A follow-up to my post below, here are a couple of excerpts from the excellent essay, "Abortion and Ideology," by Dr. Raymond Dennehy, which I originally posted on Ignatius Insight two months ago:
If it is taken as an incontrovertible universal truth that a woman's right to control her reproduction is primary, then easy access to legal and safe abortion becomes not only a moral imperative but a dictate of reason also. Granted the existence of some advocates of abortion on request who concede that induced abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being, the abortion ideology could never have found social, political, and juridical acceptance if the evidence from the science of embryology had not been flouted in favor of claims that the moment when human life begins is unclear and subject to honest dispute among scientists, theologians, and philosophers, as in Roe v. Wade, human life/personhood comes into being at some designated time after conception. In any case, an ideology has a dynamism, a mad energy generated by commitment to an ideal for humankind, that persuades the ideologue that the highest of moral imperatives is to do whatever is necessary for the realization of that ideal, even if that means transcending the injunctions of truth in science and philosophy while maintaining the needed façade of truthful inquiry.
<snip>
The lies and distortions that permeate elitist circles is a malignancy that will sooner or later spread to the public sphere, especially when, like the abortion debate, it pertains to the daily lives of ordinary human beings. When mistrust runs rampant in the population, civic virtue slowly withers; for, as a plant needs water, it is a virtue that cannot live without mutual trust. And without civic virtue, there can be no community of persons. As Hannah Arendt observed, the inability of a people to tell fact from fiction is one of the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism. In an atmosphere of conflicting opinions and skepticism, the authoritarian leader assumes, in the eyes of the public, an attractiveness that he could never have had otherwise. In the midst of their confusion, the people look to him for guidance.
<snip>
Rejecting the object of philosophy, the pure object, the ideologue is left only with his demiurgic drive to impose an ideal on the world and for this he must claim that the meanings of institutions, practices, and realities, like human beings, are social constructions that, accordingly, have only the value that society confers on them. These characteristics express themselves today in the pro-abortion and feminist movements and, indeed, both have a Marxist ring to them.
<snip>
The lies and distortions that permeate elitist circles is a malignancy that will sooner or later spread to the public sphere, especially when, like the abortion debate, it pertains to the daily lives of ordinary human beings. When mistrust runs rampant in the population, civic virtue slowly withers; for, as a plant needs water, it is a virtue that cannot live without mutual trust. And without civic virtue, there can be no community of persons. As Hannah Arendt observed, the inability of a people to tell fact from fiction is one of the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism. In an atmosphere of conflicting opinions and skepticism, the authoritarian leader assumes, in the eyes of the public, an attractiveness that he could never have had otherwise. In the midst of their confusion, the people look to him for guidance.
<snip>
Rejecting the object of philosophy, the pure object, the ideologue is left only with his demiurgic drive to impose an ideal on the world and for this he must claim that the meanings of institutions, practices, and realities, like human beings, are social constructions that, accordingly, have only the value that society confers on them. These characteristics express themselves today in the pro-abortion and feminist movements and, indeed, both have a Marxist ring to them.
This is really good stuff -- we're getting close to the heart of the matter.
But let's get even closer. Yes, Marx's secular messianism lives. However, Marcuse and Hefner may be closer yet to the heart of the evil.
The root of contemporary (as distinguished from "modern") malady is the implication of the masses (in a sense, all of us --no matter how personally blameless) in the "sexual revolution".
Here, if nowhere else, let us not mince words: Abortion is the "answer" to a sexuality that has become unanchored and out of control. It's that simple.
We can "sugar-coat" our arguments with terms like "culture of death" and "choose life", but the real action (if anyone's up to it) is repenting, then taking on the sexual revolution and its concommitant legal right of "privacy".
Privacy is hell. Person, the public thing (res publica) and communion are the Kingdom. We have to make the "choice" everday in the "public square", and --dare I say it-- "in our bedrooms"?
God first asked the relevant question in the Garden of Eden: "Who told you that you were naked?" Our contemporaries are, for the most part, clueless. Abortion, gay marriage and a culture of death and greed are the best they can come up with.
Time for us, I think, to offer a little gaudium et spes.
Posted by: Robert Miller | Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 05:16 AM
Let us not forget Marxism; the sexual revolution , I believe, is not the main reason that created the right to abortion.. Marxism is , and will continue to be, the root of all our problems of today. Abortion is but one of the ills that communism has brought to us.Secularism is another,as well as all of modernism, subjectivism, etc etc.
Manuel
Posted by: Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 05:16 PM