I do try very hard to stay away from the subject of abortion. It always begins as a discussion but ends as a fight and absolutely no-one ever changes their mind. Even so, I rate it as one of the worst crimes of the modern world, right up there, or perhaps right down there would be more accurate, with the mass murder perpetrated by Stalin, Mao, Hitler and the rest of the monsters. They at least have the very slight mitigation that they they did what they did on the basis of a political creed, albeit, perverted, which at least indicates that they thought it through. Today we slaughter babies on the casual basis that they are simply surplus to requirements, or perhaps, that they had the impudence to arrive unexpectedly.
I am provoked to raising this subject because of this damned 'co-incidence-thingie' which keeps following me! Today I hear on the news about two doctors who approved abortions on the basis of the sex of the babies concerned. Our 'not-fit-for-purpose' prosecution service declined to prosecute despite the actions being obviously against the law. Instead they handed it over to the General Medical Council for them to deal with as they see fit. Yesterday, or to be precise over the last few days, I have received these quotations from the absolutely excellent In Pursuit of Copiousness site:
Why do you approve of the extermination camps here in America?” he asksinstead.
“What do you mean? There are no extermination camps in this country!” she retorts.
“They are everywhere in this land, he replies, peering straight and deep into her eyes. "The women's clinics."
Michael O'Brien, Island of the World (p.664)
And then there was this one, too:
“I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and
constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any
contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven by the same negative
simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type
of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular
propagandist for what he or she absurdly calls Birth-Control.
I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly
word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favor
even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceedings
these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes
sure that there shall never be any birth to control…
Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly
thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a
flat refusal to take the first and obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once
grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and
they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority
in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were
mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all difference between animals
and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale
and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to
the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act toward babies as they act
toward kittens. Let all the babies be born; and then let us drown those we do
not like ... Unless I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement."
G.K.Chesterton, in his essay 'Babies and Distributism'
And finally a suitably sardonic post-script on progressive ideas in general:
“The first victim on the altar of equality is always that of liberty. The
second victim is a collective one, a long line of men, women, and children which
stretches out of sight. Hearing modernists talk about the bloody abuses of the
Middle Ages is like hearing a lecture on disease control by Typhoid Mary, and it
is all a bit much.”
- Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture (p. 168)