The definitive issue of our day

By Marita Vargas

From time to time a friend or acquaintance will challenge me to explain why abortion is the definitive issue of our day. The inquirer is usually a well-meaning, self-styled liberal who is really a live-and-let-live American pragmatist. Such a person would be angry with me if I suggested that she was really a live-and-let-kill American ostrich, and that like many an ostrich, she was burying her head in the rapidly eroding sand forming the foundation of our civilization. My hope is that she will lift her head while she still has eyes to see.

So cutting to the chase...Feminists of recent decades have taken to appending two words to the famous Marxist query so that it reads: "Who controls the means of production 'and reproduction?'" In the feminists' besotted view, the world will have reached the status of utopian dream world when procreation is under the complete control of the state.

Aldous Huxley rightly understood this trend in the modern world and wrote the cautionary Brave New World — he hoped to avoid what would be a calamity for the human race and the death of the individual.

Shulamith Firestone co-opted the "brave new world" approach in The Dialectic of Sex,[1] claiming that the remaking of the human race is the feminist project. She has been joined by a host of feminists, most famously Donna Haraway in the The Cyborg Manifesto,[2] in an effort to seize control of the means of visionary production. Haraway's goal is to inspire an army of feminist writers to capture the imagination of the human race and make us long for a gender free future — even if it means merging human DNA with machines or other species, even if it means ending the human race altogether. Go figure. Note the Marxian language — dialectic, manifesto. How chilling. How ugly. How likely to show up on college campuses across the nation.

Yet no one seems to tell the feminist recruits that societies where gender equalization has arrived are "red in tooth and claw." Think of China. Perhaps their mentors are looking the other way when equalizing "one child" policies are being implemented. The average person might find it hard to countenance birth police hunting down pregnant women and dragging them off to abortion clinics, but the fems are up for the sacrifice. Cracking those eggs to make omelets has never been so brutal. Unless, of course, you want to count the scourge of multiple abortions in Russia, the land from which the nightmare arose.

Closer to home, Mexico's sterilization program has forced women, weary from giving birth, into signing forms granting permission for tubal ligations. Hospitals have gone so far as to implant IUD's in women without their knowledge. The result has been heartache and pain. In Peru, hysterectomies have been performed against the will of women who have reached their allotted child limit. And the atrocities continue around the globe. You can read about them in Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits by Steven W. Mosher.

Only in the U.S. has the program to eliminate "the populations we don't want to have too many of"[3] been sold as a right. Gloria Steinem and company may have marched in the streets for the right of women to be as free of the consequences of sexual union as men are imagined to be, but she and the others were not smart enough to realize that minority babies were on the chopping block or that they were playing into the hands of the social planners.

So how are all the little social planners doing? John Holdren, Science Czar, believes that the government can impose compulsory birth control, abortion and sterilization on a population in the wake of a disaster. You'd better believe he gets to pick the disaster. He also thinks that laws imposing such measures would pass Supreme Court muster.[4] Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has White House inner circle influence as health adviser. His views on rationing the health care of less productive citizens (those over 40) are well known.[5] Cass Sunstein, the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, believes animals might one day be granted standing in the courts, but the conceptus will never be granted standing. Further Sunstein does not rule out human cloning so long as it is not widely available to the hoi polloi.[6] These three men embody the trajectory from abortion to euthanasia to the manufacture of human life. Who controls the means of reproduction? Not your friendly neighborhood graduates of sensitivity training.

Where does this leave us? We must see that the forces coming together to manipulate population worldwide are headed by those who have a diminished view of man and a contempt for freedom. They don't believe in saving lives, much less in redeeming souls. They don't believe in a Creator, any more than they believe in the individual. Naturally, they couldn't give a rip about The Declaration of Independence. Why should they believe that the ordinary man has the right to procreate as he pleases when he has no other rights?

They are not moved by the beautiful words: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." [7] and much less by the words: "Thou shalt not side with the strong against the weak."

The poet, Robert Lowell, said of the modern world that it had "Out Heroded Herod." That was back in 1945 when it seemed that modern horrors had reached their worst. [8] What would he say now that the machinery of the state, in abrogation of its protective role, actively seeks to devour the weakest among us? Would he fling accusations at Planned Parenthood, at the World Health Organization, at the United Nations Population Fund? We will never know. But it is easy to write a poem, much more difficult to break the power of Pharaoh.

We live in a world where Pharaoh rises every morning and decrees that not enough babies have been killed. He topples protections erected to save them. He punishes those who would defy him. He tramples on rights. He wipes out ancient oaths.

He meets with very little resistance except here in the U.S.A. But if we are to truly open our eyes we must see that we are responsible through our policies for many of the deaths that have already occurred. That should give us further resolve to win in the mission of protecting the unborn here and abroad. If we Americans falter on the abortion issue, a dark blanket of fear and death will descend over most of the world.

Pharaoh has a name; he has henchmen; he has rich supporters. He happens to go by the names of today's tyrants: Barak Hussein Obama, Nancy Pelosi, John D. Rockefeller IV (in the name of his family). But, what will become of their names? They will be blown away like so many pillars of sand. As will the name of our country.

Here is the reason why: Christ came to us as a baby. He came in complete imitation of our lives. Who would have trusted him otherwise? He lived as a poor child among poor people. How else would the great mass of humanity have identified with him? He came to sanctify the flesh as well as the soul. His healing ways have been imitated by his followers around the world, always in affirmation of life. "And it was good." That is the miracle of the Incarnation. To believe it is to believe that we can erect our civilization upon solid rock and not upon shifting sand.

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© Marita Vargas