When charity dries up

How much is a bit of pleasure worth? A dime? Ten bucks? A couple of hundred? How about a life? (Somebody else's, of course; one's own is presumably priceless.)

There are people who seem willing to pay plenty for their fun. Highwire daredevils, obsessive homosexuals who risk AIDs for sodomy with a stranger in some public "convenience," drunken teen-agers who try to take a turn too fast. Then there are the strange, masochistic perverts who occasionally tie themselves up in weird positions and then put plastic bags over their heads to increase what they apparently consider the ineffable ecstasy of painenhanced "solitary sex" (a prominent Tory died that way).

The press in England and America enjoys telling us all about these obscene "adventurers"-seeing them off with remarkable sympathy, as if their fates were "tragic" rather than merely disgusting and stupid. But despite the publicity, compared to most of us who love living and fully intend to go on doing it as long as we can, there really aren't very many of them.

More to the point, their dying is plainly not on purpose but merely accidental; the product of risk, not intent. Suicide does not seem to be something people do for pleasure.

Killing somebody else, however, appears surprisingly popular. We read every day about the psychopaths, perverts and the apparently omnipresent paedophiles, muggers and serial murderers whose ideas of "fun" have nowadays made perfectly innocent activities (children walking alone to school, or adults strolling in a public park at night) quite unwise for many, even in supposedly "civilized" communities.

And along with these well-known sociopathic monsters, we also have the "war-lovers," the hooligans and rioters who delight in the vehement joys of "class revenge" or "ethnic cleansing," sometimes with whole neighbourhoods rampaging with murderous fury and blazing high spirits through the homes of their unwanted neighbors. To see them at work-in Africa, the Balkans, India, the Middle East, and sometimes even in America-simply turn on your friendly evening TV News-which is what we do, of course.

Most of us would clearly never kill or even risk being killed for pleasure. But we seem to like watching somebody else doing it-just as the Romans did. Public executions have always been popular; sex and violence are easily the most important basic ingredients, nowadays, of the "mass entertainment" which has become, after the military, our largest and most profitable single industry.

Seeing people killed, night after night (or reading or hearing about it) is just as enticing and "thrilling" as ever it was in the horrifying days of the Roman Arena, or in Mexico when great, bloody spectacles of torture and human sacrifice regularly took place for the benefit of the crowds outside the towering Aztec temples.

And let us not fool ourselves. What we see in the movies and on TV has at least some of the physiological and psychological consequences that the Romans or the Aztecs felt. It can alter our heartbeats, excite us, bring tears to our eyes or lascivious smiles to our faces, or make us hold our breath and grip the edge of our seats in shuddering fear or horror just as if what is being enacted on the stage or screen were real. (And sometimes it is real, as in those satanic "snuff" movies that are said to be available in every major city in the world.)

What is often forgotten is that by regularly watching pain and depravity we (and our children) can get used to it. Familiarity with this sort of thing can change us, alter our sensitivities and moral perceptions, brutalize us into an indifference that requires more and more vehement stimulus in order to provoke any sort of response. Suffering, pain and death can become so commonplace as to lose the quality of reality and all but eliminate normal reactions of regret or repulsion.

As many relief agencies are discovering, if you publish enough pictures of starving Sudanese or Somali or Bengali children, the charitable impulses tend to dry up. What they call "compassion fatigue" sets in. The horror of what goes on in the world ceases to be shocking, comes to be taken for granted-disgustingly tiresome stuff that we already know about Africa or Bangladesh (or wherever), and is hard to go on caring about.

Similarly, in the movies, it takes ever-more-frantic and inventive demonstrations of calamity and catastrophe to arouse the interest and applause of the jaded ticket-buyer who has seen it all before, and to whom nothing apparently seems really exciting (or worth paying for) unless the creative impulse has been directed to more and more monstrous exploitations of destruction, disorder and death.

For better or worse, the loss of life plainly gives pleasure to many apparently quite "normal" people who would presumably never, in the ordinary course of affairs, even think of killing somebody as the appropriate price to pay for a moment or two of "fun"-they pay good money to see it. Death is a subject of interest, not a real desideratum-and it's worth remembering that even the producers of the hugely popular and agonizing movie "Titanic" (its record-setting profits have surely brought them enormous pleasure) took every possible precaution to make sure that nobody actually did get killed.

