"It's like 9/11 Everyday"
A Statistic That Made Me Cry & What it Means for the West
Last week, a friend and I sat down to watch Lila Rose’s latest abortion debate at Yale. Here’s the link (it’s a total landslide, as usual).
During her opening remarks, Rose shared a jarring statistic: “every day in this country, nearly 3,000 children meet their fate by abortion.”
I’ve heard this kind of thing before, and to be honest, I’ve gotten used to it. The internet can feel like a nonstop firestorm of nightmare news and heart-wrenching numbers. It gets easy to scroll past that kind of data and shrug it off, even if nothing in you thinks it’s okay.
But then she elaborated.
“That is nearly the number of lives lost on 9/11, repeated every single day.”1
My stomach dropped.
I sat there, staring at the screen with a lump in my throat.
I fought it off for a moment (because I really don’t like to cry), but at some point I just couldn’t help it. I sank deep into the couch, dug my face into my hands, and began to cry.
Even now I can’t even begin to process this fact without feeling a painful concoction of emotions. Grief, heartbreak, fear, rage, despair—all welling up at once.
This moment was an abrupt awakening for me and a reminder that I cannot go on averting my gaze from so grave an evil.
Without question, abortion is the paramount moral issue of our age. Nothing comes even remotely close. And I think it is the greatest indicator of where our society is headed.
It’s not uncommon for us to look back on bad things in history and, in a way, exonerate the perpetrators, blaming their actions on ignorance or the “ways of their time.” We condemn the act, but we try to understand the man, and so avoid vilifying our ancestors.
But, you’ll notice, it does not work this way for crimes against children.2
We might excuse Abraham for having multiple wives, even though it was an act of disobedience against God, because we know that polygamy was a normal practice in his day. But we do not excuse Muhammad’s marriage to six-year-old Aisha on that same basis.
We might think of our great-grandparents’ generation as having some backward opinions, and we question how they could have been okay with segregation, but at the end of the day, we hesitate to demonize them. On the other hand, we do not offer the same understanding to those vile individuals who intimidated 6-year-old Ruby Bridges or turned their fire hoses onto children marching in Birmingham.
And so on.
We might try our best to have mercy on some of those in history who we think of as being morally undeveloped, but we don’t do so universally. We don’t ever make excuses for crimes against children.
Even the least religious man can see that sins against the innocent and vulnerable must come from a deeply evil place in the human heart.
Why is this the case? Why do we mercilessly impose a modern moral standard onto our predecessors only, it appears, when it comes to children?
We rarely expect children (particularly little ones) to understand the moral implications of their actions—if a kid does something wrong, we typically know to blame the adults responsible rather than the child. Thus there are clear limits to their culpability.
All of us adults, on the other hand, have at some point willfully, knowing the full ethical implications of our decisions, gone on and acted heinously anyway. We have done the wrong thing despite having an awareness of why it’d be wrong and who it’d harm.
Through our experiences, we have witnessed enough evil within and without to understand what makes it different from good, and yet we still do the wrong things anyway. In theological terms, original sin has metastasized in us, carrying us off from a shared guilt with Adam, to a guilt of our very own.
I often put it this way: many of your actions have contributed to making the world a worse place.
Maybe that feels too intense, but I think it’s helpful. The world is messed up not only because Adam blew it, but because we’re addicted to remixing and one-upping his primordial failure, and adding as much wildness to the mixture as we can. There’s rarely an excuse we can conjure up to sidestep the consequences of our moral failures; we have no one to blame but ourselves.
In contrast, the failures of children are looked at less harshly. We all know that they can’t fully understand the moral implications of their actions, and that shapes the way we feel about their mistakes.
Young children, we understand, are not developed enough to comprehensively grasp the rightness or wrongness of their actions because they can’t predict the outcomes of their decisions or situate them in a greater web of other people’s lives.3
Crimes against children are wrong because children are the archetype of moral innocence. There is not a guilt we can put on them that justifies an atrocity.
We can’t look at attacks against kids and heartlessly refer back to some opinion they held that we find abhorrent, or some act of financial fraudulence that makes them sketchy enough to earn the judging sword of a disaffected rampager, or even some policy decision we recognize to be so unfair that it deserves to be torn down by whatever means necessary.4
Even though children do, in fact, commit these kinds of sins.
They hold totally unfounded prejudices and opinions, they baselessly change their minds about innocent people, and they are ruthless in expressions of distaste;5 all the building blocks of the various isms and phobias.
Even further, kids are not immune to monetary moral failure. They are famous for trading with dishonest scales, not yet having learned the virtues of justice and charity, and they are utterly interested in getting their way, even at the expense of others.
