Girardians, the Sacrificial Regime & Abortion

Martin Snigg recently put up a comment in response to an article on abortion put up on the ABC Religion and Ethics Website by Anthony Kelly. The comment consisted of a passage attributed to Gil Bailie, a disciple of the French literary theorist and anthropologist Rene Girard, who famously wrote on the necessity of sacrifice in social organisation in books like Violence and the Sacred.

What is striking and most compelling is the link Bailie makes between such a “sacrificial regime” and abortion in the post-sexual revolution era. According to Snigg, Bailie is noted to have written that:

…Understood in this way, the existence of abortion on demand qualifies as the greatest single sacrificial system of all time. The killing of the unborn is – explicitly or implicitly – considered to be indispensable to the continuance of the regime of the sexual revolution, and the sheer number of those sacrificed to its continuance exceeds that of any regime in history. Moreover, the unborn undeniably constitute the most powerless and voiceless category of victims imaginable.