George Orwell’s “1984” is perhaps one of the most-referenced books of the modern age. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is considered a masterclass in social prescience. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson’s “Lord of the World” has been hailed as prophetic by the late Pope Benedict XVI. Even C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” is fast becoming a staple in the discourse of Christian conservatives.
What do all these works have in common? Yes, they were all penned by British authors within the first two-thirds of the 20th century. But as far as their content, these works share three key characteristics: each centers on the future, each is at least somewhat dystopian, and each predicts or prophesies the advent of evil.
While Orwell, Huxley, Benson, and Lewis all warned against futures that Christians would surely agree are evil — Orwell feared a totalitarian state obsessed with the suppression of free and rational thought, Huxley anticipated the weaponization of pleasure, Benson prophesied the secular attempt to annihilate Christian religion, and Lewis predicted the unholy marriage of occultic humanism with bureaucracy — those key characteristics upon which their stories were built may, in evil hands, be equally powerful but diabolically destructive. The cult of abortion has done its reading and, if it has learned nothing of the voracious appetite of Hell, it has at least learned how to spin a good yarn to further its purposes.
The predominant narrative woven by the abortion cult (I say “cult” in the same manner one might refer to the old pagan “cult of Athena” or “cult of Dionysius,” as the abortion cult has taken Moloch as its insatiable god; it is no mere blood-money industry but a ritualistic cult) employs the same three key characteristics which made “1984,” “Brave New World,” “Lord of the World,” and “That Hideous Strength” so effective in their aims. The abortion cult’s narrative is centered on the future, it is (implausibly) dystopian, and it predicts or prophesies what its acolytes must consider an evil.
Even after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its disastrous Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, there was, for a time, a general consensus that abortion should be, as President Bill Clinton would later put it, “safe, legal, and rare.” The ascendancy of the abortion cult saw even those standards diminished and discarded, until abortion became, for the cult’s multitudinous acolytes, a positive good — an end, not merely a means — a good in and of itself, not a flawed or dangerous means to a purportedly good end. One of the ways this illusion has been maintained for the uninitiate is through the claim that opponents of abortion (those who believe that slaughtering unborn children is an intolerable evil) simply hate women.
This is, pure and simple, fiction. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” serves as a prime example of the abortion cult’s use for evil of the techniques pioneered by Orwell, Huxley, Benson, and Lewis for good; in fact, the distinctive red robes and white bonnets worn by the oppressed women of the novel have become a sort of uniform for the abortion cult’s activists, making frequent appearances at rallies, protests, bill signings, and even Supreme Court hearings. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” for those unfamiliar, certain women are enslaved as “handmaidens” and are, on the basis of their reproductive fertility, forcibly used by political and military elites to reproduce children. Regardless of Atwood’s intention with the novel, its themes and even content have been used by the abortion cult to paint a dark and disturbing image of the future of women in America.
A recent spate of 30-second ads funded by California’s rabidly pro-abortion governor Gavin Newsom capitalize on this dystopian fearmongering. In one ad, a police officer pulls over two young women less than a mile away from the state line. Implied to be seeking an abortion in a state where the barbaric practice is legal, one of the women is told she has to take a pregnancy test, forced out of the car, and handcuffed. In another ad, a young woman is chained to a hospital gurney while doctors use a “sexual assault evidence collection kit” to, presumably, determine whether or not her pregnancy is the result of rape.
Of course, the legislation being targeted for fearmongering in both instances is nothing to fear: the pertinent bills would simply outlaw trafficking underage girls across state borders for abortions without parental consent — and the underage girl in such a situation would face no punishment or ramification. So, for example, a 40-year-old man who rapes a 13-year-old girl would not be allowed to drive her to dispose of the living, breathing, evidence of his crime under the stipulations of the maligned legislation.
But Newsom’s ad campaign peddles the abortion cult’s proselytizing tale that any who dare to oppose abortion do so because they see women as, if not necessarily less than human, certainly as mere breeding slaves, meant to subject themselves to sex and squeeze out the resulting children at the whim of their male oppressors. This lie, and the nightmarish future which would result were it true, forms the basis of the abortion cult’s message. Like the dystopian warnings of Orwell, Huxley, Benson, and Lewis, the abortion cult’s propaganda preys on fears rooted in the future.
