If a dystopian author from the past 100 years—take your
pick, but I like to picture Huxley somehow having this keen vision—had imagined
a scenario in which several hundred thousand infant children were murdered each
year in utero with a black market developing for the sale of their parts to
Frankenstein-like medical adventurers and wrote such a scene into his book I
cannot imagine anyone believing it. Impossible, people would say.
Then, if rather than a black market existing for such
“tissue,” the author upped the ante and placed this transaction in clean and
sterile labs funded by tax dollars under the (rather broad) banner of women’s
health, staffed this fantastic clinic with educated doctors who swore to the
Hippocratic oath, and, perhaps most unbelievably, made such a system legal
under the current political regime, well, then, the literary critics would have
argued that—allowances for the genre aside—this was just too otherworldly,
transgressing even satire. Swift might have recommended eating Irish babies,
but that is a more straightforward, Maslow’s hierarchy type need, and besides
it was just the Irish. But pilfering baby parts to aid medical research so that
a fattening, lazy population could use medical science to buttress their
sagging frames—come on.
I do not want to talk only about the videos that have been
released in the past few weeks. I will say that what disturbs me about their
content is not so much whether or not Planned Parenthood profited from the sale
of baby parts (for me killing the babies in the first place is the most
egregious crime), but the blasé nature in which all of the functionaries of the
organization speak about heinous acts. It makes my skin crawl to hear someone
talk about a murdered baby’s organs as if they are spare parts from a broken
down Dodge.
I will also say that we are seeing here is the flowering of
an ideology that has sought to divorce sex from children. I cannot overstate
the degree to which this is true of our culture. We want sex without
consequences. This cuts across race, ethnicity, social class, and even
religious beliefs. The true god of most Americans is self-actualization and
that process has been known to be severely hampered by babies taking up all of
your time and money. Indeed, children can actually make self-actualization look
like a bad thing, a selfish thing. They are an 18-year long self-emptying. I
can think of nothing more anathema to our culture than that. How can we go to
Prague and find ourselves if we are bogged down with children? Asia beckons,
but here we are knee-deep in diapers. And I have witnessed Christian friends
buy into this as well. Christian couples who have no intention of having
children and if they do they push off the date into the mystical future when,
self firmly discovered, they will be able to accommodate the interests of
another.
What follows is merely an anecdote and therefore subject to
the limits of all anecdotes, but one I believe to be telling. It is fully true,
as I remember it. Several years ago Clara and I attended the Austin City Limits
music festival. A roommate from college lived in that fine Texas town and we
stayed with him during the festivities. The night we arrived we walked around
the famous downtown district before ending up back at his apartment complex
with a bottle of wine (maybe two). We sat outside in the courtyard area where
another group had already established itself.
It was an election year—2008—and we spoke about the hysteria
surrounding then candidate Obama and I gave Tim good-natured hell for
campaigning for Bush in 2004 (even planting a peck on Jenna Bush’s cheek at a
rally; true story). I made some offhand comment about never being able to
support a party that allowed (some might even argue, celebrated) the killing of
babies under the ghastly Orwellian phrase “reproductive rights.”
Little did I know—and I wonder if, had I known, I would have
said anything at all—that I was sharing a bottle of wine with a girl who worked
for Planned Parenthood. She, obviously, spoke up. I remember at one point she
made the absolutely insane claim that more women had died in botched abortions than
babies had been aborted since Roe. Given that the number of abortions carried
out under Roe by 2008 was somewhere just shy of 50,000,000 (I write out the
zeroes to be instructive), I find this claim a bit tough to take seriously.
She also made the comment at one point that she was not in
favor of late term abortion. I asked her why and she didn’t have much of a
reason. I pointed out that the only difference—in substance—between a late term
and an early term abortion is that a late term abortion is grosser. The gore
might repulse us, but if the baby is not a baby at six weeks then why is it one
at 26 weeks? What sort of alchemy takes place in the womb at that point?
Anyways, I don’t bring this up to point out the logical tete-a-tete that we
engaged in. Logic would never win an argument like this anyway.
As the conversation progressed it became more personal as
things tend to do aided by the a.m. hours and wine. Eventually we got onto the
subject of this girl’s current relationship situation. She was 30 or 31 at the
time and in an “open relationship” with her boyfriend. Her translation of this
was clear: he had sex with other women while she stayed faithful and committed
to him. She then got emotional and made a startling admission. She told us that
whenever she had sex with a man she wanted to have his babies. She told us that
though her education taught her that the desire for motherhood is a mere
vestige of the patriarchy, as worthless as that appendix taking up space in
your innards, she could not resist the desire. She told us she simply had to
deny it.
What I see in Planned Parenthood and our culture at large is
the fruition of a system that teaches people the twin lies that 1) babies are a
problem and 2) babies have nothing to do with sex. As much as I hope for political
change and the end of the murderous regime of Roe, unless this broader
mentality changes we will lapse right back into a similar system. We are a
nation of addicts; a nation dogmatic in our fealty to the god of self. What we
need is repentance.
I have thought a lot about that conversation in Austin these
past seven years and I have often prayed for that girl. I hope she found peace
and broke up with that douchebag. I hope she stopped believing the lies. I hope
she finally listened to herself. I hope she’s a mom.
