My Socks Don't Fit

Of all the definitions I’ve read or heard of that most elusive of words, the one that comes closest to capturing love’s essence is simply this: love is the movement out of narcissism. The true opposite of love is not hate but egocentrism, for hate can often be rechanneled back into love, but egocentrism prevents us from ever moving out of ourselves toward the other. Love is extinguished more quickly by apathy and indifference than it is by either jealousy or wrath. To be healthy, love must be like the Jordan River, a living, flowing conduit linking one sea to the next. When it ceases to flow outward, when it narcissistically holds within itself that which flows into it, then it becomes as stagnant and barren as the Dead Sea.

No, they aren’t right about the Gosnell story. If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.

The same media that gives daily attention to trivialities in slow news cycles does not find the mass-murder of live-born babies to be newsworthy. How can this be? How could they possibly pass up this story? Could it possibly be that they understand the implications of this story? Perhaps if the American public sees reports on the killing of live-born babies, they might conclude that there really isn’t any real moral difference between the live-born babies and the unborn ones. Perhaps the public might recognize the moral insanity of suggesting that a baby in the birth canal is killable while that same baby outside the birth canal is not.

Here’s the bottom line. What happened in Gosnell’s clinic exposes not just his crimes. It also underlines the moral bankruptcy of pro-choice arguments that routinely and callously disregard the humanity of the unborn. The entire pro-choice position requires persons to ignore the personhood of unborn persons who die daily in those clinics. That reality cannot bear the light of day, and that is why Gosnell and every other perpetrator like him are enjoying a media blackout.

There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.

Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, “But it’s still alive!”

To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.