PrintJanuary 22, 2008
Saving the Trees and Killing the Children
What can be said of a society that has reached such a ludicrous level of moral confusion that it cannot even make the simplest value judgment, cannot even distinguish between the value of a tree and the value of a newly conceived, perfectly innocent, unique human being formed in God's own image?
A society adept at saving the trees and killing the children.
Can we rightly call this "enlightened"?
Dare one call it "progressive"?
Well, yes, actually. Believers in this absurd value system call it those things all the time, as though anyone with a single grain of common sense could fall for such diabolical rubbish.
Yet a great many among us have fallen for this absurdity, are indeed still falling for it, everyday and in almost every place one looks.
Whenever I try to describe for young people today what life in middle-class America was actually like in the 1950s and 1960s, they tend to stare at me as though I must have lived in a convent. It's truly difficult for them to imagine a time in which sex was not the center of everyday life, nor the be-all and end-all of teenage and adult existence, a time in which self-control was an admirable trait and fully expected in the entire realm of civil society.
Remembering Life Before Roe
On January 23, 1973, I was 22 years old and three months into my first pregnancy. Maybe it was just my overactive hormonal state or a reverberation from morning sickness, but when I heard the announcement of our Supreme Court's newfound discovery of this so-called woman's right to abort, an actual shiver scurried up my spine as I wretched in nausea.
If I had known then even a smidgen of what was about to unfold in America because of this judicial fiat -- the murder of more than 48 million innocents -- I would not have merely shuddered and quickly thrown up.
I would have screamed, wailed and keened for a long, long, long, long time.
But who, back then, would have believed that it would ever happen, that good women would ever -- of their own free will -- make such an abominable "choice" in such huge numbers. The very idea that any woman in her right mind would even want such a "right" was as foreign to me and to all of the other women I knew then as to make it patently absurd. Only years later would I realize how naïve I was.
If you had told anyone standing on an American street corner in 1970 that by 1990, there would be openly functioning abortion mills in virtually every city in America, and that they would systematically kill more than one million babies in the womb each year, nary a soul would have believed you.
I may have led a sheltered life, but the consequences I have seen in America since then have been dramatic. From 1965-1969, I attended a large, public, suburban high school and an even larger university right in the middle of downtown Atlanta. I had been a virgin on my wedding day, and had actually only known two women who claimed to have had sex outside of wedlock. And of course, back then, men only talked about sex with their male friends - never in the company of females. Atlanta was no bastion of leftist unisexism.
That many males exaggerated their own premarital exploits was something we females pretty much took for granted, since finding a girl who was foolish enough to indulge that activity before marriage was in reality a great deal more rare than movies would have you believe. Even into my early 30's, I had never known a single woman to be pregnant out of wedlock, much less one who had ever considered having an abortion.
Such innocence seems like a fairytale indeed, a mere four decades later.
Life After Roe
In the years since Roe, we have spawned new generations of young people who have been taught in our own taxpayer-funded schools to revere every aspect of creation, except themselves. Many of them take great pride in their community recycling efforts and all those magnificent trees they're saving, while they casually hook up and shack up like alley cats on the prowl.
Here we are, 35 years after Roe, still scurrying around like idiots, dealing with epidemic STDs, never-before-seen rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, states pushing HPV vaccines on 9 year-old girls, contraception being dispensed like aspirin in school clinics, heretofore unknown depression and emotional disturbances among our young, and the long out-of-control sexual revolutionary beat goes on...with seemingly no end in sight.
In 1973, due to a dire lack of valid information about life in the womb, it was quite possible for good people to look the other way and somewhat reasonably expound a pro-abortion position. But advancements in medical technology, ultra-sound especially, have turned those arguments to the kind of meaningless, ignorant gibberish, which has been used to defend the purely indefensible genocides that we modern people had supposedly left behind to less "enlightened," less "progressive" folks.
Thanks to a relatively small cadre of militant feminists and their judicial enablers, we Americans have permitted what is, I believe, the most heinous genocide ever perpetrated against a class of completely helpless human beings. Our own offspring.
Never perhaps in the whole history of civilization, has a situation so begged the question:
What were we thinking?
This question has a pretty simple answer actually.
We were thinking what humans have been prone to think since the very beginning of our existence on this planet.
We were thinking we are so all-powerful that we could permanently alter our own inherent human natures, and throw the laws God designed for our protection into the rubbish bin of antiquated silliness.
We were thinking that we could, in one fell swoop, reorder the world to our own specifications, instead of accepting the world as God made it.
We were thinking that this world and its glittery counterfeit vision of pleasure is all there is.
The shed blood of 48 million innocent human beings does not wash off easily. And a trillion trees does not add up to the value of a single one of our innocent babes in the womb.
We are a generation that will implore, perhaps more than any other yet:
Oh God, have mercy on our souls.
We knew not what we were doing.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver@yahoo.com.
