The feminist worldview and related ideologies have a lot to answer for. They have convinced an entire generation of women that their main, if not only, purpose in life is to have a career. Everything else must play second fiddle to getting into, and succeeding in, the paid workplace.
Thus family life is put on hold, if not rejected altogether. The very strong maternal instinct found in women is suppressed, and the normal desire to form a family is squashed on the altar of feminist ideology. And of course a leading sacrament of this secular religion is abortion.
If – heaven forbid – a woman should fall pregnant in her pursuit of the successful career life, then there is always abortion to take care of things. Everything must be sacrificed in that corporate ladder climb – even unborn babies. And if the career in the end does not turn out to be all it was meant to be, one can always turn to IVF and the like and family life can again be put back on the agenda.
Of course these women are simply kidding themselves. Their biological clock has been ticking away all this time, and if they wait too long, even the various assisted reproductive technologies will not be able to bail them out of their predicament. Putting off childbirth is simply risky business.
Indeed, a majority of IVF treatments are for women over the age of 35. Having deliberately put off having children in order to reap the financial rewards of a career, many of these women now expect the taxpayer to subsidise their choices by paying for their IVF treatment. This is simply unacceptable from a moral point of view. Women who choose to make their own fertility difficult or impossible should not expect society to pick up the bill for their bad choices.
Recently some Monash academics echoed these concerns and said that women are using IVF as a “Band-Aid” for so-called social infertility. By delaying child-bearing because of social pressures, these women were creating a financial burden for the community and fuelling an entire medical industry.
But the burden to the rest of society may not match the burdens they place on themselves. Having bought the lie that a career will solve all their problems and provide them complete contentment and fulfilment, they eventually realise it has all been a sham and an empty promise.
But by then it is often too late, and most cannot get the family they now so desperately want. How many women have gone through this grief and disappointment? One story along these lines has just been published, and it is as representative as it is tragic.
Consider the moving story of Kate Spicer: “I’m childless at 42 and haunted by the baby I aborted at 18”. I offer here parts of that story: “Terminating a pregnancy seemed far cleverer than pushing double buggies in small-town Devon, which is what some of my peers were doing after their O-levels.
“Today, I feel more emotional, guilty almost, about that bundle of cells I got rid of. In the bitterest of ironies, that terminated pregnancy remains the sum total of my reproductive history. Throughout my adulthood, I have sometimes felt broody, but have never let myself dwell on it.
“Using logic and reason, I pushed these instinctive urges from my mind: you don’t have enough money, you don’t have a solid relationship, you have no career stability, men can’t be relied on, you are too insecure. The family unit — Mum, Dad, two children — looked dull, claustrophobic and suburban. I was in denial, but every now and again my real feelings would break through the tough-girl rationale.
“Once, at a smart wedding in Northamptonshire when I was about 30, someone handed me a newborn baby and my skin broke out in hot hives. In Brazil, I met a ten-year-old street kid. I fed him, let him sleep and shower in my hotel room, bought him clothes, and felt an overwhelming desire to protect and nurture him. I had never before felt such a forceful maternal instinct. These events were profoundly physical reactions, both shocking to me.
“Just around the time of my trip to Brazil, the ghost of my never-born came back to haunt me. I began imagining what he might have been like — a tall and sandy-haired boy, who would have been 17 at ?the time. I was 35, the age when the ?experts say your eggs and fertility start declining.
“It’s embarrassing to reveal these visions of my never-born son, and important to understand their significance. This imagined son was not some moral spectre come to punish me; it was my subconscious reminding me to wake up and face reality.
“My relationship with the boy responsible for that pregnancy lasted three years and ended badly. Since then, I’ve had nice enough relationships with some great men, but I never met someone I could settle with for longer than a couple of years. Yes, I was a commitment phobe.
“Ironically, from the age of 35 my relationships became even more unsuitable: a married man, a boyish party animal, a confirmed bachelor. Instead of trying to solve the problem, I was compounding it. Did I secretly not want children? More pathetically, I wonder if I thought that I didn’t deserve them.
“A niece and two nephews arrived in my life, whom, to my surprise, I love to distraction. They have bought into even?sharper relief the phenomenal love and caring instinct inside the average woman. I am not one of those women who knows they don’t want children: my problem is that I never knew parenthood was something that a woman had to fight tooth and nail for.
“Surely, I used to think, getting pregnant is as easy as falling off a log. Only for teenagers, though. For older women, it’s all about the costly indignity of the fertility medicine merry-go-round, which I simply can’t face — or afford. To have a child at my age, it seems you have to want to get pregnant with the same zeal as the goons on The X Factor who chase fame — and I’m not made of that stuff.”
She concludes by stoically trying to accept her situation – but her pathos and grief obviously remain: “This truth is one that a lot of women at the end of their fertile years are in denial about it, and it can be pathetic to watch their desperation. I will not let myself go to that place. I was a teenager who got pregnant by accident and had an abortion, as any sensible girl did in those days. I think about my lack of children, in a low-level way, all the time. That lack is always with me.
“The alternative to parenthood is not yet apparent to me. Perhaps the authorities will consider me a useful adoptive parent. Perhaps my nieces and nephews will be spoilt for love. For most people, the final years of life are all about immediate family. My old age could well be miserable. I was sitting at my granny’s side when she died: when I die, it’s quite possible there will be no one with me.
“It would be easy to feel sorry for myself, to reproach myself for my decision to abort the baby I was carrying at 18 or to desperately chase the dream of motherhood at the age of 42. Instead, I have decided to accept my situation with grace — it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than five rounds of IVF.”
Millions of Western women can now offer similar stories. The feminist revolution and the abortion panacea are shams and mirages, having deceived and harmed countless women. How many more must suffer?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2135145/Im-childless-42-haunted-baby-I-aborted-18.html
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