[Editor's Note: This article was originally published at The Warden Post on June 16, 2019, as a response to the ongoing debate surrounding abortion in the United States].
On May 15, 2019, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into a law a bill passed by the State’s Senate the previous day effectively banning most forms of abortion throughout the State of Alabama. Nine days later, on May 24, Missouri Governor Mike Parsons followed Alabama’s lead and signed into law a bill that prohibits abortions after the eighth week of pregnancy. Both Alabama and Missouri are challenging the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States in the hopes that the new, young and conservative Justices appointed by President Donald Trump would challenge the existing ruling. A few weeks later, the States of Maine and Illinois also signed into law their own abortion bills, on June 10 and 12 respectively, greatly increasing the access to which a woman could receive an abortion under State law, meaning that Maine and Illinois now have some of the most liberal abortion laws in the United States.
Before I even begin to unpack this doozy of a subject, I want to make it perfectly clear that I, being neither a woman nor a father, do not have a proverbial dog in this fight. Abortion is a very sensitive issue, made even more difficult by the fact that it is so heavily polarizing. However, it’s no secret to anyone that I am an Orthodox Christian. In fact, most of what I’ve ever written has been about Christian spirituality. Because of this, it should not be surprising that my Christianity obligates me to place myself firmly in the pro-life camp. But as I mentioned before, I am neither a woman nor a father and, by being childless, do not find myself necessarily entitled to an opinion on an issue concerning the reproduction of children. However, speaking merely as an outside observer, I do find the mercenary slaughter of the unborn to be one of the most barbaric crimes against nature that can be undertaken by human beings.
I want to say I could at least tolerate—not respect—but tolerate the position of the pro-choice faction. I want to say that, but I cannot. The reason being is that I’ve listened to the arguments of the pro-choicers and seriously inclined myself to what they had to say. And through all of it, I’ve found that that there isn’t single argument—not one—made by the pro-choice side that isn’t founded on blatant self-interest or the avoidance of the consequences of one’s actions. The purpose of this article is to break down the commonly used arguments used by those on the pro-choice side and demonstrate unequivocally why they are wrong.
Before we begin, we need to do away with the notion that this front in the Culture War is being fought between people who are simply “pro” or “anti” choice. This is an illusion. The notion of being “pro-choice” is a misnomer; the label itself serving as a red herring to lure away focus from what these people are really advocating, viz., State-sanctioned infanticide. There is no other rational way to approach this issue: you are either for the slaughtering of innocents in the womb or you are not. You have no other choice in the matter.
Now, this isn’t to say I don’t already know who my audience is. I know that many readers of my articles and essays are, if not Christians (Orthodox or otherwise), then certainly some member of the great Traditionalist family. Much to their surprise, however, I will not be using any Biblically inspired arguments to defend my position, neither will I be drawing from the divinely inspired writings of the Church Fathers. This is because I find such arguments unnecessary. If God is truly present throughout all of creation, then I don’t need to draw from Holy Scripture merely, or from Tradition more generally to prove my point. If God is truth, and we believe ourselves to be in possession of the truth, then God will ultimately be found in the details and my position can be proved both rationally and convincingly to the secular mind.
The Argument from Autonomy
First, I will address the belief that access to abortion is an issue of bodily autonomy on the part of the woman and, by restricting access to abortion, the State is violating the woman’s sovereign right to do as she pleases with her body. After all, its “her body, her choice”, right? This can be debunked rather easily, quite easily in fact. The issue of bodily autonomy first suggests that the fetus inside her isn’t an actual person, merely a “clump of cells” which just so happens to be occupying space in her womb and is parasitically feeding off her. The thing about that is, biologically speaking, we are all just clumps of cells, the only real significant difference being the varying degrees of complexity between a fetus and an adult human being. Moreover, by reducing the status of the fetus to that of a “parasite,” the proponents of this argument are ignoring one basic fact about biology, viz., that sex exists for the sole purpose of procreation, and, by extension, pregnancies are the biologically intended outcome of sexual intercourse.
