Climbing the stairs, I ring the doorbell to be greeted by a rough, heavily-accented American voice. I explain that I am the journalist who has come to interview them. Having covered many human stories by now, I am no longer nervous when I meet people for the first time who I know will have to recall sometimes difficult stories.

This was different. I was meeting a woman who had been raped, beaten and left for dead. She subsequently discovered that she was pregnant and she and her husband decided to raise the baby as their own. How do you respond to something like that?

The gruff voice greeted me at the door. He was tall and bear-like, with an overgrown beard. Someone who could protect you I thought. Jeff, the husband, welcomed me into the apartment in which they were staying.

I caught sight of Jennifer, his wife, in the kitchen. As I sat down on the couch, still feeling uneasy, Jennifer asked Jeff to open a bottle for her. Jeff and Jennifer sit on the other end of the couch. The first thing you notice about Jennifer is her strikingly beautiful blue eyes which are like the ocean, so full of life yet so weary. The bright blue held her emotional currents and told a tale of ups and downs. Her pale skin was in stark contrast to her fiery red hair.

I could tell she was weary; perhaps she had seen too many journalists in front her, asking her the same questions, over and over again. Or perhaps she was just tired. I had been told that still suffers from seizures following the blows to her head during the rape. Jennifer sits cross-legged on the couch as we start discussing what had brought them to Malta and the long journey they had had to endure to get here. I spot a colourful tattoo on her leg and make a mental note to ask about it later.

They tell me about their five beautiful children and their life back in the United States. Apparently, Jennifer and Jeff had been visiting schools during their time here in Malta. I was surprised to hear that she was telling her story to school-age children but she informs me that here in Malta children are told about subjects such as abortion and rape.

She comments that she has experienced little resistance here when discussing abortion and says that people in Malta have been very ‘respectful’, even if they do not agree with her stance. Jennifer is a sign language interpreter which basically means she uses sign language to translate for deaf people. In 2014, in America, she was hired to provide her interpretation services at a conference a few hours’ journey away from her home.

Jennifer describes the January day as being snowy and cold, so she was wearing a hood and, as a result, did not notice that a man was following her. At the door to her hotel room, she put the armful of bags containing her belongings down on the floor and, sensing something, turned around to find a man standing behind her.

He was young, not much older than her oldest child, good-looking and not immediately threatening. She thought perhaps he needed help but he punched her in the face. She fought him, but he was a foot taller than her. Jennifer thought she was going to die so she stopped fighting. At that point, she describes that she just retreated back into her own mind and imagined crawling inside herself.

She eventually lost consciousness. The man proceeded to rape her and took her nearly naked body out to the place where the hotel rubbish was left for collection.

Laying in the snow, with just a piece of her bra on, Jennifer woke up to a woman yelling and trying to cover her with her coat. She was freezing and tried to lift herself up from the ground only to realise she could not because she was hurt. She put her hands up to her face and realised they were covered in blood.

Jennifer was taken to hospital where doctors told her that she had several injuries and a brain bleed. Since then she has needed six further operations. Weeks later, Jennifer had a work assignment on a cruise ship that had been booked months in advance. She was not doing well at home so, after discussing it with Jeff, they decided that she should not cancel the booking. They believed that she should get out and continue life: that the rapist had taken enough.

On the second day out at sea, Jennifer felt really sick so, in accordance with protocol, she was quarantined in the medical unit on board. Antibiotics were not working, so she was asked, as a precaution before giving her something stronger, if there was any chance she was pregnant. She immediately responded that there was not but then she stopped and did a quick count in her head and told them that she had been raped a month earlier.

It was the first time she had used the word ‘rape’ out loud. She had been so preoccupied about diseases, her injuries and the horrible incident, that pregnancy had not even crossed her mind. A pregnancy test was carried out and  it was positive.

