Written by Kathy Clubb
Planned Parenthood made headlines recently as a Manhattan facility removed the name of its founder, Margaret Sanger, in order to pay lip service to the latest cause celebre; fighting white supremacism. Sanger is widely-known as a proponent of eugenic contraception and sterilisation and for her efforts to stop ‘inferior’ races and classes from breeding.
The story was covered by several progressive mainstream media outlets, who took the opportunity to play down Sanger’s ties with the Ku Klux Klan and attempted to place Sanger’s clearly racist tendencies into an historical context. Reports were sprinkled with quotes from liberal academics who claimed Sanger wasn’t trying to “erase the black race”, but simply wanted to make cheap contraception available to those who most needed it.[1]
Although Margaret Sanger’s name might have been erased, her legacy has not. Since Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills are disproportionately represented in black neighbourhoods in the United States, fifty years after Sanger’s death, it is obvious that eugenics is still part and parcel of her organisation’s work. But that’s not the point in this context. Instead, the erasure of the racist Sanger’s name from one of her flagship providers suggests that the abortion mentality drives cancel culture. After all, it is almost comical to think that the woman whose work initiated the cancelling of more than 300,000 tiny lives annually[2] has herself been cancelled by her woker-than-woke descendants.
The easy availability of abortion has for decades been teaching men and women that it is possible to ‘cancel’ a tiny human being who gets in the way of their lifestyle – their narrative if you will – and to pretend that that child never existed.
Weaponising Words
In addition to imparting the idea that a living human being can simply be extinguished without consequence, the abortion lobby has given a few practical tips to the Cancel Culture. One of the most potent of these is to empty words of their meanings then supply them with new ones which are ambiguous and shadowy. In this way, terminology is used to hide unpalatable realities: we are all familiar with the use of dehumanising language such as ‘blob of cells’ or ‘product of conception’ in order to hide the reality that a tiny baby is dismembered or poisoned during an abortion then unceremoniously carted off as medical waste.
In her book, The Global Sexual Revolution, Gabrielle Kuby traces the ways in which LGBTI and pro-abortion activists used ambiguous language to co-opt international law as a way of furthering their agendas. Beginning in 1974 when population control was introduced into discussions at the United Nations, activists stretched, redefined then repackaged legitimate human rights laws as drivers for abortion. It was here that the term, ‘reproductive health’ was introduced as a Trojan horse for abortion and contraception.
Over time, the right to freedom of movement became a right to travel out of state or overseas for an abortion. The right to privacy became a right to decide about pregnancy and abortion. Freedom of expression was co-opted as a right to receive unfettered information about ‘reproductive health.’[3]
In a similar way, the Cancel Culture has learned to redefine terms and introduce obfuscation into human rights tribunals and into the law itself. ‘Being offended’ has become akin to being violently attacked; disagreement has become ‘hate speech’; ’tolerance’ now means that only one narrative is acceptable. ‘Safe-access zones’ keep no-one safe but serve to forbid discourse about abortion near the premises which provide them and thus cancel the rights of pro-lifers even as hapless mothers enter the building where their children will be cancelled in the fullest sense of the word.
Aborting Free Speech
Monitoring ‘hate-speech’, especially online, has become a full-time occupation for some leftist ideologues. The Southern Poverty Law Centre is a case in point. The SPLC is a notoriously pro-abortion organisation which specialises in misrepresenting peaceful pro-lifers and painting them as violent activists. But when it comes to denouncing truly violent groups such as Antifa, the SPLC is strangely silent.
The “Hatewatch”[4] section of the SPLC website lists post after post exposing ‘fascists’ who criticise progressive personalities and movements online and describes lawsuits the SPLC is using to punish ‘offensive’ comments and even professional relationships. A closer look reveals that most of these ‘offensive’ commentators are conservative Christians who simply disagree with leftist ideology.
The “Hatemap”[5] section allows users to filter by ideology; one movement that apparently represents a great threat to leftists is ‘Radical Traditional Catholicism’. The Fatima Centre and Tradition in Action are two groups listed on the “Hatemap”. Anti-Muslim groups are included but there is no mention of radical Islam posing any sort of threat. That alone indicates how closely the SPLC is aligned with the ethos of Islamic extremism.
