27 January 2021

"Products of Conception"

I do not entirely agree with Mr Biden's reiterated enthusiasm for killing unborn Jewish babies.

It is also true that I also do not entirely agree with Mr Biden's equal enthusiasm for killing Gentile, Black, White, Male, Female, Disabled, Abled, Large or Small unborn babies of any racial or social provenance.

But today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when our cultural Masters request and require that we shall (at least principally) think, speak, and write about the killing of Jewish humans.

That's what I'm doing.

So that is why I am, at this moment, only blogging about the killing of unborn Jewish babies. I have often written about the iniquity of killing any preborn humans at all, without any distinction. Deo volente, I shall so write again. Possibly, I might select Bastille Day to think particularly about the killing of unborn French humans; and Thanksgiving Day to meditate upon the holocaust of American babies.

Is there an 'official' "Black Lives Matter Day"? There would be scope there, too.

But on this one particular day, Holocaust Memorial Day, at this precise moment, in order to show my obsequium civicum towards the commands of the Zeitgeist, I am writing only about and against the killing of Jewish babies. And, as you will by now have grasped, I am very strongly against it. 

One other preliminary: I would never suggest that Biden and his associates are keener on killing Jewish babies than they are on killing Gentile babies. I am simply willing to assume that, among the large numbers of abortions which are performed annually in the US of A, Jewish foetuses are not absent. (If they were absent, accusations would be made that Jewish women were being "excluded from Heath Care and from Reproductive Rights".)

Right. I hope everybody has got all that straight.

Another clarification: terminology. 

I gather that in the modern Death Industry, because it is medically important to extract every fragment of a Jewish girl who has been pulled into pieces in the womb, together with her placenta etc. (in order to avoid sepsis), the cognoscenti nowadays like to refer to "the Product of Conception". So they piece the dismembered child  together on the slab, like a three-dimensional jigsaw, to make sure they've got every tiny bit of "the POC" out of the adhuc mother. If anybody dislikes my use of the word 'Baby' in what has preceded or in what now follows, it is absolutely completely fine by me if you substitute "POC" for the B-word. For these purposes, I am a philological libertarian! Let's not squabble about mere words!

Quite a lot of people are uneasy about the killing of Jewish babies, but they are unwilling to be quite as absolutist as I am. I sympathise with this approach, but I am unable to agree with it. This is because I am a Catholic priest, constrained and required by the Church to take an absolutist view against the killing of Jews, any Jews, all Jews, big Jews, little Jews, born Jews and unborn Jews. I know this is Rigid and Intolerant, but that is who I am, what I am, and where I am. I apologise for my awkwardness, but ....

There are two common ethical dogmas which ... I confess ... I regard as so monstrously horrible that I am unwilling to give them further consideration:

(1) Killing Jews is acceptable as long as proportionate numbers of similarly circumstanced Gentiles are also being killed; and

(2) Killing Jews out of anti-Jewish prejudice is tremendously wrong, but to kill them for other reasons (ex. gr. Population Control; Sexual Emancipation ...) is morally acceptable, or even to be applauded.

And there are, of course, thoughtful people who might claim essentially to agree with me, but argue as follows: "In the modern secular state, one sometimes needs to do a careful audit of conflicting ethical considerations. If politician X advocates the killing of Jewish babies or adults, but simultaneously also advocates some other very highly desirable outcomes, such as preserving rain-forests or encouraging sodomy, one may be justified in casting one's vote for the Jew-killer so as to secure the sodomy and the rain-forests.".

I have been familiar with something like this type of argument since my childhood. Back in the 1940s, it was  very common to hear Englishmen ... even those who had fought against Nazism in the War ... comfortably praising Herr Hitler because "at least he built some fine roads". (Mussolini, I seem to recall, "made the trains run on time".)

I suppose, in less technical terms, this is what decent ordinary people might call "voting for X as the lesser of the two evils". 

But the Church's teachings on the sacredness of all human life as one of her chief ethical principles, and on the intrinsic evil of abortion, have been reiterated, through two millennia and especially in and since Vatican II, with such Magisterial force and decision that I am completely unable to countenance the idea that Jew-killing might ever, in any conceivable circumstances, be envisaged, or encouraged via the ballot-box, by anybody who stands in or near the Catholic Tradition. Additionally, such an approach shades dangerously and unacceptably into the condemned ethical proposition that an end (however good) can justify an inherently evil means.

One final confession of my own weaknesses. A picture which sticks in my mind is of Ukrainian Jews, naked, patient, queuing up to enter a pit; a waiting SS guard with a submachine gun, smoking a cigarette. It is true that I do have a personal and visceral detestation of the killing of Jews, and I apologise if this has coloured my modes of expression. But I am convinced that what I have written above has a prescriptive and ineluctable force on those whose minds are still open to reason, and who have not lost every last snatch of humanity.

