A Possible Answer to a Long-Time Puzzle.

Adult children hating real children.

With the leaking of the Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson, which apparently overturns Roe v. Wade and its arbitrary and preposterous Looking-Glass logic–decision first, argument afterward–abortion advocates have become positively unhinged. This however is only the latest development in a movement whose initial attitude on the subject was the superficially reasonable: abortion should be an option only to save the life of the mother, descending later to the Clintonian: safe, legal and rare and finally devolving to advocates screaming: we don’t need any damn reason at all to abort, to term and beyond.

This extreme attitude as been around for some time, as witness the repeated proclamation to her charges by the Rev’d [sic] Katharine Hancock Ragsdale, President of the mercifully defunct Episcopal Divinity School.

Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is . . . ad nauseum.

The charming admonition was delivered way back in 2007, so extremism has been with us for some time. What has changed is the degree of vehemence and rage of abortion advocates, to the point now where it seems for many, if not most of them, to be the overriding concern of their sad empty lives.

This vehemence and rage, especially the rage, has puzzled your correspondent for years, until now. Reading for an upcoming symposium, your Tatler came across a passage from a superb essay by physician, scientist and educator, Leon R. Kass. Published over 20 years ago in First Things, the title being L’Chaim and its Limits: Why Not Immortality?, it provides a possible explanation for the extraordinary anger of pro-abortionists.

Biological considerations aside, simply to covet a prolonged life span for ourselves is both a sign and a cause of our failure to open ourselves to procreation and to any higher purpose. It is probably no accident that it is a generation whose intelligentsia proclaim the death of God and the meaninglessness of life that embarks on life’s indefinite prolongation and that seeks to cure the emptiness of life by extending it forever (Emphasis added). For the desire to prolong youthfulness is not only a childish desire to eat one’s life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity. It seeks an endless present, isolated from anything truly eternal, and severed from any true continuity with past and future. It is in principle hostile to children, because children, those who come after, are those who will take one’s place; they are life’s answer to mortality, and their presence in one’s house is a constant reminder that one no longer belongs to the frontier generation. One cannot pursue agelessness for oneself and remain faithful to the spirit and meaning of perpetuation.

If Kass’s cogent argument holds true, then the reason for these angry, destructive and childish baby haters’ behavior (see photo above) could be their rejection of God and the afterlife. Manifest in them, as Kass writes, is “not only a childish desire to eat one’s life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.” Those childish desires are found not only in young indoctrinated college students, but also in superannuated children, amplifying as age and mortality encroach. Thus we have the doddering Nancy Pelosi, whose views on abortion have become increasingly strident as death becomes an ever-closer and unwelcome neighbor.

The desire to live forever (what a ghastly prospect!) causes these twisted souls to regard new life, children in and out of the womb, as evil competitors that must be destroyed, lest they grow up (most of them, anyway) and render their haters irrelevant or worse.