Jennifer sat there, holding the test result, in total shock. She knew she had to tell her husband. The nurse saw her visible shock and told she would have to wait before having an ultrasound because she had been sick. At the ship’s next port of call, in Colombia, Jennifer was taken to a hospital. She says it looked more like the basement of a building.

It was dark and no-one spoke English. She was all alone, surrounded by strangers, and at that point she felt that she did not recognise her life anymore. She was wheeled over an old ultrasound machine and flipped on the screen and although at that stage there was not much to see, she had had enough babies to recognise that dark ‘P’.

At that point, she just smiled. Something in her came to life again and she had a reason to keep going for the first time since the attack. At this point, Jennifer pauses. Jeff is visibly emotional. She tells me that he does not often hear her telling her story. He has been holding Jennifer’s shoulder all along, supporting her as she talks to me, but it is obvious that this is hard for him too.

Jennifer continues recalling how she rang Jeff and asked him if he was sitting down.

“I’m pregnant,” she told him. A small pause followed. “Ok,” Jeff replied. “Sweetheart, this is a gift. This is something beautiful from something terrible. We love babies. We can do this.”

Jennifer had never doubted that Jeff would react in that way. She knew the person she had married 20 years before. I ask Jeff how he felt, saying that once he found out Jennifer was pregnant: “That was it, we were having a baby.”

Having the baby was not easy, as she had a difficult pregnancy. She was put on strict bed rest which meant she could not work. As a result they lost their house and had to move in with Jeff’s parents. “We were just trying to survive,” Jennifer says.

At that point in the interview, the photographer interrupts us to take a few photographs outside. Jeff holds Jennifer from behind and hugs her tightly as they pose for a photograph. They joke and laugh and kiss and I cannot help but remark on the beauty of their relationship.

Despite all they have been through in their 20 plus years together, these two are clearly in love and are each other’s support system. Jennifer smiles and tells me that  she would rather be with him than anyone else: he is her best friend.

I feel so much warmth from both of them that I do not want the interview to end. Although they have been interviewed many times, it is not about regurgitating the story. Jennifer does not tell the story, she recounts and relives the memory each time.

She gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Joshua, who is very much part of the family. He scribbles on the wall like any other child, and fights and plays with his big brothers. His sister likes to take him out and pretend he is her own: Jennifer is not too amused about this.

The emotional and physical scars of the trauma are still visible. It has been a difficult trip here in Malta for Jennifer, as she has had several interviews. She has had to miss some of them due to illness. She still has seizures and with Christmas lights everywhere, which are a big trigger, it has been very difficult for her.

I ask how she feels emotionally and if her rapist was ever caught. She tells me he went on to rape and murder other women, all redheads like her. A couple of years later he was found and killed by the brother of one of his victims. And so he was dead. She could finally breathe again.

The interview draws to an end but we continue chatting about her children. Jennifer brings her telephone and shows me a lovely photograph of all of them joking and laughing on their porch. Then she shows me a picture of Joshua. His eyes are the same ocean blue as his mother’s and  when I tell her he looks like her, she proudly smiles.

As I leave, Jennifer gives me a warm hug and I am just so amazed by this couple. They give me a business card with their email address so that I can send them the photographs. When I get back to my office I turn the card over and see a quote by Dr Seuss: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Jeff and Jennifer are in Malta on behalf of the LifeNetwork Foundation and will be speaking at today’s annual ‘March for Life’ in Valletta.

Ref: http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2018-12-09/local-news/Woman-raped-and-beaten-discovers-she-is-pregnant-6736200582

In Malta, the promotion of abortion as a woman’s right is now being peddled with an increasing crescendo. This should not be surprising. Now that Ireland has legalised abortion, Malta is the last country in the European Union that safeguards nascent life.

We are being repeatedly reminded that abortion should not be a taboo topic for debate. In a society that gives lip service to the concept of freedom and freedom of expression, it is an approach that cannot be contested.

As a representative of Life Network Malta, I can assure you that pro-life advocates welcome debate, so long as the purpose of debate is to seek the truth of what is at stake.

