Pro-abortion, feminist psychologist Florence Thomas has recently created a stir with the publication of her own experience with abortion. Among other noteworthy quotes, Thomas describes the child of the womb as a “tumor”, and that it is the love of the mother which “humanizes” the baby. Read the rest here.
“I remember the nights of warmth and love. Love every night, love at midday, and the euphoria of having the world in our hands, and yes, we took risks. The love merited it. Love always merits it.”
And…
Thomas “knew that I would not ever again have an abortion in my life. I went through that once in my life, and I would not do it twice. Today I continue to wonder how a woman can have an abortion two or three times and even more.”
There is so much pathology, so much despair in those few lines. A lifetime of distortion.
I too remember that with Regina we had “nights of warmth and love. Love every night, love at midday, and the euphoria of having the world in our hands.” It’s a glorious time in a new marriage, and it serves the purpose of binding up that nascent oneness in ineffable bonds that transcend earthly realities.
Regina and I can also agree that, “we took risks. The love merited it. Love always merits it.” That, too, is true.
Our love was open to the transmission of life, a life born of the expression of our love for one another. The “risk” involved was that of growing beyond ourselves, of putting out into the deep and accepting the awesome responsibility of molding a new human being; mind, body, and soul. We “risked” making the transition from young love to the deeper dimensions of sacrificial love that come with parenthood, beginning with the loss of “Love every night, love at midday,” that accompanies pregnancy and post-partum reality.
Of course, the love Thomas describes is purely sexual. But we learned a different expression of “Love every night” when the children were born. Regina nursed, and the babies were up every two hours looking to be fed. I would get up, change the diaper, bring the baby to Regina, catnap while the baby was fed, burp and change the baby, and put the baby back to bed. This was a forty minute procedure. Then, it was back up for the next round in an hour and twenty minutes. That’s shared responsibility for the product of one’s loving union.
That’s where Thomas went horribly wrong. She viewed the child as a tumor, a disordered growth within herself. The “risk” she feared was the sublimation of love, through the loss of unbridled sex. The child came to be an externalized symbolic representation of her sexuality: a disordered entity, uncontrollable and metastatic in nature. Her sexuality was an entity that would consume her from within.
However, narcissism seeks an external locus of blame. The self is never to blame. So, it wasn’t the “risk” of staying mired in a young adult developmental stage past its useful function. That’s where she wanted, and needed to be. Thus, the baby was identified as the radically disordered, metastatic entity which threatened to consume her.
A “love” whose expression seeks to kill the new life it produces is not love at all. It is a murderous form of psychopathology, extreme narcissism. The sexual behavior Thomas describes is nothing more than hedonism, the pursuit of orgasm with another for whom one has deep feelings.
Such narcissism gives rise to the statement that it is the love of the mother that “humanizes” the baby. In one sense, Thomas is correct. Love permits us to see the humanity of another. The other “becomes” human in our eyes when we look beyond ourselves and consider the frailty of life in general, and the particular circumstances of the other. It’s called empathy.
In the absence of true love there is only the bleak and sterile isolationism that requires one to seek the fruits, the sensations of love, in order to stave off the irrevocable descent into total madness. Like the woman behind the foggy glass window, Thomas can see and appreciate the freedom, the lightness of being in the butterfly flitting about within her grasp.
The tragedy of her life is that she is too afraid to open the window.
Coming Home 
Excellent.
A beautifully worded piece. A baby is the result and expression of love not the ending of love.
“I too remember that with Regina we had “nights of warmth and love. Love every night, love at midday, and the euphoria of having the world in our hands.” It’s a glorious time in a new marriage, and it serves the purpose of binding up that nascent oneness in ineffable bonds that transcend earthly realities.”
except Thomas wasn’t’ in a marriage. There was no commitment to each other and THAT was a big part of the problem.
“Of course, the love Thomas describes is purely sexual. But we learned a different expression of “Love every night” when the children were born. Regina nursed, and the babies were up every two hours looking to be fed. I would get up, change the diaper, bring the baby to Regina, catnap while the baby was fed, burp and change the baby, and put the baby back to bed. This was a forty minute procedure. Then, it was back up for the next round in an hour and twenty minutes. That’s shared responsibility for the product of one’s loving union.”
Your lovely wife Regina (which is a beautiful name!) is a very very lucky lady.
I don’t think Thomas even knows what love is. What she is describing to me sounds like lust.
And lust is all-consuming and directed towards satisfying the needs of self. It doesn’t know sacrifice.
I also believe that Thomas’s testimony is a perfect example of contraceptive “love”. A couple contracepting is simply not open to new life. It is a mindset that creates a tremendous hurdle. Most couples cannot overcome that hurdle.
If Thomas is correct, and love is what makes a fetus human, then the converse is that one must abandon/remove love ** in one’s self ** in order to see a fetus as not human.
Throughout history, humanity has engaged in various arbitrary or even factually correct (if not genuinely applicable) bits of rationalization in order to dehumanize others. From arguments of the subjective realms of religion to the misapplication of a factual difference in skin tone, we’ve always been able to find some reason to pick a group and label them as pariahs.
Upon reflection, I would quite agree that the core of these often cruelly dividing and deprecating beliefs…racism, class-ism, Nazism, etc… is a lack of love for their fellows in the hearts of those espousing them. The heinously selfish and biologically false idea that a human fetus is neither a human, nor strictly speaking alive, strikes me as little different from the beliefs of every other doctrine of tyranny humanity has ever chosen to inflict upon some other group of humans for the sake of purely selfish gain.