Catholics encountering efforts by pressure groups to normalise and extend abortion are increasingly not only standing up publicly for what is right, but persuading others to join them.

The result is that secular elites are finding it more difficult to ram through such measures. This is heartening. What is less so is that, rather ominously, activists who see abortion as just another medical procedure and see opposition to it as religious bigotry have now shifted the fight onto the international law plane.