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This writer cannot be the only one who has noticed that Cotton Mather of Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard, known in his own day as “the pope of the Connecticut Valley,” and his grandson Jonathan Edwards of South Windsor Connecticut -- called by Charles Lamb the best metaphysician of his age -- no longer hold sway among us.
One can only wonder how this protestant triumvirate might have greeted Connecticut’s Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, which legally protects medical providers and patients traveling to Connecticut seeking something called “abortion care.” Would Connecticut’s recent favorable ruling on chemical abortion and the FDA's approval of mifepristone, an abortifacient soon to be available through the mail, have passed unremarked and unnoticed by any of the three protestant divines mentioned above??
The muted silence among Christian politicians in the state surrounding the expansion of “abortion rights” in the Connecticut Valley means that religious opposition to the practice of abortion may be left out of account when politicians, including prominent heterodox Roman Catholics, assess whether “health care” resulting in dead fetuses should become the secular equivalent of saintly behavior. On the extreme left side of the political barrier, abortion is on the way to becoming the equivalent of a secular sacrament. Question it – especially if you are politically connected – and you risk being sent to Coventry as a secular heretic, or worse a religious zealot. You will be shunned by your comrades, ostracized, silenced, smothered in treacley secular rectitude.
The new secular Cotton Mathers – in Connecticut, pro-abortionist Dick Blumenthal, a devotee of Planned Parenthood, and his son, State Representative Matt Blumenthal, a chip off the old pro-abortion block -- are every bit as insistent as earlier Puritans, but their object and end are different. And the abortion movement has yet to produce a metaphysician of the stature of Edwards that may explain why abortion, in some cases approaching infanticide, should be subsumed under the misleading label of “reproductive rights” when the object of all abortions clearly is to prevent reproduction.
Over population is not a problem. Demographers have told us that the left in America has long since won the battle of the The Population Bomb, the title of a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich. The bomb, supposedly set off by unrestrained births, fizzled decades ago.
The Total fertility rate (TFR), the Pew Research Center tells us, “is a powerful measure most commonly used to characterize ‘replacement fertility,’ meaning the level of estimated fertility that is necessary for a population to reproduce itself, assuming no in-migration or out-migration. A total fertility rate of 2.08 is considered ‘replacement level’ in the U.S.” According to the 2019 study, “the low point in U.S. fertility occurred around 2006, when women near the end of their childbearing years had an average of 1.86 kids.”
A fertility rate that cannot reproduce the current population clearly is a problem that has produced no sparks in the imaginations of our neo-progressive politicians and their media supporters.
In a piece published in the Arlington Catholic Herald, “Church Has Always Condemned Abortion”, the Reverend William Saunders reminds us what the pagan world was like before the arrival of Christianity: “The Greco-Roman world at the time of our Lord and in which Christianity grew permitted abortion and infanticide. In Roman law, the two acts were really not distinguished because an infant did not have legal status until accepted by the pater familias, the head of the family; until accepted, the infant was a non-person who could be destroyed. In some parts of the Roman Empire, abortion and infanticide were so prevalent that reproduction rates were below the zero-growth level. (Sad to say, most European countries face a similar plight today due to contraception and abortion.)”
The further we move away from Christianity, it seems, the closer we move towards a refashioned paganism. It was Christianity that rescued women from the unquestioned authority of the pater familias. What is the practical difference, we may ask, between the pagan pater familias and the more modern, updated mater familias who claims life and death powers over the infant in the womb because she believes, despite the indisputable scientific evidence offered by ultrasound technology, that the fetus within her is little more than “a part of her body?”
The destroyed fetus, the abortionist, the prospective mother, and sensible, dispassionate and objective journalists, all know that life in the womb, once surrounded by mothering protective laws, now lies exposed and, to turn a phrase of Tennessee Williams, entirely dependent “on the mercy of strangers.” And the pro-abortionists are merciless.
