The right to choose and the chosen people

From the amount of money now spent on children it would be easy to assume that they are the most wanted and cherished children in Western history; and yet we are money-rich but time-poor, because with both parents in paid employment, much spending is for the sake of convenience and to compensate for their long absences at work; this fact has been recognised in government drives to ‘get mothers into work’ as the key to saving the economy.¹ Even more is spent on compensating children for family break-up as a result of such pressures. Sadly, mental health surveys suggest that we have merely succeeded in replacing material poverty with emotional poverty.²

Paradoxically, material wealth, rather than making it easier to have children, tends to work the other way by setting the bar for the perfect childhood so high that many young couples could be forgiven for thinking that they would be better off spending their money on a luxurious house, a fast car, expensive hobbies and foreign travel; indeed, scare stories about the economic cost of children ³ could be seen as functioning as the perfect male contraceptive. There appears to be a trend towards one-child families – far from deploring the brutal Chinese one-child family policy, some have advocated that we follow it, ⁴ regardless of the effects on the ‘little emperors’. As in China, the small family system tends to acquire its own momentum as people receive less training in childrearing from the best teachers – children ⁵ – and fear that the number of problems will multiply with the number of children. From every viewpoint, having one child is better than having none, but a large family offers children opportunities for individual development that cannot be replicated by the school peer group.⁶

The Malthusian small-family system is not only more expensive,⁷ it provides less training for parents; it does, however, boost the income of childcare ‘experts’ whose main qualification appears to be boundless self-belief. The disastrous outcomes of their pet theories can be blamed on the parents, who are scared of applying discipline in case their children grow up to hate them; meanwhile children, deprived of boundaries and rendered irrational by continual reasoning, become ‘freedom’s orphans’, potentially providing more casualties of the Sexual Revolution.⁸

Campaigns against parental discipline are justified by child welfare concerns, suggesting that our society is ‘child-centred’, but the destruction of the traditional, secure childhood by undermining the authority of parents is favoured by left-wing progressives who, under Freudian influences, seem intent on planning their own lives backwards through the lives of future generations. The ‘negative influences’ they aim to avoid include traditional parents, responsible, apparently, for the ‘repression’ of the child simply by administering the discipline that is blamed for causing countless psychological traumas.⁹ Most people will continue to want children – instinct is stronger than progressives may think – but delayed childbearing produces its own evils, not least because having children prompts us to protect them from the adult-centred material and preoccupations that threaten to overwhelm them. We now see a widening gap between the very poor, who struggle to parent their children, and the highly educated, better-off woman who feels she cannot afford to have children until middle age, and who may increasingly feel resentful of the ‘welfare mother’ whom, she believes, she is subsidising out of her taxes. Society’s solution is not to restore respect to mothers, enabling them to fulfil their protective function, but to offer young women the option of freezing their eggs until they are (financially) ready to choose children.¹⁰

As for the children who are chosen to enter the club of the living, but are socially orphaned by parental work schedules, they are largely protected from negative outcomes by their ‘repressive’ middle-class parents; the outcomes are not usually fatal, although the same cannot be said of those less fortunately placed.¹¹ And it is the less fortunate that suffer from progressive-influenced interference in their lives when progressive childrearing breaks down.¹² As with most Utopias, the progressive’s benign vision tends to the Dystopian, or rather ‘I-topian’, with every tiny detail revolving around the progressive’s own preoccupations and grievances. Hostile to capitalism, it is supportive of Big State interference in some activities – eating, smoking, alcohol and motoring – but not to illegal drugs, obscenity and prostitution, taking a ‘pragmatic’ approach on the plea that ‘legalism’ does not work. Suspicious of ‘organised’ religion and antagonistic to competition, the progressive worldview all too easily melds with materialistic Marxism, atheistic humanism and eugenics population control, because abolishing self-control inevitably leads to the state imposing control.¹³

