The fixed points of human life

A very old but very insightful thought:

"I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of 'business' or industrialism, and not vice versa [...] a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to sign his letter "Hopeful." [...] the hopeful one concludes by saying, 'When people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children." You will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market. [...] Motherhood, they feel [they being men like the hopeful man], and a full childhood, and the beauty of brothers and sisters, are good things in their way, but not so good as a bad wage. About the mutilation of womanhood, and the massacre of men unborn, he signs himself 'Hopeful.' He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human annihilation. But about improving the small bad wage he signs himself 'Hopeless.'" - G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

At Chesterton's time, abortion was just beginning to be more widely advocated, so he could see the philosophical and social problems that gave it a foothold: how the laws of business and industry (which at the time involved a few business men becoming quite rich on the backs of many others who were quite poor), being elevated above the good that is marriage and family, became a justification for the evil of abortion. The elite, not wanting to change their way of life, came up with a solution that allowed them to believe they were improving the lives of the poor, and cared not that it was abominable. Abortion may make people more well-off financially, but it makes them morally poorer and robs them of the riches of loving that unborn child.