I’m not suggesting sex can’t be had merely for the experience of pleasure. Believe me, I’m very aware of that. But to deny the fundamental role of sexual intercourse and its intended purpose for the perpetuation of the species is to implicitly suggest that the only real reason that human beings have genitals in the first place is for the experience of pleasure and that pregnancy is a freak accident that somehow occurs during coitus. This whole line reasoning implies that pregnancy is a consequence of sex, not it’s raison d’etre. No sane person would seriously consider this to be true, let alone any serious biologist.
However, we need to also address the idea that somehow, by some weird alchemy, the woman in question possesses a “right” to have an abortion. The concept of what does and does not constitute a right has been an ongoing matter of debate in liberal circles of thought, as well as its myriad offshoots. The notion of what even constitutes a “right” has become ever broader and more expansive since liberalism’s advent in the American and French Revolutions. Classically, liberals assumed that one had a right to “life, liberty and property” and of these only the right to property was grounded in something non-abstract. Now, the modern cosmopolitan dwelling among the glass and concrete monoliths of the post-Western world believes that he or she has access to a whole plethora of rights: a right to healthcare, a right to housing, a right to marry the person one loves regardless of sexual orientation and, of course, a right to readily accessible forms of abortion.
I am not a liberal. And I highly doubt that you, the reader, are as well. So, the whole concept of arguing from a position of “inalienable rights” means bupkis to both you and to me. If, however, you are indeed a liberal, then I feel obliged to instruct you in the matter of what rights are and what they are not. When we speak of rights, we are essentially speaking of certain privileges granted by the State in return for certain obligations. Now, I’m not talking about something silly like “Well, we pay taxes, so we can have schools and roads” or whatever. No. I’m talking about how rights were understood by our forebears; by those who understood what it meant to be part of a real, living community.
Every society has consisted of haves and have-nots, of free men and women and thralls. The expectation on the part of the chieftain, king or potentate was that the freemen would pledge their fealty to him and in return they received certain privileges and benefits such as lands, titles and honors. If this sounds like the liberal concept of the social contract it is because it was my intention to draw together their similarities. However, unlike the social contract, the freemen primarily pledged their loyalty to the dux or to the monarch because in him they recognized the sacred authority which had its origin in the uncreated world of Tradition. But that is another matter altogether and I won’t delve into it in this paper.
Now, to a libertarian mind, the idea that the concept of rights had their beginnings in the development of the State is completely anathema. But libertarians, as we know, are stupid. And so, we’re left to conclude that the so-called “inalienable rights” granted to all men and women by virtue of simply existing is a fantasy. A fantasy because, we are led to ask, from whence and where do these rights come from? From God? No, that’s too religious. From the invisible hand of the free market? From the aether? From the mystical woo energy that pervades the cosmos? Of course not.
The libertarian position, and the liberal position as well, asserts that all human beings have inviolable rights by merely having been born and, that while the State can expand the definition of what constitutes a right, it cannot, without violating the social contract or NAP, restrict them. I say “having been born” because that is where the line is being drawn by the adherents of the above-mentioned positions. A child has a right to life because it, in their narrow definition, is alive. A fetus does not because it has not met the criteria arbitrarily set up by liberals, classical or otherwise. By saying life begins at conception we are stating an absolute. By saying that a child is not truly a person until they are born is shifting goalposts, and if you shift the goalposts far enough then who is to say a child is not truly a person, and therefore entitled to rights, because they haven’t reached the “age of reason” as defined by political demagogues?
Therefore, if we are being truly honest with ourselves, we have to say that life, as we understand it in a truly biological sense, does indeed begin at conception and that whole argument from the position of the supposed bodily autonomy of the woman is a fallacy. It is a fallacy because, if we accept unborn persons as truly possessing personhood, then they in fact are entitled to rights; and they are entitled to these rights because they are the continuation of the life-force manifested through what we, in a more limited sense, call a “people.” Rights, then, are not only granted to those free men and women who are a part of a real historical community extending back centuries, but to the persons who came before them; their forebears and honored dead as well as those future generations who are to come after them, namely, the unborn. It is for this reason that the vandalism of family graves is considered a desecration even to secular minds and if grave robbing and vampirism are to be seriously considered aberrations, it is only logical that slaughtering innocents in the womb should be as well.