To post-Christian generations of ‘wanted’ children seeking a Christ-less Christianity, however, progressive ideas sound eminently attractive and reasonable, despite built-in contradictions like opposing the mild discipline of children while supporting the extreme and deadly violence of abortion. Admittedly, progressives believe that explicit, ‘comprehensive’ sex education will reduce the numbers of abortion, but when promiscuity produces an even bigger problem, advocates refuse to abandon the idea, and instead seek to eliminate attempts to promote chastity.¹⁴ In the history of positive-sounding ideas, Marie Stopes’s ‘every child a wanted child’ must reign pre-eminent. Coined to promote her negative campaign for birth control, it was rather more positive than the campaign’s original name, ‘The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progess’, whose slogan was ‘more from the fit, fewer from the unfit’.¹⁵

The fact that Stopes had only one surviving child¹⁶ would seem to confirm her own ‘unfitness’; but in the matter of modern heroines, it is best to accentuate the positive, and Stopes has been lauded for her role in making contraception acceptable.¹⁷ But Stopes was an admirer of Hitler,¹⁸ who promoted contraception for similar reasons.¹⁹ Hitler and his henchman Josef Goebbels were also first-class propagandists, boldly spreading lies as truth while condemning their critics as liars.²⁰ Stopes provided a virtuous-sounding, but ultimately untruthful rationale for preventing children from coming into the world, although abortion, which she privately favoured, is now considered indispensable for ‘taking care’ of birth control’s mistakes.²¹ Ironically, the poor looked down on the rich for being selfish and indeed ‘unfit’ for restricting their families and sending their children away to school; but thanks to Stopes, those who preferred to acquire numerous material possessions instead of children could console themselves by feeling superior to the ‘ignorant masses’ with their large broods of children, clearly ‘unwanted’ because unplanned.²²

Thanks also to Stopes et al, Dickens’s Malthusian family the ‘Smallweeds’ would no longer be laughed at for its dreary utilitarianism, but would be seen as the epitome of respectability.²³ And while Malthus’s gloomy philosophy influenced the desire to interfere with and control family size, it also justified lack of interference in economic matters, providing “an attractive rationalization for the imperfections of a laisser-faire economy”;²⁴ under the Malthusian philosophy, the Irish Famine was blamed on the fact that there were too many poor people.²⁵ Over a century later, the same ‘logic’ shaped responses to an AIDs-ravaged Africa, where too many births, rather than too many deaths, was seen to be the greatest threat;²⁶ our foreign policy of exporting contraception and abortion to the developing world is justified by concerns for health and female equality, but the implication is the same.²⁷ A century ago, Malthus’s simplistic remedy for poverty was explicated in Robert Tressell’s classic socialist parableThe Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: ‘“The greatest cause of poverty is hover-population,’ remarked Harlow. ‘Yes,’ said old Joe Philpot. ‘If a boss wants two men, 20 goes after the job: there’s too many people and not enough work.’ ‘Overpopulation!’ cried Owen, ‘when there’s thousands of acres of uncultivated land in England without a house or human being to be seen. … Four millions of people in Ireland have been exterminated by famine or got rid of by emigration, but they haven’t got rid of poverty’.”²⁸

While Darwinian population controllers claimed that primitive peoples resorted to infanticide, thus demonstrating the need for contraception – the more ‘evolved’ way to control fertility²⁹ – the more ‘compassionate’ view was that a child’s death was a blessing to overburdened parents. Birth control campaigners were fond of inventing stories about slum dwellers and unwanted ‘bybies’, propagating the lie that to them was a truism: ‘“Another byby? Well, I think I’ll clear out. There ain’t a bit of peace and quiet in this ‘ouse wot with one kid or another always yellin’. Wot we want ‘ere is more vittles an’ less kids.”’³⁰

