This is a copy of my submission against the Abortion Legislation Bill.
As I write this, it has just been revealed that the remains of 2,246 aborted babies were found in the home of an Indiana abortionist. It's estimated that he killed over fifty thousand babies in his career. Stories like that are not entirely uncommon from a country that has had unrestricted abortion for decades. It eerily matches up with ancient archaeological digs that show Roman sewers clogged with the little bones of aborted babies flushed down drains and mass graves in ancient Near East from babies ritually sacrificed to Molech.
"If it's a boy, let him live; if it is a girl, leave her to die." So read the letter of a first century Roman soldier to his pregnant wife. Abortion and infanticide were common in the ancient world. All this changed with the advent of Christianity in the West and abortion slowly disappeared. Despite this, "it's a girl" are still said to be the three deadliest words in the world today, with an estimated 200 million women demographically missing. There's a reason this bill doesn't forbid sex-selective abortions: that would be a violation of multiculturalism.
The Debate That's Not About The Bill
While I listened to the parliamentary debate on the abortion bill, one thing stuck out to me more than anything else: the amount of debate about what was being debated.
I could spend pages detailing the problems with the bill, but that is something many other submissions against this will do. Like the example of gendercide above, the flaws are all there by design.
Numerous MPs have shown some contempt for citizens emailing them about this bill. One National MP uploaded a gif of him bulk deleting all emails related to abortion, a Labour MP showed exasperation at the number of emails she received, and a former Green MP suggested that opposition to abortion was akin to trolling and mail should be redirected to the junk folder.
Why am I submitting against this bill? The votes have been counted. This is perhaps most pointedly illustrated by a truncated select committee process with only six weeks given for public consultation. I write instead to examine the undertones of this bill and abortion in general.
I used to wonder why people make so many irrational pro-abortion arguments that are demonstrably false, until I began to appreciate that which was hidden beneath.
There is a powerful symbolism threaded through the history of abortion and I'd like to illustrate two of these symbols.
The first is that of ownership and the second is that of sacrifice. To defeat abortion, we must understand these spiritual undertones.
You can see this in those who view the baby as a parasitic being, much in the same way the postmodern ideology views humanity itself as a destructive parasite in opposition to "mother earth". The encompassing symbolic nature of all pro-abortion arguments is inescapable.
Symbolism of Ownership in Abortion
In modern terms, the claim to ownership manifests itself in the slogans "right to choose" and "my body, my choice". The letter from the Roman soldier I quoted in my introduction gives us a window into the past. In all pre-Christian societies, parents had an absolute right over their children. Only freeborn men (and depending on their status, women) had rights and protections under the law. Children, slaves, cattle—it was all pretty much the same.
When you hear a woman say "my body, my choice" she's not talking about her own body. She may be ignorant of the symbolism or fully comprehend the claim she's making, but like our Roman soldier, her warcry is claiming absolute right of ownership over her unborn offspring.
After all, to claim that I could withhold the life-sustaining fruits of my labour from my children would be absurd, in a Christian cultural context at least. To say that I could throw them out of my home and leave their corpses in the trash would be anathema to most. If I wanted to be rid of them, I'd have to wait until someone else could care for them, even if it took nine months for another home to be available.
Many will point to scientific evidences against abortion: life begins at conception, the unborn baby is fully human and has his/her own unique DNA from the first day. Yet without the force of Christianity, we are back at the Roman concept of freeborn citizens, this time called personhood. Personhood is bestowed upon you by the state. It is taken from you by the state. You have no inherent worth, no inherent right to life. Many abortionists will admit they're killing babies, it's rather hard to deny: fetus is Latin for baby. Why is it wrong though? It's legal and their victims have not attained state-sponsored personhood.
Dehumanisation is a necessity in this genocide. One of the things this new bill does is to proliferate the occurrence of "fetus", and in many cases erase references to "unborn child".
They're saying the same thing in a dead language, but their ignorance allows them to feel good about it.
Like with slavery, through the unending work of great men and women, public perception eventually changes. Even today, slavery is still prolific on global scale, it's just that civilised nations have long expunged it where they can. Those who say that abortion can never be stopped are right, as slavery can never be stopped either. That's not an argument against the prohibition of either.
The absolute right to ownership of children didn't die with the Romans. It struck me when reading John Locke's First Treatise of Government (1690) that he spends a lot of time refuting arguments that parents don't own their children. The claim to human ownership hasn't been purely limited to parents over their children or slave-owners over slaves, but also to the scientific community over the general populace and the state over its citizens.
