Bosco – Irish Sentinel (Contributor) – 27th Sep 2021 –
The scenes outside Dublin castle in the aftermath of abortion referendum result will go down as a moment of soiled infamy, a perpetual stain on the fabric of our nation that can never be removed. While the genocidal famine was forced upon the people, the vile act of baby butchery and its subsequent triumphalism was voluntarily embraced through a plebiscite. Never in the history of western civilization did a nation vote to torture and murder its next generation with impunity and callousness
A recent 2020 study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, based on interviews with abortion doctors working in Ireland illustrated an unparalleled barbarity one would normally only find in a fictionalised horror movie. The study demonstrated that unborn babies are sometimes born alive after botched legally-performed abortions in Ireland. These innocent and helpless human beings and are then left to die, alone and in pain. Such late term abortions are carried out in cases where there is a life limiting condition or a so-called ‘fatal foetal abnormality’. One would have thought in a “progressive” society that embarks on a perpetual diet of “ compassion”, and where “love is love” is prominent, that a tiny baby who has little time to live, would be cradled for that briefest of times. Instead, the society that seems so loving condemns the child to a regime of torture and cruelty only visualised in the most gratuitously gruesome slasher movie.
The doctors in the study indicate they “are ‘unclear as to who will look after these babies’ if a baby is born alive following the euphemistically termed, Termination of Pregnancy procedure. The reality is that the procedure is more appropriately described as ‘ death by dismemberment ‘. Apparently, so distressed were some medical personnel that it resulted in them ‘begging people to help’ them in providing palliative care”.
Some of the doctors performing these abortions convey the trauma of “internal conflict”, an obvious deference to some latent conscience still resident in their being. The doctors, who have taken a vow of “ doing no harm”, experience reality as opposed the abstraction presented by the pro baby killing lobby, of how ending the lives of unborn babies can be “brutal”, “awful” and “emotionally difficult”. I am sure the brutalised baby has an even more brutalised record. The study quotes one doctor referring to what they do as “stabbing the baby in the heart.” Another doctor interviewed for the study said: “I remember getting sick out in the corridors afterwards because I thought it (feticide) was such an awful procedure and so dreadful.”
Despite this grotesque pretense of “compassion”, the majority of people who voted ( many may have been manipulated but at the end of the day, those who voted yes to murder the unborn did so with full agency) selected to murder the unborn. To do this of course, they had to dehumanize them first. “ A clump of cells”, “ they aren’t persons” etc etc, were some of the excuses given to massacre the innocent. Remember, no one put a gun to their head to usher in this approved genocide of a generation. They chose cruelty, they chose badly, they chose it themselves, their hands dropped the vote into the ballot box, no one else.
I have often asked myself why? why would women especially, turn away from their maternal instinct? There are many answers to this, narcissism, psychopathy, indifference, pride and of course demonic infiltration. Today I would like to address one possible answer, a psychological response one could say to understanding the heinous behavior of torturing and killing your own baby or, promoting such an obviously villainous activity and refer to it as an act of compassion.
I introduce you to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is about inconsistency. When we hold two thoughts that are inconsistent with one another IN 1957 social psychologist Leon Festinger wrote a book on the theory of cognitive dissonance. Let me explain through an example. Let’s take the example of someone, called Daniel, who smokes cigarettes. Daniel is a person who might have two distinct thoughts, one of which is that he habitually smokes cigarettes, the other, the knowledge that smoking is unhealthy. Daniel holds these two conflicting thoughts at the same time and acknowledging that both these claims as fact but they seem inconsistent with each other. . To hold two conflicting thoughts is illogical and this is where dissonance arises. It is this dissonance, or inconsistency that leads to the exhibition of internal distress, a particular discomfort that recognizes the disunity of the dissonance conveyed,
There are few ways in which Festinger said that one could resolve the inconsistency as a way of resolving the dissonance. First, you can change one of those thoughts. In our example, Daniel realizing that smoking is bad and that he is a regular smoker, elects to change one of those beliefs and rationalize that smoking isn’t that bad, and therefore changing one of his cognitions to restore consistency. Another is to change Daniel’s behavior related to the inconsistency, he stops smoking. The third is to add new thoughts to the scenario. Daniel may admit he smokes cigarettes and that smoking is bad but he rationalizes that he does a lot of other healthy activities to reduce the inconsistency. lastly, people can attempt to trivialize the inconsistency, resulting in Daniel in concluding “ hey, I am going to die eventually anyway, so I will continue smoking even though I know it is bad for me”.
Why do people feel discomfort at all? It is argued that people like to think that they seek the truth and inconsistency gets in the way of that resolution. Research also indicates that actual physical discomfort arises when People feel cognitive dissonance. A form of stress is exhibited whenever one recognizes a dissonance is present or when you contradict well held rational attitudes and beliefs. The need to resolve the inconsistency becomes therefore important to restore consonance again and thereby eliminating the distress.
