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I Think This Is True
From a year-old NR essay:
In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.
Comparing the way ordinary German gentiles responded — or failed to respond — to the brutal oppression and eventual liquidation of German Jews with the way ordinary Americans (myself very much included) have responded — or failed to respond — to the reality of abortion is uncomfortable and necessary.
We use the same mechanisms of denial. We accept the alteration of language. We choose, actively and deliberately, not to see and not to know.
Is that how it looks to you?
Published in Culture
Yes.
It’s hard to do much when the “Nine Scorpions in a Bottle” have spoken.
I have thought about this from time to time as well. It hit me when my wife and I visited the Holocaust museum in D.C. One exhibit was a diorama of a camp and I thought of the abattoir in our hometown and it’s smokestack. Will future generations have similar remembrance museums for abortion?
My wife will confront people who say they would have fought slavery, the Holocaust, etc. from the safety of the future. She explains we have a similar battle going on today and asks if they will join her in the fight.
Unless future generations are moral/religious, they will go meh. Only a national revival would stop abortion. Only a future revival would condemn this generation for abortion. Secular humanists will always permit abortion.
When the power of the state is brought to bear against those would would object, few will be able to resist. In pre-ww2 Germany and antebellum USA, the physical resistance was covert — underground railroad stuff. I agree with KS that without a religious/moral revival, effective resistance is unlikely.
I disagree. We’re preparing to march on Washington on the anniversary of Roe v Wade, and public opinion is anything but following the judge’s ruling:
http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Being that we’ve gone from 56/37 pro/anti abortion to 49/44 in a ten-year span suggests we should continue to rattle the cage.
Our faith remains rooted in hope.
Anyone interested in this topic should follow what is unfolding in Ireland presently as we face into a referendum on whether to repeal our Constitution’s pro-life clause. Those on Twitter could follow David Quinn or Cora Sherlock for the pro-life perspective. Those looking for the pro-choice perspective will find it on any media website. And I mean “any.”
I think I am going to talk to our religious education person. The UU church (very pro choice) has a sex education course that is, to put it mildly, comprehensive. It actually handles the abortion issue better than I expected, but the only information it includes about techniques are from Planned Parenthood. Delicately euphamized, in other words.
So I am going to suggest that the kids at my church (the older teens) watch the YouTube videos from Dr. Levantino.
Depends on who the “we” is, Kate. Of course you’re referring to Western society as a whole, and I agree with you – as long as the “we” doesn’t include me.
It’s interesting, I think, and revealing of the degree to which people are willing to accept myths in order to support what they want to believe, despite all the evidence that what they want so desperately to be true – isn’t.
Abortion proponents rely on the embryo / fetus / baby not being human, and freely refer to Ernst Haekel’s “Recapitulation theory -” “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That is, the fetal development of any animal follows that species’ evolutionary path. So we all pass through a “fish stage,” long before we can be considered human.
I was first introduced to Haekel’s theory in a mammalogy class, when a substitute professor spent most of a lab telling us how important it was for us to understand this. This prof was no slouch, a well – published expert on cetaceans. That would have been in 1972 I think. The problem is that Haekel’s theory was completely debunked during his lifetime, and he died in 1919. And so did his theory, until it was needed to justify abortion. A well – known embryologist has said that “no competent embryologist today subscribes to Haekel’s theory.”
Interesting also is that Gray’s Anatomy accurately describes human embryological development, conflicting Haekel’s theory. My copy is a reprint of the 1901 edition.
Do you think President Trump will visit the marchers sometime during his term? Sending Vice President Pence to speak last year was great to see. I could see him deciding to go in person himself one year.
Please President Trump, please. We need you on this.
Oh yes—the “we” includes me (at least until recently) but I will grant that it doesn’t include you, or a whole lot of other Ricochetti. At the very least, y’all have recognized that there is a moral problem, which is more than most of my pro-choice friends are willing to do.
I think you could use Haekel’s theory (debunked or otherwise) to ask: “Okay, but would you think it was okay to kill a fish by tearing it to bits, beginning with its tail and working your way up to crushing its body and, eventually, its head?”
Hunters and fishermen are usually pretty careful to avoid inflicting needless suffering upon animals. Parents don’t approve when their toddlers pull the wings off flies. All sorts of people were appalled when Harambe was shot. And yet…?
