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Today’s Douchebag of the Day has been dead for hundreds of years, but the echoes of his stupidity continue to ring through the long tunnels of history.

Pope Innocent III (buy the action figure here), named as such because the Church loves irony, has been carefully hidden away by the Catholic powers-that-be for several reasons, none more important than his decision to legalize 1st-trimester abortions. That’s right, that Catholic Church.
The actual case presented to the Pope was that of a monk who’d knocked up his girlfriend, then ‘persuaded’ her to abort the child. Innocent decided that, as long as the fetus was yet to be ‘animated,’ i.e. it was less than 16.5 weeks old, it contained no soul, and could be done away with without a charge of murder being brought against the monk.
When did such horrid policy change? When the Industrial Revolution forced the nations of Europe to acknowledge a glaring problem, as well as its obvious solution: a lack of cheap, unskilled labor for the factories. Who better to place into these highly desirable positions than orphans, street-children, and others without the means to provide for or protect themselves? But of course, the silly habit of aborting unwanted fetuses cuts deeply into the production of orphans, and therefore poses untold risk in an industrializing economy. At this point, abortion became murder in the Catholic mind, and the mindless Catholic masses started killing people to save unborn babies, because that’s what Jesus would do, or at least that’s what you might think Jesus would do, if you were a complete friggin’ douchebag.