John C. Wright, whose blog is way better than mine

inspires and attracts the most interesting readers and conversations. To wit, a reader writes:

Hail Dark Lord!

Was over at John Wright’s blog the other day, where the item under discussion was the latest slide towards barbarism in the form of that academic paper advocating infanticide. Someone pointed out that Phil Dick had written a pro-life story shortly after Roe vs Wade was passed called “The Pre-Persons”. Had a look at it, and was shocked to find how prescient it was. The idea is that in the future children only become human when they can do algebra- by law this determines that they do in fact possess a soul.

The whole thing has a healthily savage hostility towards the pro abortion movement:

“Tim’s father Ed Gantro said, “You are insane. This postpartum abortion scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal rights — it was removed like a tumor. Look what it’s come to. If an unborn child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had no chance, no ability, to protect itself…”

“The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a fetus was a “person,” with rights, at least for a while; and then the pro-abortion crowd decided that even a seven-month fetus was not “human” and could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby — it is a vegetable; it can’t focus its eyes, it understands nothing, nor talks. . . the pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally? When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was relentlessly pushed back and back…”

“The Church had long since — from the start, in fact — maintained that even the zygote, and the embryo that followed, was as sacred a life form as any that walked the earth. They had seen what would come of arbitrary definitions of “Now the soul enters the body,” or in modern terms, “Now it is a person entitled to the full protection of the law like everyone else.”

3 Cheers and a prayer for his soul are in order, I think. He may have been a drug addled Gnostic but at least he saw this evil for what it was and spoke out against it.

I didn’t know that about Dick. May it be remembered in his favor on That Day. That, and the fact that he was a mentor and friend to the great Tim Powers.