Which is the point at which Modern Liberated Women plainly choose to differ from the loving, caring reality of most people's lives. They not only watch death or read about it, they actively participate in inflicting it. It is the price they pay (willingly and legally) for the pleasure of indulging in unrestricted and undisciplined "sex." What it costs them for their moments of passionate "fun" is the death and extermination by abortion of a living human being too tiny and defenseless to fight back and protect itself.

And why-ever not? It's the Feminist Way, isn't it? Young women nowadays are taught from childhood that "Sexual Fulfillment" is the single most valuable and necessary element in human experience-and a great many of them are perfectly prepared (with the help of their "doctors") to sacrifice somebody else's life to pay for what they consider the "Right" to physical desire and "satisfaction."

Human sacrifice is nothing new in the world. It has been practised for millennia for all sorts of purposes. People-young, old, male, female, whatever-have in some societies periodically been killed as offerings to bring rain or to make the floods go away. They have been slaughtered to persuade monstrous "gods" like Moloch to save the city from the Romans, or to persuade equally monstrous tribal deities in Africa or Haiti to bring fertility to the barren wombs of women. They have been sacrificed to lighten the sinking boat, or to provide a last desperate measure of sustenance to a starving band of travellers in some frozen wasteland.

But wherever and however they have been (or still are) sacrificed, it has generally been for what was deemed to be some great purpose such as salvation or survival, a tribute paid to vast, malevolent cosmic entities as an expression of hope or gratitude. But we are not talking about societies or situations like that.

Nothing at all like that. The great sacrifice of the unborn, willingly offered up by modern feminist True Believers, is carried out simply to keep their self-chosen moments of sexual passion or pleasure from costing them anything further in the way of time, money, discomfort or affection. With abortion readily available (by law) a dead baby is apparently a perfectly natural and appropriate price to be paid for the "fulfillment" a certain sort of Modern Woman feels entitled to enjoy from sexual intercourse.

Of course if it turns out she actually wants to have a child she has conceived, that's her own business and nobody can stop her from going ahead with it. But that is what might be called "serious" sex. What has led to the killing is the "modern" rejection of the moral code on which Western Civilization was founded.

Times have changed, we are told, and as people like Britain's current Prime Minister (who prides himself on rejecting the "elitest" dignity of a proper name and prefers, instead, to be called simply "Tony") keep assuring us, we must change with them!

Which is why, one supposes, his obedient majority in Parliament keeps trying to lower the "age of consent" for homosexual sodomy from 18 to 16 (only prevented, so far, by opposition in the House of Lords). And why, in something like one out of four pregnancies nowadays, the developing infant inside a woman's womb is viewed in both Britain and America as simply an unwanted intruder into her present and future life-style, so that "relief" (for her, not the baby) must of course be provided by law.

What abortion does is prevent an undesired and still embryonic new "human person" from interfering with its unwilling mother's pleasures and privileges by the simple expedient of killing it. And the "constitutional right" to pay for female sexual indulgence with the formerly criminal currency of legal infanticide is the one thing-more than any other-that today's "feminists" are really prepared to dig in their heels and fight for.

In the words of the popular song, "Girls just want to have fun." And fun, if it means anything at all in this age of thudding, cataclysmic "rock music" and violent, foul-mouthed exhibitionist movies has to mean sex-what else is there? Anything that gets in the way of it obviously has to be banned, barred or destroyed.

This is a commitment based on years of exposure to the animalistic notion (diligently propagated by organized homosexuals) that sex is the only thing human beings are really interested in-and that men have an enormous advantage over women in that for them gratification of this all-consuming lust has no lasting or binding consequences.

This "modern" belief is, like many other doctrinaire notions, based on an appalling ignorance of reality. Try explaining it, for instance, to the billions of men in human history who have found that sex (transient, after all, in its pleasure) has laid on them for the rest of their lives the enormous and binding consequence of paternity-with all its burdens and obligations, all its joys and disappointments, its satisfactions, sorrows and endless surprises. Or try selling it to the homosexual with AIDS, who has found-perhaps to his surprise-that there is really no such thing as "sex without consequences" either for males or females.

