Denial of Reality and of Womanhood

A week ago Andrew Klavan spent much of his weekly video talking about bodies, their importance in experiencing life and relationships. And there’s some good stuff there, for deep thinking, as he tends to do. In there he shows and talks about a short clip of a woman on TikTok. He admits that, of course, you can find crazy people out there. But the craziness of what she says is worth discussing.

Andrew Klavan, screenshot from here

As an intro, he mentions a piece in the Wall Street Journal by diagnostic radiologist Grazie Pozo Christie, talking, as Klavan says,

about how the science behind Roe v. Wade, which is about to come up, to be challenged before the Supreme Court—the science behind Roe v. Wade is out of date. With the tools that we now have, we can see that a baby at 15 weeks is a human being. It’s alive. It’s kicking, scratching himself. And it is in this mother’s body, being nurtured, being kept alive.

In the wake of that mounting scientific evidence, here’s what this crazy TikTok woman says:

screenshot from here

At no point ever has it mattered whether it’s just a clump of cells or a fully fledged person already accepted to Harvard University. It has never ever mattered when life begins. The point is that a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission. By forcing women to share their bodies with fetuses to keep them alive, you’re actually suggesting that fetuses should have more rights than any other person in the world, and that people with uteruses should have less rights. If you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people, I hate to break it to you, but you’d be pro-choice.

So, all those decades when the pro-abortion crowd claimed it was just a clump of cells, or that viability mattered—those were lies all along. But looking at this woman’s now bold claim, there’s a lot in there that seems obtusely unaware of how babies are made. I shouldn’t have to point out this biological fact, but, except in cases of rape, there’s a voluntary act that results in pregnancy. It isn’t, as Andrew Klavan points out, someone coming along and forcing a human being up inside of you. It’s a procreative act. We know what it is that results in pregnancy.

So the flaw in her argument is “a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission.” Engaging in the procreative act is granting permission. It’s more than that; it’s an invitation.

Metaphorically speaking, you can’t invite someone over to your house for dinner and then shoot them for trespassing on your property.

Even more metaphorically accurate, you can’t invite them—and hire the Uber driver to bring them to your house—and then kill them for trespassing on your property.

Except in the very rare instances when a pregnant mother’s life is on the line—which more than likely means the baby’s life is at risk as well—the baby’s presence in the womb is not a threat to the mother’s life. And in those rare cases, the medical community and doctors agree that you save both when possible; when that is not possible, you prioritize saving the mother.

So the castle doctrine doesn’t really apply here.

image found here

You don’t get to invite people to your house, bring them inside with the promise of feeding them dinner, and then kill them for trespassing because of the inconvenience of having to feed them when you failed to note the invitation on your calendar.

You don’t invite them inside and then kill them—and announce to the world that you had the right to do that—so they wouldn’t interfere with your career or travel plans. You don’t invite someone to your house for dinner and then get to indulge in resentment for their showing up. You don’t invite them unless you plan to provide. (This is why abstinence before marriage and complete fidelity within marriage has been such a good idea for so many millennia.)

If you invite the guest, and then, once they’ve arrived, you suddenly find your plumbing has gone out, or your stove doesn’t turn on, and it’s going to be a hardship—you still just do your best to get through dinner. You don’t at any point kill the invited guest for showing up at what isn’t a good time for you.

It’s not like you can tell the invited guest already in your living room that this isn’t a good evening for dinner after all, so they should leave and come again some other evening. Because “going,” in the case of pregnancy, involves snuffing out the life of the guest—so there cannot be a next time for that person.

The crazy TikTok woman speaks as though some cabal of cruel conservative humans is forcing her to host another person in her body. But that “cabal” is God, who made us in a way so that we can miraculously participate in procreating—in bringing new life into the world. If the woman doesn’t believe in God (and that’s a safe assumption), then it’s the nature that arranged for procreation to happen in similar manner in pretty much all mammalian species.

The pro-abortion opinion is premised on a denial of reality. The denial that women are different from men is the denial of nature. And the significant difference between men and women is the ability to get pregnant and bear a child. Denying that fact erases women as important for being women. Everything about the “right” to kill an unborn child says that bearing the child is unimportant—the unique difference about women is unimportant. But going to school, having a career, indulging in sex without consequence, or whatever other life pursuit—those are important. Everything supersedes womanhood. It says there is more fulfillment in having a career like a man. It says indulging in sex without worrying about getting pregnant—like a man in a decaying society—is what a woman should want. She “shouldn’t be punished with a baby” for being a woman; we should pretend she is more like a man and manipulate reality, even dispose of a baby, to make it seem so.

There is nothing about abortion that is empowering to women. Everything about it denies the unique value of being a woman.

The crazy TokTok woman might be evil. Or she might just be self-centered and duped. She did not come up with the argument she is giving here. She is parroting an argument fed to her by people more entrenched in evil.

In Michael Knowles book Speechless, he says, “No social relation influences the ‘human essence’ more than sex, which sits at the center of every creation account.” He lists a few such accounts to illustrate. And then adds,

Sex also plays a role in the construction and destruction of society’s fundamental institution: the family. Culture-minded Marxists have long understood that any successful “march through the institutions” must overcome the family.

The denial of family, favoring the individual, plays into the hands of those who devalue the individual and value only the collective. That’s why you don’t find pro-life Marxists, only pro-abortion Marxists.

There’s a selfishness that’s obvious. But refusing to become a family doesn’t lead to “being able to do whatever you want”; it actually leads to doing whatever the tyrannical ruler allows.

It’s a trap. It’s the same trap the adversary has used since the beginning: “I’ll take care of you; you just have to surrender your free will so I can make you do what I command.”

We’re getting down to the bottom of something here.

At the Spherical Model, we often point out that civilization requires two foundational things: a religious people who honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership (that’s a summary of the Ten Commandments); and the family must be supported as the basic unit of civilization.

If you want to destroy civilization, you attack the foundation. Abortion dishonors God and His creations; it dishonors life; it dishonors truth; and most particularly it dishonors family.

And what do you get when you destroy civilization? Savagery. We rightly think it’s savage for a culture to sacrifice children to their idols. It’s pagan and horrifying. But that is what we’re looking at in our modern pro-abortion culture. People like this woman spouting off on a social media platform are trying to frame baby killing as the logical and right thing—calling evil good. She is so smug as she says, “I hate to break it to you,” as though we were too stupid to see the rightness of her position before, but now that she’s explained things to us, we should simply acquiesce—when she was too stupid to know how pregnancy happens.

Texas Heartbeat law illustration found here

The savage crowd are weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth about the recent Texas abortion law, outlawing abortion after a heartbeat can be detected. During September and October, since the Heartbeat Bill took effect, abortions in the state dropped by 50%. That’s an estimated 2,149 babies not aborted. It’s hard to say whether women went elsewhere, or whether they rethought abortion and reconsidered giving birth. If that represents the 50% not aborted, that still leaves another 2,149 babies who were killed during that two months.

The separation between savagery and civilization is indicated by those who regret not getting another 2,149 babies killed (savagery) and those who regret that, even with the law, there were still 2,149 babies killed (on the way to civilization).

What kind of a person invites an innocent human being into their life and then kills them? A savage. What kind of a person convinces a woman that her ability to bring life into the world is a punishment put upon people with a uterus by an unfair society? An uglier savage. And probably a Marxist. Definitely an anti-free-will tyrant.