It wasn’t so long ago that such a thing would be unthinkable: a standing ovation for abortion in the New York State Senate chamber with the passage of legislation permitting abortion for any reason up until the moment of birth. Already in New York City, one in three babies are aborted. The bill goes so far as to drop the requirement that doctors perform abortions and decriminalizes acts of violence that result in the deaths of unborn babies. In other words, if an unborn baby dies in the commission of an act of violence against his or her mother, the perpetrator will no longer be held criminally liable for the baby’s death.

So much for “safe, legal and rare.” With this patently facetious mantra, it took Democratic president Bill Clinton only two days into his presidency to reverse policies restricting abortion instituted by his Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Virtually all Democratic candidates in recent memory, from candidates for president on down, have campaigned on their commitment to preserving the legal right to kill the unborn. It wasn’t always this way. In 1937, in response to doctors performing abortions during the Great Depression, the National Federation of Catholic Physician’s Guild issued a statement condemning abortion. In those days the opponents of abortion were more likely to be Democratic than Republican. President Roosevelt’s New Deal drew considerable support from the Catholic Church’s desire to protect and nurture all life–including the unborn.

Some of the first vocal proponents of abortion were, surprisingly, Republicans. Moderate Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller shepherded through his state’s abortion reform law in 1970. In 1967 in California, that icon of conservatives, a then “moderate” Ronald Reagan, signed a similar bill loosening restrictions on abortion. But the issue was gaining steam, and by the 1970’s conservative Republicans, campaigning on opposition to abortion after the disastrous Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973, were able to wrest control of the GOP.

The battle lines were drawn in 1976 when the first presidential election since Roe vs. Wade brought the issue to the forefront. Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, despite his Evangelical Christian bona fides, walked a tightrope trying to appeal to both sides. From then until the present, Democratic politicians have declared, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that they only wish to have abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” In 1976, the outrage against such duplicitous arguments produced a successful effort to end Medicaid funding for abortion with the Hyde Amendment, the first significant legislative victory for anti-abortion activists after Roe vs. Wade.

While abortion activists argue for unrestricted access to abortion throughout pregnancy, polls show that support for late-term abortions continues to decline, with a paltry 13 percent of Americans supporting abortion during the third trimester. The enthusiastic crowds at the annual March for Life are further evidence of the widespread desire to protect innocent human life in the womb. The most recent March for Life saw an unprecedented show of political firepower, with addresses by the president, vice-president and House speaker, all heralding the gains that the movement has made under the presidency of Donald Trump, who stated: “Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life.”

The new Democratic mantra: “While personally opposed to abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court is the law of the land, and thus I must respect Roe vs. Wade” is beginning to wear thin. As we lament the 45^th anniversary of that calamitous legal decision, the effect of this assertion wanes and the abortion issue is becoming an even more highly charged issue.

Democratic leaders have used the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to reiterate their support for legal abortion and launch new onerous legislation in Illinois and other states–hoping to expand so-called “reproductive rights” and access at the expense of innocent human lives. Now is the time for people of faith–Democrats and Republicans alike–to raise their voices in defense of the most vulnerable among us: the unborn.

A painfully honest and disturbing editorial by New York University PhD candidate Andrea Long Chu, a young man who longs to be a woman, recently appeared in the New York Times. Chu’s central thesis is that gender-dysphoric persons are entitled to surgery and that surgeons have an obligation to provide it regardless of their beliefs about what constitutes harm. In Chu’s skewed and revolutionary view, “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want…. [N]o amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.”

Chu, who has been taking estrogen and evidently had breast implants, is scheduled for “bottom” surgery on Thursday, November 29 and in this pre-op editorial admits what many “trans”-identifying people likely wish he hadn’t:

This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to…. People transition because they think it will make them feel better. The thing is, this is wrong…. I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levies of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen—effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers—enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it…. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

I won’t go through with it, probably.

Chu goes on to criticize opposition to the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of healthy and often very young bodies as “‘compassion-mongering,’” describing it as “peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern.” Apparently, Chu is unwilling to concede even the possibility that such opposition is motivated by genuine concern and sincere commitments to do no harm.

