Lord Acton, the iconic historian, famously said, “No historian thinks well of human nature.” That is another way of saying that we should never be surprised at seeing humans sink to new levels of moral decadence.
At times, a keen satirist—a Dickens or Swift or Plutarch (and too many modern counterparts to catalogue)—might suggest we have reached the bottom, but then we are vouchsafed a deeper view into the abyss of human depravity.
If we are not at the bottom, we must be nearing it when we discover that a medical doctor, trained to sustain life (did she not raise her hand and recite the Hippocratic Oath?) is one of a pack of Serengeti wild dogs performing late-term abortions, being careful not to injure fetal organs and muscle, in order that she might sell them intact. Yes, sell them. Butchers selling their prime cuts at premium prices on the open market. One assumes that modern medical science makes possible, for the first time in history, this level of unconscionable immorality. This might be a true “first.”
I suspect your mental computer is scanning your ideational cosmos in an attempt to get the picture in focus. Take your time. Like German citizens being forced to visit their liberated prison camps, we all need to have our faces rubbed in this. We need a good whiff of this sewer.
Wordsworth spoke of men whose souls were so dead they would “peep and botanize on their mother’s grave.” These dead souls, with skillful hands and razor-sharp scalpels, slice and dice up living humans in their graves—their mothers’ bodies.
What, precisely, shocks us? Not the fetal carnage—God knows we’ve seen enough of that to be immune to it. What is stunning is the nonchalance, the insouciance, the offhandedness of the doctor exuding a serene sense of accomplishment, while she, sipping wine and eating a salad, declaims her forte. “I had a seventeen-weeker today,” she brightly says.
America opened hell and broke its doors off the hinges with Roe, and many predicted the inevitable moral chaos that has followed. If a woman can kill a growing human being in her own body, at will, sell its body parts to the highest bidder, and be labeled an enlightened heroine in the process, what act, however despicable, can we say “no” to now? Mother Teresa had it right: “If a woman can kill a baby growing in her own body, what is left in Western civilization to save?”
Jonathan Swift wrote a fanciful story entitled “A Modest Proposal,” in which the satirist proposed that Irish politicians create a law which allowed babies of a year old to be sold as food. Human food. He catalogued, in brilliant satire, the many commercial advantages of such a practice.
The hope of our very civilization depends on the existence of a moral remnant which will continue to possess the ability to appreciate his satire, and be horrified as unthinkable satire comes closer to existential reality.
Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas