A blond baby crawls over a heap of infant corpses, his skin rosy against their deathly pallor. The camera pans across the heap to the figure of a blond man crawling out from underneath it. The man is Jude Law, dressed in the immaculate white vestments of a pope. He ventures forth into the Piazza di San Marco in Venice, which is empty and dark except for the lights of its renaissance arcades. Then he turns and looks back at the brilliant façade of the Basilica San Marco—obscured by an avalanche of dead babies.

This nightmare sequence, which opens the HBO limited series The Young Pope, is clearly meant as an indictment of abortion. But astonishingly, the majority of reviewers did not even mention this sequence. And the few who did pretended they were seeing something else. For example, Scott Tobias of Vulture described the heap as “a pyramid of wriggling babies.” Chris Byrd of the Catholic News Service described it as “a sea of infant mannequins.”

Not wriggling, not mannequins—these babies are clearly dead. And the living child crawling over them is clearly Lenny Belardo, emerging as a 47-year-old American who has just been elected pope, taking the name Pius XIII. Do the math, and you will see that Lenny was born in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade. Not only that, but