Cognitive dissonance is especially likely to motivate a resolution of the contradictory beliefs when the perception exists that one had an element of choice over the inconsistency. If someone had no control over the contradictory beliefs, say being forced to smoke, then no dissonance is present and no discomfort arises. It is the voluntariness of the behavior or thought that leads to the discomfort. If the element of choice was removed, so too does the discomfort.
Returning to abortion. Why would women chose to promote this, most obviously heinous, act? I would argue that cognitive dissonance may play a role. Imagine a woman called Kate. Kate has an abortion. Deep down she knows this is wrong. She now has to deal with a conflict, that she knows she had an abortion and she also knows that in any reasonable understanding of the world, she knows what she did was evil, facilitating the butchery of her own unborn child. The dissonance causes immense distress and she can reconcile the conflict in a number of ways. She can admit that she is an imperfect human being and live with the fact that she was complicit in the destruction of her own child and seek redemptive healing. She can trivialize that all she did was evacuate “ pregnancy debris” or adopt other dehumanizing language removing the immoral aspect of the inconsistency. Finally, she can rationalize the “pro choice” sophism, that tells her, it was “her” body ( ignoring the fact that the baby had autonomy over his/her little body too). The latter two choices attempt to dissociate the fact that she was pregnant and the inherent natural inclination of maternal instincts of protection associated with such an experience, the first recognizes reality.
Recognizing reality and the fact that a mother abandoned her own instincts so that her unborn baby would be tortured to death (ripping a baby out of the womb, piece by piece, and vacuuming the brain out through a tube is the most extreme type of torture) is far more a responsible response that the other two options. That recognition requires honesty, pain and suffering that many women refuse to accept. Therefore, eliminating the latter as a possible way of reconciling the dissonance, many women, those at least in the pro-choice movement, elect the easier means of disabling the internal discomfort.
The same means of reconciling the two conflicting thoughts, actions and behaviors exist for those close to the mother who aborted also. These could be a woman fearing she may have to resort to an abortion in the future given her particular lifestyle choices or a man, who wants to abdicate his responsibility by caring for a child he helped make during a one-night stand. They too, by proxy, assume the same guilt and must also attempt to resolve the contradiction, to remove their own discomfort and so, like the aborting mother, they select the easier, more irresponsible route to displace the dis-ease. They promote abortion and the sophist arguments lent to its acceptance.
Pro choice men also tend to advocate the barbaric phenomenon with the aspiration to curry favor from women who think, themselves, more attractive for being feminists and understanding the “plight” of women. In truth, most females detest adult males who act not as solid principled men, but are willing to use these effeminized men for their own advantage, for voting in policies to their advantage.
Cognitive dissonance could also be used to explain why very high profile “catholics” with children who are same-sex attracted would promote same sex marriage, in contradiction to the faith they apparently profess. The same discomfort arises when there is a dissonance between adherence to the teachings of the Catholic faith which considers homosexuality to be intrinsically disordered, and the desire to want to see their child happy at any cost. There is an added dimension here too for the parent, who may blame themselves for the homosexual child’s predilection. Current science seems to suggest that homosexuality is the result of BOTH nature AND nurture. The nurture element may create a discomfort in the parent who might have to concede that their parenting style or circumstance ( being absent from the child during his formative years) contributed to the child’s disorder. To resolve the conflict, the parent goes through the same deliberation, often unconsciously, that 1) that her son exhibits a sexual disorder and that she can accept the cross she must bare and love her son regardless but not minimizing or ignoring reality, 2) trivialize the issue by believing the behavior or the Catholic teaching are not to be taken seriously or 3) attempting to alter the Church’s teaching, making the illicit now licit. Another option is to try to alter the son’s behavior but this would embody an acknowledgement that her own parenting choices were partly to blame for the child’s disorder, and if the parent is an egotist, this can be a step too far, too painful to adopt.
This is a piece of conjecture as I am not an expert and to truly know people’s motives requires expertise and a clinical environment, but these thoughts would at least, go to some length at understanding what would otherwise be incomprehensible, to explain the counter intuitive nature of anti maternalism. Human beings are imperfect beings and self-deception is our most perfect vice but it has consequences. Merely cast a glimpse at reality, and look at the 14000 unborn Irish babies that are discarded like trash, or worse, sold off to big pharma for large profits.
Christianity acted as the great bulwark against grotesque evils such that the first line of defense against it became our own conscience. That arbiter within, what we Catholics might derogatorily classify “ Catholic guilt” prodded us uncomfortably to maintain that bridgehead of good as the Russian author and Marxist dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn called it. Solzhenitsyn knew the frailties of human nature, he experienced it in the harsheness of the Soviety Gulag. But, he was aware that he, himself was not absolved of this blight, when he wrote
““The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil”.