Neither is it unusual for them to make ridiculously unfair rules and enforce them violently. They can be like power-hungry autocrats, subjugating whole classes under the weight of their preferences.
I’m being funny, of course. That’s the point.
Children have all the makings of bigotry, capitalistic greed, and systematic oppression, but we don’t blame them. We don’t point fingers and holler accusations, even though they possess the qualities we feel compelled to protest elsewhere. We would never consider these actions as carrying the same kind of guilt as our own.
We might be able to posthumously vilify a man, but the same cannot be said of a boy.
In recent times, innocence has come with all kinds of qualifiers. “Yes, I think that was evil, but…”
You can’t do that with children.
When a child is the victim of tragedy we don’t respond with “yes, but they should have known not to trust that stranger,” or “yes, but they came from an evil family,” or even “yes, but raising kids can be stressful and expensive.”
Any sane person needs zero time to deliberate through excuses like that, they will immediately register them as inhumane.
There is no excuse for evil carried out against the innocent. We can find no sin in them that could lighten the weight of injustice. It just doesn’t work that way.
Furthermore, it should also be said that children are, by nature, incapable of being independent. They lack the knowledge, strength, and maturity to live on their own. The survival of the human race relies upon our collective sense of responsibility to help children become adults—we actually have an obligation to do good by them.
It should go without saying that evil against the helpless is uniquely twisted and more obviously condemnable than evil against those who can defend themselves. When soldiers kill one another, we register this as a necessary evil taking place on even ground. When soldiers strike down women and children, we call it a war crime.
The law is written on our hearts; we intuitively know the difference.
What’s more, it’s not only the fact that children are physically weak and small that makes them helpless, but also that they lack the cognitive development necessary to interpret what they see.
Why is it always adults retroactively working through their trauma and never children? Because children are incapable of understanding the magnitude of what they experience. They literally can’t understand when something they’ve experienced is traumatic because they have no frame of reference by which to make sense of their lives.
This raises the stakes when it comes to the way we treat kids.
There are two senses in which we mean the word “innocent” when we say it. There is the legal sense of someone’s status in regard to the committing of a crime, and there is the sense by which we mean that someone is unaware of certain dark, grotesque, or graphic things.
It’s absolutely wrong to aim wickedness at the first group as though it were justice, of course. But something in us tells us that it is even worse to act this way toward the second group—that it is horrific to be the reason their status changes from innocent to exposed.
It is undeniably horrific to harm someone who has not even been introduced to evil. It is wrong to be a force in a child’s life that robs them of the chance to be a child. It’s wrong to harm an innocent person, but to steal a person’s innocence is even worse.
Children are prophets.
They make us moral. They offer more to the world philosophically than any abstract thinker ever has.
It’s not just that they make us watch our mouths and skip scenes on the tv. Those adjustments are fine but there’s more to the story.
Their thoughts, words, and actions have the power to make us confront our own loss of innocence and purity. We envy them because they do not know what we know.
They do what adults cannot, they see the world in ways we can’t. Children don’t think with the anxiety, resentment, or pessimism that we do, and their presence makes it obvious to us that we have aged.
Puppies are not prophetic. They can make us happy, but they can’t convict us. When a Labrador is a preciously good dog, we can credit this to it being a very different animal from us. The fact that Labradors are specially bred to be gentle and loyal is a perfectly good excuse for why we lack their most admirable qualities.
We cannot do the same for children, we can’t make excuses for what they have and we lack as we could for the dog. They are little humans. They are us, though they are free of all that has deformed us. They are what we are, unharmed and unhardened to the world.
Their goodness is something we had long ago but have since lost, and they are always accidentally reminding us of what once was.
Children have not yet learned to understand whole halves of our basic binaries. They know light but not darkness, good but not evil, life but not death.
They might detect traces of them, fearing monsters under the bed, fantasizing about catching “bad guys,” and shouting “BLEH” with their tongues stuck out to signify deadly defeat, but we know these things to be caricatures.
The human heart has a natural gauge for those things. Still, children are too young to have learned to fear the real darkness which can cave in on the mind and haunt the soul, to be unsurprised by the pervasiveness of evil in themselves and their neighbor, or to know the way that death awaits us all, creeping up on us and robbing us of those we love most.
Our little ones, someday, will need to confront these things. There is no way around it. All the while, however, love keeps us hopeful that they will never lose this quality. We hope, somehow, that they will always retain it. We hope that their problems will stay small, their assumptions optimistic, and their trust forever unbroken.
We hope that they will always be our little ones and that no evil will ever wake them up from their innocence.
In this we find something worth protecting and preserving, no matter the cost.
I don’t have children of my own yet, but when I look at the faces of my nieces and nephews (both genetic and honorary) I see a reason to save the world. I see a soul worth fighting to the death to protect.