One hopes that we all agree with the hallowed maxim ‘The Truth will set you free’. Yet, we must make a clear distinction between an honest attempt to seek the truth of an issue and an organised campaign to present evil as a choice to be considered.

Here in Malta, we have already had the disgraceful situation where the abortifacient Morning After Pill was legalised on the false assumption that it is only a contraceptive.

We all remember distinctly the farce of a so-called public debate that preceded its introduction. This false claim is being challenged in court.

With regard to abortion, we want to ensure that public opinion is not hoodwinked in a similar fashion.

It is beyond debate that unless impeded, humans develop in stages from conception to adulthood. At all stages, the right to life is present

It is beyond debate that unless impeded, humans develop in stages from conception to adulthood. At all stages, the right to life is present. The value of life is literally incalculable: we cannot calculate it.

Promoting the killing of nascent life to attain a good end is not just contrary to natural law, it violates the morality Christianity has taught from its beginning.

In the West, over the past half century, the coarsening of conscience with respect to procreation and unborn human life has been astounding. It has abandoned the 1959 United Nations General Assembly declaration stating that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.

The underhand strategies employed in the Irish referendum should serve as a warning. It is a fact that in Ireland, powerful overseas interests played a role in funding the pro-abortion lobby. But there were other factors at play.

One of the most dishonest claims by the pro-abortion activists was the claim that the 8th Amendment in Irish law placed pregnant women’s lives at risk.

The tragic death of Savita ­Halappanavar was dishonestly exploited under the false premise that her life was sacrificed as medical intervention to save her life would have killed her foetus.

In Malta, there are those who are brazen enough to peddle the blatant lie that pregnant women are denied treatment if it places the child’s life at risk. With modern medicine, such cases are very rare indeed and the decision to opt for treatment rests with the mother.

Another attempt at justifying abortion is the case of women who are victims of rape. The pro-abortion strategy is always the same. Very rare cases are used to break down the law and our culture that defends life from conception. 

The evil action of rape is then compounded by the evil of eliminating innocent life. To sensitise public opinion to this false contention, Jennifer Christie and her husband are being invited to Malta. Jennifer was brutally assaulted, raped and almost killed. Following the rape she was expecting a child and both friends and medical people advised abortion as a solution to her dramatic situation.

Jennifer chose life and insisted that an innocent child should not be sacrificed. On the contrary, she upholds, that if anyone should be punished, it should be the rapist. Life Network Malta will be holding its annual march on Sunday where Jennifer and her husband will give their stirring pro-life testimonies. We invite people of good will who cherish life to join us.

Klaus Vella Bardon is deputy chairman of Life Network Foundation Malta.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

Ref: https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20181205/opinion/standing-up-to-abortion-klaus-vella-bardon.695910

“Paul VI’s genius proved prophetic: he had the courage to stand against the majority, to defend moral discipline, to exercise a ‘brake’ on the culture, to oppose present and future neo-Malthusianism.” Pope Francis

 CONTRACEPTION and ABORTION

 William Newton, Ph.D.

 Contraception Changes Our View of Life

In an attempt to lampoon Catholic attitudes toward childrearing, the British comical ensemble Monty Python have a scene in one of their films (The Meaning in which the father of a very large group of ghetto—dwelling children tells us in song precisely why he is the father of so many. The song has the memorable refrain in which the father assures us that “every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great, if one sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.”

This leans in the direction of suggesting that Catholics oppose contraception because it is a crime analogous to murder—the idea that every sperm (as well as every child) is sacred points in this direction.” It is clear from the quotation above from Evangelium vitae that John Paul II, at least, does not equate contraception with murder, because he says abortion and contraception are different in nature and not just different in degree of seriousness.

Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that contraception is an essential part of a culture that is ambivalent, at best, about the generation of new life—it is antilife in a different way than abortion is antilife but, at the very least, it leads to the general idea of pregnancy as something to be guarded against as a potential disaster.