To the question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ even the innocent taking refuge in silence may be seen as guilty, but progressive slogans and catchwords – ‘family planning’, ‘every child unbeatable’, ‘humanist’ – demand assent, since it is difficult to disagree without implying that families should be unplanned and children should be beaten; that we should not prioritise human needs and that children should be unwanted. We cannot, however, plan children or prevent them from being unwanted; we can only prevent children – or, failing that, treat the ‘unwanted’ child in the womb like unwanted hair, unwanted weeds, unwanted pests – by elimination.³¹

The ‘wanted child’ idea sets so high a standard for childrearing that any less-than-ideal set of circumstances can justify abortion. And although many people are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, the crux of the matter is ‘wantedness’; it makes all the difference between killing an unwanted child in the womb or striving to keep alive a prematurely born child of the same gestation, even although our abortion time limit, now set at 24 weeks, is being regularly challenged by reality.³² Disability is automatically equated with ‘unwantedness’, justifying abortion up to birth, although it is principally the State that does not want to underwrite the cost of caring for a disabled person.³³ In the case of eugenics abortion the final decision is left to parents, but if ‘wantedness’ is to be our criterion, what about the elderly, the lonely, the depressed? What of tramps, gypsies, slum dwellers, street children, drug addicts, alcoholics, murderers? We are all ‘unwanted’ by someone, but this points to a failure of society as a whole; it should not be an excuse for killing, but although many more people would want to adopt an ‘unwanted’ baby than would want to adopt a tramp or an alcoholic, thanks to abortion, their chances of doing so are slim.³⁴

Paradoxically for an age that kills its young in the cause of freedom, equality and health – even in the cause of improving children’s health³⁵ – we are said to live in a ‘youth culture’; but it is more like a rose-tinted celebration of how we think young people ought to feel – enjoying all the freedoms that progressives have won for them; rebelling against tradition without feeling guilt or even responsibility. The ‘youth generation’ really began in Stopes’s era, with the ‘bright young things’ of the Roaring Twenties, but thanks to Margaret Sanger’s development of the Pill, it became a reality in the rebellious 1960s. When the rebels had children of their own, however, they had to deal with the fallout from freedom, therefore our ‘youth culture’ inflicts as many adult issues as possible on children, hoping that they will spring into adulthood fully equipped to deal with those issues; unsurprisingly, an increasing numbers of teenagers suffer instead from depression.³⁶ Modern ‘comprehensive’ sex education, with its emphasis on ‘condoms and consent’, but promoting abortion just in case, has led not only to neurological malfunction in the young, as a ‘hook-up culture’ has become the new normal,³⁷ but to cognitive dissonance as children are encouraged to see children as mistakes – annoying obstacles to a free sex life, to be tidied away with little inconvenience and no regret. Rather aptly, one ‘advisory’ agency for young people advertises the ‘morning after pill’ as being available at hosptial Accident and Emergency departments.³⁸

In times when childhood mortality was high, with disease, hunger and war constant threats, young people longed to ‘grow up’; now, we seem intent on ensuring that they do not grow up emotionally or spiritually, but regress to toddlerhood, kicking against the realities of life, and avoiding its responsibilities. No wonder the teenage years are increasingly beset by insecurity and anxiety, the responsbilities of adulthood deferred, sometimes indefinitely; and as the young, increasingly deprived of meaning, become increasingly miserable, we increasingly seek vicarious rebellion against grown-up conformity in their imagined discontents.

As to the elderly, instead of the West celebrating longer life-spans, we hear warnings about the ‘ageing population’, beset by a lifeboat mentality that sees other people’s survival as jeopardising our own.³⁹ According to this Malthusian humanist mindset, people must not be fruitful and multiply;⁴⁰ the world must not be filled but emptied of other people because resources are finite. Like Malthus, who saw the poor as hangers-on at the banquet rather than producers,⁴¹ the lifeboat mentality sees the world as already overflowing; and the more hangers-on there are, the less there will be for the ‘chosen’.⁴²

