Ever since the legalization of Abortion in the United States through the Roe vs. Wade decision, religious conservatives and even some non-religious conservatives have united, in spite of religion or other issues, to oppose the ruling.
Every year for 36 years, hundreds of thousands have descended on Washington D.C. to rally for the unborn. In some cases, polls have shown most Americans oppose abortion in most circumstances, yet our laws continue to make it legal from conception until birth. If the same number of people could be found who oppose eating animals or the burning of fossil fuels without question the government would jump to outlaw these things at once. Programs would be presented in school on the evils and horrors of such things, and no doubt hate crimes legislation would be drawn up. In some countries men are already fined for doubting Global Warming, and opponents of it are called “climate change deniers”.
Yet this is not so with abortion by any stretch. In fact, the attitude of law, of media, politicians, doctors and the local vet is anti-life, staunchly favoring abortion by any means possible. If any other thing were opposed as much as abortion it would be outlawed or else restricted and disfavored by all government action. Gun Control is a perfect example. Opposition to gun control in our country is comparable, though not as significant, as opposition to abortion, and the government has consistently refused to implement gun control policies. Why this state of affairs?
Firstly, pro-life advocates are tackling the issue from the effect and not the cause. Abortion is the last step in a process that begins somewhere else. Perhaps it could be a defect of the fact that only Catholics, some Orthodox and a minority of Protestants and even some Jews (all Orthodox) have identified the cause, and so it becomes a taboo for fear of offending other cultural crusaders who don’t see it the same way. Secondly, it is profitable. In fact as we shall see, the second reason runs directly back into the first. Thirdly, I would identify the lack of progress with a fictitious identification of the Republican party as the party of life, when in fact it is equally the party of death in spite of its rhetoric.
The cause of abortion does not start at Planned Parenthood offices, neither when a woman opens up her monthly supply of birth control pills. It occurs when she makes the choice to buy and use them. It starts when men watch pornography. It is made profitable (number two) because they open up their wallets for both. Pro-life activists of all religious stripes don’t attack this and assume the Grand Old Party will take care of the only issue that unites them.
The ecumenical jihad however is not sufficient to tackle abortion unless it attacks the cause, which is the contraceptive mentality, and to do so would weaken the overall effort since most Protestants have favored contraception since the 1930s. Yet without it the pro-life movement is at a dead end. Even if laws against abortion could be passed, and Supreme Court decisions overturned, there would not be a pro-life victory. The change must come in the culture from below, not from above. The first place to strike is not however contraception in and of itself, because again, we could pass laws like those which existed before the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision of 1967, but contraception would not go away because the demand would continue. The contraceptive mentality is the view adopted, long before the visit to the drug store that sex will be engaged in for pleasure without any thought to procreation or commitment. For men this begins with pornography. It introduces graphic sexual content in an abstract manner, which is outside its intended purpose, and leads to the idea professed or conceptualized that women are just objects. Hugh Heffner, the founder of Playboy and close friend of Alfred Kinsey, declared that he would demonstrate in pictures that woman is playmate and man is playboy. It was a conceptualization of Kinsey’s doctrine in “Sexual Reproduction in the Human Male”, a book which based its research on the testimony of homosexuals and for which Kinsey molested children. But that is another story.
Women, responding to the perverted attitude increasingly prevalent amongst young men, began to use sexual relations to find love. This is also the origin of our modern divorce rate, for men would soon discover that women were not the machinations of the smut they had been reading, but breathing thinking human beings made in the image and likeness of God with human dignity, and not to merely be used. Nevertheless, in the interim, problems developed. People not serious about having children started having children. Surprise! To counter the fact that reproductive organs were designed for, well, reproduction, society developed a need for contraceptives, and the ultimate insurance policy, abortion, to make certain the good ol’ life could continue. Therefore a mentality which was contraceptive in nature was born, and man invented drugs to suit that mentality.
The proliferation of pornography however was not something either Kinsey or Heffner could achieve by their own means, any more than Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control League could single handedly bring contraception to the world. It was achieved by doing what Republican Free Market economists tell us we must always do: Letting the market work.