Now, once this seed of doubt about the goodness of new life is planted and nurtured in the mind of a people, then the doors to abortion have been unbarred (if not opened); and as sure as day follows night, abortion will become law. Contraception turns pregnancy into a disease, opening up the way to drastic “curative” measures.

The antilife atmosphere nurtured by contraception goes a long way toward explaining why when countries permit contraception they very quickly follow up with laws permitting large-scale abortion. Just eight years separate the legalization of contraception and abortion in the United States (1965 and 1973); seven years in Britain (1961 and 1968); eight in France (1967 and 1975). Ireland held out longer, thirty-five years (1978 to 2013). I suspect this is a record but perhaps has something to do with the fact that Irish women could abort their babies in Great Britain. The point is that once contraception is legalized, its antilife inner character begins to do its work—the writing is on the wall. Of course, for many countries liberalized contraception and abortion come as a package under the euphemism of “reproductive health rights”.

The antilife character of contraception is perhaps even more starkly evident in the acceptance of the morning-after pill, which sometimes works not by preventing pregnancy but by destroying a newly conceived human being. So-called emergency contraception is a testimony to how contraception “naturally” extends its inner logic toward abortion. Here is where the antilife essence of contraception spills over most directly into the antilife practice of abortion, since no longer is any effort made to separate these two realities.

Another way that contraception changes attitudes toward human life is that it engenders an exaggerated and ultimately despotic desire for power over the origins of human life. As John Paul II points out, to decide for contraception is to take the stance of an arbiter rather than a minister with regard to one’s power to transmit human life.

In accepting contraception, mankind becomes forgetful that his role in the

transmission of human life is one of partnership with God. After all, the mother and father can only contribute the material part of every new human being; the spiritual element must come directly from God. In Humanae vitae, Paul VI reminds couples about this very point several times by using the word “munus” (meaning “mission” or “office”) to describe the task assigned to spouses. If the task of transmitting human life is understood as an office bestowed upon the parents, the notion of collaboration with God is better preserved.

But contraception fools us into thinking that we are in charge of the whole process of generating human life. This, in turn, leads to the perception that since we alone create a child, we alone can decide when we shall and shall not exercise this power. It gives the impression that we are the gatekeepers of human life. This totalitarian and autocratic notion of our power over the origins of human life easily leads to despotic attitudes with regard to unwanted and unplanned human life, as regards either pregnancies or the destruction of spare embryos resulting from in Vitro fertilization.

Contraception Changes Our Notion of the Human Person

A few years ago, a colleague of mine told me a story about an experience of his own son at school. My colleague’s wife was expecting their sixth child, and their eldest son had announced this happy news to one at his friends at school. This friend, on returning home to his own family, asked his mother why they might not also have a new baby brother. The mother told her son that they would not be having any babies because she, the mother, had had one of those operations “like you give to rabbits” to stop that unfortunate type of thing happening.

To my mind it is significant that this mother explained things in terms of the fact that she had had an operation that had also been given to the pet rabbit in order to stop it from breeding. It strikes me that this explanation has embedded in it yet another powerful effect of the contraceptive culture—namely, the blurring of distinction between humans and animals. It is not too much to say that one of the very distinctive aspects of human beings is that they can control themselves in matters of sexuality—they can harness their sexual desires and integrate them into higher forms of love.

This is, by my reading, the central thesis of Karol Wojtyla in Love and  Responsibility, where the pope-to-be explains that human beings are able to bring reason to bear upon their sexual drive and thereby use it as raw material for self-sacrif1cing love. Contraception is a discouraging phenomenon because it suggests that this is not really possible—in this way it conflates the difference between humans and animals in matters of sex. Something similar goes on in some forms of modern sex education. The View is taken that young women (and young men) are no more capable of developing virtue than are rabbits; so it is better just to give them some pills in order to chemically neuter them.