“In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays,” Lewis himself wrote in “The Screwtape Letters,” in the character of the titular tempter. “Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception.”
For Lewis and his contemporaries, this truth was seen as a call to action. The past is, of course, immutable, and the future unmoored, unknown, unexperienced; but in the present moment, the future can be shaped, if one has only the courage to act. Thus the warnings of “1984” and “Brave New World” were not warnings of an unavoidable evil, but of an evil that may yet come to be without the courage and moral strength needed to avert it. Though an apocalyptic tale, Benson’s “Lord of the World” is not a prophecy of certain doom, but a cry for Christians to prepare themselves for the coming of the Antichrist. Lewis’s own apocalyptic narrative exposes what will become of bureaucracies, scientific institutions, and even government agencies if their moral standards are left unchecked.
In like manner, the abortion cult’s message warns of what may happen if child sacrifice is restricted or criminalized: women will be oppressed, subjecting to randomized pregnancy tests, strapped to hospital beds and forced to give birth, held down and ritualistically raped in the name of the “replacement rate.” Enter the characteristic of dystopia. Such a future is obviously horrific, something any rational human being with even the slightest bit of empathy would oppose.
But for this hellish vision to come to fruition, of course, the premise of the abortion cult’s narrative would have to be true also — and it simply isn’t. Men are not obsessed with breeding hordes of children, whether women will it or not: if that were true, men would have never devised, practiced, promoted, and legalized abortion in the first place; if that were true, men would have never invented contraceptives; if that were true, men would have never pressure, connive, coerce, and bully mothers into abortion; if that were true, birth rates would be skyrocketing, not plummeting. Nor, of course, is it true that those who oppose abortion do so out of some unexplained, inexplicable hatred of women.
Pro-lifers establish pregnancy resource centers to assist, support, and even provide for women who might otherwise turn to abortion; charitable organizations arrange donation drives for struggling mothers, gifting them diapers, clothes, food, even money; fathers across the globe make countless sacrifices for their wives and children, working long hours or extra jobs, exhausting their youth, their energy, their talents, and sometimes even their health to ensure their wives and children are well-tended-to; Christians in particular (often the archvillains in the abortion cult’s narrative) revere women as made in the image and likeness of God, as recipients of human dignity, as persons with purpose, worth, and value.
Under even such cursory examination, the entire proselytizing mythos of the abortion cult collapses. Why, then, is it still used? And, perhaps even more disturbingly, why is it still believed? This brings us to the third characteristic employed so adeptly and nobly by Orwell, Huxley, Benson, and Lewis — and so cunningly and maliciously by the abortion cult.
The “evil” that the abortion cult so dreads is not, in fact, the oppression of women. Communist China after all, used abortion as a means of oppressing women for decades, brutally enforcing its one-child policy. But it does sound so nice and wholesome to say that one is fighting against the oppression of women, doesn’t it? Why, it sounds gallant, downright heroic! Whereas saying that one is so selfish, so irresponsible, so weak-willed that one is willing to kill a child just to have sex sounds rather — well, there are no polite terms for what that sounds like. “Women’s rights” is far likelier to attract adherents than “Baby butchery.” The abortion cult’s proselytizing narrative is, essentially, just a means of saving face. Pro-abortion politicians do not fear the oppression of women — they would have banned pornography and “sex work” long ago if they did. No, the abortion cult fears its chief sacrament being banned.
In short, the abortion cult fears that someday it will not be permitted to slaughter children. With this knowledge, it is little surprise that its high priests and acolytes tell dystopian tales of oppression, of women being chained to hospital beds or forced to take pregnancy tests. What is surprising is that so many who once called themselves political opponents of abortion have simply accepted the cult’s mythos, desperately signaling that they don’t hate women, that they don’t want to deprive people of “choice,” and even outright ceding to the cult’s demands for blood sacrifice.
All it takes to unravel the dystopian lies of the abortion cult is a little truth, a little logic, and a little courage. If only we had taken the lessons of Orwell, Huxley, Benson, and Lewis to heart, then perhaps we might have more such heroes among us now.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
