The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference.
When the Northern Illinois Women’s Center closed its doors for good in early January, after nearly 39 years of profiting from women’s exercise of their “constitutional right” to have an abortion, the death toll stood much higher than 58,000—perhaps as high as 70,000, according to Kevin Rilott of the Rockford Pro-Life Initiative. Before NIWC founder and first abortionist Richard Ragsdale passed to his eternal reward in 2004, he estimated that he alone had performed 50,000 abortions from April 1973.
Yet how we regard that loss of life depends largely on what we think abortion is, and what we think abortion does. The many local Christians who prayed outside of the Northern Illinois Women’s Center every day that it was open over the course of four decades, and the many other Christians who supported them with prayers and donations, regard that loss of life with the same sadness as we do the death of American soldiers in Vietnam. And indeed, in that view, these children were the victims of a war, victims who had one distinct disadvantage over the soldier in Vietnam: They had no means or opportunity to fight back. Whatever chance they had to emerge unscathed from the house of horrors known as “Fort Turner”—a majestic old public school converted over to the destruction of life—came entirely through grace by the prayers of others.
For those who believe abortion does not stop a beating heart, but simply solves a problem or safeguards a “right,” there can be little question of mourning over the tens of thousands of lives lost. Even those who regarded the Vietnam War as just and necessary could view the loss of each American soldier’s life as a cause for grief, but in abortion, the child stands in for the enemy soldier, and even the best of us find it hard to mourn the loss of the enemy. That is simply the way the world works: In war, lives are cut short, futures erased, so that others may continue to live.
Of course, not all of those who support abortion have taken part in the killing. While the armchair warriors in the media and think tanks are more bloodthirsty than the average soldier, because they do not have to spend the rest of their lives remembering the faces of those their rhetoric has killed, the mothers who end the life of the children growing within their wombs are, like the soldier, much more likely than the abstract defender of “our way of life” to recognize what they have done, even if guilt compels them to continue to justify it as necessary. The woman who proudly proclaims that she has had several abortions and would gladly have another reminds the normal person of the veteran who laments that he had but one tour of duty to kill for his country.
On Monday, January 23, ten days after the Northern Illinois Women’s Center announced that it would close its doors for good, and 39 years and one day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, our eighth child was born. Because the anniversary of Roe fell on a Sunday this year, the organizers of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., decided to transfer it to that Monday, as if it were, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Interestingly, the supporters of Roe followed suit—a curious sign, on both sides, of how much of the battle over abortion has entered the realm of abstraction.
When, however, your child is born on the day that all of America is either celebrating or commemorating the right of mothers to kill their own children, abstraction is simply not possible. To receive hearty congratulations on the birth of your child on, say, Facebook, offered by those who have spent the rest of the day expressing their gratitude for Roe and attacking those who acknowledge that life begins at conception, is profoundly chilling.
When did Clare Frances’s life begin? Not when she emerged via C-section from her mother’s womb a week before her due date—a time when many states would still allow a “late-term” abortion to “save the life of the mother.” Nor did it begin 15 weeks earlier, when she reached the point of viability—before which almost every state would have allowed her life to be ended to “preserve the health of the mother.” Nor did it begin another eight or so weeks before, when Amy first could be certain that she felt Clare move. Nor six weeks before that, when, at ten weeks’ gestation, we first heard her heartbeat, and when abortion is legal in every state for any reason. Indeed, her heart had been beating since the 23rd day after her conception, a time when many a first-time mother is only just beginning to sense that her life is about to change forever.
Physically, Clare Frances’s life began at conception; but even that does not tell the whole story. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you“ (Jeremiah 1:5), and before she was conceived, Clare existed in the sacramental union between Amy and myself. That, however, is a thought to develop in a different piece on another day. For now, suffice it to say that if we reduce the beginning of life to a biological milestone, we will never understand just how destructive abortion truly is.
I first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall, a few years after it opened, and found myself there frequently when I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The impact of the Wall on visitors is often ascribed to the fact that the war remains close to us in time. But I think there is something more to it. Seeing those 58,261 names all brought together in such a small space distills the very real human costs of the Vietnam War. The visitor standing in front of the Wall cannot escape the consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia. And the very design of the wall gives the impression that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that behind and beneath each name lie mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and friends, all the lives that the fallen had touched, and those that they would have touched, had they survived the war.