The porn industry did not miraculously appear, and there were many laws against it initiated in the 19th century. However gradually, self made men, entrepreneurs, pioneered the way from which the modern industry has sprung. The greatest of these though the least known was Ruben Sturman, who got his start selling comic books and later picked up pedaling soft porn. Once he saw the profitability in it, he made that his exclusive trade. He got around obscenity laws by using his revenues to create large phony businesses which he technically owned, but on paper were owned by someone else. The FBI and local government could not track down who actually owned the companies, and Sturman remained scott free racking in millions until finally after 30 years of failed obscenity prosecution an IRS agent brought him down for tax evasion (this is perhaps the only time in my life I cheered for the IRS). According to researcher Eric Schlosser:
“When an employee at Premium Sales suggested he carry a few sex titles, Sturman gave his approval without much thought. It didn’t take long for him to notice that there was great demand for such publications and that a sex magazine produced at least twenty times the revenue per copy of a remaindered comic book. Once Sturman realized these things, he wanted to distribute every sex book and magazine that had ever been printed.”1
Sturman’s business sense was superb. Schlosser, noting the evidence, shows how the VRC was launched by pornography:
“As early as 1974 Sturman had recognized that technology would soon transform the distribution of sexually explicit materials, telling his employees that “the future lies in audio-visual tape.” Three years later, when videocassette players became widely available to American consumers adult film companies offered their titles on video, while the major Hollywood studios resisted the new medium. As a result, by 1979 75% of all the videotapes sold in the United States were hard-core films. Porn was responsible for the successful launch of the VCR.”2 (My emphasis)
This is what good entrepreneurs do, they adapt to new mediums, they tailor a product which meets the public demand and sell it. The sex industry did not stick to VCR, with every new medium; they have provided their product and reaped millions. Direct TV, Pay-per-view, hotel porn, DVDs and streaming internet now all provide their product. With the decreasing cost of video equipment, new films are not difficult to produce. In the same book, Schlosser claims there are as many as11,000 hard-core pornography films produced per year, compared with 100 in 1975.3 The facts of America’s porn addiction only get worse:
Although the revenues of the sex industry are difficult to estimate, Americans now spend as much as $8 billion to $10 billion on ‘adult entertainment’- on hard-core videos and DVDs, Internet porn, cable and satellite porn, peep shows, phone sex, live sex acts, sexual toys and magazines. That’s an amount roughly the same as Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts an amount larger than the revenue generated by rock or country and western recordings. Americans now spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway theaters, regional and nonprofit theaters, and symphony orchestra performances-combined. Sexually explicit material has become so common place that one can easily forget how strictly it was prohibited not long ago.” 4
With 211 films produced per week, the US leads the world in pornography. That is LEADS THE WORLD!
Is it any wonder there are so many heinous crimes involving sex? Is it any wonder there are so many crimes against women? Is it any wonder that there are so many rapes and so many deranged individuals? The truth of the harm of pornography is that it leaves the intellect “beached” as it were, constantly disrupted by the passions, and through that sexualization of the person he becomes a creature of the state, unthinking and utterly dependent upon the whims of his passions, and horribly addicted to the product. The government waged a campaign against cigarette companies because their product was addictive, and fought to keep it marketed toward children. The government’s involvement was to such a degree that it made Camel eliminates their popular marketing figure “Joe Camel”. If it could do that, why can’t it stop pornography, which is repellent and abhorrent?
The truth is, the 1st Amendment to our Constitution more or less allows for all forms of expression, because it is based on the false concept that man should be free to say whatever, so long as it does not falsely create imminent panic. Even our sainted Republicans, those crusaders that the pro-life movement continues to suggest we ought to vote for, do not think pornography should be outlawed. Radio talk show host Sean Hannity, has hosted notorious smut broadcasters like Howard Stern on his program, and supported him on the grounds that if Stern can be shut down, so could he. Personally I think we’d be all the better and it was after he did this in 2002 that I shut Hannity off for good. All around, in the economic model that Republicans espouse, there is the belief that they need to let the market work, and this includes pornography. The future Rueben Sturmans of the country are well supported by the so-called conservatives. During Schlosser’s research, a porn star he interviewed claimed “You would be surprised how many producers and distributors of pornography vote Republican.”5
Not only has the market been allowed to work for pornography, which has substantially transformed the American psyche, but it has also worked for contraception and abortion. Although Planned Parenthood legally a non-profit, it makes tremendous profits from the sale of contraception. There is a massive demand for contraceptives in our culture, as well as in Europe, and a demand to distribute them to the third world, even though the actual demand there is questionable. Planned Parenthood last year made an income of 1.02 billion and a profit of 15 million according to their annual report. Why is this?
