Abortion: The Mark of Dystopia - Catholic World Report

Abortion: The Mark of Dystopia - Catholic World Report

"...two of the... most preeminent dystopia novels even include swipes at one of the most sacred cows of the 21st-century liberal project: abortion....

"Concerned with the homogenizing and stultifying effects of television upon culture, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicts an America that had degenerated into a state of utter inanity, where reading is a lost art and people spend more quality time with strangers on video screens than with their own family and neighbors....

"When they are horrified by [the protagonist's] attempt to draw them out from their shells of entertainment, consumption, and light gossip, he becomes so incensed that he finally explodes at one of them:

"'Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?'...

"The same mark is found in Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World, which depicts a world where sex has been disassociated from family and procreation, religion has been reduced to a form of social therapy, and science is meticulously censored so as to preserve a political orthodoxy....

"...Without the benefit of modern technology, Linda has suffered the ultimate indignity during her exile from the cosmopolis: She has had a baby. But it isn't her fault, she explains, for 'of course there wasn't anything like an Abortion Centre here.' She goes on to reminisce somewhat nostalgically about the brightly-decorated and well-equipped abortion centers near her childhood home--a narrative detail that was no doubt shocking in the 1930s, when Huxley was mocked for his preposterous and alarmist outline of an antiseptic future.

"This outline was based upon Huxley's conviction that the 'truly revolutionary revolution' was not the Scientific Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution, nor the French Revolution, but rather the Sexual Revolution initiated by the Marquis de Sade. This was, in Huxley's words, 'the revolution in individual men, women, and children, whose bodies were henceforward to become the common sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization.'"