But harm is a concept that Chu inverts and twists in his effort to compel doctors to medically ravage the bodies of girls and boys, women and men. His confusing thicket of childish rationalizations for compelling doctors to concede to the “wants” of gender-dysphoric persons come down to these:

1.) Doctors shouldn’t be allowed to “gatekeep,” (i.e., to decide which treatment modalities will be prescribed for gender-dysphoric persons), because, Chu alleges, many doctors view “trans”-identifying persons with “suspicion and condescension,” and are motivated by “bigotry.”

2.) Doctors shouldn’t use the alleviation of suffering as a criterion for assessing treatment modalities, because some of the treatment modalities desired by gender-dysphoric patients will not alleviate suffering and may increase it.

3.) Allowing doctors to determine the best course of action constitutes an illicit dictatorial control over the bodies of gender-dysphoric persons and encourages them to lie by pretending that such treatment modalities will, indeed, end their suffering:

As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it….  [A]s things stand today, there is still only one way to obtain hormones and surgery: to pretend that these treatments will make the pain go away.

Chu wants what he wants, and any impediment—including the knowledge and expertise of doctors—to the satiation of his desire for self-negation is ipso facto wrong. This raises the question, does Chu believe his principles should be applied consistently to all medical and psychological conditions or just gender dysphoria?

Chu’s explanation that doctors are motivated by the goal of alleviating pain is myopic or incomplete. Many doctors believe the practice of medicine—both means and ends—is circumscribed by objective standards that determine the appropriateness of medical options. Those standards derive from objective measures of bodily health and wholeness. The goals are the eradication of disease, the restoration of proper form and function, and the alleviation of pain. The alleviation of pain is limited too by ethical principles. Most doctors won’t alleviate the suffering of those who identify as amputees by amputating healthy arms. Most doctors won’t treat insomnia with propofol. And many doctors won’t treat gender dysphoria by chemically sterilizing pre-teens, lopping off the healthy breasts of girls, and castrating boys.

Chu’s troubling editorial reveals the primacy of subjectivism in the “trans” ideology. Subjectivism is the philosophical belief that knowledge “proceeds from or belongs to individual consciousness or perception” and that “there is no external or objective truth.” Subjectivism is foundational to the “trans” ideology, which subordinates objective biological sex to subjective feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. This exaltation of subjective experience is exposed in Chu’s implicit denial of the objective truth of his surgery: “Next Thursday, I will get a vagina.”

Chu is not getting a vagina. He will be getting a surgeon-constructed facsimile of a vagina. It won’t be materially or functionally a vagina. It will be composed of either the inverted skin of his penis and scrotum or a segment of his sigmoid colon. If skin from his penis and scrotum are used, his fake-vagina will not be self-lubricating as vaginal tissue is, and it may grow hair. If a segment of his sigmoid colon is used, his “vagina” may produce a smelly, mucus-y discharge, will be at risk for colon cancer, and will not have the sensitivity of an actual vagina.

Even while claiming he will be getting a vagina, Chu acknowledged that his body won’t see it as that: “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain.” His body will always recognize this gaping hole as the unnatural wound it is and will seek to close it unless Chu regularly inserts dilating stents.

Ironically, while Chu places his subjective, internal feelings at the center of his identity and bases his actions on them, like many other opposite-sex impersonators, he denies the same freedom to others. In fact, he believes his subjective desires place obligations on others. His subjective feelings about his sex require actions of others that deny their subjective feelings and beliefs about the meaning of biological sex and of harm. Chu seeks to force doctors to violate their moral convictions, ethical principles, and concomitant feelings in order to serve his “wants.”

Chu writes this about the real possibility that more and new forms of suffering may follow surgery:

The negative passions—grief, self-loathing, shame, regret—are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition.

While grief, self-loathing, shame, and regret are common experiences, it is nonsensical to refer to them as human rights. Chu seems to be suggesting that surgery and the ensuing suffering are not only human rights but also that they’re positive rights, which are rights that oblige others to do or provide something. Chu believes doctors, in violation of their own ethical convictions—convictions that are central to their identities—are obliged to provide services that will damage bodily functions and wholeness and may result in grief, self-loathing, shame, and regret.

In the mixed up, muddled up, shook up world of Andrea Long Chu, doctors will mutilate, treatment will harm, and men will be women. Isaiah writes, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)

In his spiritually dark, inverted world, Chu seeks self-erasure and longs for woe:

Tragically I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/boy-ERASED.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; and Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman.

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!