Was Your Body Your Choice? Wholly yours?

'Reflections' ventures into hostile waters.

I have long hesitated in the small surf of this very wide argumentative sea. Rather than Roe-ing back, I am going to Wade, waist deep into the rip tides, the under-tow and crashing surf. The alternating currents of conviction are equally strong, so any swimmer into this issue risks battering from both sides.

Remember that unattractive child shouting ‘How dare you’ and being feted everywhere, marshalled by her Rothschild minder to travel the world repeating the guilt inducing accusations that the future generations are being robbed of their rightful inheritance by our selfish uses of ‘their’ resources. The ‘future generations’ are owed? Yet when it comes to abortion, they are not even owed life? The people who glue themselves to impede others quietly going to work are the same who shout ‘my body my choice’ on their rights to abortion or ‘your body my choice’ when screaming at those who refuse the jab.

So, which is uppermost? Whatever, however inconsistent, gains the headlines of the day?

The entire global warming, or depopulation argument rests upon the claims of future generations and the world they are to inherit, but the pro-abortion lobby rests its case on the ‘freedom’ or liberty to end the life that is inconvenient, ill-timed, or likely to demand a devotion that is better offered to a career, or travel plans. In California, where abortion pills are now mandated on every university campus, that liberty extends until a foetus is considered ‘viable’ which is a decision undefined. If a full-term baby is not breathing it is not ‘viable’ and can be legally left to expire, without any efforts to assist it to breathe. Is this baby still-born or murdered? In fact a breathing baby unwanted by its parents is also non-viable when abandoned. Viable seems a relative term when its conditions are not specified.

If we, mankind, are supposed to heed the claims of future generations, why do those claims stop at our own door? What does each of us owe the future? Is our body entirely ours to abuse, to addict, over-indulge? After which, to demand repair at public expense? Or is it the greatest gift to be safeguarded, and protected? If the latter, to what end? Merely our personal longevity, and enjoyment, or something universal, a link in the chain of creation? A link to be welcomed and fulfilled by the next generation, using its door into life? What do we owe the future, since shouted epithets are being pretty strident about our present? The statistics on industrial levels of abortion by Planned Parenthood (and its ilk) does not suggest much care for the future generations, not even in countries like Japan and Italy which are failing even to replace their existent populations. No matter, there are ‘alternatives’ in the pipeline.

That stridency about transhumanism extends to baby ‘pods’ to incubate at factory levels, the next generation. No wombs necessary. DNA editing or splicing offered as an extra?

The major abuses of the body, promiscuous or deviant sexuality, degraded aesthetics of dress, surgical and genetic manipulation, and medical exploitation, has almost entirely robbed the body of any claims to honour. That has been incremental and deliberate. First feminism and ‘women’s liberation’ sold liberty as freedom from masculine oppression, and male liberation sold itself as freedom from responsibility, parenting, or provision. Both men and women were tempted to discard discipline, and instead, to ape one another. Neither have done it with grace but both sexes lost, almost everything. That was planned and the intention was to destroy the family and substitute exhibitionism. So better to replace its loyalties with tempting indulgence. The seven deadly sins were given their head, and every advertisement speaks entirely to them.  Hedonism is now the supposed norm. ‘Do what thou wilt’ is the new religion, and it includes the abuse and sacrifice of innocent children. The defiling of the future, and the degradation of humanity.

But y’all, know all that.

Yet into that norm, I foolishly wade an argument (and a portrait) that only thirty years ago would have been mainstream.

[ Before you assume that I speak as a Mary Whitehouse, the prim believer in gender roles, the woman in the kitchen, the man set to plough, I should assert that I have spent a long life at the plough, and longed for a pair of calloused hands to take it from me. I have two unmarried daughters who have, force majeur followed suit, and a stepson who has a cat, but never a wife. We have all had reason to regret the world we inherited where finding a partner who is not gay, or busy being free is a needle in a haystack hurdle. On-line dating did not cater for their dreams. It offered only short-lived small nightmares which destroyed confidence and eroded courage. The leg-over was not what was hoped for. The committed friendship was seldom on the menu.]

Now I am close to my own close without grandchildren or any hope of continuity. I built a homestead for white washing, and a pram under leaves, but that pram was never needed. I still have a moderately reliable memory of a different world, one in which a new baby was sunlight, and the smell of a baby’s skin evoked rain after long drought, a kind of eternal cleanliness. That world moved in a different time zone, where early morning tea spread its cloth to seek the shadows behind a creeping sun, and the dew-damp seeping up from a long dusk. So long a day to read, or reflect, to seed a bed, hours before it summoned the children in from the woods for supper or dozed before a fire. That kind of slow time lasted for most of my life, but my own children only briefly caught its tail.

That slow time of little change had space for children. They came to reward its endeavours, give ultimate purpose, and discipline, they shaped the day and filled out the years with the need for self- denial and restraint. The sort of natural virtues now being called for, nay, demanded; but without the structures that once supported a family; without the passing wave from the neighbour, without the village schools with free milk, without a secondary school that teaches history. Gone are the apprenticeships or the hope of employment, gone the provision for the old or infirm, gone the means beyond today’s survival, and finally now, after the farce of  the global holohoax, the end of any belief that any doctor cares about health or alleviation. (Doctors, affluent and well rewarded for collusion, have, on their two day working week, disappeared to the golf links, and diagnose from a photograph, as difficult to encounter as plumbers once were.)

I now know when that change began, before it broke into a gallop. It needed all the erosion that has happened since, to be recognised. Its start was camouflaged by the ebullient sixties, the era of dance and songs that spelled out hope, the era of nudity and pungent cannabis, impromptu embraces, Woodstock, sit-ins and burning bras. It was all about hope and belief in something better, more generous, more spontaneous, a world into which to bring children, for its promises could surely never be extinguished? So we, the joyful innocents dancing for joy, believed.

Long after it was extinguished, I wrote a novella commemorating what we had lost, in a story of searing loss. The story and its time were welded together. It was a true story but I gave it a cloak of fiction, to protect the character who had suffered enough, and set it in a place where she would never be found. I did hope one day she might find my tribute to her. The place was Coconut Grove in Florida where I lived when first exposed to America, its casual ease, its sweat, its spare-ribs, and its supermarkets, as well as its ballooning optimism. Those days were luminescent with promise, of something I could not define, but a ‘no-way-back’ seemed its taproot.

Even as I wrote it, I felt it was in memoriam, interring the precious and once loved.

Below is a short introduction to introduce Stephanie, through the ‘play for voices’ entitled A Shadow in Yucatan.

A group of actors got together at a friend’s house and gifted their time. With a local sound engineer we recorded it together. The engineer, Steve Deakin-Davies, was carried away enough to generously add musical bridges.

I will put links to the two audio chapters of the whole book ( about 1 hr 20 minutes) up in my next post. You might enjoy it on a car journey, or doing something mindless like potting seedlings or painting a wall! I hope it evokes some sense of the time.

Here is the opening five minutes of Chapter One.

It is about childbirth and I hope ties up my mini-rant with something better. I suppose it tells you where I’m coming from, and going: An old woman on her way out, with so much lost, carefully folded. Soon to be sealed.