This weekend walking the halls of the public high school hosting my daughter’s volleyball tournament, I saw handmade signs inviting students to join the club that fights against human trafficking. I approve.
This generation of high school students have particular reason to object to the buying and selling of human bodies: They are the Objectified Generation.
Take a look at #43 on the annual Beloit Mindset List for the class of 2021:
Having another child has always been a way to secure matching tissue to heal an older sibling.
If you were born in 1999, it is possible you were conceived not for your own sake, but as a medical treatment for someone else. You may well have been one of a vessel full of embryos created for the purpose of serving another person. You whose tissue was deemed the most useful was saved, and your siblings were killed.
This reality for the Class of 2021 is the culmination of a long list of modern ways of turning children into objects for the gratification of our parents. Those of us born after the legalization of abortion know that our lives were always disposable: If our existence pleased our mother (or those who controlled our mother), we were allowed to live; if our existence did not please, the state sanctioned our murder and disposal in the garbage dumpster, so long as the execution was carried out in a state-approved facility.
(But no mercy for those who carry out the exact same procedure without the government’s oversight. Ironically, only those who go through public channels get a “right to privacy.” Those who commit their infanticide privately are public enemies. Go figure.)
If “Reproductive Health” is the code for the power of life and death over one’s offspring, “Reproductive Technology” refers to all the ways children are purchased by those who demand their (understandable) desire for offspring be gratified. Children born today may have been conceived in the union of a man who sold his semen on condition that his children have no relationship with him, ever, to a woman who desired to acquire a child, even at the cost of denying that child its own father.
Surrogacy and IVF are likewise commercial transactions involving the trafficking of human bodies. It degenerates from there.
***
On the way home from the tournament, my daughter asked me, “Why is it that so many of the girls at my school are willing to listen to songs about rape?”
Any woman ought to know that rape is wrong. No matter your political or religious convictions, it ought to be utterly repulsive to hear a song glorifying coercive sex. And yet the girls at school listen to such music, and complain if you insist on turning it off.
And why not? Generation Objectify Me has been trained to accept that their bodies are not their own. They’ve been trained that it is an adult’s sacred constitutional right to decide whether children live or die; whether they know their own parents or not; whether their health is good enough to merit being carried to term, or whether the child ought to be “terminated” in order to rid society of whatever disease or disorder is deemed too much trouble.
Rape music is the natural anthem of the generation solemnly raised to believe that Mommy has a sacred right to kill you.
Artwork: Famine Victims Selling Their Children from The Famine in China, Illustrations by a Native Artist (1878); China Famine Relief Fund [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]
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