Fort Turner is, in its own way, just the tip of the iceberg represented by the tens of thousands of children whose lives ended therein. Might it, one day, become a monument to the war on the unborn, to the tens of millions of lives lost through legalized abortion, and to the hundreds of millions of lives affected by that loss?
Perhaps, but it will not be any day soon. Just as the Wall could not be built until the war had ended and the nation had begun to come to grips with the destruction it had caused, so, too, we will never fully comprehend the horror of legalized abortion until we have moved beyond it. Fort Turner, pray God, may remain shuttered for good, but its heart of darkness long ago outgrew its walls and is spreading throughout the land.
[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here to subscribe.]
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When I was three, nearly four, I learned that my mother was expecting a baby. In those days, the gender was not to be known until birth; however, I held in my heart that it would be a brother. In Sunday school, we had learned about the Archangel Michael; so, I decided that if the baby were a brother, he should be named Michael, in honor of the Archangel. I do not recall whether or not I ever made my wishes known to my parent; nor do I know if they would have honored my laddish wishes. Michael was not among our family names: Zebulen, Julius, Luther, Morris, Robert, etc., but no Micheal. I never came to know the gender of the baby; it died in a miscarriage which broke my mother's heart. In their early thirties, mom and dad had perhaps waited too late to begin a large family of which my father had dreamed. (He was one of eight children; my mother was one of six.) When is fellow is between three and four, life moves on.
About ten years ago, having bridled Munin's tongue for nearly fifty years on the loss of the baby which I had hoped to be a brother, I had, in the early morning hours of a given day, a dream. I saw a battlefield on which the dismembered corpses of very tiny folk lay. A darkness accompanied by an eerie glow prevailed. There, however, in the midst of this horror, stood what appeared to be a knight. He stood, fell and grim, his eyes seeming to search the horizon which lay behind my dream point of view, searching for a retreating enemy. In his right hand, resting but at the ready, was a fearful sword, In his left hand, gently held, was the hand, not of an infant baby, but of a tow-headed toddler with a look of wonderment, no fear, on his face. It looked not unlike my father's brother who died when he was ten of appendicitis, a brother of whom my father had often spoken; but this toddler was not Lester, my father's brother; it was that Michael, that brother, whom I had never gotten to meet. The knight, as the dream informed me, was the Archangel Michael.
Although the brother whom I have yet to meet was not aborted and, as the dream reported, was safe in the gentle but firm grip of his namegiver, the dream informed me that the dismembered were aborted babies and that Michael was the agent of God's vengeance.
Until this dream, I had intellectually opposed abortion; but after it, I joined the crusade against it.
The fight against abortion cannot stop with the simple blockage of the procedure. How does a frightened young girl get pregnant in the first place? What was she doing at a mixed social event all off alone? Where was her father, where were her brothers, where, even, her first cousins to put the axe to any attempt by some an unscrupulous young hooligan to touch her?
Answer: she was at the event because her family believed the lies of feminists who said girls should be able to go out on their own. Her father works all the time, or worse, divorced her mother and took off to another continent with his mistress. Her brothers do not exist--for her parents long ago contraceived them out of existence. Her cousins are halfway across the country, because regional clans no longer exist in the U.S.A.
Abortion is murder insofar as it unjustly terminates a human life. It is contraception insofar as it thwarts the natural end of sexual union. But it is at least as much a symptom of the erosion of family and society as it is one of the instigators.
On this forum, I suppose I am preaching to the choir. But the "pro-life" movement at large will not find success unless it comes to terms with that last fact about abortion.
An excellent meditation on the evil of abortion.
Does anyone know whether a relationship, other than ideological, exists between Dr. Richard Ragsdale and the current president of the Episcopal Divinity School, Katherine (abortion-is-a-blessing) Ragsdale?
As far as I know, no.