Paul Hanrahan of Family Life International is not surprised that abortion lobbyists are at the forefront of ‘cancelling’ conservatives and Christians:
“I’ve been saying for decades that anyone who endorses the killing of little children is capable of anything, be it undermining the institution of marriage, putting the elderly to death or silencing dissenting opinions. Few other sins are as effective at deadening the conscience as is abortion.”
Forced Abortion: Extreme Cancel Culture
The Communist Party of China is perhaps the most successful proponent of both forms of cancel culture: its regime of sterilisation and forced abortion and its all-pervading control of its citizens through surveillance and its social credit system should strike fear into the hearts of freedom-loving westerners. The CCP has cancel culture down to a fine art and it is shameful that Australia has allowed that nation to make inroads into our infrastructure and economy.
The CCP is responsible for around 20% of the world’s abortions, cancelling approximately 9 million babies per year. (This figure doesn’t include abortions achieved through hormonal contraception and implants.) Citizens who fail to adequately support the government via the social credit system or who deliberately voice an opinion contrary to the party line or who try to expose the horror of China’s human rights violations face cancelling in ways that are more extreme than those in the West can imagine. Consequences range from the inability to fly first-class or procure desirable employment through to detainment, re-education camps, torture and death. China has put its own spin on Marxism and controls its peoples’ births and deaths to a degree Marx and Mao could not have imagined.
Our murderous culture
Pro-life academic and activist, Elizabeth Anscombe, had much to say about liberals’ ironic commitment to eliminating any sort of inequality or difference. She pointed out that this Marxist idea of a preoccupation with ‘equality’ actually reflected – and distorted – a fundamental truth. This is that all men and women do share an equality – the only one – which is that they have value and dignity by virtue of simply being human beings. Anscombe calls this equality impregnable, in that, although it can be violated, this equality can never be removed.
She observed of VE Day celebrations which commemorated the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany:
“I have been bitterly amused at the solemn pratings about how the human spirit shewed that it could not be suppressed; the love of freedom must win in the end – but, it was added, we must never forget, because we must be resolved never to let such things happen again. We must remain in the sun of morality triumphant over evil; we must preserve our happy state and be determined to fight against monstrous evils when they threaten.” ‘Fools!’ I thought. “You talk of being armed in spirit against possible future threats of evil. You seem all unconscious of living in an actually murderous world.” [6]
Anscombe was referring to modern man’s passionate embrace of legal abortion, which gives our civilisation the dubious distinction of being the most effective cancel culture in history.
Cognitive dissonance is contagious
Removing Margaret Sanger’s name may seem more genteel than a public statue being pulled down by an angry mob, but the goal is the same: obliterate a person, group or an historical fact that doesn’t fit the latest woke narrative and effectively rewrite history. The gleeful destruction of statues, characters and memory points to a pathological darkness that justifies even murder as long as it is on the ‘right side of history.’
Dissenters who side with the patriarchy, laud historical achievements by white colonialists, or believe in the binary nature of human sexuality may find themselves without a job, or facing lawsuits and/or anti-discrimination courts, being censored or ignored by their peers, or being doxxed (having their personal details revealed online). All this is done with a smile or a snarl in the name of eliminating ‘hate-speech’ and upholding ‘equality.’
Martyn Isles of the Australian Christian Lobby asks, “How have we become so ignorant that we think history is just a rolling saga of powerful men, sitting around like the guy on the front of the Monopoly game, smoking fat cigars, lobbing money everywhere, raping, pillaging, “racisting” [sic], and laughing with each other about how powerful they are? It has almost become that comical.”[7]
Surely, such a simplistic view of reality is possible when cancelling a baby has become the default position for most unplanned pregnancies? When a disabled baby can be killed to ‘save it’ from death or an unplanned baby can be killed to ‘save it’ from poverty, surely human discourse can be sanitised to ‘save us’ from uncomfortable ideas?
