By Judie Brown
Years ago, before affirming life became a political question, it was a way for women to emulate the virtues of the Blessed Mother. That is not to say that women were free of moral challenges, but they did not have the likes of Betty Friedan yacking about what it means to be a woman.
For those who cannot recall, it was Friedan who wrote in 1963: “Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.”
While Friedan was not the first feminist to denigrate motherhood, she was a firebrand similar to Margaret Sanger and others who found it necessary to insult the blessing of bearing a child. In the name of feminism, it became obvious that nature itself was perceived as an enemy of freedom. Gloria Steinem, another feminist icon, would say some years later, “We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud.”
In stark contrast, we hear the voice of Catholic teaching, reassuring us that “the beauty of the universe [is that] the order and harmony of the created world results from the diversity of beings and from the relationships which exist among them” and that “man discovers them progressively as the laws of nature.”
Our duty to insist on this truth and help others to see the facts about procreation as nothing less than miraculous becomes more imperative as our enemies flaunt their twisted views. Chief among them is Planned Parenthood, which has recently expanded its services to include “transgender care”—a euphemism for those who choose to alter their natural identity by using hormonal therapy.
At the core of these various techniques designed to deconstruct nature we find the root cause—the detestation of truth. In that process the very definition of pregnancy-related death is changed, the truth about the devastating consequences of medical abortion chemicals is hidden, and our work to expose these demonic efforts is described as waging a “political war . . . against bodily autonomy.”
Our foes refuse to see the truth that is before their eyes, preferring instead to decry facts. This is why we hear the most recent Alabama law defining the human embryo as a person described as “knee-jerk” and “simplistic.” Rather than understanding the science, the enemy’s preference is to trash the facts in a quest to rewrite the laws of nature.
The same is true of the latest efforts in the Iowa state legislature where a recent proposal that would define the human embryo as a person has been met with guffaws, hysteria, and other tactics designed to drown out the truth in a cascade of fear-mongering and rejection.
The common thread that ties all of these cultural machinations together is nothing less than a total rejection of the “natural law or what we can know is right or wrong through the aid of reason alone.”
To do good and avoid evil is the simplest way to understand the laws of nature and why it is that those who engage in terrible acts such as contraception, abortion, IVF, and euthanasia fight tooth and nail to reject the laws of nature. Pitting themselves against God is their vocation. They prefer the darkness to the light and error to the truth.
This is why we have seen a surge in the cultural war on nature over the last many years. As Peter Kreeft so astutely wrote, “Love makes more waves than hate. Wicked men will hate and fear you more for loving them than for hating them. They will quickly forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right.”
The cultural war on nature is a fool’s errand; our quest to teach the truth will be victorious.