Mr. Moses you hit the nail on its head and drove it squarely down into the board. When the female in any [uneroded] society is honored as Woman the trade off is that she has to be protected as a woman. It's worth it for any number of reasons, the first of which is that she is innately more familiar in having easier access to [than her male counterpart] the rich emotional area of the Human sphere which she need not excessively mask when that place or position of honor is secured For her, for not-against. A second reason is community, group, reality (since there are in fact no individuals per se but members of a group each having their individuality or uniqueness) gets constellated as concentric circles smaller and larger in right-sized Human proportion beginning with a family. Rather than constellated as naked, deluded [super]-individuals, helplessly reliant inevitably since in Fact group-beings, on the giant inevitably impersonal, often Monstrous State...The largest of the concentric circles and yet today with no meaningful right-sized groups or communities building normally up to--and as mitigating buffer For the naked, helpless individual as he or she stands before--the now distant but all too pryingly unrestrained, monstrous-State. Sweet Loretta modern thought she was a woman but she was another man. In other words due to the erosion of the civilization over the past few hundred years and its excelleration in the 20th century woman gets that she no longer holds a position of honor in society as Woman. And that is stressful to her--(to men as well, whether they realize it or not)--because nonetheless she is also the Human bearer of the next generation. She's been made or re-made by the forces around Her more than less--(of necessity for her very survival)--into another man and yet of course remains inevitably a woman for all inherent and inextricable intents and purposes. She even assumes, since she must be an accommodating creature (as must we all be in our own way given our very real limitations), that this newer way is how she 'should' be. In other words given all that is around her, she concludes rightly how else 'could' she Be, under the circumstances?!. And so any males that would prevent her from being more 'like' them must be the enemies of her very existence? However there is a constant or absolute-Human-reality involved, as the context for this situation as well. Aristotle wasn't 100% correct in averring A always = A. But he was close. A [or in this example Woman] always = A + all that is around A. And so you see the essence of Woman; Man as well : always remains biologically, socially, spiritually constant, the only question being which civilizational template of those possible templates unique to a particular people-their gene pool inevitably and their History is better suited to their happier survival than another. Do we want to honor Woman or hypnotize her via the media and send her all the signals and create forces around her making her instead believe/perceive she 'ought' to be another man? ... The females are merciless with themselves as well in this hyper-competitive cluster-f#ck of a modern template...'all the girls around her said she had it coming, but she gets it while she can.' ... Awfully sad, isn't it? The depths to which we've descended and been Pushed to descend into. It's an imperfect world by design and so can never be 'just so', but given reality some time-tested templates for a given people are in fact at least better than others. -?-
oops it didn't 'excellerate' in the 20th Century (in my reply to Mr. Moses) it accelerated in said century. Freudian slip. There's no such word as 'excelleration'. Self-analysis: being a horny 'devil', subconsciously I must have thought it 'excellent' that it accelerated. Needless to say if I subconsciously thought that, I was wrong. Or as 'we' say on the street 'My bad.'
The article is terrific.
I quarrel only with the slight sense of defeat in this passage: “Might [Fort Turner], one day, become a monument to the war on the unborn, to the tens of millions of lives lost through legalized abortion, and to the hundreds of millions of lives affected by that loss? Perhaps, but it will not be any day soon.”
For many years, I’ve been trying to think of ways of “aborting” Roe, the worst court decision ever, from the body of our law.
Recently the Alabama Supreme Court “interposed” itself against Roe. For a report on that, see http://douglassbartley.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/alabama-supreme-court-rejects-roe-v-wade/
I’ve also written that a constitutional amendment is unnecessary, for the 5th, 9th, & 14th Amendments, by themselves, protect unborn life. And no legislation is needed, because the amendments are self-executing. For that article, please see http://douglassbartley.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/5th-9th-and-14th-amendments-of-the-constitution-protect-unborn-life
God bless those writers, like Mr. Richert, who keep the continuing tragedy of abortion right before our collective glazed-over eyes.
Indeed, an excellent article, sir. So much comes to mind, but I can't help thinking one of the many threads that form the fabric of this abomination - along with radical egalitarianism - is a quest for liberty and freedom. But this freedom, as I'm sure you all know, is one that has no substance to it. I suppose this is expressed in the well known question "Could God create an object so big that He couldn't lift it?"
In our quest for this fantastical (and diabolical!) brand of "freedom", we choose to forget that the Creator Himself doesn't even possess this "freedom". He is bound by the limitations of His nature. He can't be anything but perfectly loving, just, kind, rational, etc. So, too, He created us with limitations (and blessed inequalities), and we will never know the true liberty that comes from functioning according to our design, for we are indeed "fearfully and wonderfully made."
And on another note, might not facilities such as this one stand as monuments to never-forgetting, just like Auschwitz or Dachau?