But this conflation of what is human and what is animal has implications for life issues. When techniques proper to the farm (such as neutering) are deemed suitable for human beings, then destructive forms of artificial fertilization are likewise seen to be acceptable. Here we can also see a logical link to euthanasia, because animals are routinely “put down” either when they are no longer useful or when they are sick and suffering.

In his 1994 Letter to Families, John Paul 11 touches upon a more subtle, but no less significant, shift in the attitude toward the human person that is brought about by contraception. This is closely tied to what the pope calls the reoccurrence of Manicheanism. By this he means an exaggerated dualism in which the body is estranged from the person, being seen more like a mere tool or vehicle.

John Paul II believed that this exaggerated dualistic anthropology is implicit within a contraceptive mentality. His argument is as follows: when a couple engage in sexual intercourse and at the same time intentionally render  themselves sterile (as they do by contraception), they are at one moment  seeking to give themselves to each other for the sake of communion, and at the same time seeking not to give (or receive) something important—namely, their fertility. This only makes sense if the couple believe that the body (of which fertility is an important characteristic) need not be included in the personal communication because it is not really part of the person.

The body is seen as a kind of tool used by the person to achieve union, but not part of the person and part of the personal gift of self that is inherent in sexual intercourse. In short, John Paul II is pointing out that contraceptive sex implicitly operates on the basis of an exaggerated dualistic anthropology.

Hence, the anthropology underlying contraception subtly but profoundly distorts our view of the human person and, thereby, removes a formidable psychological obstacle to abortion. It can translate into a belief that while a human body might well be present in the womb of the mother—by which is meant that matter of a human type is present—a human person is not present because, on account of the underlying contraceptive anthropology, the human body and the human person are radically distinct.

Contraception Contributes to a Change in Our Views of the Purpose of Science

It is instructive to consider two of the candidates for the ten inventions that changed the world, mentioned earlier. Penicillin and hormonal contraception stand side by side historically, because they were created within ten years of each other, in the first half of the twentieth century However, what separates these two is, for our purposes, more interesting than what unites them. While both give to mankind a power over himself (over his body), one, namely,  penicillin, fights against disease and promotes health and hence is clearly ordered to the true good of man, whereas the other, contraception, seeks to frustrate the operation of a healthy faculty, rendering it inoperative. As noted above, contraception treats fertility as though it were a disease.

This difference is very significant. Lauding hormonal contraception as one of the greatest achievements of mankind represents a quintessentially modern view of science. It sees progress as a task unconstrained by the question of what is really good for mankind. It is a manifestation of what Benedict XVI liked to call technocracy—meaning the ideology that what is possible is by that fact good.

The key point is this: contraception embraces a notion of science and progress as the search for power unconstrained by the question of the good. This philosophy of science has obvious and disastrous effects when it is applied to other life issues. It inevitably leads to a totalitarian claim over the origins of life itself, which manifests itself not just in abortion but in illicit forms of artificial procreation, cloning, and embryo experimentation—according to the logic of technocracy, as these technologies become possible, they become good.

Contraception Changes Our Moral Outlook

The final “game-changing” aspect of contraception is the way that it helps shape a culture’s basic moral outlook. In order to understand how contraception shapes the moral culture, it is necessary to focus on what is called the  connection of the cardinal virtues. According to Saint Thomas, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance are so related that there cannot be growth in one without growth in the others, and, likewise, weakness in one is a weakening of all.

It is on account of this that, elsewhere, Aquinas can argue that the thing that more than anything else undermines prudence is intemperance (and especially sexual intemperance, namely, lust). As Josef Pieper notes, the “will-to-pleasure prevents [the unchaste man or woman] from confronting reality with that  selfless detachment which alone makes genuine knowledge possible”.

We need now to factor in an insight of John Paul II concerning contraception—namely, that contraception contributes significantly to the problem of intemperance. This is, in fact, perhaps the major complaint levelled at contraception by John Paul II in the Theology of the Body.

