Deep in the jungles of Guatemala, where the earth still guards secrets of ancient civilisations, archaeologists recently unearthed a haunting relic: a Teotihuacan altar in Tikal National Park, its stones stained with the memory of child sacrifice. Dating to 300–500 CE, this altar, tied to a goddess who would later inspire the blood-soaked rituals of the Aztecs, held the remains of three children, none older than four. Their deaths, we're told, were no act of cruelty but a "sacred offering," a bridge to celestial forces meant to shield their people from divine wrath, or so they thought. An archaeologist, María Belén Méndez, described it as a "gentle act," not violent but spiritual, a way to commune with the heavens, as if she would know. The words ring hollow against the image of those tiny bones, their lives snuffed out on cold stone. Yet, as I read Andrea Widburg's reflection in American Thinker, a darker truth settles in: the altar's grim purpose, however brutal, pales beside the child sacrifice unfolding in our own time, here in the West, where the toll is measured not in handfuls but in millions.
Widburg's words hit like a gust of cold wind, stripping away the comfortable distance we place between ourselves and those ancient worshippers. The Teotihuacan people, she argues, killed with purpose, however mistaken. Their children, offered to capricious gods, were a communal gift, a desperate plea to avert famine, flood, or cosmic retribution. The numbers were small—three at Tikal, perhaps thousands over years in later Aztec rites, their hearts carved out in rituals we shudder to imagine. But these were not random murders. They were woven into a worldview where the universe demanded blood to keep turning. The violence was real, undeniable, yet it served the collective, not the individual, not to subtract from its evil. Widburg forces us to look closer, not at Tikal's altar but at our own society, where the altar is a clinic table, and the sacrifice is abortion—65 million lives ended in the U.S. alone since 1973, a number so vast it dwarfs the wildest estimates of Mesoamerican offerings.
Sixty-five million; bigger than many countries such as Australia. The figure lingers, heavy as the jungle air. Widburg doesn't let us dodge it. She recounts stories that cut deeper than statistics. A woman in 2004, pregnant with triplets, faced a choice. The thought of buying bulk mayonnaise at Costco—such a mundane burden—tipped the scales. She aborted two of her babies, preserving her lifestyle over their lives. Another woman testifying before Congress in 2022, called her abortion "the easiest decision I've ever made," a "transformative" act of "self-love." These aren't tales of desperate mothers escaping death or abuse, as abortion was once framed. They're stories of convenience, of women placing their careers, education, or freedom above the lives growing inside them. Widburg sees a chilling shift: where ancient peoples sacrificed children to appease gods, modern women have become the gods, their desires sanctified, their choices bloodier than any Teotihuacan priest could dream.
The comparison stings because it's not just about numbers. It's about intent. Those children in Tikal, their small bodies laid out under a foreign sky, died for a community's survival, or so their people wrongly believed. The act was woven into a pagan cosmic order, a pact with forces beyond human control, however evil. But abortion, Widburg argues, has no such higher purpose, however misplaced. It's not about saving society or warding off catastrophe. It's about the self—finishing a degree, keeping a job, shedding a boyfriend, or simply avoiding the weight of responsibility. The "Shout Your Abortion" movement, with its bold embrace of choice as empowerment, crystallizes this. Feminists' words echo like a chant: liberating, transformative, self-love. Yet behind them lies a toll that makes the Aztecs seem restrained. If the ancients were bloodthirsty, what are we, with our sterile clinics and sanitised rhetoric, ending lives on a scale that could fill cities?
Widburg doesn't stop there. She turns the mirror on our hypocrisy, our quickness to judge those long-ago worshippers while excusing our own carnage. Méndez's claim that Tikal's sacrifices weren't violent but spiritual reeks of the same relativism that calls abortion a "right." We nod along when academics dress up ancient brutality as cultural nuance, yet bristle when our own practices are laid bare. Widburg challenges this double standard. If we forgive the Teotihuacan for their rituals, seeing them as products of their time, why do we shy from questioning abortion's moral weight? The 65 million lives lost aren't just numbers—they're a legacy of choices, each one a small altar where convenience triumphs over existence. The ancients, at least, believed their gods demanded sacrifice. We sacrifice to ourselves, and the cost is staggering.
Widburg's argument isn't just a critique; it's a warning. A society that normalises such loss, that elevates individual desire over life itself, risks fraying the bonds that hold it together. The demographic toll—fewer births, aging populations—only deepens the crisis, compounding threats like economic instability or cultural fragmentation. Yet Widburg's words also spark resistance. She calls us to look honestly at what we've become, to reject the sanitising narratives that make abortion a sacrament of selfhood. The Teotihuacan altar, with its silent bones, reminds us that sacrifice is never gentle, whether offered to false gods or to our own ambitions. Before we condemn the violent past, which we should, we must face our present, where the altar is everywhere, and the enemies walk and talk among us, and the death of innocence has become a "right."
"Stephen Green posted about CBS's very woke take on child sacrifice at a Teotihuacan altar in what's now Guatemala: It was a gentle, nuanced thing, non-violent, and spiritual. Yeah, right. But we must admit something right now: Our child-sacrifice culture is infinitely worse.
The cool thing is that another bit of archaeology has emerged from the Latin American jungle. I find it endlessly fascinating how the Earth still hides so many secrets about our past. As CBS reports, the Teotihuacan altar—that is, an altar to what became one of the central Aztec gods—emerged in Tikal National Park in Guatemala:
Edwin Román, who leads the South Tikal Archaeological Project within the park, said the discovery shows the sociopolitical and cultural interaction between the Maya of Tikal and Teotihuacan's elite between 300 and 500 A.D.
Román said the discovery also reinforces the idea that Tikal was a cosmopolitan center at that time, a place where people visited from other cultures, affirming its importance as a center of cultural convergence.
What's archaeologically mysterious is how this altar appeared there, given that the Aztec culture, which elevated the Teotihuacan worship to extreme and blood heights, came along about 900 years after the altar.
Oh, there's one other thing about the newly discovered temple, and that's the fact that it was used primarily for killing children.
Lorena Paiz, the archaeologist who led the discovery, said that the Teotihuacan altar was believed to have been used for sacrifices, "especially of children."
"The remains of three children not older than 4 years were found on three sides of the altar," Paiz told The Associated Press.
Fear not, though. This wasn't some nasty, pedophile child murder stuff. Instead, it was death with dignity for the greater good.
María Belén Méndez, an archaeologist who was not involved with the project, said the discovery confirms "that there has been an interconnection between both cultures and what their relationships with their gods and celestial bodies was like."
"We see how the issue of sacrifice exists in both cultures [Mayan and Aztec]. It was a practice; it's not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies," she said.
Stephen Green correctly calls out Méndez for that statement:
Well, yeah — it is that they were violent. If Teotihuacan culture was anything like the Aztecs, who followed in their bloody footsteps, they carved the still-beating hearts out of children under the age of four. But no matter how the Teotihuacan did it, "their way of connecting with the celestial bodies" was a murderous business.
However, here's a thought that ought to embarrass us all. In a way, Méndez has a point.
The children sacrificed at that altar weren't slaughtered willy-nilly. Instead, they were a gift from the people to their gods. The relatively small number of children who died at that altar were unwittingly performing a service for the entire community by protecting them from the arbitrary and capricious nature of pagan deities who, unless placated, would wreak havoc on an insufficiently respectful and generous community.
In America, abortion—which we were once assured would be "safe, legal, and rare"—has resulted in the deaths of roughly 65 million children. Significantly, abortion is no longer to protect women from death, abuse, or becoming a pathetic societal outcast. Instead, it is for the woman's convenience to allow her to finish her education, hold on to her career, dump her boyfriend, or just have consequence-free sex.
In 2004, one woman's narrative led to a very famous essay. She explained to the author that when she discovered she would have triplets, she thought to herself, "I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise." That thought was a death sentence for two of the triplets.
Eighteen years later, an abortion activist named Sarah Lopez testified before Congress that "Having an abortion was the easiest decision I've ever made. It was transformative, it was liberating, it was an act of self-love."
What Lopez said (and the Shout Your Abortion crowd would echo) is incredibly profound...in a bad way. While people once sacrificed babies to placate the gods, women now do so to benefit and transform themselves. They are the new gods and, with 65 million dead babies, infinitely more bloodthirsty than the old ones could ever dream of being.
So, before we sneer at those long-ago Teotihuacan worshippers, we need to remember that we are worse, both in motive and sheer numbers."