The Argument from Eugenics
Secondly, I want to address pro-infanticide arguments from the position of eugenics. This position is a tempting one to many of us on the Right and indeed one that is widely accepted by those in our circles of thought, particularly by Pagans. Admittedly, when I was a Pagan myself this was a position that I readily accepted because it easily ties into the belief that “only the strong survive” or any of the other kinds of views that are typically accepted by Pagans and Heathens. The problem with this argument though is that it is fallacious; fallacious because the argument itself presupposes a kind of naturalism that is true a priori.
The naturalism fallacy is one that assumes that just because lions and tigers and bears and all other myriad of creatures who exist in a state of nature rend each other limb from limb in a constant struggle for existence, human beings should as well. Although, perhaps the word “should” isn’t quite the right word here. The Pagan perspective on the matter, as I myself well know, isn’t suggesting that living like wild animals is some sort of ideal that human beings should strive for, instead they argue that that it is the way it has always been from the beginning. From the moment the earliest creatures even resembling creatures first emerged from the primordial soup on downward to the present day, the unbroken rule that governs all life has been written down in tooth and claw; in the red ink of billions of slaughtered organisms feeding and being fed on by one another.
The reason this argument has been so enduring is by the fact that it is so difficult to disprove, at least from the outset. I can’t deny that any of the above mentioned is not a fact, precisely because it very well is. But truth and facts are not the same thing, as funny as that sounds. For example, if I were to say that the sun rises in the East every morning and sets in West every evening, that is a fact and is well attested by both scientific observation and common sense. However, if I were to say that the sun is Ra sailing his boat across the sky on his daily journey to Duat or Helios driving his chariot across the heavens, nobody would take me seriously, not even the Pagans who would be most likely to attempt to explain that these myths are merely allegorical.
Nevertheless, they were considered truths at one time, and in an age no less civilized or sophisticated as our own—and one as equally prone to mysticism and superstition. But the error that takes place in coming to these assumed “truths”, or rather truisms, is the mistake in taking basic, observable phenomena and misconstruing it to construct something wholly artificial. For example, I can’t prove that there are dryads in the forests or nymphs in the pools and grottos anymore then say, a virgin gave birth to God himself roughly twenty centuries ago. Such things are articles of faith.
However, I can avoid falling prey to the delusion that just because the sun rises every morning that it must be because it needs human hearts to give itself strength to ward off the eternal night. The point I am trying to make here is that just because one can observe phenomenon that occurs naturally, such as the interactions between other living organisms, does not necessarily mean that truth can be derived from those interactions. The argument from the eugenicist perspective, which is essentially the Pagan one, is that because life is a horrible never-ending feeding frenzy of innumerable creatures tearing each other to bits, that means it’s perfectly acceptable to kill off the unborn, or even infants should they have disability or defect because nature somehow demands us to breed out any form of weakness or vulnerability.
That presumption is ridiculous because nature doesn’t “demand” anything from us. That is because nature is a state of things, not some deity on high commanding us to make oblations for the survival of the strong and the brutal. For example, while it is true that the strongest, tallest and perhaps even the most ruthless of men have access to the most beautiful and fertile of women, that is ultimately an observation, not a moral assessment. If the sum total of human life and experience were simply about the perpetuation of the race or species, then the scientific achievements of Isaac Newton or the artistic accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci count for nothing merely because both men never had children.
The fact of the matter remains that man is a dualistic animal. He is both a biological and spiritual creature and his spirituality compels him towards the creation of culture, an inclination that no other animal has. And it is precisely because he is a spiritual being that this allows him to be a cultural being as well, for if he were not then he would be living in a state of ignorance like the lower animals and then, I suppose, all these arguments about breeding out weakness amidst a social backdrop of grunting and fornicating might be justified.
