August 8, 2013 (Unmasking Choice)
- Few writers have the breadth and scope of Canadian-born commentator
Mark Steyn. He calls himself “The One-Man Global Content Provider,” and
he is easily one of the most popular and prolific conservative
polemicists writing today, producing everything from obituaries and
Broadway reviews to tomes on Islam and demography. His work has been
reviewed by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and renowned British
novelist Martin Amis. Amis, whom Steyn wrote very critically of in his
book America Alone, provides one of the most accurate
descriptions of Steyn’s writing: “Mark Steyn is an oddity. His thoughts
and themes are sane and serious—but he writes like a maniac.”
And so he does—on the rise of Islam in the West, on liberty-stifling
Big Government, on the decline of masculinity, on plunging birthrates.
And he also happens to be very anti-abortion—and his comments on the
matter are, as usual, witty and incisive.
I had the opportunity of interviewing Steyn a couple years back when I did freelance work for The Jewish Independent.
Steyn was coming into town to speak at the Hillel gala, and a few of us
were going to have lunch with him a day or so prior to the event. As I
asked him questions for my Independent article, I decided to throw in a question about abortion, just out of curiosity.
“Why does anyone think Europe needs huge numbers of Muslim immigrants?”
Steyn replied, “Supposedly to keep their welfare state in business,
because they are the children that Europeans couldn’t be bothered to
have themselves. One third of German women are childless. If you just
take your average, dopey Western feminist at a university campus in
North America today, and she’s concerned about patriarchy, [she thinks
that by] forming a pro-life club you’re forcing your backwards,
patriarchal views on her. If she thinks you’re the big, stern,
dominating patriarch, she ought to wait twenty or thirty years in the
average Canadian city. She’ll be figuring out what the people in
Amsterdam and Brussels and Malmo and Paris are beginning to figure out
right now—that there’s a whole, far more motivated breed of patriarch
that’s going to be walking around those cities. That’s what the dopey,
clap-trapped, cobwebbed 1960’s feminist doesn’t get—that abortion is an
indulgence and the indulgence only works for a generation or two before a
bunch of other people take over and rebuild the future you weren’t
interested in building for yourselves.”
And suddenly, abortion is put in context. It’s not simply
killing—although it certainly is that. It’s cultural suicide. It’s
emblematic of the bloody, narcissistic tailspin of the West at twilight.
It is, as Mark Steyn refers to it elsewhere, Big Government’s back
alley.
“The back alley is back, and supersized,” he writes, “When the
pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and the other
celebrities d’un certain age return to Hollywood, and the
upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their
suburbs, a woman’s ‘right to choose’ means that, day in, day out, the
blessings of this ‘right’ fall disproportionately on all the identity
groups the upscale liberals profess to care about—poor women, black
women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big
Government’s back alley.”
But does the touching and suffocating compassion of Big Government and
its enforcers encompass pre-born human beings with its long tentacles?
Unfortunately no, as Kermit Gosnell, the butcher of Philadelphia, and so
many others have proven. An indication of moral bankruptcy, Steyn
notes: “One solitary act of mass infanticide by a mentally-ill loner
calls into question the constitutional right to guns, but a sustained
conveyer belt of infanticide by an entire cadre of cold-blooded killers
apparently has no implications for the constitutional right to
abortion.”
Thugs and bullies kill babies, or “fetuses” if you prefer, because they
cannot fight back or make noise—at least not noise unmuffled by the
body of his or her mother. And ideological thugs and bullies, desperate
to maintain their right to frivolously frolic away the future with
sterile sex hammer down on any who publicly disagree with their feticide
free-for-all. Think of what happened last year, when Komen, an
organization dedicated to fighting breast cancer, decided briefly to
pull their paltry donation to abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Komen
was soon brought grovelling back into line by Planned Parenthood CEO
Cecile Richards and her fellow hench-womyn.
“Ms. Richards’ business is an upscale progressives’ ideological
protection racket,” Steyn noted wryly, “for whom the ‘poor women’s’
abortion mill is a mere pretext. The Komen Foundation will not be the
last to learn that you can ‘race for the cure,’ but you can’t hide.
Celebrate conformity—or else.”
Abortion, as any literate human being can tell you, kills a human
being. Abortion, as any moral human being can tell you, is a human
rights violation. And abortion, as Mark Steyn tells us, is a cultural
indulgence that can’t last more than a few generations. Abortion is a
symbol of everything that threatens the West, from plunging birthrates
to skyrocketing self-absorption to the slow rise of Big Government’s
Brave New World.
For as Mark Steyn wrote, “When the state has the ability to know
everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end
well.”