Actually, it's a very adolescent idea, and the "Leaders" who promote such nonsense evidently have adolescent mentalities to claim that they believe it all, and that we must believe it too. In truth, this fixation on "sex" and the virtual duty to "enjoy" it without restraint or responsibility has led to what is probably the most massive slaughter in all of human history.

Figures published recently in the London Times suggest that since 1912, our indulgence in war has killed approximately 67 million people. Which is quite staggering, no doubt, until one notices that just since 1973, members of the medical profession in the USA and the United Kingdom-acting not on the orders of tyrants like Hitler, Stalin or Chairman Mao, or tribal "chieftains" like Idi Amin, but solely at the behest of women who have exercised their "freedom of choice" not to be pregnant-have killed more than half that horrifying number without a single shot being fired, a single city being bombed.

And still counting. As of now, there are over two million more added to that list every year.

Which means that in these two great democracies alone, we have hadand continue to have-the numerical equivalent of the Jewish Holocaust repeated every three years for the past quarter century! Not because of race, creed or colour this time. Just to meet popular demand from women who have managed (with the help of their "physicians") to create so many tiny corpses since the legalization of abortion that if you could inter all of them together into a steel container you could make a memorial tower two or three times the height of Mount Everest!

It is extraordinary, this power that women who "choose" to exercise it have been given over other people's life or death. Fortunately for the rest of us, it is still somewhat limited.

If a baby actually manages to get out of the womb alive, killing it is still treated (perhaps oddly) as a crime. As reported in the London Daily Telegraph (July 10, 1998), a girl named Amy Grossberg and a boy named Brian Peterson were given two-and-one-half and two-year prison sentences respectively for killing their newborn son by "multiple skull fractures" in a Delaware motel. The same newspaper also reported on June 17 that in Yorkshire, 32-year-old Tina Jamadar was imprisoned for three years by Leeds Crown Court (but assured that she would only have to serve about 18 months) after pleading guilty to "infanticide" for having suffocated two of her babies, one aged three weeks, the other (six years earlier) at only 13 days ("She was tired, and the babies made great demands on her"). Yet at Cardiff Crown Court in Wales, on July 24, 1998, 20-year-old Dean John was found guilty of punching his girl-friend's eight-week-old baby to death because it cried too much. Being a man, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

All these cases were of course "do-it-yourself" killings, whereas abortion almost invariably involves hiring somebody. But a woman can't even always get away with that unless the victim is an unborn baby. There are various well-publicized cases before the courts just now about widows accused of having contracted for the deaths of their husbands or ex-husbands-in June a British woman named Jackie Ambier was jailed in Spain for paying two men named Holmes and Stewart to murder her lover and "partner" (She got 27 years-the men each got 29 years).

Had she been tried in England or America and the killers had been dealing with her "pregnancy" instead of her adult "lover," nobody would have gone to jail for anything at all because of the peculiar notion that a "fetus" is not really (or ever likely to become) a human being. Which is why, if a woman chooses to have the thing killed before it actually escapes from her own body, it doesn't count.

Most women cannot make this particular choice and do not wish to. They want their babies to live; they want not only to have them but also to raise them and love them as best they can-and even after decades of media indoctrination they remain as kindly and caring and protective of their young as used to be thought "normal" in human beings just as it generally is among animals and birds.

But the "choice" of abortion nowadays is made by the sort of woman brought up to believe that she has an absolute, even sacrosanct right to do and be whatever she pleases. Social conventions like "Right" or "Wrong" have nothing to do with it. What she wants is what she must have-and if her idea of personal "freedom" requires that she be rid of the helpless little human creature kicking and squirming in her belly, she is free (sacred word) to have it killed.

