Tea at Trianon: A New Abolitionism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

A New Abolitionism

Lord Nicholas Windsor spoke in New York city last month.

Lord Windsor modestly described his lecture as "modest," but the importance of his message is monumental and he is a particularly noteworthy messenger. He is a great-grandson of King George V of the United Kingdom, the first blood member of the British royal family to be received into the Catholic Church since King Charles II on his deathbed in 1685, a patron of the Right to Life Charitable Trust and the Catholic National Library and a student of theology at Oxford University. His godfathers include Prince Charles and an Archbishop of Canterbury.

After crediting European accomplishments during the twentieth century, Lord Windsor asked whether "anything of any real significance...had been overlooked, anything dangerous smuggled into this new phase of history that has caught us unawares." He answered affirmatively and identified "the abortion of our unborn children" as "a practice that constitutes the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life: the abortion of our unborn children."

The first member of the British Royal Family to be born in a hospital and married in the Vatican, Lord Windsor noted that he was born in 1970, about the time abortion was legalized in both the United Kingdom and the United States and lamented the "historically unprecedented cascade of destruction wrought on individuals: on sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, future spouses and friends, mothers and fathers—destroyed in the form of those to whom we owe, quite simply and certainly, the greatest solidarity and duty of care because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans."

Lord Windsor's based his case against abortion on the primacy of the right to life and human instinct . As he put it in his article: "All else that we concern ourselves with in the lives of human beings derives from the inescapable fact that first we must have human lives with which to concern ourselves. By disregarding this self-evident fact of the debt owed immediately to the unborn—which is to be allowed to be born (and let us not forget that all of us might have suffered just the same fate before our birth)—humanity’s deepest instincts are trampled and shattered."

Explaining what he deemed the "normalization" of legal abortion and "insidious," Lord Windsor related that what had been "only an implausible glimmer in the eyes of the most radically progressive thinkers and activists a century ago" is now "a fact of life so deeply embedded and thoroughly normalized in our culture that...it has been rendered invisible to politics in Europe" and its mention "has become the first taboo of the culture."

Lord Windsor acknowledged his fellow pro-lifers in both Europe and the United States, but opined that abortion is "a matter that impinges little" "[f]or most of our contemporaries" because "[t]he effectiveness of determined campaigns of propaganda at the outset to harden consciences, and gradually to enforce a conformism that fears to question what is said to be a settled issue, has worked wonderfully well."

Lord Windsor attributed this conformism to the allure of "choice": "...enforcement of a new status quo succeeds so well due, surely, to benefits enjoyed as a result—benefits of an order that make acceptable even the killing of innocents, by their protectors, on a scale that freezes the imagination. How much then must depend on its remaining so, remaining beyond question? This is the nub of that ideological word choice. So much else can be chosen in a given life if the option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably available. So many intoxicating freedoms are newly established, if only abortion is never again denied to women and to men."

To dispel the allure of "choice," Lord Nicholas eloquently explained the inevitable cost--to the aborted, to those who choose abortion and to society.

"But what of the cost? As with the cost of previous great willful destructions of human life, of whole classes of human life, the fact that it must and will be borne is a certainty, whatever the nature and scale of it. Of course, in the first order of consequences, the price paid by the victims is not obscure: We must never forget that the heaviest price is paid by those whose lives are not to be lived.