Recommended by Fr. Pisut
Going Back on Abortion
February 21, 2013 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker
Driving down the pike this morning I pulled up behind a little blue two seater with a bumper sticker that said, “Keep Choice – No Going Back – Keep Roe”
Here in Greenville, South Carolina one doesn’t see too many pro-abortion bumper stickers, so it made me stop and think, and as I stopped to think it became clear that the driver of the blue car had stopped thinking.
Somehow or other she had got the idea that abortion was a step forward and not having abortion was a step back. There at the stop light I saw the light and it made me stop. Here was an example of what we call “progressivism”–that heresy that is a subset of “historicism”.
Historicism is the idea that the human choices and events of the past (and present) are conditioned merely by the time period they are in, and that they are otherwise neutral. In Roman times they had slavery. So what. That’s what they did then. Now we do not because now we don’t think that’s very nice. For historicism there is no over arching meaning or purpose to history. Events just happen due to a random sequence of what happens. That’s it.
Progressivism is a strange and contradictory subset of Historicism. The progressivist, on the one hand, believes that history is random because at heart he believe in historicism (even if he is unaware of it) and yet the progressivist also believes that what is new and now is intrinsically better than what was old and then. The progressivist (despite all evidence to the contrary) truly believes that humanity is getting better all the time, and that we must be better than people from the olden times simply because we live at a later date than they did.
The advance of technology has helped to make the progressivist lie very persuasive. We must be better! We have iPhones, WiFi, Google and restaurants with thirty seven flavors of milkshake!
So the girl in the blue sports car imagines that the choice to have an abortion is an advance and having to give birth to a child once pregnant is a retreat to a more primitive time. The reality is exactly the opposite, but to understand how, one must have a broader understanding of history than that usually understood by twenty somethings who drive blue sports cars.
Is abortion an advance and giving birth a retreat?
For the rest of the article click here: Standing on my Head
