be a watershed for our cause: the government funding of embryo destruction. It seems their decision makers really believe that it’s all in the interest of noble medical goals. Give rein to their folly. Later, we will have an eternity enjoying their shock at how they were played like a hand of rummy.

The quotes in the press clippings you included were particularly stirring. Statements like, we will be guided by “scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” and our decisions need to be “based on the recommendations of experts and scientists outside of politics and religion,” indicate that the guardrails we have been tugging on for centuries are at last, everywhere, crumbling.

Thanks to the efforts of field agents who have been patiently conditioning them with wileful whisperings, I feel that our long-fought outcome is within grasp.

In the not too distant past, the question before them was, “What should be done to improve their lot?” Now, by our incremental influences, they only think in terms of what can be done without regard to whether it should be done. Step by step, we have ushered them along a path which, just a few decades ago, they would have shuddered to look upon, but now course down in full stride!

I’ll tell you, once they became convinced that abortion was an inviolable right, I knew that, with scant nudging from us, they would follow the inescapable thread: If one of their tadpoles can be sacrificed for the sake of the mother, it is only logical—nay, necessary—that one be sacrificed for the sake of the many.

That movie actor—what was his name, Reese or Reeves, whatever—stated the case well when, from a wheelchair, he lectured his government that its duty was “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

But the real beauty, Swillpit, was that neither he, nor his audience, picked up on the delicious irony of the scene: A quadriplegic arguing for the good of the many when the millions of dollars spent on his incurable condition, should, by the thread of his own reckoning, be used to treat the curable masses.