This is not a parody.  I wish it were.

An outpost of the Satanic Temple has established its own abortion clinic, which offers a “protective rite” to ward off unwanted feelings about abortion.  As the website declares, “The Satanic Abortion Ritual is a destruction ritual that serves as a protective rite.  Its purpose is to cast off notions of guilt, shame, and mental discomfort that a patient may be experiencing due to choosing to have a legal and medically safe abortion.”

Since one of the purposes of the rite is to “cast off notions of guilt,” it looks like the main thing which is to be “destroyed,” and from which one is to be “protected,” is conscience.

The ritual involves the recitation of several charms.  Before the abortion, the woman is to intone Satanic Tenet III, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone,” and Satanic Tenet V, “Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world.  One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.”  After the abortion, she is to pronounce the Satanic Personal Affirmation, “By my body, my blood.  By my will, it is done.”

Of course the baby’s body is not part of “one’s body” but only inside it.  So much for Tenet III.  And of course the denial of this biological fact does distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.  So much for Tenet V.  But the Personal Affirmation nails it.  Although repentance is possible after a woman has killed her child, the baby cannot be brought back.  By her will, “it is done.”

The late Richard John Neuhaus remarked, “If you set out to justify the attack on something so primordial, so given, so foundational to human community as a mother's love and responsibility for her child, you have to come up with a new explanation of fundamental reality, a new worldview, and finally a new religion.”  The new religion has been in the works for quite a while.  As the feminist Ginette Paris wrote in the nineties, “Our culture needs new rituals as well as laws to restore abortion to its sacred dimension, which is both terrible and necessary.”  She called it “a sacrament” and “a sacrifice to Artemis,” but we now know who to whom the sacrifice was really offered.

Pro-abortion demonstrators who chant “Hail, Satan,” have been defended on grounds that they aren’t really hailing Satan, but are merely lampooning Christians.  So much for that naïve idea.