The Malthusian mindset re-emerged after the Second World War when the Labour government appointed C. P. Blacker, Eugenics Society Honorary Secretary, as the Ministry of Health’s official delegate to the 1948 Cheltenham population conference. From this gathering emerged the International Planned Parenthood Federation, founded by Blacker with Margaret Sanger;⁴³ but dealing with ‘overpopulation’ was not the intention behind the conference, which was called in response to the most prevalent fear of the 1930s – under population.⁴⁴ Crucially, in the interim, the end of Empire and the Atom bomb transformed not only foreign relations but domestic politics: the neo-Colonialism of population control would be applied not only to the newly independent African nations, but to the domestic poor once required to police the world;⁴⁵ no longer would an expanding population be seen as necessary for defence purposes.⁴⁶ But the younger generation, including many of the working classes, had absorbed the ‘wanted child’ orthodoxy and become ‘reprod-snobs’, associating large families with poverty and squalor;⁴⁷ such attitudes, combined with the low birth rates of the 1930s, contributed to another ‘birth dip’ in the early 1950s.⁴⁸

Our Malthusian world no longer puts its trust in God – no longer sees every child as a gift, but as a drain on resources, public and private – a sign not of hope but anxiety. It is assumed that any poor person who does not use contraception must produce unwanted children;⁴⁹ any poor person who produces numerous children must be mentally ill, since they are going against their own self interest – in common parlance, they must be ‘crazy’.⁵⁰ In Western culture children can be planned and ordered like items purchased through Amazon, and returned if imperfect or unwanted. At least, that is the idea, although for most people the reality, as with all progressive ideas, is far different.⁵¹

But it is not crazy for people – even poor people – to want children – to appreciate them for their intrinsic worth, as well as the future security they offer; rather, those who seek to fill their lives with dead material objects show irrationality, not least in believing that children can be planned. Although not everyone would articulate such views, few would dare to voice opposition to what has become received opinion; and since the vast majority of us came into being under the Stopes imperative, this is the only opinion we are likely to meet. Stopes, a “possessive and jealous mother”,⁵² was made to feel inferior to the family pet,⁵³ and rather than decrying the false belief system that ranks animals above children, we have internalised it; rather than admitting the unpleasant truth that the unconditional love we advocate has been jettisoned in favour of individual choice, we make the best of a bad job, reflecting the belief that because we were ‘planned’ we were chosen.

Thus we have become the ‘chosen people’ – not chosen of God, but under our own highly irrational ‘rational’ philosophy. We are the ‘elect’, proud of being chosen in preference to other, unwanted biological specimens – not by a Darwinian Mother Nature but by parents who prioritised our welfare by restricting the number of our playmates in order to give us more material things. G. K. Chesterton noted that the English were not immune to the idea of chosenness – the Puritans had seen victory against the Spanish Armada as a sign of their “election.”⁵⁴ No longer in the age of Puritanism or Victorian Imperialism, we worship no God above all things, but bow to the gods of our own appetites and preoccupations; the strongest of these, apparently, is the latest progressive god, ‘British values’. We can no longer assert our moral superiority by condemning Islamist extremists for killing the innocent, since we ourselves demand the right to do so; indeed, the right to abortion and, increasingly, euthanasia, is considered the mark of a civilised society. Instead we assert the right to sex, the corollary of the right to kill; and we must teach both in our schools via sex education, while ensuring that any who disagree will be marginalised, silenced, or exposed as intolerant – all in the name of tolerance, albeit an extremely intolerant tolerance.⁵⁵ In our ‘child-centred society’, we demand the right to non-procreative sex, and our tolerance is reserved for sexual acts, not for children. And if children are put at risk as a result of unquestioning obeisance to sexual diversity – and even perversity – so be it.⁵⁶

