Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand.Another war was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundations centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children.
So wrote G.K Chesterton, in Chapter 7 of The Everlasting Man. One cannot help thinking of it, and of modern man's worship of his god, efficiency, when he reads this story from the Telegraph:
The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste, with some even used to heat hospitals, an investigation has found.Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.
So babies who were murdered in the name of freedom and, ultimately, commercial efficiency, were then recycled as fuel for the very facilities carrying on with those murders. So also were stillborn babies whose parents, we are informed, were advised that their remains would be "cremated."
Two things to note:
First, though the article goes on to inform us that the practice has been deemed "totally unacceptable" and that a ban on it has been decreed effective immediately, it is not clear than any heretofore established law or regulation stood in the way of using human babies as a source of energy.
Second, there is little that the pro-choice side can offer in the way of a philosophically consistent condemnation of such a practice, though you can be sure that for public relations purposes, they will go through the motions of condemning this abomination, for no convincing reason.
Chesterton's final point in the chapter cited above was that a civilization will of necessity live out and fulfill its religious and philosophical orientation. Let us hope that we will reorient our own, while time is.
Comments (11)
What would Obama and his administration do if that occurred in America?
Posted by Truth Unites... and Divides | March 24, 2014 5:37 PM
Oh, that's easy: They'd blame the Republicans' resistance to Obamacare.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | March 24, 2014 9:51 PM
Will horror at this change minds concerning the slaughter itself? Or will it be confined entirely to the "insensitivity" of incinerating the children for fuel? Those aren't rhetorical questions. I'm sincerely curious, because Western society is so shockingly schizoid about such matters.
Posted by Lydia | March 25, 2014 9:00 AM
I wonder the same thing, Lydia. My guess is that these kinds of stories have an incremental, cumulative effect. Americans are less and less enchanted with abortion as time passes, but at any point in time individuals are going to be unwilling to admit error, and a Kermit Gosnell is not going to change a lot of minds by himself.
I suspect there will be a lot of denial flying around. My grandmother, when confronted with the reality of "partial birth" abortions, flatly refused to believe it, because she had voted for Democrats her whole life.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | March 25, 2014 9:10 AM
Of course, there's also the scourge of youth unemployment to think about, so maybe we just have bigger fish to fry.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | March 25, 2014 9:13 AM
Mollie Hemingway did a short piece on this for The Federalist. If you check out the comments, you will find some commentators showing no horror at all and talking about how this sort of thing is only sensible.
Posted by Mr. Fosi | March 25, 2014 1:35 PM
If the unrepentently insane won't recognize the evil in slaughtering a fetus for the sake of their own convenience, why, then, would they be horrified by the further abomination of incinerating the aborted fetus for they're own comfort?
Posted by Lauran | March 26, 2014 12:45 PM
Corrected:
If the unrepentently insane won't recognize the evil in slaughtering a fetus for the sake of their own convenience, why, then, would they be horrified by the further abomination of incinerating the aborted fetus for their own comfort?
Posted by Lauran | March 26, 2014 12:46 PM
It's kind of like Clinton's wanting abortion safe, legal, and rare. It always was illogical. They never really did want it to be rare in the normal sense, only that it be no more used than required to achieve all the good that they intend by it, THAT kind of rare. But of course, even that was illogical once the rhetoric machines and the no-holds-barred legal regime were in place. No, then eventually it had to become a good thing, a celebrated thing, an absolute right and a core plank of the liberal mindset. Scratch a really committed feminist, and you will find underneath someone who really doesn't mind the notion of treating "that tissue" as offal or for incineration.
Posted by Tony | March 26, 2014 8:36 PM
Right, Tony. Soon enough, we are bound to hear that, "While I remain personally opposed to the use of aborted babies as heating fuel..."
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | March 26, 2014 9:05 PM
I thought this quotation from a recent John C. Wright rant was apropos here. Wright, for all that he is wordy, attains almost Chestertonian heights at times:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/the-unified-field-theory-of-madness/#more-10183
Posted by Lydia | March 26, 2014 10:01 PM