One of my favorite authors, Dietrich von Hildebrand, makes an interesting argument about the relationship between beauty and virtue. Essentially, what he said was that we ought to encourage people to attend to beauty, to seek it out in art, music, literature, poetry, and any other venue where it could be found. We should expose young people to beauty, train them to recognize it and appreciate it, and that if we do this, we will be helping them to grow in virtue. Why? Because authentic beauty is itself a participation in the limitless beauty and grandeur of God, the one who creates and bestows beauty.
What I see happening with this current public relations nightmare for Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is, perhaps the inverse of von Hildebrand’s suggestion: people are being confronted with the gruesome truth of PPFA. They’re seeing the callous disregard for the dignity of human life, and are being awakened to the depths to which that organization regularly stoops. It’s taken away the clean, well-crafted public image of PPFA. It’s a look behind the curtain, and what people are seeing isn’t beautiful, it’s grotesque.
This latest mess with the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress is somewhat reminiscent of that iconic moment in The Wizard of Oz when we finally see behind the curtain in the Wizard’s court to reveal the real person behind the Wizard. What Dorothy and her friends found was not a powerful, mysterious leader, but a cowardly man putting on a show for the residents of Oz.
A similar thing is beginning to happen, I think, with regard to PPFA and its current president, Cecile Richards. Mrs. Richards likes to portray herself as a great champion of health care and, above all, the rights of women. Yet her organization’s operations stand in direct contrast to that mission. They can be considered a health care organization only when termination of an unborn life is considered a positively good thing. They often bemoan the regulations different states have put in to limit abortions, such as the 20-week ban, waiting periods, ultrasounds, etc. Based on their actions and their budget, the story PPFA tries to tell the media and dupe women into believing is an all out lie. They sell abortions incredibly well, and they account for over half of their annual budget.
Whatever the reasons for those abortions, they inherently involve the killing of a small child. A great deal of those aborted every year by PPFA (which performs in excess of 300,000 abortions every year) are women. Yet instead of being empowered and defended, they are bought at a price: $470. That is what a woman’s life is worth to Cecile Richards. However sanitary the public image of PPFA has been, it is slowly being shown to be a farce.
In the view of von Hildebrand, the human heart always longs for beauty, and has a natural capacity to recognize it and, in that very recognition, we know God. For instance, he said that
“…the beauty of the dome of Florence or of St. Peter’s, the beauty of the first chorale in St. Matthew’s Passion, or of Mozart’s Figaro—all these are, to be sure, immediately attached to audible and visible things; they are not connected with beauty of form merely by thoughts; they are not ideas that these express thereby, but in their quality they speak about another, higher reality—they make God known.”
Hildebrand also knows the beauty of marriage and human sexuality to be moments which take the goods of the human experience and transfigure them to a divine plane. The fruit of sexual union, the birth of a new human life, is without question one of the most beautiful and essentially awe-inspiring moments in the world. It is a time which calls to mind all of the grandeur of creation and points to the joy we hope to experience in the heavenly reward awaiting the end of our life. Human life, which develops during pregnancy, calls for that same joy, respect, and awe. It is beautiful, and it points to the author of beauty, God himself.
But PPFA and their supporters would have us think that there’s nothing mysterious and beautiful in pregnancy. Or, at the very least, nothing which can’t wait until next time. Nothing which deserves protection. No, for PPFA, the developing life can be cast aside, then dismembered and repackaged for the honorable cause of scientific research. This is a perversion and a twisting of beauty into the grotesque.
This encounter with beauty’s polar opposite can, I think, in a way awaken them to the beauty of the pro-life position and hopefully to the goodness of the Creator, the only one on whom we can call to really put an end to the holocaust that our country has legally sanctioned since 1973.
Pax,
Luke
6 thoughts on “On Beauty and Planned Parenthood”
I’ve been pregnant twice, both resulting in perfectly normal sons, but there was exactly nothing mysterious about the process. Pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation are ordinary biological processes like sweating or sneezing. Doctors know exactly what happens throughout. If there is any beauty in the grossness of biology it is in how the human performs the process. Sweating from the effort in ballet, or sports, or useful work is good. Sweating because the air conditioner failed while you are stuck in traffic is not beautiful; it’s a nuisance.
Look at http://www.feministsforlife.org. What do you think of them?
No woman should have to choose between being active in the public realm and her child. Abortion only perpetuates the problem by saying essentially it’s okay to discriminate against the pregnant woman because, “Well, she should’ve just taken care of that at her local Planned Parenthood if she didn’t want to be discriminated against.”
Biology is made by God. It is beautiful. Not just childbirth, but the conception of the child, the physical feats of the person (as you list above), the death of a person…The cycle of life is beautiful as everything made by God is beautiful. In our limited human experience, there are many things that are trying, but looking at the immense web of existence from the bigger picture, it’s all so very, very beautiful.
Childbirth and death are two parts of the human life cycle that science hasn’t been able to completely and thoroughly explain, not that we haven’t tried. For example: what exactly is consciousness? When and how does the baby gain it? When and how does the dying person lose it? We can break it apart a little and say, for example, that a baby gains his eyesight slowly over the first few months or that the sense of hearing is the last to go for the dying person. But those are the senses, what about the “person” behind the senses? We are all so much more than the sum of our biological parts.
They aren’t feminists; they just use the word without actually doing anything. I support this conclusion by noting that they nowhere argue for laws that require parental leave, they do not advocate for universal health care, and they don’t address any of the million other structures that keep women in a subordinate position. Most importantly, they don’t loudly and passionately advocate for every possible birth control option to be available and free. If they don’t support women’s sexual agency they are not feminists.
@bethanieryan:disqus
No woman should have to choose between being active in the public realm and her child.
Why not? People have to make discriminating decisions over much less important things than a child all the time. Is there anything in your opinion that a woman should have to choose between? Would it be wrong to expect a woman to have to choose between, say, being a brain surgeon or being a plumber?
Though she clearly does not grasp the meaning of mystery, apparently thinking that the only things real are the things she perceives with her senses, KarenJo12 is on to something with the romanticizing and sentimentality that goes along with talk about childbearing among many Catholics. I can understand why she would see it as patronizing: something that has happened or has the potential to happen to half of the worlds population does not make you unique or special, and it comes up hollow to suggest that it does. (NB: I am not saying the author has done this in his article above.)
Nice article. I read the title and I thought to myself, “Where the heck is he going with this?” but the article answers that question well.