But here arises a problem for my own position, and one that has allowed the Pagan position to remain seemingly unassailable for so many people, and that problem is this: many highly cultured and civilized societies were also ones that practiced infanticide. It’s common knowledge that the Greek cities, most notably Sparta, would leave infants to die of exposure. Although in the case of Sparta the decision was made by the Gerousia where in other Greek cities the decision was typically made by the father. I’ve thought long and hard about this contradiction: how could a civilization with such an elevated degree of high culture such as Greece also condone an act as barbarous as leaving a child to die of exposure?
The answer that I came too was that, for the Greeks, infanticide was undertaken as a kind of last resort measure due to the natural cap on population growth that came from being in such a confined, resource bare country. The population of Athens for example never seemed to exceed that of 300-350,000 inhabitants. Indeed, the wave of Greek colonization which led to permanent settlements being established across the Mediterranean was one way of dealing with this constant fear of overpopulation. But here’s the thing: Greek infanticide, again, except for Sparta, was always a private affair and was never sanctioned by the State as it was in Canaan or in Punic cultures such as Phoenicia and Carthage.
Moreover, it appears infanticide was performed due to a lack of resources on the part of either the family or polis, therefore being a matter of necessity and not of “personal choice.” Again, necessity is the key word here. Ancient cultures carried out infanticides because of the strain overpopulation put on their own societies and only if it was deemed absolutely necessary, and not, as it should be emphasized, because they subscribed to some notion of eugenically engineering a master race—with the exception of course being, once again, ancient Sparta.
I am not writing this article to say if or when an abortion could be deemed necessary, such as in the case of rape, incest or to save a mother’s life. Those scenarios are few and far between, as I will explain later, and are so rare that they almost aren’t even worth discussing. But I will, if only because I must. The overall point that I am trying to make is that abortion, or really infanticide, is always a negative thing, even when such an infanticide must be carried out by the pressures of necessity or extreme duress placed upon the mother herself. It is never a morally neutral decision, and certainly not a positive one.
The last point I would like to make is before anyone passes judgement on anyone else as being “life unworthy of life” is that they should take a hard look in the mirror and decide for themselves whether they have a face that Arno Breker would sculpt. Also, it’s no secret that we on the Right have more than a few of our fellows on the autism spectrum. Undoubtably, some of those autists, due to their lack of understanding social cues, probably imagine themselves as belonging to one of the few, elect “chosen” among the herrenvolk—with the irony of course being completely lost on them.
What convinced me out of the eugenics position was interacting with people who suffered from deformities and palsies and coming to realize that they can live meaningful, productive lives just like the rest of us, and indeed, have a desire to live despite the overwhelming burdens imposed upon them by nature.
I think perhaps the reason why so many Pagans are mentally stuck in the Nordic Bronze age is because of their intense, yet completely understandable, hatred of the modern world. However, if the modern world has brought us one good thing it is its material abundance and sophistication of medical technology that wasn’t even conceivable in our grandparents’ generation. The technological advancements and availability of resources has allowed even those who suffer from deformities something of a fulfilling life and, to deny them that even before they’ve tasted their first gasp of air is outright criminal. Even the least of us want to live out their lives to the best that they are able, even it means requiring a little extra help.
The Argument from Overpopulation
Thirdly, I want to address the argument made by the advocates of infanticide that the termination of a fetus is necessary because of the sheer number of human beings already populating the planet. They argue that because the world is already so heavily populated, and that the future number of human beings shows no signs of decreasing, that the responsible thing to do is to have fewer or no children to curb the increasing likelihood of catastrophe caused by overpopulation. They also cite the demand for more living space for human populations would mean the further destruction of animal habitats and would additionally put more pressure on the already decreasing supplies of clean drinking water and natural resources, not to mention the increased need to cultivate arable farmland which further accelerates ongoing deforestation and habitat destruction.
