Column by John Jalsevac
February 13, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A while back Cardinal Egan wrote an uncharacteristically scathing column, which is one of the best I have ever read on the abortion issue, certainly by a bishop. In it he included these few lines: “If you can convince yourself that these beings (unborn children) are something other than living and innocent human beings, something, for example, such as ‘mere clusters of tissues,’ you have a problem far more basic than merely not appreciating the wrongness of abortion. And that problem is – forgive me – self-deceit in a most extreme form.”
Human beings are extraordinarily adept at self-deceit, which is witnessed to by the fact that whole generations have periodically convinced themselves of things that are laughably (but often tragically) false, even when all the evidence points otherwise. Usually this is accomplished because the prevalent lie of the age happens to be a convenient one, and to think contrary to what is fashionable would spoil one’s groove.
For instance, I often meditate upon the fact that not a few highly intelligent men and women (not to mention a lot of the rabble) convinced themselves not so very long ago that members of other less-developed civilizations were “sub-human,” and could, therefore, be treated according to one’s whims. Hence the institution of slavery, which was thought to be an extremely groovy institution by people who made bundles of cash off of it, and even by those who didn’t profit at all, but were simply taken in by the propaganda.
I often idly wonder if I would have been one of those working alongside William Wilberforce. Would I have been fighting against all the odds to abolish the slave trade, or would I have been one of the complacent, or even (God forbid) one of the complicit? It is not so straight-forward a speculation as I would like to think. We like to forget (because of what it might say about us) that William Wilberforce was an anomaly, an almost solitary voice of contradiction, a single bolt of lightning in the midst of a seething black sky. In the end he may indeed have lighted the whole world, but it was only after he nearly killed himself in the effort to galvanize his compatriots into action.
There is a scene in the movie “The Mission,” in which the Jesuit priests working amongst the South American natives present to a visiting Cardinal and his retinue a native child, who sings for them a convincing rendition of Ave Maria. The priests arranged this performance to demonstrate that the natives could perform well and with feeling the most elevated of art, and were, therefore, just as spiritual and human as anybody else.
Of course, the wily slave traders denounce the whole performance as a sham, observing that a beast could be trained to do the same, which was only the first of their many lies. But it is well to remember that this very same tragic scene was going on all over the world at that time, in many of the colonies. And the slave traders were considered the popular ones, while the puritanical objectors mere gnats buzzing in the face of progress and profit.
Vision is 20/20 in retrospect, and now we all rightly wonder at this monstrous blind spot in the collective conscience of the colonial West. But it is mere fantasy to suppose that some of us wouldn’t have been taken in by the lie, if we had lived then. And the same goes for every other great lie in history.
Now, I happen to have a wife, and she happens to be pregnant. (But, before I explain my reasons for bringing her up, I feel I must dispense with an objection. Paul Johnson proclaims as law in his essay, “the art of writing a column,” which I just read last night, that a columnist ought never to mention his wife in print. However, I observe that Johnson also lays out a scad of other rules, and, as far as I can tell he violates every single one of them, often. For instance, he wrote that a columnist should never talk down to his readers, but if anyone talks down it is Johnson, which is perhaps the very reason he is so popular. He also strongly proscribed against name-dropping, but after I read the essay in which he nonchalantly spoke of the time he kissed Margaret Thatcher, I began to suspect something of the humbug in him. Hence, I have thought it admissible to forego his advice.)
And so, back to my wife. As I say, she is pregnant, just recently into the third trimester, and therefore exceedingly uncomfortable. Now, I have never had a wife before, let alone one that is pregnant. Like most men, prior to discovering my own fatherhood, I never paid much attention to pregnant women, whom I thought strange and mysterious creatures that I could not hope to understand. And so now I am learning very many things, not the least of which is that they are much more strange and mysterious than I could have imagined.
One thing that I have been most astonished by, however, is just how present the baby has been. We began to be able to feel its movements quite strongly only 17 weeks into the pregnancy. And in recent weeks he seems to be positively in training for the Golden Gloves boxing match. I can even see when he or she (we have decided against finding out the sex) moves now, which I did not expect and is an odd experience.
The baby reacts to all sorts of things, including voices and light. Once I turned on the stereo and it came on unexpectedly loud, and the baby jumped all of a sudden, startled by the sudden noice. You can feel the baby’s head, and feet and hands, and sometimes when you push against its hands or feet, he pushes back as if to say, “Please give me some peace in here. It is the only nine months of peace I am likely ever to have.”
It is at such moments as these, when I feel this tiny fist resisting my own intruding finger, that I think soberly of the many women with children, or married men, including many politicians and journalists and other important and intelligent and influential people, who vociferously defend, not simply abortion, but late-term and partial-birth abortion, under the pretense that the fetus is a “blob of tissue,” or “sub-human” in some other way. And at such times I can only think of that South American child beautifully singing the Ave Maria, oblivious to the fact that he was singing for the very existence of his race.
The President of the United States is a married man with two children. He has also been one of the most outspoken defenders of all abortions, including partial-birth abortions. I wonder then, did he ever take the time while his wife was pregnant to notice what pregnancy was like? Surely Barack has sat on the sofa with Michelle, as I have done with my wife, and watched as his child’s fists imprinted themselves on his wife’s belly in a sudden flurry of punches. Was he not moved? Did he not, even for a moment, question himself? And somehow we have convinced ourselves that Obama is the great, indeed, the model family man.
Ay, we humans are very adept at self-deception.