Blonde is a biopic about Marilyn Monroe. (One critic insists that it shouldn’t be called a “biopic”, because it is based on a novel, but the number of historically accurate Hollywood biopics can be counted on the fingers of a man whose hands have been amputated, so I think the term is good enough here.) In the course of the movie, the protagonist has two abortions, each coerced. Before the second, she has a vision of her unborn child, who begs, “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?”
Planned Parenthood is outraged by the scene, declaring, “As film and TV shapes many people’s understanding of sexual and reproductive health, it’s critical these depictions accurately portray women’s real decisions and experiences.” In the eyes of the organization’s “national director of arts and entertainment engagement”, there is evidently nothing “real” about a woman’s anguish at being forced to end her child’s life.
This is but one small aperçu into the contemporary pro-abortion mentality: Abortion is no longer presented as a difficult personal choice to which women turn only as a last resort but as something so benign that nothing ill can be said concerning it.
Another, more appalling bit of evidence showed up in my e-mail inbox today. It was sent to a mailing list that I happen to be on, and the writer was a clergyman. I’m not going to identify him or his denomination, because I cannot believe that he truly believes what he wrote. He begins by noting that the Supreme Court repudiated Roe v. Wade shortly before its fiftieth year and that, in the Old Testament, every fiftieth year was a “Jubilee Year”, in which debts were canceled, land returned to those from whom it had been taken and slaves set free.
The clergyman discerns an ironic inversion of the Biblical Jubilee. “This year, in a stunning reversal, hundreds of millions [sic] of Americans who are pregnant or concerned about becoming so unintentionally, find themselves in the same dire legal situation their foremothers occupied fifty years ago. This reversion does not liberate; as the dissenting justices [in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] stress, it oppresses. A jubilee turned against itself, twisted into elegy.”
No summary of the Jubilee’s moral vision is [a] more succinct or more accurate summary than “liberty and equality”: slaves are freed and land is redistributed, erasing a half-century’s accumulated divergence of wealth. The Bible’s dream of liberty, born in Leviticus 25:10’s cry to “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof,” arrived on these shores in the inscription of those very words on the hallowed Liberty Bell. The dissenting justices recognize this same liberty, first spoken into being at Sinai, in access to abortion: reproductive rights are a direct descendant and present-day expression of the Jubilee’s program for human equality and freedom. . . .
Abortion – as a choice in the fullness of a life, and all the more so as a shared moral, religious, and political reality – unites the tectonic biological, spiritual, moral, and political dimensions of human existence.
I forbear to quote more from this Molochian tirade. It has a parallel from our country’s past. Some supporters of ante bellum slavery were not content to defend the practice as a “necessary evil”. They argued that it was a “positive good”, that the world was a better place because of it. Similarly, the clergyman just quoted proclaims abortion as an expression of “human equality and freedom”.
Yet there is a difference. Slavery’s “positive good” school contended that slavery was also good for the slaves, that they led better lives under the lash than in their African homelands. That was preposterous, but it was at least a backhanded recognition of the humanity of the enslaved.
The champions of abortion “as a choice in the fullness of a life, and all the more so as a shared moral, religious, and political reality” utterly cast aside the victims of their quasi-sacrament, who are obliterated from human care, consigned not just to non-personhood but to nonexistence.
As I said earlier, I cannot believe that this clergyman is so indifferent in his heart to “the least of these my brethren”. Why he will write what he must know to be a lie is beyond my comprehension. It is a sign of the sad state of our world that he is not unique.
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