For him, contraception is not so much antilife as antilove, in the sense that it promotes concupiscence understood as sexual intemperance. It does this because it totally removes from sexual relationships the need for self-control, and in a postlapsarian world this is a recipe for lust.

Hence, contraception fuels intemperance in cultures that accept it, and intemperance distorts and obscures our moral vision. The upshot of this is that intemperate persons and cultures see the world differently from temperate persons and cultures. This accounts for the disconcerting fact that unchaste cultures cannot see what is entirely obvious to the chaste—they even fail to see the humanity of the unborn child. It is not even a matter of bad will—intemperate cultures simply cannot see it. because they are blinded by their intemperance.

Or even worse, the unchaste are not able to see beauty. They cannot see it because the appreciation of beauty demands the appreciation of something “for its own sake”. This is not possible for a person or a culture that is fixated on consumption—which is at the heart of intemperance.

Only the pure can see beauty, so only the pure can see the beauty in and value of every life.

And finally, only the pure can see God. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). To have a pro-life view of the world, one cannot do without this purity of heart. The ultimate reason to respect every human life, no matter how small or compromised it might be, is that every human life is stamped through with the image of God; however, only the pure in heart can see this, because only they can see God.

Let us note here that all this points to a wider issue. I am taking contraception as a major contributor to intemperance in our culture, but it is not the only one——there is pornography, lurid music, various forms of immodesty, and consumerism. To the extent that these fuel intemperance, just like contraception they cloud our vision of the truth, and they are, therefore, elements of the culture of death.

A second way that contraception disturbs our moral compass is by way of undermining the notion of moral absolutes. John Finnis makes this point explicitly in his definitive work on moral absolutes. He notes that “the formal attack on the moral absolutes emerges, among Catholics, in response to the problem of contraception“: and that in its wake has come the denial of the moral absolutes of killing innocents (abortion), of telling lies (deceiving the public in matters of state security), of marital intercourse as the only legitimate form (masturbation, homosexual unions), of procreation as the result of marital intercourse (artificial forms of procreation and embryo freezing).

His point is that contraception is the soft underbelly of moral absolutes. It seems a less serious issue than abortion and homosexual acts, for example. People are much more prepared to admit that there might be special cases in which married couples might do a little evil (use contraception) for the sake of the good, such as the good of marital intimacy. But once this is accepted, the horse has bolted.

What I am arguing here is that the widespread acceptance of contraception, especially among Catholics, fatally undermines the opposition that can be mounted against abortion by the only organization that can mount a global challenge to the culture of death. This is because along with the acceptance of contraception comes the implicit acceptance of consequentialism and the denial of moral absolutes.

This fatally undermines effective opposition to abortion, to euthanasia, to embryo experimentation, and so on. After all, the moral analysis that would justify contraception—namely, consequentialism—can certainly also justify these other elements of the culture of death in many cases.

There are, no doubt, other important connections between contraception and abortion (and other antilife activities) that I have not touched upon here. There is, for example, the legal connection, most evident in the case of the United States where the law permitting abortion is built upon a case law permitting contraception. There is also undoubtedly a demographic connection—namely, that contraception contributes to a top-heavy population that stokes the flames of euthanasia.

Here, however, I have chosen to focus more on the psychological effects of contraception and how they have helped to bring about a cultural revolution that has itself ushered in the culture of death. One might say that as a mind-warping phenomenon the contraceptive pill is more powerful than a tablet of LSD. The latter only changes one’s perception for an evening—~the former has changed the minds of a whole culture and a whole generation.

I have been following closely here the teaching of John Paul II. However, on one thing I would humbly beg to differ. The late pontiff says that contraception and abortion are “fruits of the same tree”. I would suggest that another way of articulating this relationship would be to think of contraception not so much as the fruit of this tree but its rotten root—abortion, euthanasia, and embryo experimentation are the rotten fruits.

Historically, contraception has predated these other evils, but this is only  because these other crimes pre-exist in the logic of contraception, which inevitably takes time to unfurl.

