The author of “Abortion: The Silent Holocaust” (1981) was a man, and a celibate Catholic priest at that, yet his understanding of the moral import of abortion far exceeds that of feminist pro-abortion women who deny the nature of what they are doing, or, worse yet, understand it fully, but nonetheless elevate their own convenience above it at all times (Salon):
“I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.”
(Lila: my emphasis)
The author of these chilling lines, which could have come out of the mouth of some KGB chief or Nazi commandant, does get one thing right: Motherhood, devoid of elementary moral development, does not in itself confer humanitarian feeling or ethics. One can be childless and/or a male and have a far truer ethical compass than many of the malign mothers of modernity or the industry experts who brainwashed them.
For instance, contrast Father Powell, who quit his career for a year to write “Abortion: The Silent Holocaust,” with Dr. Nathanson, the godfather of the abortion industry who admitted that the pro-abort movement manufactured statistics to brainwash the population to accept the new laws.
Nathanson stated unequivocally that abortion was kept in place not by the needs of “women’s emancipation” – as feminism’s dupes believed and still believe – but by the self-interest of the abortion providers and the state.
National Right To Life News reviews Father Powell’s important book:
“(Father) Powell rhetorically asks himself why a heavily trained academic [Powell says he had so many degrees he felt like “Father Fahrenheit”] would be so burdened by Roe. He concludes it was because of two formative experiences that had left Powell with an “acute sensitivity to the value of every human life.”
One came about as a result of his short stint as a hospital chaplain in Akron, Ohio. He quickly realized that “scenes of suffering and raw grief had been quarantined out of my academic experience.” It dawns on him that he had never even seen someone die or be born.
[Lila: What changed me from pro-choice to pro-life was not a change in understanding of the nature of the act. I always understood abortion to be the taking of human life, but I was mesmerized by the propaganda that the child was somehow “more” the moral responsibility of the woman’s because of its residence in her womb.
This, of course, denies the man’s genetic contribution as well as the genetic contributions of the grand-parents of the child on both sides.
Previously, I’d also not seen pictures of the fetus or the evidence from new technology of its complete humanity very early on in development. As soon as I saw that evidence, thanks to the activism of Lila Rose (yes, I realize she’s Opus Dei but that’s another blog post), I changed my mind.]
“…..each of us has an absolutely essential part to play, that none of us are accidents, that God could have created the world without a place for us but didn’t want to.
“No one else can speak my message,” Powell writes, “or sing my song, or bestow my act of love. These have been entrusted only to me.”
The other formative experience for Powell, also before Roe, came when he went to Europe for further studies. While there, Powell visited the remains of the Nazi death camp at Dachau.
There he learned firsthand of the utilitarian ethic of the Nazi regime, its utter disregard for those who were frail or “unproductive,” and the silence of many Germans to the unspeakable monstrosities that were taking place.
He notes that the words “Never again” are printed on the gate in five languages. It’s a memory that haunts Powell when the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed the abortion holocaust.
Both experiences left him numb. One was too beautiful, too sacred. The other too violent, too shattering.
Yet troubled as he was by these experiences, it was something else that persuaded Powell to take a year’s sabbatical to serve as a pro-life speaker: his counseling experience with three young women.
The first had aborted and was deeply sorry. The life had seemed to have gone out of her eyes and as she left her visage seemed to say, “How can I ever forget?”
The second–a bubble gum-smacking teenager–represented the polar opposite extreme. She was as casual about her impending abortion as the first woman was devastated by the abortion she now bitterly regretted. But it was the third woman whose attitude nearly struck him dumb.
Laboratory tests had confirmed her pregnancy. In response, she told Powell that she had even stopped smoking and drinking; those “can affect the baby,” she remarked. Then in the next breath, she offhandedly remarks, “But I have an appointment to kill this baby next Thursday morning.”
While rocked back on his heels, Powell didn’t blame her for her wildly inconsistent statements. This new ethic of “utility and convenience” was in the very air she breathed, air remarkably like that which permeated Nazi-era Germany.”
Powell also grasps the fact that abortion is intimately connected with neglect of the weak and elderly. He describes what the last 24 hours of his mother’s life meant, absent any measure of “productivity”:
“During those many hours of conversation, characterized by “complete openness,” Powell was “introduced to parts of myself that I didn’t know existed.” He adds, “If I had to pick out the most humanizing, maturing, and life-transforming days of my life,” they would include his mother’s last 24 hours.
“What a terrible and personal loss I would have suffered,” he writes, “if she had been ‘put out of her misery’ because the supposedly meaningful and productive days of her life were over.”