Originally posted 2017-09-03 13:57:58.
Abortion has become a central pillar of the Feminist assertion of women’s power over society.
Let us be quite clear before we begin: a human foetus is a human: it is an unborn baby. At what point does it become socially unacceptable to kill a human and how far does an individual woman’s right to self-determination go, in allowing her to kill another human?
One argument made, by Feminists and their supporters, is that a foetus is not a real human being, because it is incapable of surviving outside the mother’s body. They draw a distinction between ‘human’ (which a foetus obviously is) and a ‘human being’ which is a human to whom they allow privileges that some people call rights — in this case, the right not to be arbitrarily killed because it suits somebody else. This is hardly a new approach. Totalitarians have, throughout history, attempted to classify those they wish to destroy as somehow ‘less than human’ and it is no exaggeration to say that, in the West today, a human who is still a foetus is comparable, in terms of its perceived worth, to how a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp was seen by Germans.
Othering
The technique being used here is called ‘othering’. If one can persuade others that the subject under discussion is less than human, then it becomes easier to justify killing that subject. As Jews were to Hitler, so unborn babies are to Feminists.
This is not an argument of principle, it is an argument of degree. It asserts that a foetus is less than human, and remains unprotected by ‘human rights’, because it cannot survive independently and so is not yet ‘fully human’. But this glib and specious. Either we have rights or we do not, and, if we do, these apply from conception. For a Feminist, humanity begins after natural parturition; but that is arbitrary. Why not ‘when it is weaned’? Or, ‘when it becomes mature’? Clearly these latter are unacceptable and by extension, so must be the first premise be.
In addition, in a civilised culture we accept that those who are able to make decisions in a cogent and responsible manner must a priori protect the interests of those who cannot. Quite clearly an unborn baby is incapable either of making any decisions or acting on them. So these children must be regarded as the most vulnerable in society and therefore, should be the most assiduously protected. But Feminists are so obsessed with the idea of power over their own bodies that the rights of unborn children mean nothing to them. We should realise that this is just the first group in society that Feminists have targeted in this way. If they can, they will spread their malice to others.
Independence is a bogus argument
No human baby is capable of independent survival. All juvenile humans need to be protected and fed until they reach around the age of 12. A foetus is just further back along the line. A foetus is an unborn baby and has all the rights that any other baby has, as a human. Otherwise our entire structure of rights is meaningless. It becomes a hierarchy of privilege and worse, one which may be distorted by the will of others.
As an aside, it is fascinating that Feminists, who spend so much time talking about the alleged abuses of their own ‘rights’ and those of their fellow travellers (Feminism and Communism are the same thing and they seek allies where they can) actively argue and mitigate against the rights of the most vulnerable and defenceless group of humans in the world, unborn babies. This is a moral double standard that we should not tolerate. We either accept the principle of human ‘rights’ (which are actually universal privileges that we all agree are permanent and inalienable) or we do not; if we do, by definition, universality means that these ‘rights’ must apply to everyone, whether born or not.
It duplicitous to argue against the abuse of ‘rights’ of one vulnerable group while systematically abusing those of another. In relentlessly insisting that human babies have no ‘rights’, feminist utterly debase the very concept, or at least show that they have no understanding of it. Since many are intelligent and well educated, we must suspect that they know very well that their position is ethically and morally untenable, but it suits their political objective to adopt it anyway: the end, as always in Communism, justifies the means.
On the other hand, it can be argued that many foetuses die of natural causes, particularly in the first few days after conception and these are resorbed by the mother’s body.
Abortion is killing
Abortion, however, is a surgical procedure that is specifically intended to kill the baby and then — depending on the age of the foetus — dismember it and remove it from the mother’s body. This is a specific process of killing. It is not an accident of nature. It is the deliberate termination of a human life, at the behest of the mother.
Now, we can argue till the cows come home about a woman’s ‘rights’ over her own body. Some will side with the foetus and the rights it has, to develop into a human and have a full life as such; others will side with the mother and claim she has a right not to be burdened with the risk and responsibility of having and raising a child.
The trouble is, these arguments are not equal. A human life is a human life; killing a human is a weighty responsibility, whether it be thirty days or thirty years old. Most of the countries that permit abortion, do not allow the death sentence to be carried out on humans who have been born. That is a double standard.
It gets worse. We live in a world where contraception is readily available. Any woman, who intends to have sex, has a variety of reliable methods at hand to prevent her from getting pregnant.
Moral dilemma
But if we allow these measures, and we should, then we are faced with another moral dilemma. If a woman can, by showing responsibility before the voluntary act of sex, avoid getting pregnant, then on what grounds can we justify deliberately killing that? She so irresponsible as not to have taken precautions — and for this we must end a human life?
When we have the benefits of these technologies, which are well-known, reliable and widely available, then people should use them when appropriate. If a woman does not do so, then what right does she have to demand that the human growing within her should be killed? Just because of Feminist notions of power?
We are not talking here, about rape victims — we shall discuss those elsewhere. We are talking about women who willingly engage in the act of sex, without contraception in place. Do they still have the right to demand that a human be killed, because it is growing inside them?
