In ancient Rome, the father who headed a household had extreme power over it -- a genuine patriarchy led by a patriarch, or in Latin, paterfamilias. In his legal powers he was patria potestas, which included the right to kill his sons (or sell them into slavery) even into adulthood. Willingness to kill a son who refused military orders was seen as a proof of the honor of the father and the family, as it placed the needs of the society over the needs of the family or the individual. Such sacrifices for the common good were taken as an exercise in virtue.
Two years ago, a writer in the New Oxford Review proposed that modern women are insisting on a similar power over their children, mater potestas.
Roe created an adversarial model of the mother-child relationship, one that the elite or mainstream culture imbibed and prizes, perhaps without even consciously examining its implications.Its implications, however, are profound: Maternity has been turned into the matria potestas, a 21st century American version of legal rights over offspring, not just to give them a name but even an acknowledged existence. Berg and Wiseman claim that one-third of women in the prime years of becoming mothers insist they must have a matria potestas, the power of life or death, over their offspring. Let’s also be honest about the slavery part: a mother can sell her offspring (though prices might be regulated) to another person through surrogacy, a trafficking-in-persons most recently legalized in Michigan.
What I think is missing there is the scale, which is captured in the X post linked under the screenshot of the post. The scale of the killing is very hard for people to grasp: if unborn Americans count as Americans, then abortion is the leading cause of death of Americans. It's not close: even omitting at-home 'Plan B' style abortions for lack of information, it's on the order of a quarter million a year more than the next leading cause.
I don't think we can easily grapple, either, with the point about the moral harm to the fabric of our society of having blood-guilt spread that widely. Societies have had large-scale populations of killers before; in The Tigers of Baluchistan, an anthropological survey of that ancient people, Sylvia A. Matheson pointed out that no Balochi man could hope to marry until he had killed another man. Like the Romans, the equally-ancient Balochi believed that this demonstration of a willingness and ability to kill was a proof of personal virtue.
What does it mean to have so many of our women bearing this guilt? And not openly as the Balochi or the Romans would: they bear it without admitting it, so many of them preaching loudly about empathy while neither conceiving nor granting empathy to all the innocent dead children? What do we get from so many women preaching so often about the violence of men, and convinced of how much better society would be with more women in power? If 25% of men were killers, let alone killers of children, it would be a very different world.
While "sympathy and understanding"--now the rule in courts--is understood as "feminine", the case points to another "feminism," alright: one which is murderous.
ReplyDeleteLate to the party. +Fulton Sheen was on it a couple decades ago.
ReplyDeleteSee: https://x.com/ChrisPlanteShow/status/2096271665118289971?s=20
I understand why the Oxford Review article and the post are talking about women/mothers. But all the abortions involve a mother and a father. Is it just the mothers who bear the guilt and just their guilt that does "moral harm to the fabric of our society"?
ReplyDeleteYou know the law, Elise. A man has nothing to say about an abortion as a matter of law; he can't save his own child no matter how much he wants it, should the mother elect to abort. Nor can he demand an abortion against her will, nor escape the legal duties that come from being the father to her child once it is born.
DeleteThus, while "just the mothers" and "just their guilt" is a little too strong -- we are aware, for example, that sometimes fathers who don't want to be fathers attempt to bully or coerce abortions -- women do bear the brunt of this guilt. They have been granted power and authority over this by our laws. They bear the responsibility for how they have used that power and authority.
Agreed. But a man can attempt to influence the mother of his child. He can ask her not to have the abortion; he can offer to marry her or support her financially; he can promise to stay with her for the duration of the pregnancy; he can offer to raise the child on his own; he can agree to let the child be adopted and handle the legalities thereof. In other words, a father can do everything in his power to convince the mother not to have an abortion. If a man does not do any of this, then he must bear some of the guilt. And I think that sort of guilt would be just as damaging to the father's soul as the abortion is to the mother's.
ReplyDeleteThe man has all of that, and more. His responsibility begins at the beginning: his decision to have sex with the woman in the first place and whether he chose to use birth control in the absence of the woman's use of birth control. That male forms of birth control are less than 100% simply allows a pregnancy to occur despite his attempts. In the even of that birth control failure, though, he still has all of the responsibilities regarding the subsequent pregnancy that you outlined.
DeleteEric Hines