What term best describes it? “Two-faced”? “Conflicted”? “Split-Personality”? “Bipolar” “Jekyll-and-Hyde”?
“Describes what?” you ask?
Why, America’s attitude about its babies, of course.
The nation’s fractured perspective on its little ones bubbles up all the time, in the most unlikely spots, under the oddest circumstances — on a Friday evening, for instance; as part of a popular, prime-time television series.
The weekly episodes of The Blacklist are, typically, rather outrageous anyway. We’re not talking here about hard-boiled reality funneled through a fictional thriller. The trials and tribulations of the quirky Raymond “Red” Reddington and his harassed “daughter”, FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Keen, may make for engaging entertainment. Still, even by the program’s own elastic standards, November 15th’s offering was … ummm … out there?
I won’t bother exhaustively rehearsing the convolutions of the outré story except to say it involved a group of male, politically conservative public figures, each surgically impregnated as part of a particularly vile revenge scheme conducted by a — literally, it seems — insane pro-abortion zealot. One plot point involved her tearful devotion to her own daughter — an adolescent-aged girl she’d wanted to abort years previously, but had been prevented from doing so by “evil” men who’d withstood her “right” to kill her child. One of the “expecting” dudes — a hypocritical, anti-abortion politician — is shown at episode’s end sleazily and surreptitiously procuring that very procedure to solve his predicament. Another is pictured adoringly cradling the infant he carried to term. (One Blacklist regular admiringly refers to him as “a man who stays true to his convictions.”)
In forty-two minutes, this sample of scripted, small-screen diversion efficiently captured the addled viewpoint of 21st-Century Western Civilization toward its progeny: We sanctimoniously champion the legal option of snuffing them out of existence at the early stages of their lives — while simultaneously and cloyingly cherishing them, doting on them, banging the table over our collective duty to care for them. So, do we celebrate our kids, coo over them? Or do we keep the way wide open for their deaths? Or is it all of the above, mushed incoherently together?
Cosset the crumb-crunchers! (Unless you waste them first.)
It’s a real pickle; positively warped, really — which, I suppose, is what happens when a society attempts to justify the indecency of a mother’s extinguishing her offspring in utero.
And it isn’t just on display during TV programs.
Consider the California woman authorities arrested on a murder warrant after they discovered her stillborn child was actually a casualty of her meth addiction. Don’t miss the location: California. Not exactly pro-life central. Had she gone the conventional route and let a medical professional do the butcherous deed? We’d never have heard about it. Unless, that is, she turned up at some pro-abort confab “shouting her abortion”; in which case it would only be clamorous applause greeting her.
If the targets of abortion are only “blobs of cells”, “something like tumors” or merely “pre-humans”, why are individuals regularly charged with murder, manslaughter or some subset of the lawless taking of life when their reckless driving or other violent acts result in the termination of a woman’s pregnancy?
Another Golden State resident “faces a first-degree murder charge after allegedly holding his girlfriend at gunpoint and forcing her to take pills and effectively abort her own child.” Whoa. First. Degree. Murder. That’s about as bad as it gets on the homicide scale. The accusation isn’t just that he mistreated mom, but that he killed that “thing” inside of her.
So, do Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-controlled Cali Legislature acknowledge unborn children as people or not? If a government is going to promote lawful infanticide, is it too much to ask for a skosh of philosophical clarity about it?
Meantime, daffy Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was the first in the 2020 pack to release plans for taxpayer-underwritten universal childcare and pre-school. In June, she followed up by introducing legislation to that effect. Yet, as with nearly every Donkey Party White House hopeful, on “abortion rights”? She’s a radical; a NARAL Pro-Choice America dreamboat.
The Massachusetts lawmaker slobbers over the State’s obligation to raise our children for us while slobbering equally for it to grease the bloody skids for more licit pre-born baby-killing. The floundering pol is pathetically pledging to wrap herself in a Planned Parenthood scarf if she’s sworn in as Chief Executive on inauguration day. You know PP, right? They’re the ghoulish outfit caught on video chortling about the most profitable method for harvesting baby body parts for medical researchers.
Follow the equation: In Elizabeth Warren’s world (and in that of most of her fellow party bigs) it’s open season on kids in the womb. If they survive those hunting grounds, however? Government is to move heaven and earth to protect them (no spanking, parents!), provide for them (cough it up, taxpayers), propagandize them (State-curated daycare, public school, etc.)
Yeah, no internal contradictions there.
Here’s the transparent explanation: burrowed deep within every one of us, nearly ineradicable, is a visceral recognition, a stubborn knowing: The natural result of two human beings’ coming together sexually is … another developing human being. A mother executing her offspring at the point of its greatest innocence, its most heart-rending vulnerability? That’s a soul-chilling abomination, no getting around it.
All the creepy, dead-eyed feminist chants, “Celebrate Abortion” campaigns, chowder-headed celebrity cheerleading of baby-killing, can’t smother that instinctive conviction, Neither can our gutless courts’ and lawmakers’ oily complicity fully numb the inner throb that reminds us: Destroying one’s unborn child is wrong.
Someone needs to tell our pop culture to make up its mind; knock off with the mixed signals. Otherwise, we might be tempted to call it “two-faced”, “conflicted”, “split-personality”, “bipolar” or “Jekyll-and-Hyde” — any of which, by the way, will do.
