“Toilet Births” & the New Paganism

One of the arguments used by supporters of legalized abortion is that if the procedure is outlawed, women will be forced into back alley abortions. That argument was in play this summer as the North Carolina Senate debated a bill that would place stricter guidelines on abortion providers. The Christian Post reported:

Listening to some of the railing by pro-choice legislators against SB 353, Health and Safety Law Changes, the abortion bill considered recently in the North Carolina House, could at times be exasperating.

No moment was more strenuous to the ears of pro-lifers than when Rep. Alma Adams (D-Greensboro) insisted that if the bill closed abortion clinics across the state, it would force women back to the time of back alley abortions and pregnancies ended with coat hangers.

Adams decried, “What a terrible day for North Carolina women – shame on us,” while waving high a coat hanger. “Do we really want that blood on our hands? I do not,” she said. (bold mine)

If criminalizing abortion leaves “blood on our hands,” does keeping it “safe and legal” absolve us of guilt?

Pro-lifers argue that the availability of abortion, government subsidization of the abortion industry, and intentional obfuscation of the methods and emotional consequences of the procedures, have created a “culture of death.”

“Toilet births” may be further evidence that we are living in, perhaps even perpetuating, a “culture of death.”

“Toilet births” is the name given by some Pro-life groups to the growing trend involving the public abandonment of newborns, the most recent being the discovery of a dead baby, in a bag, in a Victoria’s Secret in Manhattan.

LifeSiteNews.com sees this as just the tip of a disturbing trend, and proceed to compile a list of similar incidents just the past eight months or so. From their article:

• October 17 – A 17-year-old girl is stopped at a Victoria’s Secret store in Manhattan for suspected shoplifting, and admits that in her bag she has the body of a baby that she gave birth to the day previous.
• October 11 – A newborn baby is found, bleeding but alive, with part of his umbilical cord still attached, abandoned on the concrete in the back yard of a house in Queen’s, New York. The baby survived.
• September 19 – The body of a baby is found at a garbage dump in West Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom.
• August 28 – A woman gives birth in a bar bathroom in Pennsylvania, stuffs the baby in the water tank of a toilet, and then returns to the bar to watch a fight on TV. The body was subsequently discovered by the bar owner.
• August 7 – The body of a baby is discovered at hospital rest room in Texas.
• July 9 – Police discover the body of a baby abandoned in a diaper box in the bushes at a public park in Roseville, California.
• June 21 – The body of a small baby is found in a solid waste tank in a waste disposal plant just north of Montreal. Police say the baby was likely flushed down the toilet.
• June 21  – The body of a newborn baby is discovered in a trash can in Oildale, California.
• June 20 – An Iraqi-born UK woman is found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm after stuffing her baby in a garbage bag and throwing her down a 44 ft. garbage chute.
• June 14 – A garbage truck driver in Thailand sees a small hand emerge from a garbage bag during a pickup. The baby had a balloon tied around her throat.
• June 12 – Brittany Cole is arrested in Altheimer, Arkansas, after dumping her infant son in the trash can. She reportedly told police that she was tired of caring for the baby and could no longer do so.
• June 5 – Twenty-seven-year-old Virginia resident Shavaughn Robinson is charged after allegedly giving birth in a toilet, then placing her daughter in a trash can, and then taking the garbage bag with the baby in it out of the can and tossing it in a dumpster.
• June 4 – A dog discovers a living baby in Thailand that had been placed in a white plastic bag in a dump. The baby, which was premature, survived.
• May 30 – Police announce that charges will not be filed against a Kansas teen who gave birth and dumped the body of her baby in a trash can. The teen claimed the baby was stillborn.
• May 27 – Video footage of firefighters in Jinhua, China, rescuing a baby who had become stuck in a sewage pipe, rockets around the globe. The baby’s mother apparently gave birth on the toilet, and by her own account “accidentally” flushed the baby down the toilet. The mom reportedly hid the pregnancy because the baby was not considered legal under China’s brutal One-Child Policy.
• May 2 – Cherlie Lafleur, 19, is arrested in Pennsylvania after allegedly attempting to flush her newborn baby down the toilet at her school. When that didn’t work, she reportedly deposited the body in the trash can.
• Dec. 10, 2012 – The body of a newborn baby is discovered on the conveyor belt of a garbage sorting facility in La Puente, California.

If you can read through this list without being disturbed, repulsed, or sick to your stomach, may I suggest that something is wrong with you.

Even with abortion legal, the number of “toilet births” continues to rise. But why?

The author of the article suggests this may be evidence that we are entering a new era of paganism.

Last month, a prominent Catholic deacon speculated that the rash of such incidents signals the return of the ancient pagan practice of “exposure,” in which parents would simply leave their unwanted newborn babies on a rock or in the wild to die.

“It was the Christians who saved [these babies] and transformed those cultures from cultures of death into cultures of life,” wrote Deacon Keith Fournier.

Infant “exposure” occurred for various reasons,

• Exposure allowed poor people to get rid of extra mouths to feed, especially the mouths of baby girls who were also a dowry liability.
• Children who were imperfect in some way were also exposed.
• Exposure was also used to get rid of children whose paternity was unclear or undesirable.
• The paterfamilias technically had the right to get rid of any infant under his power.

In more ancient times, pagans sacrificed their sons and daughters to the Canaanite god Moloch as rites of purification and appeasement. The commonality in both “exposure” and ritualistic “child sacrifice” is the pagan view that children are disposable, their worth superseded by the demands of a bloodthirsty deity or an individual family or family member.

Likewise, “paganism” is at the heart of today’s abortion culture.

“Toilet births” may be evidence that, not only are we living in a new “culture of death,” but that we are entering a new era of paganism. Perhaps the only real question is whether Christians of this age will, like the Christians of the Roman era, seek to “transform” the “culture of death” or simply rationalize our complacency with political rhetoric and odes to “freedom of choice.”  Which, in a way, are their own gods.