Soon the solstice will be upon us, primordial night. Happily, lawn to rooftop lighting brightens hearth and home across hemispheres. Thank God for those holiday lights! We mortals don’t like darkness. Spirits dip and lies thrive when the light dies. But light, lives and truth are about to die in my native Massachusetts. The Massachusetts House and now the Senate have voted overwhelmingly to codify – i.e. cast in icy permanence – the lies codified nearly half a century ago in Roe v Wade. Lie number one — that, in defiance of all modern science has taught us, we aren’t extinguishing a human life during an abortion or that, body and soul, woman aren’t being emotionally, if not physically damaged by the experience. Or that men meant to be fathers don’t, however privately, share the pain or, in failing to do so, commit a grave offense against justice and the obligation to love and support those with whom they — we — are intimate.
Massachusetts already swings the gate wide for abortion rights. This bill rips the gate off the hinges, News accounts unfailingly make it sound like a “strengthening of reproductive rights” (where but in Red China are we denied the right to reproduce?) or a matter of enhanced “health care.” Strange how we hide our lies. Among other outrages, it would eliminate the requirement that women (girls) under 18 gain parental or judicial consent before they abort their child.
Pro-choice Governor Charlie Baker is proposing a couple of amendments and send the bill back for re-working. In effect, he’s clinging to a branch with two fig leaves as he struggles to balance himself on a very slippery slope. He’ll be accused of trying to quiet the Bay State’s faint and overmatched anti-abortion voices. But I suspect he’s hearing other rational voices in his deep heart’s core, muttering “this goes too far.” Good luck, Charlie. No distance is too far in this culture of death. I fear the blood-dimmed tide will ultimately sweep you down that slope. I pray not. Stand your ground.
I confess I long thought unplanned, unwanted life a burden on the planet and on that same hearth and home we now brighten with holiday lights. I liked being liked and being “woke” before we called it that. But you have to be Rip Van Winkle to stay truly Unwoke to such natural realities, or for a lie as large as this to survive in your head in broad daylight.
Time and again on Facebook, I see friends, relatives and former colleagues, male and female, happily cradling new children and grandchildren, delighted at all the anticipated joys, sorrows and challenges we humans bring into the world. We’re a beautiful, indispensable mess, we mortals.
Yes, I’m Catholic and I know “liberal” Catholics often take their stand against the Church on the seemingly antinomian pronouncements of the current pope. Well, good old Francis just yanked the rug out from under them. He’s appalled and fighting hard against an abortion-on-demand measure being proposed in his native Argentina. “Is it right,” asks the redoubtable Jorge Mario Bergoglio, “to eliminate a human life in order to solve a problem?” And, just in case you don’t get the point, he compares the abortionist to a “hitman”. His strongest allies are a group of women living in the slums of Buenos Aires, the very people the “woke” masses assume would want to be liberated of their burdensome unborn.
Francis’s new book is called, “Let Us Dream.” Yes — and let us live!
19 Cent Notebook 