The case they make seems like a very reasonable argument, even a responsible a one. However, like all the arguments we have examined so far it ignores certain obvious truths. The fact of the matter remains that overpopulation is not an issue for the Western or even the developed world. No, overpopulation, as well as its companion problems of habitat destruction and environmental degradation, are almost exclusively a Third World problem. According to the United Nations own findings, Africa is the fastest growing continent in terms of expected population growth, closely followed by Asia, specifically the Middle East. The UN reports that:
More than half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to occur in Africa. Africa has the highest rate of population growth among major areas, growing at a pace of 2.55 per cent annually in 2010-2015. A rapid population increase in Africa is anticipated even if there is a substantial reduction of fertility levels in the near future. Regardless of the uncertainty surrounding future trends in fertility in Africa, the large number of young people currently on the continent, who will reach adulthood in the coming years and have children of their own, ensures that the region will play a central role in shaping the size and distribution of the world’s population over the coming decades.
Shrinking population growth in Europe, which has been an ongoing trend for the last few decades, is expected to continue. The UN reports:
In sharp contrast, the populations of 48 countries or areas in the world are expected to decrease between 2015 and 2050. Several countries are expected to see their populations decline by more than 15 per cent by 2050, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. Fertility in all European countries is now below the level required for full replacement of the population in the long run (around 2.1 children per woman), and in the majority of cases, fertility has been below the replacement level for several decades.
What population growth is projected across the Western world is expected to be the result of external migrations from outside of the West itself. The UN findings go on to say that:
[…] However, in some countries and areas the impact of migration on population size is significant, including in countries that send or receive proportionately large numbers of economic migrants or those affected by refugee flows. Overall, between 1950 and 2015, the major areas of Europe, Northern America and Oceania have been net receivers of international migrants, while Africa, Asia and Latin and the Caribbean have been net senders, with the volume of net migration generally increasing over time. From 2000 to 2015, average annual net migration to Europe, Northern America and Oceania averaged 2.8 million persons per year.
The influx of Africans, Saracens, Turks and Moors into Europe as well as the ongoing flood of mestizos and indios into the United States is a demographic disaster in the making. As much as stupid, raceless cuckservatives like to drone on about how abortion disproportionately effects low income Black and Hispanic women, the reality is that the fertility rate of these groups far outpaces the rate in which their women undergo abortions. And yes, while White women seek out abortions at a much lower rate than their Black or Hispanic counterparts, the fact remains that Whites have a much, much lower rate of fertility than any other racial group. This means that when a young, fertile and relatively well-off White woman voluntarily chooses to consign her unborn child to a medical wastebasket, the impact that resonates across demographic lines is far more devastating.
Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I am writing this under the assumption that the ongoing demographic winter is obvious to everyone. I should have realized, or rather, we all should have realized, that when the proponents of infanticide make their dumb, barbarous arguments, they do so believing that overpopulation must be occurring everywhere across the world evenly, across all racial and ethnic lines and that, being one big “human family,” it’s up to all of us to get our tubes tied or our wieners snipped.
The reality of race and its significance is completely lost on these people. They think that all human beings are interchangeable units of labor and capital in the great postmodern hellscape that we find ourselves living in. They don’t understand that human beings are not the same. That they don’t think the same way, dream the same way, see and experience life in the same way. To them, your average run-of-the-mill WASP is no different than a Maasai tribesman living in the highlands of Kenya. To assume that these two completely different human types even begin to think or relate to the world in remotely the same way is lunacy.
That being said, I want to deconstruct the overpopulation argument a bit further. To do this I will be putting forth a thought experiment. For the sake of the argument let us assume that we have two populations groups: population Group A and population Group B.
Now, population Group A are the indigenous inhabitants of their respective territory and have lived there since time immemorial. However, over the course of many years, members of population Group B slowly start to move into Group A’s territory, seeking access to resources and a better quality of life. At first the arrival of peoples belonging to Group B isn’t a problem. Members belonging to Group B eventually adopt the culture, dress and even language of Group A and, despite being either lighter or darker in complexion to the members of Group A, become almost indistinguishable from them.
However, Group B and their descendants tend to, by sheer custom, have larger and more extended families than those of Group A. Coupled with this is the fact that the members of Group B also tend to have a higher rate of fertility than those of Group A and, as more immigrants from the original territory of Group B move into the territory of Group A, they begin to overtake their Group A neighbors in terms of birthrate alone. To make matters worse for Group A, the peoples of Group B also have a completely different culture than they do.