All totalitarian regimes have been ‘child-centred’, in the sense of moulding children into the kind of future citizens least troublesome to the totalitarian regime. Nazi and Communist alike had ‘values’ that they wished to transmit to the young, indoctrinating them to become the eyes and ears of the regime; turning against their parents, they terrorised them as spies and traitors, as George Orwell so memorably described in Nineteen Eighty-four.⁵⁷ The student generation of the 1930s, dazzled by the Communist ideal, became mentors and gurus of the Sexual Revolution, inspiring rebellion against parental authority, creating a climate of opinion that few dared to challenge for fear of appearing out of date. Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted “a certain retreat by the older generation” in the West, ‘“yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience in life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say…that this is what forms the spirit of the age, this current of public opinion, when people in authority, well-known professors, scientists are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. …there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom.”’(Original emphasis)⁵⁸

With sexuality diverted from its reproductive course, the ‘summer of love’ turned into a winter of lust, giving birth to cruelty and death in a rage against Nature and its law of diminishing returns; the quest for endless novelty led to degradation of the gift of sexuality, underpinned by a cold-blooded ‘humanist’ utilitarianism that eventually was capable of utilising the products of conception to heat hospitals.⁵⁹ Perhaps unsurprisingly in a society that treats the unwanted child as rubbish, an increasing number of aborted or newborn babies have been found discarded in the rubbish, although one made its way into the recycling process.⁶⁰ In Belgium, they now utilise the organs of euthanasia victims to repair the economically viable;⁶¹ the progressive obsession with compulsory organ donation⁶² suggests that it would be a short step for the State to assume ownership of every citizen’s biological material, justified no doubt by applying it to a higher purpose, such as scientific research to relieve unbearable suffering; this already happens with ‘unwanted’ foetal remains, and might in future apply to the millions of ‘spare’ embryos created via reproductive technology.⁶³

In our ‘child-centred’ culture, the commodified baby obtained through reproductive technology represents the (genetically) perfect exemplar of the wanted child, carefully constructed with the best biological material rather than generated haphazardly in a thoughtless act and allegedly unwanted. And yet, as one ‘product’ of the fertility industry maintained: “I have come to detest questions such as ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What nationality are you?’ or ‘Why are you an only child?’. … Finding out that I am the ‘wanted child’ of a sperm donor doesn’t make these questions any easier to answer, and I often find myself asking more questions after the fact. Where do I come from?”⁶⁴ Another ‘wanted child’ commented: “One of the most upsetting things for me about the way I was brought into the world is the blatant double standard involved. My mother’s need to have a genetic link to her child was valued, while my need to know, love and understand the father with whom I have a genetic link was not.”⁶⁵ It is now clear that the law governing the much-heralded ‘3-parent baby’ technique, to be introduced as a solution to parents at risk of begetting seriously disabled children, will dismiss the child’s ‘right to know’ his or her mitochondrial ‘donor’ – the status awarded to the anonymous mother of the newly-fertilised egg used in the process.⁶⁶

Far from being a ‘youth culture’, our growing obsession with copying youthful fashions and with cosmetic surgery suggests that we fear growing old like a race of strulbrugs, the immortals in Gulliver’s Travels.⁶⁷ We fear new life as a reminder that we are at risk of being chronologically supplanted, but we fear death even more; the disabled and the dying, the momento mori, must be tidied away lest they remind us of our own mortality. Paradoxically for youth-obsessed progressives, euthanasia has become another obsession, offering the prospect of controlling the dying process even though in practice it may mean handing someone else the right to kill. Heedless of such dangers, they will be ready to sacrifice the sick, elderly and disabled to the indifference or greed of their nearest and dearest; the weakest will be sacrificed to the god of the ‘good death’.⁶⁸

Our reluctance to have more children as the answer to the ‘ageing population’ has meant that the planned birth has led inevitably to the planned death.⁶⁹ The ‘right to choose society’ has led to the ‘chosen society’. But the child chosen like a commodity may see its parent as a product with built-in obsolescence, as one doctor predicted in 1936: “Our children, not being savages, would lead us to the Lethal Chamber – ‘This way, mother! You can’t see very well, so take my hand. I am taking you for a long walk.’ ‘Thank you, my dear. It’s a long time since you took me for a walk.”’⁷⁰ Like the right to plan a child, the bogus concept of the ‘right to die’ is exposed whenever anyone chooses to live and to be cared for.⁷¹ But the fiction of ‘choice’ will be maintained by relentless propaganda until society is so used to the idea of fearing the ‘unplanned death’ that no one can remember things being any different.

