The conventional media has not been good at covering the Planned Parenthood scandal, even in the United States where it ought to be front-page news in every paper and heading up every news bulletin on the television. Social media, on the other hand, has done a very good job of publicising things which are so vile that to see people explaining it away is to enter into an understanding of how so many Russians and Germans could tolerate the Gulag and the Camps, and how our ancestors could defend slavery. The coverage by the pro-life groups strips away the tired old excuses and arguments advanced by the other side.

‘My body, my choice’, is the mantra; well, unless your body has two heads, four arms and four feet and two hearts, that is simply incorrect; it is someone else’s body inside your body, and what choice are you giving them? If you want to make your choice, do so before getting pregnant. The old ‘it’s a lump of cells’ line is rather ruined by the fact that PP sells ‘body parts’ – so, not ‘cells’ but ‘a body with parts’ then? It is about women’s health? Really, when may foetuses are female – their health is going to suffer. There have been nearly 58 million abortions in the USA since 1973 and 6.6 million in the UK since 1968. When pro-life campaigners call that a ‘holocaust’ they are not exaggerating – quite the opposite. So why no coverage in the UK and so little in the US?

There will be a variety of motives, but given the socially liberal views of most media folk, one wouldn’t be far wrong if one began with that. There is also a genuine, if from my point of view, misguided, view that women need protection and abortion is the only way to do it. But there’s something more. Europe’s population figures reveal that its inhabitants are not reproducing at anything like the rate needed to sustain population levels. In this country, the UK, it is the immigrants and their children who are reproducing most, and upon whom many of us are going to be depending for our old age pensions and medical care; indeed in my own case, without the help of what our newspapers call people of ‘Asian heritage’ (their parents are all from Pakistan, so don’t run away with idea that there’s a lot of Chinese or Japanese in these parts), I doubt Mrs S would get the care she gets. The lasses who pop in and help are paid peanuts, but when it comes to care, they are first-rate – but then, as I find when talking to them, most of them were brought up in traditional households, and they find it odd that the natives in these parts don’t care for their old folk as happens in their culture.

It seems to me that we, and by that I mean the Europeans and what used to be called WASPS in the USA, have no real interest in reproducing ourselves. We want to consume, we want to enjoy things, and we don’t want to make any sacrifices of investment in our own futures. Babies take up a lot of time and ‘resource’. Indeed, Mrs S and myself went precisely nowhere on holiday for about a decade, and made do and mended when it came to consumer goods – I write this at a kitchen table we bought in 1974 for £2.50 from a lady down the road – it’s worn rather better than she did, or, indeed, than we have. It is, no doubt, tiresome when planning what my youngest tells me is called ‘recreational sex’ (which is surely a misnomer as it has nowt to do with creation at all), to have to worry about the consequences of your actions, and much easier to outsource that to the pharmaceutical industries or the abortion clinic. But it is wrong, all the same. Folk don’t like being told they are behaving badly, never did.

My youngest is, of course right, when she tells me that I was against abortion before all this PP news – but now she has a better understanding of where my revulsion came from. But the fact is we are talking to a society so deeply in love with its own ease and needs that it will resent being reminded of the price it is is paying. It will, as we all do, make excuses for its sins, it will criticise, as it does, those who took the undercover videos, and it will criticise the tone of outrage hurled at it. It will continue to close its ears. Mankind cannot bear too much in the way of reality, especially when it comes to its sins. A society which does not believe in sin or evil has lost the moral markers which would help it to understand why human life is sacred, and, alas, why it is wrong to turn the womb into one of the most dangerous places a baby can be.

Those who offer real help to young women ‘in trouble’ – as we used to put it – do a great work of mercy. But it seems as though there is such a gulf between the pro-abortionists and the anti that no bridge can be build across it for the young women both sides are, in their own way, trying to help. I don’t suppose that most of those who supported slavery, or ignored the Camps and the Gulag, did it because they were bad people, and so I don’t find the abuse often hurled at many of those who support abortion, helpful – are we trying to relieve our own feelings or get through to those who don’t share them? It’s understandable, but not useful. It may be that revulsion at what’s in the videos (I’m not linking, they can be found easily enough on the Web) will begin to take its toll and the educative process be aided; but until we, as a society, learn to restrain our selfishness, I doubt anything will change much.