Today is the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children and I found my mind drawn to Christopher Hitchens. In 1988 Hitchens said, regarding abortion:
“Look, once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of “the woman’s right to choose.” If the unborn is a candidate member of the next generation, it means that it is society’s responsibility. I used to argue that if this is denied, you might as well permit abortion in the third trimester. I wasn’t as surprised as perhaps I ought to have been when some feminists—only some, and partly to annoy—said yes to that. They at least were prepared to accept their own logic, and say that the unborn is nobody’s business but theirs.”
Of course now for nearly all feminists, 37 years later, the right to unlimited abortion is enshrined in holy script.
The ironic things about Hitchens’s views was that he was an atheist; however, he was honest and a contrarian as opposed to an ideologue. He started as a Trotskyist, for many years considered himself a democratic socialist, and changed his views again after 9/11, notably breaking with The Nation over its opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
My first taste of Hitchens came when I was a wee lad listening to him on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Like him, hate him, I don’t think he cared; he was fearless and went where he thought his values and intellect showed the way. He was always worth the time, whether you agreed with him or not.
Hitchens was an immigrant to the US and died in 2011. I would dearly have loved to hear his views of the past 10 years.