However, most likely, the ‘right to die’ will not be chosen by the wealthy, who will opt to live forever, seeking ways to ‘cryopreserve’ themselves, or to transfer their brains to computers; or perhaps seek young bodies into which their ‘minds’ can be transplanted, while operating a strict programme of population control by curbing the births and promoting the deaths of the ‘unwanted’ poor – the ‘useless eaters’and the ‘unfit’.⁷²

Believing the lie that we have the right to choose to have children has made us feel chosen; but only at the cost of suppressing the logical conclusion that we are not the products of unconditional love. And if we cannot bring ourselves to relinquish the right – really, the power – to choose, we must rationalise our choices as based on humanitarian concern for the child. Therefore we justify killing the unborn by saying that we want to spare them the suffering of being unwanted. The truth is that the unplanned pregnancy can become the wanted child, a ‘problem’ the abortion pioneers knew they had to overcome.⁷³ Abortion supporters still oppose ‘waiting periods’ and the proper counselling of pregnant women,⁷⁴ thus exploiting the ‘window of opportunity’ in early pregnancy when hormones are disrupted, emotions torn, and cold logic (often coming from those who should be supporting the mother and her child) tells her that she can choose not to be pregnant.⁷⁵

To facilitate the denial of motherhood, we must deny that the unborn child is a child; but now that 4-dimensional scans have exposed the old fiction about ‘clumps of cells’ and ‘blobs of jelly’, we have legally redefined the unborn child as something with no inherent status – as an “organism”; significantly, this legal redefinition was the outcome of avoiding a compensation claim on behalf of a seven-year-old child with disabilities resulting from Foetal Alcohol Syndrome acquired as a result of her mother drinking heavily in pregnancy. The case illustrates the cold logic of ‘chosenness’, since the child’s problems could have been avoided if the mother had chosen abortion; but it would have been better for both mother and child if the mother had chosen to give up alcohol, and society had chosen to help her. In order to avoid jeopardising the ‘right to choose’, however, we are forced to assert that, legally, the unborn child does not matter.⁷⁶ But in so doing we cannot avoid the conclusion that we do not matter, unless someone gives meaning to our lives by wanting us. Perhaps those prominent bioethicists who spend their time trying to find get-out clauses from the Ten Commandments⁷⁷ might more profitably ponder how we have succeeded, in our quest for the wanted child, in abolishing the intrinsic meaning of all children.

In future, if the ‘right to choose’ really produces a ‘chosen people’, the choosing will be done by governing elites influenced by eugenics population control, aided by unethical capitalism; and they will be produced in anonymously generated batches, their characteristics determined by the sphere of life to which they are consigned. Can we learn again to want the child we have, rather than having the child we want? Or will we sacrifice even more categories of human beings, in addition to our unwanted children, while sacrificing ourselves to the children we do want in a vain attempt to please them, fearing that they may otherwise sacrifice us when we too become unwanted?

Religions of human sacrifice have never been noted for their egalitarian nature; it was always the poorest, weakest and most expendable that were deemed suitable offerings to placate the gods.⁷⁸ Christ was born into the true Chosen People – a culture that was taught to abhor such practices; it is secular humanism that wishes to take us back to less civilised times by ‘taking us forward’ to a world of unimaginable benefits accruing from the sacrifice of the innocent, while preserving the lives of convicted murderers and terrorists. No wonder the eugenics population control movement, the cognate society of secular humanism, would have us return to pre-Christian ways. A religion that worships a baby – a baby sent as a gift, rather than designed and constructed by scientists, and chosen by consumers – might set a dangerous new trend.

Notes