Stop the Killing. Stop the Crying.

Trang Bang, South Vietnam, 8 June 1972

Robert Stacy McCain

Did I ever mention that I can’t stand to hear children cry? It’s rather odd, considering I’m a father of six, that I can’t stand the sound of a crying child. When my kids were babies, I’d take them for long walks, rocking them in my arms until they fell asleep, rather than hear them cry.

As they got older — and this was especially true with the twin boys, who would beat each other up for fun — my trick for dealing with this problem was to strike a pose of callous indifference to their pain: “Is it bleeding? Are there any broken bones? No? Then shut up or go to your room.”

The thought of my children actually being injured horrifies me, and seeing them suffer the inevitable dings and bruises of childhood — the stumble on the playground, the cut or scrape — was so traumatic that I can’t actually recall any specific incident. Evidently, I’ve blocked these psychic wounds from memory. And the fact that one of my sons is now a 20-year-old Army private in training to become a front-line warrior involves risks I prefer not to think about. 

Ever.

All this is as a preamble to quoting Megan McArdle’s reflection on her admitted role in the media’s Gosnell blackout:

[T]he MSM has barely covered a story that could plausibly be named “The Trial of the Century”. And that demands explanation. So I’ll tell you why I haven’t covered it.
To start, it makes me ill. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle.
But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by “our side.”
Of course, I’m not saying that I identify with criminal abortionists who kill infants and grievously wound their patients. But I am pro-choice.
What Gosnell did was not some inevitable result of legal abortion.

Except that it is, just as legal abortion is the inevitable result of the Contraceptive Culture, which was sanctioned by the “penumbras, formed by emanations” that Justice Douglas miraculously discovered in 1965, and if you are “someone who cringes when [you] hear a description of a sprained ankle,” you really ought to think about why these results are inevitable, including The Law of Large Numbers.

Having spent many years thinking this through, and unwilling to deliver a sermon on the topic, I am content to let others think through it for themselves, if only I could get them to pay attention to what is actually happening — “What ‘Choice’ Really Means” — and trace these horrors back to their philosophical and historical origins.

It’s like the Soviet Union: Socialists had dreamed for decades about the utopia that would be ushered in by the overthrow of industrial capitalism and, when the Bolsheviks seized power, many of these idealists insisted that the brutality and misery that resulted were incidental or accidental or, at any rate, not inherent to the Marxist-Leninist project itself. It took many decades and many millions of lives lost before some in the intelligentsia of the West recognized the hopeless folly of the revolutionary ideal. Strange to say, there are still historians determined to re-write the past in an effort to redeem the totalitarian nightmare.

So also with “choice”: Long before the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, there were those who dreamed of a sexual utopia where the risk of pregnancy could be removed as a disincentive to commitment-free promiscuity.

This dream was then conveniently dressed up in the rhetoric of “rights,” so that anyone who criticized promiscuity could be depicted as an opponent of freedom, and even the most ancient of legal and social traditions that stood in the way of the revolution could be trampled down as hindrances to Progress. Sophists who deliberately misinterpreted the American Founding were eager to assist in this effort, so that All Men Are Created Equal and the More Perfect Union could be made to seem as if they mandated the judicial imposition of a new social order the Founders most certainly never envisioned.

Utopian dreams have an ironic way of becoming nightmares, don’t they?

Now we look back over the course of four decades that have seen the sanctioned slaughter of tens of millions of humans, and with the knowledge gained from direct experience — like the refugees who fled the Marxist nightmares of the past — are we not yet capable of saying that the Sexual Revolution was an error based on a false ideology?

Isn’t the trial of Kermit Gosnell a moment like when Kruschev confessed and condemned the crimes of Stalin, which many in the West had denied or minimized? Isn’t the blood-chilling testimony of what went on in Gosnell’s clinic like the scenes of desperate “boat people” fleeing Vietnam after 1975, or the horrors of Cambodia’s “killing fields”?

Megan McArdle is shocked by these tales from Philadelphia. Might she now notice the death of Jennifer Morbelli?

Yet I said I would not preach a sermon, and I’ve written more than 800 words, but again I ask: What does “choice” really mean?

“. . . it was like screeching, making this noise . . .”

Any loving father would rock that crying baby in his arms, because he could not stand to hear his children cry.

And just think what that loving Father might say to anyone who excused as “choice” this ghastly slaughter of His children.