That’s the part that gets me—the complete and willful ignorance of what is happening in an abortion. Okay, so at sixteen weeks a woman finds out she is carrying a baby with Down’s Syndrome. She decides she can’t handle rearing a disabled child, so she decides to have an abortion. Not only are we all supposed to agree, or even go out of our way to avoid mentioning all the happy, loving Down’s Syndrome people there are in the world lest we hurt her feelings (! never mind the feelings of the aforementioned D.S. Persons) we’re supposed to imagine that it’s okay to kill the kid by tearing it limb from limb. Literally.
Would you consider it acceptable to kill, say, a mostly-developed chick fetus by yanking its legs and wings off before crushing its head?
I’m listening to Gosnell as an audiobook, read by one of the (Irish) authors. (I like the Irish accent).
The women who came to Gosnell’s clinic weren’t having late-term abortions because there was a problem with the fetus. Not even once is that cited as an issue. Also: it is strange to be prosecuting someone for stabbing a baby in the neck after it comes out of it’s mother’s body, while condoning exactly the same act perpetrated while the baby’s head happens to still be inside.
I wonder: If Kermit Gosnell hadn’t also been running an unsafe (for the mothers) and wildly unsanitary clinic while dealing in oxycontin on the side…that is, if he had been running a perfectly clean, respectable, well-organized abortion clinic …but one that took care of the problem of an occasional infant born alive by stabbing it in the neck…would he have been prosecuted? Convicted?
I’m working on a sermon…. should be a doozy.
I am a cradle pro-lifer: I was raised by pro-life parents, and because of that, I can’t really take any moral credit for my position. A lot of support for abortion is emotional-not just selfishness, but an inability to come to terms with the fact that one’s parents, teachers, family, neighbors-all the people you rely on- could be so horribly wrong about something so important. This is exacerbated by the merciless attitude many liberals take towards those who are wrong about things like racism. Having rejected the idea of forgiveness for others, they will have a hard time granting it to themselves.
I think forgiveness is the only way out of this.
We will never be rid of abortion in this society. Contraception is the root, abortion is the flower. Funny that all Christian churches were against contraception up until the Lambeth conference in 1930, which decided it could be permitted it in “hard cases”.
Our culture is very influenced by the Sexual Revolution, which is dependent upon contraception. The contraceptive mindset is ingrained in the culture, and therefore abortion always will be too, because there needs to be a backup when the contraception fails.
Not necessarily religious. I do think the generation on the heels of millenials will blow your socks off. They are the survivors of mine and the previous generations’ little genocide and I don’t think they necessarily need to be religious to have a kind of righteous anger at what we permitted, excused, and defended happening to their unknown brothers and sisters.
They exist by luck – not by some profound connection between mother and child. The trust bond is broken and I doubt they will be indifferent to it.
Slavery was ingrained in our society for a long time too, until it wasn’t. As far as I know, no society in the history of the world has ever been totally free of abortion, or murder, or any other crime. Just because something cannot be eradicated completely doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against it.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight it – we must. I’m just saying that I don’t see it ever being seen as a crime such as murder – though it most certainly is just that – because our society is invested in the contraceptive mindset, and cultural acceptance of contraception means cultural acceptance of abortion as a backup. About the best we can hope for is a lack of enthusiasm for it.
I totally disagree with you :) Younger people are becoming more pro-life all of the time; the statistics simply do not back up what you are saying.
I don’t even think the pro-choice position is constrained by the humanity of the unborn anymore. We already know, not just by ultrasound imaging, but by the study of genetics and the mapping of DNA, that what we’re dealing with is a person.
Pain capability certainly has a stronger emotional appeal, but the fact is even the blastocyst has all it needs to scientifically qualify as a unique individual — a complete, unique human genome. In which case, even chemical abortion kills a person, unless we’re willing to make the argument that it’s okay to poison unwanted individuals while they’re asleep (or otherwise unconscious).
We have a long way to go to convince people of the sanctity of human life, though some of us already see the post-Roe world as mass-murdering on a scale that makes the Holocaust seem mild.
And, speaking of racism, there’s an ongoing genocide against blacks in this country. The abortionists set up shop in their neighborhoods and exploit their situation. Over 50% of all black babies in New York city are aborted. Think about that.
Even among developed nations, the US is an extreme in the killing industry, given Roe’s unrestricted “right” to abortion. Yes, we will be held to account — by God, if not by future generations.
The root of all this is the pernicious, pervasive zero-sum ideology of the Left. The view that new persons are in competition with the well-being of the born. As my pastor said recently, people are not just consumers of precious resources — they’re producers. Even the most severely disabled teach us profound lessons about who we are.