For example, the culture of Group A places a high emphasis on personal liberty, the sovereignty of the individual, favors secularism over religionism and has a long history of representative government. On the other hand, the culture of Group B emphasizes the good of the whole over the personal comfort of the individual, a respect for authority and tradition, and prefers the leadership of strong, charismatic figures that closely line up with the values of their own religious traditions. One noticeable difference between Group’s A and B is that for Group A, abortion is a widely accepted practice and has long been considered a private decision on the part of the woman. Understandably, abortion is considered completely anathema to the members of Group B as well as most of the descendants of the original immigrants which migrated from Group B’s territory to Group A’s.
Eventually, through both birthrate and the habit of women belonging to Group A to seek out an obtain abortions, Group B inevitably becomes a large demographic bloc that wields tremendous voting power in Group A’s elections. Because of this, Group B can enforce its own cultural and religious norms onto the members of Group A, much to their chagrin. The homeland of Group A eventually becomes absorbed into the cultural bloc of Group B and begins to resemble just another frontier of Group B’s territory, taken without a fight or any significant resistance on the part of the peoples of Group A who had their own ideas of individual liberty and political institutions used against them.
The abovementioned is not a hypothetical scenario but a clear, demonstrable reality occurring right now across the Western world. No truer words were ever said than “demographics is destiny” and the population groups that have more offspring, successfully contend for more living space, access to resources and desirable mates are the ones that have a future. A population group that refuses to have children, and willing aborts the one’s that it manages to conceive, does not. Regarding human populations, this also means that the culture and values of the original population are replaced by the new arrivals and that the way of life that was once indigenous to that land eventually disappears, almost always with the original inhabitants as well.
The Argument from Abortion as Healthcare
As we approach the end of this paper, I want to dismantle one of the most frequently cited arguments coming from pro-choicers, viz., that the debate over abortion is really about women’s healthcare. Now, out of all the arguments we have heard from the pro-choice camp thus far, this one, despite being of the most frequently used, is also the most disprovable.
One need only take a look at the statistics which list the reasons why women choose to undergo such a procedure. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the most commonly cited reason why women seek out abortions is because the woman fears that having a child would interfere with their education, career and lifestyle; reporting that:
The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child. Fewer than 1% said their parents’ or partners’ desire for them to have an abortion was the most important reason. Younger women often reported that they were unprepared for the transition to motherhood, while older women regularly cited their responsibility to dependents.
Keep in mind that the Guttmacher Institute is a pro-choice outlet. In fact, the Institute itself was founded by former Planned Parenthood president Alan F. Guttmacher in 1968 and was originally set up to be the research arm for Planned Parenthood. I managed to find this information with just a quick search on Google and was struck by the overwhelming reason given why—a whopping seventy-four percent of women—choose to have their unborn children murdered in the womb by mercenary “physicians” is because they thought the child would be an inconvenience to them. Further down, and citing changes in the reasons given by the participants in their study from between 1987-2004, the same article goes on to say that:
On the other hand, smaller proportions of women in 2004 than in 1987 said that having a baby would interfere with their job or career (38% vs. 50%), that they were not mature enough (22% vs. 27%), that their husband or partner wanted them to have an abortion (14% vs. 24%), and that they and their partner could not or did not want to get married (12% vs. 30%). In both surveys, 1% indicated that they had been victims of rape, and less than half a percent said they became pregnant as a result of incest.
To reiterate, abortion patients who listed the reasons why they sought out the procedure, and were also victims of rape or incest, accounted for one and a half percent of the recipients in this study. Think about that: ninety-nine percent of all women who choose to undergo these kinds of operations do for reasons other than rape, incest or because childbirth poses a conceivable risk to their life. Even assuming that some of the women who participated this study may have concealed the fact that they were raped, it still wouldn’t make a dent in the overall number of women who choose to obtain abortions for non-medical reasons.
And so, there you have it. With just a quick Google search the entire debate on whether or not abortion is a “healthcare” issue is immediately ended.