Our little friends naturally remind us of everything else worth defending. Our rights, our freedoms, and our traditions—these things seem good to us now, but one might forget to appreciate them. That is, until the thought ever arises that anyone might try to take them from these tiny, innocent people we so adore. Children are the single strongest motivation to live a life unselfishly dedicated to the promotion of goodness, beauty, and truth.
In other words, children are walking proofs that some things are more important than me.
^ If we deny that, and we become so engrossed in self-worship that we cease to care about the world we are leaving behind for these tiny prophets tomorrow, then we will lose everything today.
Here’s a critical question: if children are not worth sacrificing for, then what is?
If a society should decide that defending its offspring, in their most innocent and vulnerable form, is not a worthwhile cause, then it will have forfeited its most basic reason for survival. The people will quickly find that they have nothing left worth defending, and that they feel devoid of all meaning.
If the most precious, guilt-free, helpless people we have are not worth protecting, then how can my life be meaningful? And if they can be treated as though they do not matter, what is keeping sinful, broken ol’ me from being turned on next?
If their life does not matter, then how can mine? How can anything matter in a world where babies don’t?
If you think that the current emotional state of our society (anxious and despairing) has nothing at all to do with the moral state we are in, if you assume that these ethical/political opinions will have no effect on those who hold them, you may be choosing to be blind.
It is my opinion that today, children are dying on the altar of individual freedom.
They are treated like test-subjects at best, and necessary sacrifices at worst. Our nation, in my eyes, has systematically failed the innocent.
They have been forcefully made disciples of a warped worldview, reflecting our disinterest in protecting their minds. And, downstream from this, they have been experimented on with chemical castration, among other things. We’ve passively watched our precious kin become a subservient class of expendable tools to prove a point.
Furthermore, they are largely unprotected from and frequently exploited by a $12 billion industry (pornography), made up of corporations resisting laws that would restrict children from gaining access to adult material online.
All the while, prostitution has been increasingly glorified (and in some places decriminalized), despite the fact that the average age women IN AMERICA enter the “sex work” industry is 13 years old.
They are viewed as a commodity that can be purchased (unless, of course, the purchaser decides that they have lost interest; see this case) by those who, by virtue of gaining a marriage certificate, deserve to have them for their own pleasure.
!!!!We are protecting demographic categories, ideologies, and lifestyles invented by the sexual revolution at the cost of our children!!!!
And, worst of all, approximately 1/3 of them are murdered before they are ever allowed to live.
Here’s the truth: a fetus is the most morally horrible thing to destroy. There is no creature more dependent, no human more innocent, no person more helpless. If you can murder a child in-utero, you can murder anyone. You can kill anything.
When the defenseless die without protest, it is certain that a society has lost both its soul and its vision for the future.
We’re not just killing children, we’re killing ourselves. With every bit of innocence stolen, our society sinks deeper into the grave.
Out of everything in our world that Christians might lament, I see abortion (and all of its kin that so violently target the next generation) as the greatest sign of the West’s moral decline and spiritual sickness.
The secular kingdom, according to Nietzsche, has tried to kill God. It is my understanding that they are now trying to strike down the little children He so expressively adores as a testament to their victory over Him.
They have not counted the cost of these executions.
We need to understand that the practices I alluded to don’t just harm individual kids, but that they are a disease in the soul of a nation. Demonic ideologies are gripping the collective mind of the West and stripping us of a reason to fight back. Will you remain silent?
This is the preeminent moral issue of our age. The survival of our society as we know it depends on what we do about this horrific injustice. How will you respond?
What will your children one day feel about the way you reacted to the genocide of their peers? What will you do?
Onward, Christian soldiers.
The global number is even more shocking: 200,000 a day (according to WHO). For reference, that’s equivalent to the total number of people who died from the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945, or just over 12 Holocausts a year. While at first those comparisons might feel crude, like abortion is somehow different from those things, this is actually an indication that we are falling for secular rhetoric which refuses to afford personhood to children in the womb. These numbers HAVE to bother us.
By “child” I do not mean “anyone under the age of 18” (though this would still be true). Throughout this article I will be specifically referring to young kids.
I’m not saying that children are perfect, or even that they’re unable to know they shouldn’t do certain things. A child’s working ethical theory might move them to avoid certain actions, but this is hardly ever for admirable, mature reasons, i.e. they are usually focused on avoiding negative consequences or achieving a positive reward.
This year alone, violent crimes against adults have been justified on separate occasions by all 3 of these excuses.
Recently, a child I adore looked me dead in the face, totally unprompted, and said “I don’t like you today.” Classic.
Borderline infallible post
Read this and cried. You’re a strong voice in the war against children, and will hopefully stir other Christians to raise their voices, too.