Absurd
It is absurd that such irresponsibility should be rewarded. Childbirth, today, is not a dangerous process, certainly no more so than a late abortion. And we are talking about under a year of a woman’s life, since she can have the child adopted after it’s born. There’s no shortage of people seeking babies they cannot themselves have. So we are to indulge a woman’s irresponsibility to the point of killing a human, in order that she does not suffer a few months’ inconvenience, for the sake of her own carelessness and lack of responsibility? Is that morally justifiable?
Of course it’s not. The rights of an unborn baby, as a human being, do exist, despite the glib moral relativism of the Left. Women certainly have the right to avoid becoming pregnant, but not necessarily to abortion. There is no right to demand the killing of another human on our behalf, and it is time we recognised this.
Except, therefore, in cases of rape, or where the mother’s health is severely at risk from carrying to term — an exceedingly rare situation — abortion is absolutely not a ‘right’ and a very dubious privilege indeed. There can be no justification in taking a life, just because someone was too irresponsible to take a simple pill.
The demand for the ‘right’ to abortion is of a different order from taking care not to get pregnant by using consent or proven, effective contraceptive methods. It goes on to insist on the ‘right’ to kill another human being, because that human being is occupying a part of a woman’s body.
Abortion is permitted where contraception also is; that is illogical
In the West, where abortion law has been relaxed, it has always happened after reliable contraception became available. So, if women do not need to get pregnant, save for exceptional circumstances, why is abortion not limited to those cases? And why do feminists raise such a furore every time this perfectly sustainable argument is put forward? The answer to that lies in women’s attitude to power.
Men think in terms of sex and women think in terms of power. Everything, for a woman, is about power and power over her own body is the root of that. This is why feminists and their allies are so determined on what they see as their defence of the ‘right’ to abortion.
Demanding that another be killed in order that women’s own power over their bodies be maximised is not, after all, new. We know that, in the ancient world, high-status women, often priestesses, would be ritually married to a young man, who would be sacrificed after a year’s service. Women’s power over their own bodies here extended to power over their consorts’. This is not to be taken lightly. Female obsession with power is one of the most important forces that have shaped the world we live in and, arguably, that process is accelerating. At the very root of it is women’s control over their own fertility, through access to their own sexuality.
Women’s power
Women’s power is that of gatekeepers. It is enshrined in the oldest social covenant that humans have. This is: men do not take sex because they desire it; they are permitted to have sex through consent of women. Men agree to this because human society is an efficient means of ensuring the carry-forward of our genes; that society is based around women and motherhood and so, women have the power. We have a range of mechanisms, unique to humans, that preserve and enforce this, from marriage through the strictures against rape, which is severely punished in all cultures. These social mechanisms exist for one reason only: to guarantee women’s power over access to sex. Since men think in terms of sex and everything men do is motivated by their sex drive, this means that through their power over sex, women control men and thus society.
Here is the real reason for the Feminist obsession with abortion. If women’s access to it be curtailed, then women’s power, which they have assiduously protected through the aeons of human existence, is curtailed too and that, for a Feminist, is intolerable. Remember that Feminism and Communism are just two sides of the same coin, and the end of both is the destruction of masculinity and the end of free society. Upon the altar of this political philosophy must the lives of unborn babies be sacrificed, just as, 6000 years ago, boys were sacrificed after serving as sexual consorts to the High Priestess. There is no difference: killing is killing.
Humans are not to be killed at the whim of another
Well, human beings are not tumours; foetuses are babies and babies are little humans. The claimed ‘right’ to kill a juvenile human, just because a woman was too lazy or too disorganised to use contraception, or just because she knew she could demand a surgical intervention and likely get it, is not a right at all. Women’s relentless obsession with power must be moderated by the rights of the individual. This is the way of men, respect for each and every individual human being. We do not see in terms of ‘group identities’ as Feminists and their fellow-travellers do. The concept of Human Rights insists on universality and these rights must apply from the instant of conception.
This is why the Christian God is benevolent and fair, even-handed, just and tolerant. He tempers the extremes of the Goddess, her histrionic mood-swings, desire for revenge when slighted and, most of all, her obsession with power. For She is Nature, who does indeed govern all things and Mankind is well-named, for it is men who tame nature, or try to, not women. As such her power is unlimited and we can only seek to moderate her exercise of it. And this is why Feminists hate Christianity so viscerally: they know that it stands against the Kundalini power of the Goddess, the untamed violence of Tiamat, the deadly power of Medusa, the Gorgon, who was once one of the three most beautiful women in the world.
Remember that Tiamat and all the other serpents and dragons who are the Goddess and who represent women’s power, also represent chaos and destruction. The Goddess is not only Birth, she is also Death and she is immoderate. She is the end of society, as well as the beginning. The Christian deity seeks to moderate that quintessential intemperance and so challenges the power of women; just as questioning their ‘right’ to kill humans living inside their bodies challenges it.
Abortion should be abolished
If we are to consider ourselves civilised, then we must recognise that abortion is an abomination and a moral disgrace; it is a sop to Feminist obsession with power. It has no place in a society where contraception is readily available and women’s power over sex is, in any case, protected by law and custom. It must be ended.