Muses rage against 'gods' who gave us abortion

In 1973 the Supreme Court decided to assume godhead and rule in His place. They alone would determine the issues of life and death from then on. With their newly-minted superpowers they decreed that life as we had known it would be sharply winnowed and tenuously defined. They were not wise enough to recuse themselves for a higher court, unfortunately for us.

Now women killed their babies (born and unborn), long before Roe vs. Wade, but never so carelessly and in such crowds. Thanks to seven men, child disposal is now guiltlessly easy due to their magical legalities and self-ordained powers of absolution. Most of our culture followed after them, digging a wide, easy path for themselves to abortion-clinic fundraisers.

But it wasn't always so.

Some of the proof for this lies in the arts. Over 2,500 years back the Greeks were appalled by Medea, the vengeful wife who killed her own children just to spite her husband. Unthinkable! Until quite recently abortion was considered a tragic and shameful thing by the majority of Americans of all types. This was in spite of the fact that some writers and artists who dealt with the issue procured (illegal) abortions themselves.

In those dark ages, even Bohemians wrestled with their flesh in their work to some extent. This was before the post-conscience era, though. The arts are realms where good and evil (among other things) are contemplated, weighed and set in conflict with each other.

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Except for a few novelists and poets, there is little soul searching or examination over anything truly controversial within the ranks. Abortion is generally avoided by contemporary artists, except for a group nod of mass approval.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Just 28 years before Roe vs. Wade decision, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem on abortion. "The Mother" isn't an outright denunciation or in the least spiritual. Yet Brooks openly admits she was "sinning" and "stole" the lives of her children. She bears responsibility for her decision, if not great tears of remorse.

"The Mother" (excerpts)

Abortions will not let you forget ...
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children ...
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?

Spike Milligan was a British writer and comedian more well-known for silly projects such as "The Goon Show." While an inspiration for Monty Python and Robin Williams, he also had a serious side and wrote some insightful, intense works. Most of Milligan's poems are amusing short pieces for children, but for abortion, Milligan revealed a rare, dark side. "Unto Us" is an accusative and harsh narrative poem from the point-of-view of an aborted child.

"Unto Us"

Somewhere at sometime
They committed themselves to me
And so I was!
Tiny in shape
Lusting to live!
I hung in my pulsing cave.

Soon they knew of me
My mother – my father
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me!
I will bring you love!'

I was taken
Blind, naked, defenceless,
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
And dropped on the sterile floor
Of a foot-operated plastic waste bucket.

There was no Queen's Counsel,
To take my brief.
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod's shop window.
When my passing was told
My father smiled,
No grief filled my empty space.
My death was celebrated
With two tickets to see Danny La Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.

Spike Milligan

Milligan's last lines here would be enough to spark feminist and transgender rioting, although he died in only 2002. He's gone far off the progressive script. An online comment from a poetry forum is an example of the wrath of the crossed liberal who assumes all artists naturally think exactly as they do.

Shocked that Milligan lost the rhetoric of a "cool, left-field" liberal, a young reader attacks the poet as "reductionist, sensationalist, regressive and totally offensive to women." It's good thing women have trained him so well what to think. The kid doesn't realize how doctrinaire, unappealing and unconvincing he is, an inflexible, little pedagogue who can only come up with a few paltry slogans in the face of a serious, life-or-death issue.

It's hard to dig up contemporary poets that deal honestly with the ugliness of abortion. This is odd, because abortion has everything for "great" art: blood, violence, rejection, turmoil, ethics, death and issues of basic human rights. The act forces abortionists and patients into an intimate, uncomfortable invasion, a plot. Abortion forces anyone who ever concerns themselves with such things to wrestle with conscience, betrayal and parenthood. It is a bloody act rivaling Lady Macbeth's. How could they miss it all these years?

Rober Klein Engler is an exception. An exquisite poet, he teaches and writes for conservative publications such as the American Thinker. Engler isn't even the orthodox conservative liberals love to paint. His work is often found in "gay" sections of bookstores, yet he is at least honest, grappling with moral conflicts in his own life and in the culture.

Abortion and child murder are confronted in "The Infants in Limbo" from Engler's book "Three by Seven: Poems for Voice and Cello." Several themes are knit together, like the bones of the reassembled dead he refers to as prelude (from Ezekiel 37:7).

Excerpts from "The Infants in Limbo"

The babes in limbo billow in a foam,
floating without care, no work to lose,
nor trumpet flesh that sounds the night.
They need not give an offering without stain.
Perhaps when we are called with them to live
again it will be like the blind who see for
once the waving trees but think them men.

All men have names. It is their knot untied.
We make our name stand out by deeds and
warp our spirit on the way – those in limbo
never savor this or the pepper of philosophy.
They cannot say the word that draws them
down nor do they know the other name
that is the nameless want within our heart …

Every murderer believes this is the only world.
Yet we are all brave today, stepping head first
into the faithful autumn light. That man who
carries the blister of names and robes of smoke
will always love who would abandon him.
Try to understand the mystery of his hand –
the promise to be numberless as grains of sand.

Condemning abortion unsparingly, Engler defines it as the "welcoming of a newborn into the community of death by liberalism." These are charges liberals avoid by putting their fingers in their ears and humming mindlessly to ward off any stray remnants of conscience.

Writing on same-sex marriage, Engler reveals how the arrangement logically and legally "un-defines" children, along with the myriad parenting possibilities. But he charges support for abortion was the first step in the "un-definition" of children.

If infants remain "undefined," nameless and disregarded in America, aren't we all? At least in the eyes of the gods enshrined in Washington, D.C., and for liberal artists, their faithful muses.

SOURCES: American Thinker / The Poetryfoundation.org / Poemhunter.org / Robert Engler Klein