The other week British Olympian Laura Kenny announced that she was expecting another child.
The announcement in the BBC sports section caught my eye for two reasons: the first that this child was being welcomed into a married, two-parent home, and the second, that Kenny was so anxious and eager to see her baby arrive safely. In this day and age, both circumstances are anomalies, for most celebrity babies are born to parents who go through partners like a revolving door, and many women—particularly successful, high-profile ones like Kelly—seem to believe that having a child will permanently ruin their careers.
Unfortunately, babies and children in general are low on the list of valued items in society. My home state, for example, is close to enshrining abortion rights into state law. Many young adults across the country have also decided that they are better off without children, continually delaying them in favor of yoga or road trips, Peachy Keenan writes in The American Mind, unknowingly setting themselves up for later years of loneliness and neglect.
As much as we might like to blame young people and rail on them for holding such negative attitudes against children, before doing so, we should take a step back and ask ourselves where they got such ideas. Given that the younger generation has been steeped in Marxist ideology at school and in society, it’s not hard to realize where to lay the blame, for a rejection of life and children has been a prime component of Marxist-leaning groups for many decades.
Former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers testifies to this fact in his autobiography Witness. “One extreme group among the Communists held that it was morally wrong for a professional revolutionist to have children at all,” he writes. “They could only hamper or distract his work. That was one of the penalties of being a Communist.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
While Chambers admits he didn’t entirely hold such views, he did assume he would never have children because of his involvement with the Communists.
That changed, however, when he found out his wife was expecting his first child. Although he was initially thrilled and excited over the fact, he soon realized that he and his wife must rid themselves of the child.
Abortion was a commonplace of party life. There were Communist doctors who rendered that service for a small fee. Communists who were more choosy knew liberal doctors who would render the same service for a larger fee. Abortion, which now fills me with physical horror, I then regarded, like all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation.
To his surprise, however, his wife begged to keep their child. “‘Dear heart,’ she said in a pleading voice, ‘we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.’”
That little baby was allowed to live, and her life in turn woke Chambers from the stupor of the Marxist ideology he was steeped in, eventually delivering him from its clutches.
Such deliverance leads me to believe that we need to first change our attitudes toward babies and children if we’re ever to get out of the Marxist mess we currently reside in. We should encourage young men to get married and start a family. We should encourage young women to be marriage-minded and domestically-friendly, rather than pushing them toward college and career and loading them with the debt which comes from such ambitions. We should encourage families with three, or four, or six, or eight children, rather than tearing them down with random comments about “having their hands full,” or questions about when they’re going to be done having kids.
The fact is, children have a way of changing mindsets. The people having kids, raising them in good, solid, large families—these are the individuals who likely hold the exact opposite mindset of today’s Marxist ideologies.
So let’s cheer them on. The next time you see a large family at the grocery store, or hear of a young couple about to give birth to another child, tell them thank you. They, and their children, are our ticket out of the cultural mess we’re in.
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This article originally appeared on Annie’s Substack. You can subscribe to it here.
Image credit: NegativeSpace-Joel Carter, CC0 1.0
1 comment
1 Comment
David Krishan
January 31, 2023, 3:19 pmBut to get more men to marry, you must first make it worth their time, not highway robbery like it is now. Pass laws to make alimony limited to some multiple of the poverty line, not a percentage of total wealth. Make child custody default 50-50. Make unproven charges of assault illegal slander in divorce cases. Etc. Remove the bias towards women and against men in relationships, and men will be less (rightfully) wary of them.
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