The pharmaceutical companies sell birth control pills to Planned Parenthood for $1, much less that what it does for pharmacists, then Planned Parenthood sells them for $20, undercutting the drug store by a significant amount yet making a 2,000% profit. The pharmaceutical companies are happy to do this because they know they will make more money selling to Planned Parenthood which aggressively meets the demand than it will selling to drugstores. Over all contraceptives provide a multi-billion dollar a year industry for pharmaceutical companies. This is because demand is there, and they are just being good entrepreneurs and getting rich off of providing products. The social effects of contraception are obvious, they lead to abortion and unwanted children, and introduce disharmony and abuse into the family. Contraception leads directly to abortion, because, as we know from ample experience in 40 years, contraception does not work. Thus people depend on contraception to make their procreative act non-procreative, and when it doesn’t work, they turn to murder as the solution. It is futile to be against abortion while not against contraception, and the pro-life movement will get nowhere attempting to stop one without the other. It is like trying to stop the water flowing from the tap by putting a cork in it, and not turning off the water from the source.
The Supreme Court said as much in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, when it declared:
“The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” 6
Abortion is also a money maker, allowing abortionists to pocket $100,000 a week. However the money is not made so much from the abortion as from the sale of aborted fetus parts to (surprise) pharmaceutical companies, cosmetics companies who use the collagens in their products (including shampoo), and to universities conducting research on murdered babies. Parts are also sold to clinics specializing in plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery to help aging women look 10 years younger.7 The same abortion that the doctor was paid to perform, he profits doubly by selling it to a large company. Living the American Dream no doubt with their parties and cocktails and fancy dinners. So was Hitlerism. It made Germany profitable, so why not? Did I forget that Margaret Sanger was a Nazi and ran articles by Nazi doctors in the Birth Control Review?
All this should be ample to illustrate that the powers the pro-life movement is up against are not laws, they are not merely lawmakers and judges, rather the notions founding the Constitution, it is the atheistic secular worldview increasingly prevalent in the last three hundred years. The pro-life movement is against the prince of this world and the culture which has converted to his cause. This is why I call porn satan’s Church and satan’s medium. When we consider, that more money is spent on it than on the popular cultural music, rock and country, and more than enlightened things like symphony orchestras (I don’t consider Broadway that enlightened), we must realize that we are also up against the cold hard economic trends of our culture. The enemy of the pro-life movement is the free market and freedom of expression which leads to the unbridled lust for anything that can be sold at whatever cost, even if the social costs are grave. Who cares, these people are entrepreneurs living the American Dream.
Furthermore whereas government in the past tried to curve obscenity today it practically encourages it as part of the market from which it gains tax revenue. As long as we support Free Market ideals the Reuben Sturmans, Margaret Sangers and Hugh Heffners of the world will be free to market evil with impunity. Pro-lifers will continue to march every 22 January, but the status quo will reign and the plight of the unborn, men and women the same. There is too much money, and when the government does not step in for the common good of the people, life turns into the haves dominating the have nots. Government becomes the servant of business rather than of the people.
Real change is ending the unbridled “liberty” that has been pursued both in so-called “expression” and in economics. They are two sides of the same coin, and ultimately lead to the same evil. Now even if obscenity laws were re-instituted under the best possible interpretations and hefty penalties and fines applied, this still would not eviscerate pornography, and likewise abortion and contraception if the relevant case law to be were overturned (which is increasingly unlikely as every decision reinforces abortion law in the Constitutional framework) without conversion in the culture. Just as Catholic conservatives have tried to recover the sacred in the liturgy, we must also look to recover the sacred in the culture, promoting real art, real music, putting an end to the overly litigious, overly entertained, overly advertised and sexualized culture which demands more filth and pays for it. Though the government does have a proper role interfering in the market place if it is for the common good, it is insufficient to rely on government action to solve our problems. We also need action from within communities, beginning with the preservation of the family. If the latter is not done, all the laws in the world will be as fruitless as they were 80 years ago.
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Notes:
Ryan Grant for Volume I., Issue 7.