In conclusion then, I do not believe that the pro-life movement can be indifferent about the issue of contraception. In some way, it has to address the root of the culture of death. Every gardener knows from bitter experience that if the root of the weed is not entirely destroyed then it grows back and often with a vengeance.

We need to set the axe to the root of the culture of death, and this root is contraception.

Taken from the chapter written by William Newton in the book IS HUMANAE VITAE STILL RIGHT by Janet Smith  2018

There is no law against a man biting off his own nose, unless it be a law of nature; nor even any police regulation against his hanging himself up by the hair or whiskers to talk to his friends and family in greater discomfort. There are penalties for suicide but, though I have no suicidal habits myself, I fancy they must be rather hard to apply; since they could only be sharpened into the legal and logical paradox of hanging a man to cure him of wanting to be hanged.

The majestic legislative mind of man does not commonly concentrate specially on forbidding things that nobody would normally want to do. Most probably, there never would have been any laws at all, except against things that men do quite naturally and even passionately want to do. Men punished murder precisely because there are such a large number of persons whom it would seem quite natural, and almost necessary, to murder. Men forbade theft because it is so utterly obvious that any fool could see it, that some property is in the wrong hands, and that anybody might think it would be better applied in his own hands; any fool could see it, any fool could say it, and the law was made because any fool might do it. There was a third commandment, against stealing not only our neighbour’s ass, but our neighbour’s wife, on which it would now be indelicate to dwell, because all the fools have done it.

Now about this, the Modern Mind has passed through two stages, and I do not know which is worse; for the Modern Mind is rather a weak mind. In the nineteenth century, roughly speaking, all respectable people seemed to suppose that nobody could be tempted to murder or theft or adultery, if he was really respectable. They thought these temptations only came to a curious remote tribe of monsters, called the Criminal Class. We were solemnly told that every criminal must be a lunatic; when in fact there is hardly a healthy or sane man who gets through forty-eight hours without some temptation to commit some such crime.

Then suddenly the Modern Mind discovered this and (not being a very strong mind) instantly slumped into the opposite extreme. Like most moderately intelligent people, I read detective stories in preference to modern novels; but even in detective stories I find this queer rudimentary reason creeping up. Even in crime stories there is now some comprehension of crime; that is, of the fact that we are all criminals. And now the whole weakness is working the other way; many recent murder stories are actually justifications of murder. The moment a refined respectable gentleman realizes that he might want to kill somebody, he jumps to the conclusion that this person ought to be killed. The fact that Aunt Jane is obviously a nuisance, that Uncle William is becoming a terrible bore, that Cousin Hildebrand stands between us and the really sensible family solution, is beginning to look more and more like a real reason for doing them in. That is why, in my own country, some are proposing what is called Euthanasia; at present only a proposal for killing those who are a nuisance to themselves; but soon to be applied progressively to those who are a nuisance to other people. As it applies by hypothesis to an almost moribund or partially paralyzed person, the decision will presumably rest with the other people.

It all began, of course, with stealing our neighbour’s wife as well as his ass; because she was more of an ass than the ass. If we want to know how this allowance for exception ruins or replaces the rule, the best example is divorce. Those who first urged it, urged it quite honestly as an extreme exception. They did really mean to apply it only to somebody married to a homicidal maniac. It has come to mean that a leading literary man told me on a platform in New York that no man could remain married to a woman who said, “Right-O.” I thought he might have avoided being married to a woman who said, “Right-O.” It has come to the point when a man advertises his desire to be divorced from a woman, only because he has forgotten her name. How jolly it will be when the sanctity of human life has reached the same stage as the sanctity of marriage! When men do not even remember whom they have murdered, as this gentleman could not remember whom he had married. Is it not time we reasserted the principle, known to primitive men, that the things we desire to do are the things we may be restrained in doing; and it is because we are all criminals that we had better be discouraged from crime?

(From The American Review, Feb. 1937)