Stephen Green, an evangelical Christian with a distinguished record in protest, was arrested at the beginning of February and charged, after holding a placard depicting words that mentioned a womb (taken from Psalm 139) within the statutory buffer zone near an abortion clinic.
Reflecting on the precedent of the government of the day silencing religious protestors, some commentators have looked to events during 1670 in Britain. Back then, Quakers William Penn and William Meade were arrested and put on trial for a silent religious act in a public street, which was an apparent contravention of an Act of Parliament that prohibited gatherings of more than 5 people.
Such commentators may be right to draw this parallel, since when the State is frightened it overreaches itself – and the State was certainly frightened of private conscience and dissent against the Anglican settlement in 1670. So much so that from 1559 to 1829, Catholics, their liturgy and conscience were banned from the public space.
Now, once again, the State is setting out to silence dissent when the latter calls the values of the former into question. This is happening as Catholics and various Christian denominations – especially evangelicals – are being united once more against the English State through their objection to the killing of children in the womb.
Both Catholics and other Christian groups are informed by the Bible and they want to publicise what the Bible says about the pre-born and about the sanctity of human life. When life has clearly begun, and a sentient human being has been formed, it takes some strange contortion of the imagination to resist the conclusion that the aborted growing embryo or foetus is in fact a child being murdered.
This murder of children, and the sacrifice of the living, growing sentient fruit of pleasure to the modern god of liberty and self-indulgence, has stirred many consciences, particularly of Catholics and of evangelicals – and they are speaking out.
Parallels have not unreasonably been drawn between the human sacrifices of the Inca tribes in South America – with human sacrifice used to placate the gods – and the industrial scale of over 10 million deaths among the pre-born through the modern abortion industry.
While it’s tempting to look back for comparisons to the heavy handedness of the censorious Anglican state in the seventeenth century, when it silenced its Christian opposition, or to the barbarity of the likes of the Incas, it might actually be better to look forward: to see the arrest of Stephen Green and the silencing of his biblical witness as a threat not so much from the past, but a threat from the future.
Hence there are stronger arguments to add to the traditional ones: that the abortion industry may represent the growing threat of transhumanism, especially when twinned with the impatience of the State that appears unwilling to accept voices raised against it.
One of the most persuasive voices currently being raised is that of Mary Harrington. Formerly a progressive lesbian feminist, and now a married mother arguing for ethics that parallel with Catholic social teaching, Harrington is one of the most cogent voices identifying the great threat to society that is coming from the transhumanism movement.
She coins the phrase “cyborg woman” in order to describe the phenomenon in which feminism is acting as an ally to a movement whose aim is to remodel our humanity and, in so doing, to detach us from our biological and somatic identifies.
Transhumanism wants to modify our biologically normative given humanity and to medically re-engineer human nature. The intention is, firstly, to free us from biological sex, and, secondly, to provide us with the opportunity to download our consciousness in computerised form.
Although there has been a revolt by feminists, and especially and understandably by lesbian feminists, against the trans movement’s widening net that has sought for biological men to gain access to woman-only spaces, Harrington suggests the overall problem has derived from feminism’s own intellectual landscape. It is an inevitable consequence of the victory of what she calls the feminism of freedom (women in the market place) over the feminism of care (women working from home).
Why is abortion part of the trajectory of transhumanism? Because is it an expression of the application of medical technology flattening the difference between the sexes. Giving birth becomes optional instead of essential. At the same time, the pill is a chemical which not only liberates from child bearing, but chemically alters the brain of the women who take it.
In one sense these are freedoms, but they come with a cost. And in particular, they lay the platform for the future. You can’t have trans people without the pill and abortion. Abortion is the primary platform on which a sexless dystopia is built, leading the way for the cyborg feminist paradigm.
Feminism thus finds itself in a dilemma, thanks to the forces of the market (to which feminists have become captive in their masculinised liberation) accompanied by the assault on the concept of gendered humanity.
Harrington sees the catastrophe of a trans intervention that sets out to chemically and surgically castrate children as a threat that everyone, but especially women, ought to come together to resist: “At the end of the day the cyborgs are coming for your kids too – so we need to cooperate,” she says.
She argues that both the pill and abortion are instruments of a medically adapted humanity through which our self-understanding, biology and behaviour are being changed irrevocably by technology.
There is, as a result, a convincing case to be made for arguing in favour of a new reactionary feminism to claw back the initiative, to defend women from being de-feminised by capitalism, and for regaining agency from the machine-ification of everything that diminishes our humanity.
The abortion industry has produced common cause between Stephen Green and Mary Harrington. What is very striking is that Harrington has moved from hard Left progressive lesbian feminism to a place where she has become one of the most articulate voices of Catholic social conscience and Christian ethics.
Stephen Green may not have known it, but if Harrington is right, only a collective protest against the abortion clinics and the associated abortion industry can save us. Not only save those pre-born children, but also our God-given identifies as men and women from a determined transhumanist threat and ambition to replace men and women with cyborg humanity.
(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.)
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