As anti-maternal as it gets
Some follow-up reflections on last week's piece: how is it that we have become such a blood-stained, morally confused society?
I’m embarrassed to admit that in last week’s piece I wasn’t even thinking about (let alone motivated by) the then approaching Mother’s Day weekend. The clip featuring Brandon Gill that I had seen on Twitter/X (thanks Matt Walsh) was enough to inspire the post. I didn’t consider a “maternal perspective”, which is a dubious position in the context of a conversation about abortion. Abortion is not merely the least maternal thing a mother could do – it is literally anti-maternal, contrary to maternal instincts, maternal obligation, maternal love. I’m following up this week with the beginnings of an exploration into how we can get to these places. Places where anyone might suggest that there is something responsible, something maternal that might motivate abortion. Places where otherwise sensible folks can make decisions and stick stubbornly with decisions that are not only practically (i.e., socially and economically) catastrophic, but morally wicked.
The last Sunday of May kicks off “National AccessAbility Week”, during which “the valuable contributions and leadership of persons with disabilities in Canada” are recognized and celebrated with the use of my tax money. In all the media there will be bright pictures and puff pieces of people (especially kids) with missing limbs, in wheelchairs and with various mental and developmental defects. Those with Down Syndrome will be featured prominently.
And yet this is in the same Canada in which it is perfectly legal for a mother to “screen her pregnancy”, i.e., have her unborn child tested for all kinds of disability and developmental defects, including Down Syndrome, and to choose to kill that child on the basis of that screen result. Also with the use of my tax money. (And nope, here we don’t use the truth-denying, reality-obscuring, conscience-blunting euphemisms like “terminate the pregnancy”.)
Right now, this week, Torontonians are being bombarded with the story of a 37-year-old Scarborough mother who has been charged with the murder of her daughter who was not yet two years old. Obviously, whatever happened here, it is a tragedy. And yet, two very short years ago, not long before this little girl was born, the same mother could have walked into a clean friendly clinic and had the same little girl clinically, officially and legally torn into little pieces and discarded. And that would have been no tragedy at all, just another Tuesday in Toronto. Because in this part of the world, the majority of people wringing their hands and shaking their heads in sanctimonious sorrow at the death of a little toddler have absolutely no problem with the killing of little toddlers just before they become newborns. YES, it’s the same person: the little sparkling toddler was once a cute newborn who was once an exquisite child-in-the-womb.
There’s no “maternal perspective” that can draw a clean line between these two perspectives. The deaths of a toddler and a preborn baby are either both tragedies we should do all we can to prevent (including restraining the mothers in various ways if necessary), or they are both simply expressions of permissible choice from a maternal perspective that should be respected. If you are honest, or if you will allow me to interrogate you, you will find that any efforts to find a “third way” here involve the indefensibly selective application of moral standards. In other words, a relativism is necessarily invoked that arbitrarily finds moral fault in the deliberate killing of one innocent child and fails to find moral fault in the deliberate killing of another innocent child, based on circumstances of development [specifically age and location and, if you want to be pedantic, mode of dependency] that are outside the children’s control.1
Those are all fancy words for saying: we kill babies, because we have chosen to allow it, because it suits us. Any perspective that denies or tries to soften that truth is to be condemned. We kill babies because we are the kind of people who do the kinds of things that lead us to kill babies for our convenience. And then we make excuses for it, justify it, or even claim it is a moral good, for the mother and [yes, we can be this ghoulish] even for the dead baby. This is because we may be apostate but are not quite so degenerate as to have become mere animals that neither know nor care for right and wrong. The moral law is still etched on our hearts, however faintly, and we cannot erase it completely. We will invert it, turn it upside-down, misdirecting the warped remains of both our justice and our mercy. And so, as the terrible line goes, from the brilliant Casting Crowns song While You Were Sleeping, we all, mothers and fathers, family and friends — killers, collaborators and bystanders — will be “sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children”.
It is no wonder that it was so easy for Brandon Gill to expose Ms. Walters, the abortion advocate who refused to engage his pinpoint questions about abortion—and given how badly that turned out for her, no wonder that abortion advocates have for so long been so effective at obfuscation and at never getting put on the spot!