Killing ... any ... Jews ... is ... always ... wrong.



13 comments:

Paul in Melbourne, Australia said...

The most eloquent and moving statement on this subject that I have ever read, Father.

Tom said...

Perhaps there are some truths that cannot be stated too strongly?

Osusanna said...

I was forced at one time at my job to transcribe the medical descriptions of abortions. That is the term they use - products of conception.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. So far this year here are the number of deaths and their causes

121,153 HIV/AIDS deaths this year

591,910 cancer deaths this year

28,421 malaria deaths this year

180,265 alcohol deaths this year

77,289 suicides this year

So far this year the number of deaths from smoking, HIV/AIDS, Cancer, Malaria, Alcohol and Suicide combined
equals 1, 359, 329 souls dead.

Compare that with 3,069,555 dead from abortions so far this year

Zephyrinus said...

Dear Reverend Fr. Hunwicke. With the greatest of respect (and gratefulness), I applaud you for these most pertinent and necessary words.

Oh, that so-called Politicians, Statesmen, and Meeja Folk, would also use such words and expressions, instead of the opposite.

ABORTION: The greatest Evil The World has ever seen.

Unknown said...

thank you.
ay the lord love and keep you and bless your priest hood/

Nancy from Canada

PDLeck said...

I agree that killing any Jew is wrong. Killing any human is wrong. (I also have to say while submitting obediently to the Church's Magisterium I cannot accept the death penalty is ever right, but that is another discussion and I do not wish to detract from the current one.)

Recently, I watched a TV documentary about Jewish people discovering what happened to previous generations of their famiiies during World War II. (I watched it on a catch up service and don't recall when it was originally aired.) It was most upsetting. I will not repeat here the horrors I struggled to watch.

I believe Holocaust Memorial Day is important. I do not think we should forget it and should not forget to what depraved levels we humans are capable of stooping. I think it even more important that we do not forget as the generation most affected by the Holocaust is now elderly and getting fewer with every passing year.

Mary Kay said...

I am pleased to see that you are speaking as universally as does the Church on this topic.

I've forwarded this to my sons. They'll appreciate it for all of the right reasons.

From your friend, Mary, across the pond, once of Portland, now of Texas (thankfully)

coradcorloquitur said...

The killing of innocent human beings---not just Jews---is always wrong. All innocent lives matter. Furthermore, the traditional and consistent Magisterium of the Church teaches that, contrary to Francis' innovation, the death penalty of justly convicted persons is justified by Scripture and Tradition. Aquinas and a host of church fathers teach in harmony with the Old Testament about its morality. It is up to the innovators to explain how they are entitled to turn Catholic teaching into a matter of personal whim. That is the slippery road to heresy and doctrinal chaos.

Wynn said...

Thank you.
No one who ought to hear this is likely to hear it. But that does not diminish by one iota the need for it to be said.

dunstan said...

The appropriateness of this post on Holocaust Memorial Day is amplified by Rene Girard's theory of sacrifice since holocausts are of course sacrifices. Girard's argument is that sacrifice is the solution to what he calls 'mimetic crises' in which the rivalry caused by the mimetic structure of desire ("I want what you've got because you have it") reaches unmanageable proportions. The resolution of such crises occurs, according to Girard, in the offering of a sacrificial victim ('the scapegoat') who is then sacralised as the bringer of peace and harmony to the community.
Following Girard, one might see abortion (and contraception) in these terms as liberating women from their biological destiny ('biology is not destiny' was an early feminist slogan) and thereby bringing to an end (as feminists would claim) the mimetic rivalry between women in their biologically determined social roles as wives and mothers. (Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique discuses this phenomenon in 1950s suburban America.) By scapegoating their female fertility (through contraception and abortion) feminism brings about a new set of relationships between women independent of their relationship to men. Such I would suggest is the origin of the feminist 'sisterhood', It is indeed ironic that this familial expression should be chosen to define an explicitly non-familial relationship. There is another irony here also. For being released from the trammels of intra-feminine mimetic rivalry, women are now pitched into the essentially masculine mimetic struggle for power, wealth and status. Thus abortion (and contraception) become necessary for without it women would be greatly handicapped in that mimetic system.

Terry Mushroom said...

A brilliant defence of our fellow humans in the womb.

And all the more powerful for its unemotional understatement.

Albrecht von Brandenburg said...

... Not of said Jews have been convicted of any of the usual capital offences one finds in various Criminal Codes or Crimes Acts.


AvB