“If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell,”(Mark 9:47, New American Standard Bible)
“It is better for you to go into heaven a little maimed than to go hell in a push-up.” (Mark 9: 47, New Bodaciously Awesome Bible)
Do you need me to recount Henry V’s St. Crispin Day speech? As he in essence answers Hamlet’s query, “To be, or not to be, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them: to die, to sleep no more; and by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to?” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1603)
It is far nobler indeed! There is nothing more precious than our honor, our integrity. Popularity is not worth having when it is purchased with the currency of integrity. We live in a culture which can see no other way forward than to validate, as not to offend, what it should grieve as a tragedy.
Monetizing an institution which does evil monopolizes that capital away from saner alternatives and so potential good is choked on the vine in favor of the present evil. Let us not mince words Planned Parenthood is evil. One can no more say the Nazi party had an amazing infrastructure that put the population to work after the abject poverty of the First World War than one can say Planned Parenthood serves the impoverished woman.
For as each statement may have a thin veneer of some truth, the deeper truth is that no institution which does what is inherently evil has the right to claim any good. Nazi Germany must never be known for its successful social programs because it was built upon a eugenic utopian ideal which called for the destruction of the fashionably undesirable. This echoes the argument against holding up Planned Parenthood as the bastion of the poor woman with no other recourse to breast health. The poor woman may require her breasts but she certainly cannot require her children. She certainly cannot feel whole without her breasts as then she will not be able to care for her phantom children; phantom children who have brought countless women very real pain and regret. As is inherent among parents if it be my life (the parent) or the life of my child let me die in the preservation of that child’s life and so the parents of aborted children quite often have a self imposed survivor’s guilt.
“I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of "business" or industrialism, and not vice versa; examples from all the magazines, novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open in front of me—a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated [138]the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to sign his letter "Hopeful." Well, there are certainly many methods by which people in the upper classes prevent procreation; one of them is what used to be called "platonic friendship," till they found another name for it at the Old Bailey. I do not suppose the hopeful gentleman hopes for this; but some of us find the abortion he does hope for almost as abominable. That, however, is not the curious point. The curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying, "When people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children." You will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted children; but unwanted by whom? This man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not want to pay them properly. Doubtless, if you said to him directly, "Are you in favour of low wages?" he would say, "No." But I am not, in this chapter, talking about the effect on such modern minds of a cross-examination to which they do not subject [139]themselves. I am talking about the way their minds work, the instinctive trick and turn of their thoughts, the things they assume before argument, and the way they faintly feel that the world is going. And, frankly, the turn of their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted, as the turn of my mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted. Motherhood, they feel, and a full childhood, and the beauty of brothers and sisters, are good things in their way, but not so good as a bad wage. About the mutilation of womanhood, and the massacre of men unborn, he signs himself "Hopeful." He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human annihilation. But about improving the small bad wage he signs himself "Hopeless."” (G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922)
“Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, that he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart; his passport shall be made, and crowns for convoy put into his purse; we would not die in that man’s company that fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is call’d the feast of Crispin.” (William Shakespeare, Henry V, 1599)
There is still cause for great hope as the truth was dared uttered for a moment, though delivered with great and obvious trepidation from the outset. The retreat is not a great surprise, though it is a great disappointment especially to those of us who felt they could finally contribute to this cause. The battle was not undertaken with diligence and clear-headedness as this outcome could not have been a surprise. What is lacking is not vision but resolve and that is something which is indispensable.
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