THIS business of the foetus's eyes being used as a tissue source in Sweden has been troubling me greatly. Many aspects are worrying. Firstly, the lack of prominence which the story achieved. Only one newspaper seems to have carried it - this one, in a single paragraph on January 9th, in its country edition, but not in the city. In other words, the eyeballs of foetuses being used as cell reservoirs for geriatrics is not - apparently - regarded as being of major importance these days.
It would have been not long ago, and have been regarded as a barbarity. Now, it goes by unremarked: the intellectual values of abortion culture have entered a society like Ireland even though we outlaw abortion and - in law anyway - quite wickedly compel a woman with ovarian cancer to carry her child to full term.
More to the point, abortion culture and its political progenitor, "the woman's right to choose" have so thoroughly colonised journalism and European liberal culture that eyebrows are not even raised when an agency story lands on newsdesks telling us how in Sweden the eyeballs of aborted foetuses are being plundered for useful eye tissue for the old. And anybody who expresses unhappiness about this can expect to be labelled sexist and reactionary.
Just because the majority of people in America and Europe think something is right does not mean it is right. No doubt popular will in the 15th century was in favour of burning witches. Hitler came to power by democratic means on a platform of anti semitic promises. The popularity of a policy is no mark of its virtue; it might only be a measure of how great is the gap between civilised standards and society's actual ambitions. How long is it since pregnant girls were shown the door to ruin and prostitution by decent, civilised, God fearing Catholic Ireland?
Eyeball Tissue
On the issue of foetal eyeball tissue, no doubt if you are "prochoice", you will regard it as simply unintellectual and emotive. But it is not. It is deeply rational, though our responses might and should be emotional. Only a rational person could contemplate in clinical detail what happens to a foetus. Only a rational person could worry about the cellular destiny of useful fragments of discarded foetus. Only a rational person can debate the morality of such experiments.
Abortionists will object to this because the matter is painful to contemplate, and abortionists prefer pain free thought. (In that business, wouldn't you?) But consider - how is this tissue taken from foetuses? Is it scraped from the eyeball of a still living foetus? And you who are "pro choice" - are you content that this is so? Are you unmoved at the thought of a doctor inserting steel cell removers into a living foetal eye socket? Or is the little foetus anaesthetised? And if it is, why? Exactly what are you anaethetising?
Abortion does not exist as a single, simple, woman's choice issue. It goes far deeper than that. It is a valiant but historically doomed attempt to arrange by surgery what nature did not itself create - an equality between the sexes. Because men cannot get pregnant, and women can, the political medical culture of the Western world, unable to create male pregnancy, opts in stead for unconditional female infertility on demand, regardless of other considerations.
Equality Heresy
The equality heresy, the notion that men and women are interchangeable species, able to do virtually identical tasks with identical skill, is the great heresy of our age. That this is demonstratively garbage does not mean these mad experiments do not continue, as shown most recently by Lieut. Alice Miller who won a two year battle before the Israeli Supreme Court for admission to the Israeli air force fighter school. She was the hero figure of the sexual equality activists in Israel. And having won her courtcase, she then failed her exams and will not now be trained as a fighter pilot.
Is this such a shame? Do we want women trained in the abominable skills of killing people? Do we really? It was tried before, by the Israelis and by the Soviet Union: both abandoned their experiments. The truth is that so few woman possess the dedication for combat and an enthusiasm for murder - which is ultimately what soldiering comes down to - that they make poor soldiers.
Is this bad? No, it is not. But the equality lobby had decreed equality as the sine qua non political virtue of the age; and after this heresy, we all scamper, calling firemen firefighters and disregarding the evidence of our eyes and the accumulated wisdom of humanity over the ages. Within this heresy, not merely must abortion be right, but is proved to be right by playing fast and loose with the contents of the womb, as if we were dealing with the entrails of a white rat. We are not.
No Real Debate
Yet there was not even real debate on the issue. Even to say "A woman's right to choose" absurdly simplifies the impossibly complex truths about biology, about life within the womb, about bodily destiny and, most of all, about what you actually are.
The discussion never took place in Ireland because the anti lobby was led by the lunatic right and the Fine Lads In Purple (FLIP); many who might have joined in were disinclined to follow FLIP, and events have shown that we were right. But our silence was not.
Elsewhere, feminism and "pro choice" what an absurd, tendentious political title that is, as if we could really choose whatever we want in this life - conquered the liberal garrisons on Day One. There has been no worthwhile discussion since. The result is a political culture in which women officially have the status of pseudomen, with male skills, male aptitudes, male desires.
This is a fiction, the silliest fantasy of our age: but the political endeavours of the entire Western world have been towards the realisation of that fantasy. One day the world will laugh at such follies and stand appalled at the abortion industry: but that day, alas, is long away.