The fact that the pain and horror of what she is doing may very well haunt her and warp her psychologically for the rest of her days is simply put straight out of mind. What she wants-and what the medical profession has to give her if she asks for it-is for the baby to be dead. Not given to somebody else who may love it, not saved alive for whatever future luck, genetics and the kindness of others may help provide for it, but simply for it to be finished and done with and not to survive.

One cannot know who the child might have turned out to be. Another Mozart? Maybe another Marie Curie or Mother Teresa, or perhaps another Jack the Ripper-nobody will ever know, and the person who gives the order to kill does not even want to. Later she may indeed wonder, but for the moment at least all she claims to want is "freedom."

For herself, that is; not for anybody else. The freedom that is sought by abortion is something only an individual woman can choose-and nobody else, by law, can interfere with it.

Obviously there is always a man involved in every normal pregnancy, but nowadays he has no choice whatever as to what may or may not happen to his progeny. He can neither save it nor order it to be destroyed. A woman's unrestricted and absolute "freedom to choose" life or death for her unborn child is, in the end, the one true achievement of contemporary "Feminism."

True, Feminists have demanded much more-"equality of opportunity" and "equal pay for equal work"-even the "anti-biological" claim that women can be equal to men in military combat. But the single non-debatable achievement of Feminism has been a woman's "right" to unrestricted, unfettered access to abortion, even the grotesquely horrible "partial birth" abortions (like the one in Arizona recently, where the child actually survived, born alive with a brutally fractured skull).

This, it seems, is what the whole passionate "cause" (to which so many honourable, loving and devotedly caring mothers and respectable, highminded spinsters once gave so much of their lives) has come down to in the end. To the "Women's Movement" of today, if you try to limit abortion in any way you are inhibiting a woman's freedom to have the same sort of fun that a licentious and profligate man has always had-even though (unlike the man) she's had to pay a "little something" for it-the life of her own child.

One should remember, perhaps, that people used to "have sex" (and many still do) with the hope and expectation of having children. The intense pleasure of the act itself was a bonus, reserved by law and tradition to those prepared to accept the bonds and responsibilities of marriage, in return for the joys of "making love."

But today, the media, entertainers and the "sex-educators" insist that lust gratified is all that matters, the responsibilities (other than to avoid "disease") have miraculously disappeared. No civil or religious rite required; no inhibition or modesty considered to be in any way healthy-do as you please whenever you want with anybody who happens, at the moment, to please you!

What a pathetic vision of "freedom" the Feminist ideal has turned into! What a cheap, shoddy, thoroughly adolescent alternative to the dreams of the great liberal minds of the past-who were so certain that if men and women were at last unshackled from the bonds of necessity and custom, they could aspire to great and truly noble things, and that "freedom" would finally make both sexes physically, morally and intellectually superior to anything our species had ever been before. And that women in particular would lead the world into a new and glorious era of virtue and achievement.

But according to current dogma, the right place for women (when not slaving away in the office, the Army, or the workshop) is in bed somewhere. Having a good time, a time of uninhibited sexual freedom as libertine as men are supposed to be about it all.

Well, not quite, actually. However early, however successful, the "procedure" of abortion has to be at least somewhat uncomfortable? And though it is the price millions of women are apparently prepared to pay for their "fun," it cannot be much fun.

But worth it, apparently. Certainly to the doctor who profits, and presumably to the woman, because otherwise she wouldn't choose to have it done? Whether the baby who pays for his Mum's pleasure enjoys what happens to it is another question entirely. Research published in London's Daily Telegraph (Aug. 2, 1998) indicates that-far from feeling no pain-the unprotected nerves of unborn "fetuses" are infinitely more susceptible to agonizing pain than we safely-born former fetuses are.

But then one isn't really supposed to think about that sort of thing, is one? After all, it's not you being killed. Anyway, according to "Pro-choice" dogma, a pre-born baby isn't really human like us: Who need care what it may feel? In truth of course, what we have done is declare an entire class of fellow humans to be sub-human-Untermenschen-just as Hitler did with the Jews. But then we need not think about that sort of thing either, need we?

John F. Matthews, professor emeritus of American Studies at Brandeis University, is now "A Yank in Tony Blair's Court" (he lives and writes from Sussex, England).

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Fall 1998
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