In the 20th Century, Darwinism led to widespread eugenics programmes in America and Germany that led to hundreds of thousands of sterilizations, lobotomies, abortions, and open genocide. To this day, in some states half of American blacks are killed before birth. The targeting of the disabled is also rife, with countries like Iceland "curing" Down's Syndrome by killing them all before birth.
Symbolism of Sacrifice in Abortion
This is where we come to our second symbol: that of sacrifice. This has less to do with the legal and social framework in which abortion is justified (who owns the unborn) and more to do with the personal justification. You remember the graveyards I described earlier. The victims were newborn babies sacrificed to the false god Molech. Why was this done? Young women could enter the service of the temple for engaging in fertility rites, they were basically prostitutes until they got pregnant. Afterwards, the child would be returned to his/her "father" Molech via burning. It was the path to a better life for these women. A sacrifice of infinite value in return for promised future blessings. It were not just temple prostitutes who engaged in the practise though, even Judean kings are recorded to have "made their children pass through the fire". The valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem is the site of one of these mass graves where parents burned their children in a devil's bargain.
This translates into the present, where abortion is generally justified as it allows women to further their education, career, social status, or relationships. There is of course plenty of room for the woman's friends and the child's father or grandparents to join in with faith—or coercion—that the promised blessings for the mother will materialise in return for the sacrifice of her offspring. A living sacrifice to alter the path of life, on a sterile altar, with priests draped in white or blue. In some instances the baby's parts are taken as trophies or sold for research, but it's more common that their bodies burned to heat buildings, cementing the symbolic parallels.
Plenty of these women are victims too, much like their fore-bearers were victims of a vile priesthood and social structure that drove them to the temples of Moloch. How little has changed. Abortion is good for men, it always has been.
There's also the element of adding medical language and treating abortion like a treatment for a disease, perhaps much like Latinate lingo is favoured during some religious ceremonies to make it sound more sacred.
There is, of course, no mention of religion in this procedure. It is a ritual truly adapted for the modern era: the religious replaced with the scientific. Modern abortion is infanticide that takes advanced medical knowledge, but the end result is identical to its ancient precurors.
The stigma of this mode of worship must be removed, and that's where this bill comes in.
It's touted as a modernisation, but it is the least modern thing that parliament can implement. Abortion is a return to paganism and human sacrifice. The person having the abortion is making a bargain that their future self will be better off with the termination of the baby's life.
This brings me to the "safe zones" proscribed in the bill. I can't help but be reminded of a "holy place" around a temple altar that may only be approached by those who are participating in the sacrifice. We see that even MPs who harp on about freedom of speech and expression in public are quick to support this bill, even with the protest prohibitions included. They will vote for these "holy zones" because they serve a higher purpose.
Call to Culture War
We are in a culture war, but is this bill a manifestation of the ascendant culture or the desperate overreach of one losing its grip? Time will tell.
What will come out of this is a much stronger pro-life and abolitionist movement. The current law seems to garner some sympathy that this new one won't. Many of those who support the current law will change to "I oppose the current law" once the new bill is passed. That shifts a large number of people towards the pro-life camp and will make them more receptive to genuinely becoming pro-life.
The "safe zones" will also bolster the pro-life cause. I've never protested outside an abortion clinic, but after this I might just start. If this bill passes you may very well be able to go to prison for standing quietly and holding a sign in a public place. That's the kind of civil disobedience I would be open to.
There is hope, for example, in Russia during the height of Communism, over 70% of babies were murdered in the womb. With the revival of Christianity in the post-Communist bloc, that number has been cut down to 30% and is still dropping. In the USA, nearly 90% of counties are abortion-free and states are moving to restrict abortion as much as possible—without Roe v Wade, abortion would likely be completely illegal in most of the USA. The bulk of abortions take place in the left-leaning urban areas.
New Zealand's abortion numbers have been dropping too, but there is a risk that this bill could see those numbers incrase. If there is no spike in abortions, then in an absolute sense this bill will do no harm, but tragically we're more likely to see at least a small increase due to increased ease of accessibility. Change will come through the culture though, and it's up to us to drive those numbers down. The tide can be turned back.
It's no surprise that younger generations are becoming much more pro-life than their parents, since pro-life and pro-natal go together. The postmodernist proponents of abortion aren't having as many kids, and so they have inevitably created the means of their own undoing.
This blatant disregard for life is rife in our legal system, which gives only 4 years in jail to those who do illegally murder born babies. The state does everything it can do to protect the lives of mass murderers such as the Christchurch terrorist while at the same time expanding their own genocidal abortion regime.
To thematically bastardise a Stalin quote, 51 deaths are a tragedy, but 13,137 deaths are a statistic.