Now, keep in mind I know that this is just one study. However, every other study I found seemed to mirror these same findings, and the reason why I’m citing this one in particular is because a majority of other studies that I came across—while confirming that roughly over three-quarters of women seek out abortions due to the inconvenience that a child would pose on them—do not however seem to list how many abortions were carried out due to rape, incest or personal risk to the mother's life.
The answer seems to be the same no matter where I look; and the number of abortions undertaken due to rape, incest or personal risk to the mother's life all seem to account for either one percent or less than one percent of all abortion procedures carried out, and that proponents of the pro-choice side are aware of this and seek to conceal it. The majority of the other reasons given by abortion patients seem to fluctuate between either it would dramatically change the way of life for the mother, the mother can’t afford the costs that come with having a child, or that the would-be mother states flat out that she doesn’t want to be a single mom—with the former reason being the most prominent given. A more concise list of reasons given can be found on Illinois Right to Life website which links in their article a report compiled by the Guttmacher Institute reinforcing the findings laid out by their project.
I believe I’ve said all that I need to on this subject. It should be obvious to everyone what a preposterous argument this actually is. But see, by framing the infanticide as a “healthcare” issue, one moralizes what would otherwise be an immoral position. This allows the pro-choice side to grandstand over their detractors and falsely accuse them of wanting to deny women healthcare out of some perceived misogyny on the part of the accused. But for those who aren’t easily bamboozled, or rather, anyone with a working internet connection, can see for themselves what a big fat lie this argument is. It literally has no basis in objective fact and furthermore is just a way for the would-be mothers who allowed their unborn infants to be murdered to feel unashamed for their actions. Make no mistake, this was never about access to healthcare, but avoiding responsibility for having gotten pregnant in the first place and the shame for disposing one’s own child like garbage.
Keep that word in mind, friends, shame. Shame is a very useful tool, and it’s one we should make use of whenever we can. Not out of hatred, malice or indignation for the women who choose to undergo these procedures, but for their edification. Shame is simply the inverse of honor, and furthermore opens the gates of repentance, and through repentance, mercy.
The Problem of Suffering
Finally, I want to come to the one last argument I keep hearing from the pro-infanticide camp: why would anyone want to bring a child into the world when they know that they are going to eventually suffer? The problem of suffering has been a thorn in the side of philosophers, theologians and ethicists since human beings could comprehend what suffering is in the first place. And yet, while I am in no less good a position than the great thinkers of the past to answer why we suffer, I feel like the fact that we do is something that is almost taken for granted. Yes, things such as disease, hunger, plague, civil war, foreign invasion and natural disaster are certainties and even if somehow, somewhere, one was able to live an insulated existence completely cut off from the calamities of this world—much like Siddartha Gautama before he became the Buddha—one would still be faced with the looming specter that is the inevitability of death.
So, what is to be done? We can’t very well escape death, let alone suffering, so why even continue the absurdity that is existence in the first place? The question of whether to have one’s morning cup of coffee or commit suicide is a question apocryphally ascribed to the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. And indeed, Camus was the one to put forward the statement that suicide was the only real serious philosophical question to be considered.
The people who say that any unborn child is better off being killed in the womb because suffering is unavoidable are answering an affirmation with a negation because life, where it can be found anywhere to exist, is an affirmation of existence. This is precisely because life is the actualization of the possible, as both Nietzsche and Yockey studiously noted. Death is always a negation because it represents the end of possibilities. When one finds oneself standing in the center of eternity everything seems relative to everything else; the end of the world is no different than the beginning. But that is precisely what death is, the human confrontation with eternity. But eternity is not comprehensible to the human mind, in fact, one would have to be either God or like God in order not to go mad, otherwise the only other name for such an experience, that I can think of at least, is hell.
I am convinced that no one truly wants to die, not seriously at least, they just want the momentary pain in their life to end. Death is a terribly frightening thing to think about, and one that doesn’t have any obvious solution. In that way humans are cursed by their own high degree of self-awareness, being the only beings that we know of who can conceive of their own mortality and must live with the knowledge of its inevitability. But here’s the crux, death has never been the answer to life, only life can say yes to life. Death is always effectively saying no.
