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According to the Letter of Barnabas, A.D. 74, “Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born.”
The position of Governor Ned Lamont and Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly on abortion is much the same as that of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood: Abortion should be available to pregnant women at any state of the birth process; all regulations on abortion should be stoutly resisted or repealed. According to this view, uncommon only a few decades ago, abortion is simply another mode of birth control.
What, the reader may ask, is the problem with birth control? Well, there are problems, not all of them related directly to abortion.
We all remember The Population Bomb, a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich. The book, intentionally alarmist and forecasting famines and other social upheavals caused by overpopulation, issued a clarion call to limit population growth.
Current demographers tell is that a birth rate of 2.1 children per family is necessary to sustain the population. For most developed countries, the replacement fertility rate, the total fertility rate (TFR) at which women give birth to enough babies just to sustain population levels is 2.1 births per female. The TFR in North America is 1.8, in Europe 1.6, in South America 2.0, and in much of the developed world 1.5.
The demographics tell us that the population bomb has largely fizzled, and the arc is bending downward. – and that is a problem. It would be much more rational these days to talk about The Depopulation Bomb and to ask what accounts for the drop below levels necessary to sustain population.
On the matter of abortion, Connecticut’s progressive legislators are “forward looking” – positively Californian -- none more so than those who cling loosely or not at all to their religious prescriptions. Connecticut’s U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have resisted any and every attempt to regulate abortion. The same is true of many progressive state Democrat legislators. Catholic prohibitions among Catholic lawmakers have been painlessly surmounted. Both President Biden and U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro are nominal Catholics who are unwilling to meet Catholic objections to abortion half-way, or even one sixteenth of a way. The full measure of their devotion is given unstintingly to Planned Parenthood. In return, Big Abortion coughs up money to finance their reelection campaigns.
The Christian Church – here defined properly as the body of the faithful – has over the years lost its cultural bite. Toothless, few Christian politicians fear to confront and subvert its teachings on the matter of abortion and birth control, all the while claiming votes as nominal Christians. The word “heterodox,” the opposite of orthodox, is rarely mentioned in political circles, and among Catholics the defense of Mother Church is left to historians and orthodox Catholics, fewer and fewer in number as time remorselessly rolls on. Many Christians do not know that it was their church, before and after the fall of the Roman Empire, that elevated the status of women and released them from the iron grip of the Roman paterfamilias who exercised life and death powers over the fetus and the born child.
It is generally assumed that the modern Catholic Church is thinking theologically when it is thinking scientifically. Birth, most scientists would agree, is a developmental process that begins with the fertilization of an egg and ends with the birth of a baby fully invested with statutory and constitutional rights. These scientific and historical propositions have in recent times been effectively vacated by nominal Christians, not all of them resistant to right reason, who believe – more strongly than any Pope believed in the Virgin Birth – that, alone among large, wealthy and powerful international companies, Planned Parenthood, should not be burdened with any regulations, however reasonable. Biden, DeLauro, Blumenthal, Murphy, and many other Connecticut politicians, bending their knees reverently to the brittle unscientific doxologies of Planned Parenthood, fall effortlessly into this vat of unreason.
In the face of new technologies, such as ultrasound that can track the birth process through its various formative stages, it is unscientific babble to insist that a four month old child in the womb is simply a mass of undifferentiated protoplasm or, worse, a “part of a woman’s body” such as an impacted tooth that can have no claim on our moral sense. This absurd view, objectively untrue, is a nearly perfect example of throwing the baby out with the wash water.
People who argue in this fashion are asking us to believe 1) that mighty oaks do not grow from little acorns, and 2) that the acorn has nothing whatsoever to do with the mighty oak culturally, historically or scientifically.
