It was a kind of blessing to have such insane abortion laws in America. It kept you honest. 

In America, pre-Roe, abortion was legal up to the moment before natural birth, for although Roe and Casey allowed states to place regulations, these all went out the Constitutional window if a woman could show carrying her eight-and-a-half month old caused harm to her “mental health.” Our system was always totally insane, but also commendable. Said Justice Kennedy in Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This is both retarded and Zarathustrian, if you consider snuffing out babies a sign of the ubermensch. 

This was insane. The American vassal states once known as Western Europe mostly cut off abortion services at 15 weeks. This is surely the enlightened position, the one arrived at by the most those great minds refined by twenty weeks of vacation a year and universal “free” healthcare. If criminalizing abortion at 15 weeks makes DeSantis’s Florida a fascist haven, what to say about France that criminalizes it at 14 weeks? 

The demented nature of America’s abortion laws made room for a genuinely reactionary position in mainstream politics. The fight over abortion posed a very clear, split between ancient Christian notions of personhood and the Court’s practical allowance of infanticide. It was a black and white issue, where most of the Western world had contented itself with the gray.

Before the mid-20th Century, abortion was as assuredly an evil. It was criminalized everywhere, through common law and statute. Blackstone, in describing the common law’s treatment of abortion, notes that punishment was only meted out after the time after quickening, that is, when the child could be felt to stir within the mother. Modern pro-aborts use this to justify the claim that abortion was common in those days. The “proof” of this claim is never empirical, for they have no data; it lies in the assumption that women of the past were the same as the women of the present, and as Nature abhors a vacuum, Universal Woman will rush to swarm to any ambiguity in the law as a refuge for killing her own spawn. 

What changed? Most obvious is the collapse of Christian morals. Just as romantic love is an outgrowth of Medieval chivalry and Christian self-sacrifice, our modern sentimentality towards children is a Christian thing. One can find sweet things written about children in pagan literature, but it usually arises out of the child’s potential to bring its family honor. A child that could not bring its parents honor or wealth was a useless thing and was painlessly disposed of. It was Christ’s laudations that lent childhood its special place, which made it native in the hearts of Christendom, even in those of gross heretics like Blake and Rimbaud.

But this affection was girded by the fact that children were in fact useful things. Few characters of the Old Testament are more pitiable than the childless, condemned to an old-age of loneliness, isolation, and insecurity. Children today mean nothing of the sort. The succor and solace they once provided in old age can be replicated through Social Security, television, and Honduran Care Assistants. It is no quandary why people who place most faith in the liberal technocracy also tend to have most contempt for children. Strictly speaking, children just get in the way. They are substitutes for bureaucrats and politically pliable immigrants. Other than that, they are just other mouths on the welfare dole.

Some are wondering why the powers that be are moving in this direction, why the Court of 2022 would roll back the victory of 1973. Roe was probably the last gasp of the eugenics movement of the early 20^th Century. Most of the men who voted on the Civil Rights Act accepted some or all of the premises of the eugenicists. The blacks and other minorities who had been promoted unworthily into the technocratic apparatus were to be managed by Planned Parenthood from now on.

Things did not go as they planned. Regardless of the sixty-five million mouths displaced, the modern welfare statists are finding there just aren’t enough Mexicans to fund our pay-as-you-go Social Security. From a social perspective, the one thing worse than a eugenic system of mass murder is a dysgenic system of mass murder, and this is exactly what the American abortion regime fostered: Rule by whore from the top to bottom of social life. It is actually hilarious to consider that abortion was ever thought to be a eugenic measure. In 2022, endorsing a mass murder regime, ever after acknowledging abortion as murder, is far far less likely to get you fired than endorsing a system of eugenics. 

But none of it can hide that abortion is a mass-murder system, and either you jive with it or you don’t. Human life begins at conception. This was always the Christian perspective, and science has only confirmed it. There is no serious way to argue against this. You can sink to the level of “I don’t know what a woman is, I’m not a biologist,” if you want, but barring this, there can be no doubt that legal protections are owed to that human life from the time of conception. 

This is the crux of things: Westerners still have a sentimental attachment to children, but hold to no religious demand to protect them or material need to want them. This explains the modern enlightened position on abortion: At and beyond the time of quickening, when it is eminently clear to the senses that a human being is stirring in the womb, most people disapprove of abortion. Before that point, most people approve. This is sub-rational, to be sure. If the thing is human at twenty weeks, it is human at ten. But at this point it is no logical question, but a sentimental one. As our nation’s proud drone operators know, it isn’t that hard to kill a child you don’t see. When his little hand is pressing up against yours it becomes an entirely different matter. It is no longer an issue of morals but an issue of sentiment, the way you wouldn’t kick a pig in the face, but you’d sure be happy to eat it. 

This is why the Roe system had its benefits. It made the reactionary position feasible, that the little unmoving ricegrain inside the slut had as much right to life as the slut did. The enlightened position did not need to be consulted, for a full and true “pro-life” platform could be put forth against the monsters who reserved the right to decapitate five-pound children in the womb.

Now that our Court has cast aside the insane position, there is every reason to worry that America will soon become respectable. The Church is in especial danger, because the radical pro-life cause was what forced Christians to adhere to the old concept of personhood, one that is distinct from a person’s utility to the technocracy and welfare state, one whose dignity comes from God. Whether dignity comes from God or whether dignity comes from the government is the fundamental political question, with the liberal and socialist always siding with the latter. When the Church sided with the ricegrain, she inadvertently sided with the politics that opposed servile statism. It was one of the last remnants of the reactionary force the Church was before 1962.

The pro-life cause was one of the few that united all real Christians. It is also the one area where the Church seemed to lead rather than just follow along. Anti-abortion advocacy has risen to the level of almost sacramental importance. 40 Days for Life ranks almost as highly as Lent in the minds of serious Catholics, Eucharistic Processions head to the abortuary, Stations of the Cross on Good Friday occur not in the cathedral but outside the abortuary. None of these things is bad, necessarily, but it shows how central the cause is to the modern Christian. And always part and parcel with it the liberal pablum about abortion, that the mothers are “victims” of men, that the only way to combat abortion is a bigger welfare state and more pandering to feminist vanity.

Now that the battle over Roe has been won, there is a good chance that unity will falter. More Christians will be ready to thoughtlessly cast men, women, and children into the socialist sludge. More will be content to say that 15-week bans are good enough. The pro-life cause will no longer be an implicitly reactionary position, but a sentimental one, one not so far different from the rest of the world’s enlightened opinion. And as the Church has gone along with every other liberal reform, it will go along with this one. The pro-life movement will likely shrink.

But these are all just tendencies. In fact, the pro-life movement has done a great deal towards instilling the rational perspective in its adherents. It is full of dedicated people who will fight at the state level. Talk to them: They understand the fight for the ricegrains. And where they are present there is hope for the social order centered around man rather than one where man is just an appendage of the social order.

But the technocrats are firmly in control. The economic and social system we have is ossified, and if a man can’t find a place to burrow in its hollow bones, he has no place at all. What’s that baby with an 85 IQ going to be doing in twenty years, when the trucks are automated? Will he be among the growing class of people who cannot find wives, can’t hold jobs, can’t have kids, can’t buy a house or afford rent? If I had to put up a hypothesis for why the powers that be have decided they can relinquish their mass-murder of babies, it’s because they’ve moved on to the mass-murder of adults.