In early August, Democrat Gov. Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, permitting abortions up to birth. Here we find two anomalies, other than the horrific killing of an infant.

First, the euphemistic name of that bill needs some work. Babies in the womb often receive patient care, yet this treatment promises death. Second, the photo of the signing ceremony shows Healey surrounded by a dozen smiling and clapping women. Surely this version of infanticide calls for at least a pretense of sobriety.

Now consider the case of Lindsay Clancy, the woman who admitted to strangling her three children. Clancy’s sympathizers, nearly all of them female, wore pink in solidarity with the defendant, touting all manner of theories to exonerate the murderess, ranging from postpartum depression to lack of medical care to suggesting that her husband killed the children, despite all contrary evidence.

How many of these ghoulie girls can name Clancy’s children and their ages at the time of death without reference to a news source? I’ve known the children’s ages for several weeks, but couldn’t remember their names. I daresay many of Clancy’s supporters would fail this test as well. Victims disappear quickly from the news while their killers snag the attention.

Clancy’s case was eerily reminiscent of the Constance Fisher case. In 1954, Fisher murdered her three children, roughly the same age as Clancy’s children, then failed her suicide attempt. Judged psychotic with postpartum depression, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Eventually, with the assistance of her husband, Fisher was pronounced fit to rejoin society and proceeded to have three more children with her husband. In 1966, she again killed her children, copycatting her previous murders, again failing at suicide. She was again found not guilty by way of insanity and was again committed. In 1973, she escaped the facility and died from drowning.

Both the Massachusetts abortion law and the support for Clancy are just two of the countless outward signs of an ongoing, 50-year culture war: the attacks on the traditional family, marriage, and motherhood. Under the flag of feminism, an ideology that has undergone several mutations, academics, politicians, and commentators, many of them females on the political left, have wreaked havoc with society’s traditional perceptions of family, motherhood, and a child’s need for both a mother and a father.

We see the results of these battles in the decrease in the number of marriages, our country’s now historically-low birth rates, the enormous number of single-parent households – the United States leads the world in this regard – the political divisions of the last decade, and the “No Contact’ movement with its shattered families.

By undermining motherhood and the family, these radical feminists have contributed to a culture of death and civilization’s demise. Family is the foundation of that civilization, and in America that bedrock has suffered a long and dangerous erosion that continues to the present day.

How can we reclaim what has been taken from us?

In her podcast, “The Solution to Western Civilizational Collapse: YOU,” Julia James Davis answers that question. As she so often does in her War on Beauty podcasts, she reminds us that we are ultimately the only real hope and means for reviving our battered culture, saying, “You are the revolution. Re-civilize yourself and save Western civilization.”

Davis then quickly outlines the steps needed for this reclamation of the West. We must first turn to God and find strength and courage in our faith, just as the early medieval monastics did when preserving the West after the fall of Rome. She then recommends a course of intellectual formation, again emulating those monks working away in their scriptoria. Next comes aesthetic cultivation, her core concern in her War on Beauty series. Difficult as it may be at times, she says, we must seek to surround ourselves with beauty, which is not “a luxury, but it’s really necessary for your soul’s health.”

Finally, Davis recommends the practice of excellence. Whatever we do in life, from parent to teacher to entrepreneur to the working in the trades, if we wish to preserve and restore civilization, we must perform our given tasks to the best of our ability. Davis then ends her podcast on an upbeat note, encouraging her viewers to take advantage of the technological wonders of our age while fighting its assaults on the human person. She concludes, “Keep the flame of civilization burning in yourself.”

When we apply this same wise philosophy of preservation to our family life and then stand with Davis and so many others in the fight against the ugliness of our age, we strike a blow against the culture of death and help restore a culture of life.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Freerange Stock