That is why reproduction exists for the reason it does, for the perpetuation of life, for the emphatically stating of an eternal Yes! Now, one certainly has the choice to commit suicide, but that is always one’s personal choice and cannot—must not—be made on the behalf of an unborn child who has no say in the matter. However, not even suicides truly want to die. As I said before, the problem isn’t so much the choosing of death over life, but the assumption that one’s own personal suffering will end. In that way, one is answering the problem of suffering with a negation, by effectively saying no when yes means to continue onward with the good fight, by choosing possibilities over the cessation of possibilities. And that is exactly what life is, the varying degrees of the possible that one can experience.
And here’s another point: the people who are saying that by not having children they are in effect preventing the future suffering of hypothetical children are really using their own cowardice as a soapbox to morally grandstand. Yes, life sucks. But life is also as free and beautiful as it is oppressive and ugly. For my part at least, I can scarce imagine a future where I’m not around to read my favorite books, come home to my favorite shows, eat my favorite foods, drink my favorite brand of hefeweizen or make love with whichever woman I’m able to find to put up with me and my antics for the night. As small or as shallow as these little pleasures in my life may seem they are enough, at least in my mind, to keep me going for that much longer.
But I get it, I know what its like to feel like you’re walking on thin ice every single day, as if the ground underneath you could give way at any moment. Anyone whose suffered from anxiety can relate to this. For me at least, its not enough to make me want to end it all, I assume it’s the same way with most people; otherwise we’d have a lot more bodies raining down on us from the overpass on our daily commute to work. All in all, even as dirty, grimy and bleak as life can be sometimes, there are always those little moments which make it truly worth living and to take that away from a human being not even old enough to form their first memory is unconscionable.
Conclusion
To conclude, I feel like I have done what I had set out to do at the beginning of this paper and successfully proven why the arguments from those who are supporters of abortion are founded on either self-interest, avoidance of the consequences of one’s actions or an all-out hatred of life.
But abortion, or rather State sponsored infanticide, is merely tip of a much larger iceberg. The greater question we need to ask ourselves is do we wish to see ourselves continue to deteriorate into a people that hates, reviles and denies life or one that affirms it? Those in the pro-abortion camp, or really all leftists in general, are mental adolescents who are willing to destroy anything and everything that prevents the hellish dystopia in which they foolishly believe every single want, inclination and desire will be fulfilled. To be free of children is to be free from family, and to be from family is to be free from a story that has its roots in the untold biological history of countless millennia.
And that is really the issue here.
By not having children one is essentially still a child oneself, precisely because one isn’t a parent. Parenthood entails responsibilities, and the pro-choicers, all of which I imagine it's safe to assume are leftists, project their infantilism onto the icon of the State and shift the responsibilities that they chose to forgo onto this new, faceless all-encompassing father figure.
The fight over abortion isn’t just another petite bourgeoisie issue like tax reform or gay marriage, its costs cut much deeper than that. In fact, I don’t think I would be writing this paper at all if I thought that surgically mutilating an unborn child and scooping it’s remains out of the womb had the same moral and even existential repercussions as say, whether we allow mentally ill crossdressers to use their preferred bathroom of choice. The demographic, and more to the point, ethical consequences run far deeper than that.
I feel as though I have made the best possible case I could have made in the time I have been allotted for the side that loves and respects life, despite all its hardships and misfortunes. Whether or not anyone chooses to listen to what I have to say is beyond my ability. However, if somewhere out there on the fringes of the world wide web there’s a young woman reading this who is pregnant, alone and looking for guidance, please know that life is always an option. After all, our options only truly end with death.
We, as the Dissident Right, need to decide once and for all what our position on this matter is going forward. We are either on the side that loves life or the one that hates it. Either we say yes to life and all its beauty and adversity, or we succumb to the allures of perpetual infantilization and, drunk on the nectar of our own self-absorption, say no life and slip further down the slope into depravity and nihilism. We cannot rebuild our civilization with other people’s children and, make no mistake, children are indeed the future. In this moment, the question we need to ask ourselves is whether our future is one worth securing, or one worth consigning to the medical wastebin of history.
