“All you need is love,
Love is all you need.”
– The Beatles, 1968
(Image credit – Pinterest)
The Counterrevolution of the 1960s captivated much of the West’s imagination for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I grew up during that time, and was myself drawn into it, like many of my contemporaries trying to find a new path to peace in the midst of a conflicted world teetering on the edge of annihilation. I tried the experiment of living with urban wannabe hippies, and, when that evaporated, living with a few “cool dudes” who, we hoped, could support one another in maintaining some separation from the Establishment grind of conforming to the system.
As the Sixties departed, the true Hippies retreated to their communes to let the system and its oppressive culture “go f— itself” amid the ugliness of race riots, horrible Indochina atrocities, the turmoil of Middle-East affairs, Superpower proxy wars in Africa, and nuclear war near-misses. The millions of Hippie-imitators and wannabes who had held onto the Counterculture coat-tails to enjoy its more hedonistic aspects began to face the truth that they had to actually begin to work for a living. That meant making a pretense of “conforming to the Man and his demands”.
Some, like myself, tried to hang onto the some of the threads of our old illusions, but found we were mostly deluding ourselves. Young as we were, this called for some serious reflection about who we really are and what we are here for on Planet Earth. It seemed that love is not all you need. It requires something strong to bolster it and keep it, and the hope it gives, alive.
This great social and cultural crisis thus dove-tailed with personal crisis for many of the somewhat more idealistic millions of young adults of the early boomer cohort. The resolution of this great identity search seems, to a great extent, to have depended on how we had been raised. Many reverted to the values and expectations, although usually not the religion, of their upbringing – go get a job, settle down, contribute a bit to society, and raise a family. Or: go get a good education, find a career, climb the ladder, get your share of the rewards, raise a family, contribute a bit to the community, then retire and enjoy what was beginning to be euphemistically called “The Golden Years”. Our views on love had become much more prosaic and less “heavenly”.
There is no doubt that we all need love. All through life we all need to be loved, and to love, to receive it and to give it. This transaction is the most validating part of life. This is what makes every human being “belong” and feel valued.
One of the earliest justifications for abortion, which had then become so “pregnant” an issue all across the West, was “every child a wanted [read loved] child”. We will not rehash the abortion debate in this space. Suffice it to say that the root cause of that still virulently corrosive issue that has driven such deep wedges in all nations across the world in the last fifty years is cold love – or no love.
Abortion has been selectively and somewhat surreptitiously practiced for thousands of years, but only in the last century has it become a world-wide ideological and metaphysical pandemic. Obviously, it is not a “pandemic” in the same sense as our latest exemplar, COVID-19 and its variants. But it is far more deadly if we want to be honest about running an actual body-count over the last fifty-odd years or so. If we were to do so, its only rival would be the Bubonic Plague, the “Black Death”, which has been guesstimated to have killed at least 100-million in the space of 10-15 years as it swept across Central Asia and into Europe in the mid-14th Century. But on a sheer numbers-basis, abortion dwarfs the Black Death.
It is a measure of our collective shame and guilt that many nations (of which Canada, my homeland, is one) are no longer honestly reporting or even collecting accurate abortion statistics. Canada has become the only nation on Earth without any law on the books governing abortion. In 1988 the Supreme Court struck down the existing law and told Parliament to make a new one that conformed to its evolving interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The politicians attempted this over the next several years and, failing to find a consensus, then failed in moral courage, all the while blaming one another. However, lest we blame them too much, they merely reflected the state of agonized public division and wishing the whole thing would somehow just go away. Nevertheless, reputable statistical extrapolations can be and have been done to approximate both the local and global impact of abortion on population.
Once more, we can use Canada as our exemplar in the question of statistical impact on society. Canada has had legal abortion since 1969. For thirty plus years, statistics were kept and collected from the Provinces by the Federal Government. In the last 10 years when they (we) still kept track of these “procedures”, the annual number of documented abortions in both public and private hospitals and clinics was between 90,000-110,000. We also knew that reported statistics were probably not complete, so the numbers were probably a little higher, meaning we should probably add another 5,000 or so.
If we assign a conservative average of 80,000 over the 53 years of legalized abortion in Canada, we arrive at a reasonable estimate of 4,240,000 abortions. If we allow a “fudge factor” of 10% for under-reporting, which we know has been the case, we arrive at almost five million future contributing citizens having been eliminated.
All we need is love? Where was the love for five million human beings not allowed to be born and live a normal life-span because they were “not a wanted (loved) child”? This makes an utter mockery of this maudlin cliché that “every child should be a wanted child”.
The purpose of this reality-check is not to assign blame. It is not to make the women who felt/feel compelled or desperate enough to choose abortion feel ashamed and guilty and terrible. Let us be frank that many of them did and do not really have true liberty to choose (so much for freedom of choice!) when surrounded by insistent and indignant parents, bullying male partners, and well-meaning peers and friends, all the while fighting their own internal maternal instinct. What options were/are given them besides, “If you have the baby and keep it, you will be ruining your (and my/our) life?”
Who was/is there for them to offer them another road, amid the often unsympathetic and vehemently righteous pro-life/anti-abortion advocates and the carping, oppressing, bullying unsupportive significant others, not to speak of the frequently strident ideological and uncompassionate militancy of the pro-choicers?
Love was/is desperately needed, but has gone into the deep freeze on both ideological sides, and, sadly, at the personal level where these forlorn women live. The pregnant and vulnerable woman is still pretty much left alone and abandoned, the victim of cold love, even while protests of “We’re only telling you this because we love you,” are drummed into her ears.
Let us also be clear that governments, churches, and other charitable organizations were/are not disinterested bystanders during all this. Almost the whole old-fashioned support system of orphanages and homes for single mothers has been defunded and gutted, whether by design or neglect. Much cheaper to erase the problem than fund assistance to a young woman trying to raise a child and still have a life for ten-to-twenty years, or whatever time it may take for her to find a husband/partner who will help support her and her child. And the religious institutions who used to do most of this sort of thing are largely in disgrace for reported scandals of abuse of various kinds. “Shut ‘em down!” runs the Greek tragedy chorale.
This is but one flaming example of the utter failure or our society to demonstrate real love to so many segments of the population who have been marginalized, ostracized, victimized, vilified, etc. For more examples, we can look at how we neglect and shove the disabled and mentally ill out of the way. We can consider how we warehouse our inconvenient seniors because we can’t, or won’t, provide funded assistance to the many who could still live at home if we bothered to pay care-givers a living wage. This would be far cheaper and, for many, far more compassionate than funding long-term beds at $40-70,000 per annum in impersonal institutions.
Consider how we still cheat the indigenous of what they are entitled to after 200 years of racism. The parallels with the abortion issue in all these cases is striking. In similar fashion, all the old-fashioned but at least partially effective institutions have been defunded and gutted, leaving these underclasses isolated, unsupported, and driven to the brink of despair.
Agape where are you? Where have you gone?
Agape is the highest form of love which God exampled in Jesus. He commissioned a community of followers which became known as the Church, to continue to spread it and bring it into every part of human life and society. It is sad to watch and lamentable to admit that cold love has all too often and too much crept into the Churches of the West, not to speak of the secular, godless ideologies which have supplanted them here in the rich and comfortable First World.
TO BE CONTINUED
World.V.You 