The ideology of Feminism has the sacrament of abortion. Feminism tells the woman that what she wants is all-important, and her feelings and desires relating to her own body are paramount. The sperm-donor of that child in her womb has no say in whatever she decides to do (unless of course he insists that she get an abortion when she doesn’t want one). It is HER body, and HER life, and HER decision.
But these women go to clinics, seemingly willfully.
Is it genocide if you murder your own progeny?
Heavy stuff, but worthy.
No, I don’t think parallels with the Holocaust are accurate or appropriate. There are some pretty stark differences. Without stating a position on the legality of abortion, I’ll mention a few.
The people who conducted the Holocaust knew they were doing something monstrous. They made some effort to do it in secret, and they tried to hide the evidence of what they’d done when the war was ending. I don’t believe there was any significant population that looked upon the effort as empowering or in any sense compassionate.
That isn’t true of abortion. A great many people see it as a recognition of a positive right women have to decide whether or not they will follow through with a pregnancy, and consider depriving women of that right as an offense against them. Contrast that with the Holocaust: no one was being harmed by a failure to murder Jews; no plausible injustice would have been done to anyone by allowing Jews to live.
There were no sympathetic perpetrators in the Holocaust. In the case of abortion, many of us have some sympathy for the situations of at least some of the pregnant women.
The execution of a Jewish man, woman, or child was unambiguously, undeniably murder. There is no sane interpretation of the Holocaust that doesn’t reveal it to be mass murder on an industrial scale.
But the termination of a pregnancy in its very early stages is arguably more ambiguous. (I say arguably: in fact, I believe it is hard to make a non-theological case that it is not ambiguous, at least in the earliest stages of pregnancy.) We can assume that many of the women who choose abortion do not believe that they are committing murder; it is hard to imagine that they do believe it.
If I were to guess, I’d imagine that future generations will look back on ours and wonder — assuming they possess more wisdom than do we — at the enthusiasm with which pro-abortion factions supported their cause, and at the lack of sensitivity they expressed, and at their unwillingness to draw lines and acknowledge that, at some developmental point, the character of the act of abortion changes from ambiguous to unambiguous, and from defensible (at least by some) to ghoulish.
But I also suspect that some forms of abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, will remain legal, and that people will not be considered moral monsters for supporting that.
My $.02.
BTW – One can still find this dogma being taught in middle school and high school biology classes as “settled science.”
(On other Ricochet threads we’ve been discussing the problems with public schools. Here’s a snapshot illustration…)
It’s true that younger people are becoming more pro-life. At the same time, the numbers of people who think abortion should remain legal at least through the first trimester, is still a majority opinion and is unlikely to change that much. I expect there to be more restrictions on abortion, but it will remain as a form of birth control for many in the first stages of pregnancy.
I ask this sincerely and with no malice or sarcasm.
Should pro-life people support sex-robots in order to prevent abortion?
I was talking with a liberal friend today about vegans and how soft hearted they are. They can feel the pain of animals, you know. (Even honey is exploiting bees!) Oh how soft hearted and compassionate they are.
I asked how many were for abortion and she said (that which we all know) that most were for abortion “rights” but I interrupted her right then and insisted on her admitting that almost all were. She agreed.
Then the enthusiasm she had for talking about vegans seemed to drop off and we changed the subject.
Logically, pro-life people should support really really good birth control methods and really effective and realistic sex education in High School.
Seriously – most people want to do each other, right? Most people don’t want to do robots – because there is more to sex than just rubbing it till it goes.
100%
I am completely pro choice but I absolutely believe that life begins at conception.
I hate how people pretend that an abortion doesn’t involve killing a fetus and ending its [human] life.
I haven’t noticed western civilizations becoming less materialistic, nihilistic and self absorbed, or more attached to notions about life and morality they inherited from the civilizing and cultural formation process that gave rise to those civilizations in the first place. If it happens it may be because the demographic collapse of the west and other advanced economies threatens their ability to resist the demographic and ultimately military pressure from the populous part of the world but Europe’s response to it’s self destruction doesn’t offer much hope. Then there’s the racism that drives the abortion lobby; I don’t see those we now call progressives changing their approach to death either. It’s like everything else, every generation has to learn the basics all over again and some don’t learn because they don’t think it’s in their interest to do so, in part precisely because they don’t have many children or grandchildren that causes them to think about the future. The US offers some hope again because so many progressives aren’t reproducing, but we have to free the children from their grip.