From womb to waste: how modernity made life disposable

Ten million children have been ‘disposed of’ since 1967.

The verb we choose matters. Because arguably the right word—the clearest, most accurate word, the word that tells us most of the truth—is ‘murdered’.

Why would a society murder its children?

For most of my life, I would not have used the word murdered. Aborted is a horrible word, but so specifically linked to the removal of a child from its mother’s womb that we had got used to it. It was the numbers that jolted me out of my modern-mind complacency into a new perspective, one that forced me to ask new questions.

I was hosting a BBC weekly three-hour radio programme on Sunday mornings in the south-east of England, part of which was dedicated to phone-ins. A pro-lifer with a bee in her bonnet about abortion phoned in and began to complain. I couldn’t muster much personal interest, but out of professional interest I began to Google the subject to see if I could put together a framework of facts. The number leapt off the screen at me. Six million. Six million?!

Without realising, I spoke out loud—on air. Astounded, I said: “Six million. That’s a Holocaust.”

It is indeed the Holocaust number that haunts the European imagination (except of course for the Holocaust deniers, who for strange reasons think the number has been grossly exaggerated by the Jews themselves to gain political leverage or self-pity. But they are a distraction today).

For the apocalyptically minded, 666 is the number of evil. For the people of Europe born after 1945, six million is the number of evil. Not just evil—but the evidence of a corrupting, metaphysical force of evil. Because it is inconceivable that human beings could destroy each other with such brutality, while telling themselves such lies, and in such numbers.

Suddenly, I joined the dots. The numbers did it. The scale was too great. It broke the fiction of medical care for mothers and turned six million wombs into chambers of death—where the smallest of children were not gassed but cut, hacked, and sucked to oblivion.

I began to shift my position from that moment. Nothing more happened during the phone-in—except that perhaps my voice lost a degree of disinterest on the subject. But the following morning, the station editor invited me in for a swift and unambiguous confrontation:

“If you ever link together the Holocaust and abortion on air at the BBC again, we will pull the plug on the transmission and show you out onto the street.”

I went away wrapped in thought. New thought.

I’m sorry that I could not be at the UK’s March for Life London this weekend. But I want to pay tribute to all the people who do march to save the babies. I will try to use my words instead of my legs.

What has taken me aback is the depth of the grip of the ideas that have turned an otherwise kind and generous culture into one that tolerates the transition of wombs into death camps.

My first chain of thought led me to a conviction that evil was real. From there I realised that meant there must be a good God (or how else could I call evil evil in contradistinction to good?). And thence to an encounter with Christ, the Incarnation of God—and so I became a practising Christian.

As many of you know from my other contributions, I’m very taken with the insight of Jordan Peterson: in many cases, it’s not that people have ideas, it’s that ideas have people. There is a good deal of ideological possession—or oppression—as well as the spiritual kind.

And in my mind, there’s no great distinction between evil spirits and ideas. I’m not saying they are the same. But I am saying they are more closely related than we might imagine.

If we look at the nature of the ideas that have possessed our culture, the situation is both more drastic than we thought—and also more solvable. What’s needed is a kind of ideological exorcism. Confronting the modern mind with the Catholic mind.

We’ve experienced a kind of wholesale brainwashing, producing something we might call the modern mind. And we have an antidote to that: the Catholic mind. This is the mind that built the best of our civilisation, and more importantly, the mind which perceives, celebrates, and protects the human person as sacred—because we are made in the image of God.

In a recent conversation with Sebastian Morello (see the recording here), he traced the modern mindset to the influence of René Descartes.

Descartes drew a new map for the mind and of the mind. Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—dislocated humanity from the safe space of belonging to God. What sounds to us like a truism severed the umbilical cord of our ontology. It broke our sense that we had come from God, were held in being by God, and were returning to God.

It replaced this with a self-referential self-sufficiency. “I know myself by my thinking, and my thinking defines all I need to know about myself.” This sets me up as an autonomous being, self-sufficient in my own mind.

Before this, the common perception might have been summed up by Aquinas’s ipsum esse subsistens—Being itself subsisting.

Before this, the traditional understanding of human existence was profoundly different. It was best expressed by St Thomas Aquinas, who described God as ipsum esse subsistens—Being itself, subsisting. In other words, God is not simply one being among others, but the very act of being itself. Every person only exists because God shares his being with them.

This earlier view held that our existence was not something we generated or proved through reason, but something we received. We are contingent beings—dependent on God not just for our creation, but for our continued existence.

St Paul reminded his Greek audience that Greek philosophers shared this perception with Christians. In Acts 17:28, he quotes Aratus: “God, in whom I live and move and have my being.” The Logos was a common concept amongst the two groups—but the Christians gave it a name: Jesus. More than that: the intelligence that created matter, ordered it, and enlivened it had taken form in matter. He had become incarnate. The similarity between us and Him strengthened our sense that we shared something in Him, as He so obviously shared something of us.

But the moment Descartes (on our behalf) offered a different way of looking at ourselves—separate from God—then humans lost their radiance, their connection, their significance. We became just stuff.

But the problem with stuff is that it is without status. It becomes dispensable and disposable. It is, after all, just stuff. We don’t even feel responsible for it—unless not looking after it is against our interests.

From this stems the argument used to justify cleansing the womb of an inconvenient life: the foetus is “just a bunch of cells.” In other words: just stuff. No status. No rights. No recognition. We can get rid of it.

When we point out that life begins at conception, we’re asked to prove it. And soon we’re wrangling about how to define life, and we don’t get very far.

But if we stop arguing about when life begins, and instead recognise that all humans share in the being of God, then everything changes. What matters is not the potential, but the pattern. The clump of cells is not a mere biological possibility—it is matter imaging God, from the first nanosecond of conception. It doesn’t have to become. It already is.

The danger of the opposite argument extends beyond babies in the womb. It includes fully grown humans who are no longer useful. Or those near death who have lost their significance to everyone but themselves. Or the wrong kind of people, like the Jews who were seen as six million of the wrong kind of stuff. Once the quality goes, the numbers hardly matter.

We can’t easily convince pro-abortionists that foetuses are people. Sometimes we try—by pointing out that from six weeks, after which nearly all abortions take place, they have heartbeats. But it makes no difference. Stuff is still stuff.

What might work better is to challenge the faintly ludicrous and hubristic sense of self-importance in the modern self.

We are not independent beings. We had no say in whether we were born, to whom, how long we will live, or what happens after we die—and in the meantime, we control very little.

In the struggle to save our culture from the mind-virus of modernity, good arguments are not enough. What we need is the Catholic mind: the conviction that all humans are sacred because we are made in the image and likeness of God.

We may not begin by comparing Descartes with Aquinas or St Paul. But if we can reconnect people with the reality that God is where we come from, where we go, and the ground and purpose of our being—then other ideas and priorities will begin to shift.

Humans are sacred. We don’t have to invent or earn our own significance because it is already stamped on and in us. Suddenly we find ourselves no longer isolated and atomised. We are no longer separate and alienated. We are all connected and held—together.

Jesus saves mankind. But the Catholic religion He founded will save our culture.

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