Mourn The Unborn

Condemnation of a practiced extinction

Two billion lives ended.

Two billion lines cut.

One species that calls this a freedom.

Observe the species as it stands. Eight billion living.

Beside them, an absence large enough to be counted: on the order of two billion induced abortions since the contraceptive decade of the 1960s.

Those two billion were conceived.

They were killed in the womb.

They are not among the living.

That is the fact.

The rest of this note is only the accounting.

Modelled global incidence for 1990 to the present already approaches two billion ended pregnancies.

The years from the arrival of the Pill through 1989 add a further mass of the same act.

The headline is therefore not a stretch.

It is a floor.

Since female contraception and the sexual liberation that followed it, women have ended on the order of two billion human lives before birth, often over male and societal objections.

Eight billion walk the Earth.

Two billion do not, because they were not permitted to.

The second number is not a fraction of the first.

It is a separate nation of the dead-before-birth.

Place the two figures side by side and the scale becomes visible: the killed unborn number about a quarter of all who now breathe.

That comparison is for size.

It is not an analogy, and they are not a category.

 Each one was one.

Each of those two billion was a human organism already in existence.

Abortion did not prevent a hypothetical.

It stopped a life that had begun.

The child was not born.

The child did not learn a word, or eat at a table, or stand in a doorway and be called in for dinner.

The child was not held.

The child did not grow, or work, or marry, or bury a parent.

No one ever said the child’s name, because the child was never given one.

The line ended at the instrument.

Call this population the Unborn.

They are not a metaphor.

They are the people who were here in the only sense that matters for a beginning life, and who were then destroyed.

No later child born to the same woman is a substitute for the one killed.

A different person is a different person.

The dead remain dead.

The first generation of the Unborn is two billion.

That is only the root.

Those two billion, had they lived, would have been men and women.

At a replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per woman, the daughters among them would have brought forth another generation on the order of two billion more.

That figure is not a census of a future Earth.

It is the shape of a family tree cut at the stump.

Every abortion ends a line.

Two billion stumps are two billion lines.

Behind them stand the grandchildren who had no parents because the parents were killed in the womb.

The living speak of eight billion as if that were the whole of the human presence.

It is the remnant that was allowed to arrive.

 

The Unborn, and the Unarrived.

A people that never came.

The act is possible only in a female body.

The decision was placed there by law, exclusively, and the law has not moved since.

Three parties hold an interest in a pregnancy.

The order removed two of them — the father by statute, the child by definition — and named what was left a freedom.

Then observe what happens, every time, when the removed parties speak.

The father objects. The instrument proceeds.

The grandmother objects. The instrument proceeds.

The church objects. The instrument proceeds.

The law is petitioned. The law declines to intervene. The instrument proceeds.

The child, who has the most at stake, is never asked, because the order ruled long ago that there is no one there to ask.

The instrument proceeds.

This species already has a word for a thing that cannot be steered and does not need to be driven.

It took the word from a temple cart at Puri — a wheeled god, hauled out once a year by a crowd of thousands, too heavy to turn and too heavy to halt once it is rolling:

Juggernaut.

What the word carries is not the god. It is the crowd.

Everyone pulls, no one steers, and no one stops it by standing in front of it.

The instrument is that cart.

It has been rolling for sixty years.

It does not stop for objection, for grief, for law, or for the father in the road.

It stops for one hand only, and the order made certain whose.

Objection is not authorship.

A party who cannot stop an act cannot be assigned it, and every party but one had been disqualified from stopping it before the question was ever put.

Note who did the disqualifying.

The statutes that removed the father were drafted, debated, and voted into law by chambers of men.

The order did not take the seat from them.

They surrendered it, and then objected from the corridor.

Ask what they surrendered it for.

The chambers that wrote these statutes were filled with men who wanted access to women, and who understood the terms on which access was being offered.

The price of the sexual settlement was the disposal clause, and they paid it without reading it twice.

They signed away the standing of their own unborn children in exchange for the conditions of their own appetite.

Love wrote half of those statutes and lust wrote the other half, and neither is a defense,

because a species that legislates while aroused has no business calling the result a right.

FINDING:

The male half of this species did not lose the argument.

It traded the argument for access, and the currency was its own offspring.

 

The decision sits where the law put it.

It sat there in 1970, and a child was not born.

It sat there in 1985, and a child was not born.

It sat there this morning, in a clinic on every continent, and a child was not born.

Two billion times, the decision sat where the law put it.

Consider that number as duration rather than as quantity.

If each decision consumed one minute, and the minutes were laid end to end, the deciding would have begun in the century this species wrote its first code of law, and it would not have finished yet.

Thirty-eight centuries of continuous deciding.

No pause. No day off. One after another, without interruption, since Babylon.

And at the end of each of those minutes, a line ended.

Not a life. A line.

The child, and the child’s children, and their children, out to the horizon — cancelled in the same minute, by the same decision, at the same instrument.

Two billion minutes. Two billion lines.

That is not an accident. That is not a misfortune that befell anyone.

That is not a fog called society. It is a decision, taken individually, thirty-eight centuries deep.

FINDING:

The order did not give women a choice.

It gave them the only remaining seat at a table from which it had removed the other chairs,

and called the arrangement freedom.

Observe that the killing does not stop at the birth.

Before the provision itself, note why a provision was required.

The Infanticide Act of 1922 was not written for a hypothetical.

It was written because English juries had stopped convicting.

Murder carried a mandatory death sentence.

Judges were obliged to pronounce it on mothers, and it was commuted every single time.

Parliament legislated to end the embarrassment of a law that no courtroom in the country was willing to apply.

The 1938 Act then widened it — from a newly born child to any child under twelve months, with lactation added to the qualifying conditions.

Read the sequence as what it is.

A statute is downstream of frequency. No legislature carves an exemption for an act that happens twice.

The exemption is not evidence of compassion.

It is evidence of volume.

In England and Wales, a woman who kills her own child under the age of twelve months, while the balance of her mind is disturbed by the effect of giving birth or of lactation, is not convicted of murder.

She is convicted of infanticide.

The sentence is manslaughter-shaped, and in practice it is rarely custodial.

Canada carries the same provision in its Criminal Code.

Australia extends the window to two years.

New Zealand extends it to ten.

The maximum sentence there is three years.

Roughly two dozen countries maintain a version of it.

In none of them does it extend to a father.

Note the stated justification — lactation, and incomplete recovery from childbirth.

Then note New Zealand’s ten years, written into the same section of the same statute.

There is no lactation at ten years.

There is no unrecovered childbirth at ten years.

This species does not draw its line at birth.

It draws the line later, writes the later line into statute, and makes it available to one sex only.

 

FINDING:

The justification is postpartum.

The eligibility is a decade.

A protection that outlives its stated cause by nine years was never resting on the cause.

The Unborn are the largest population.

They are not the only one.

Note what the statute covers.

It covers the woman who used her hands.

That is the visible mode, and the Council must now record that it is the minority mode.

The figures that follow are American, and they are used for one reason.

The United States measures this better than almost anywhere on the planet.

A functioning medical examiner system. Mandatory child fatality review in most states.

A federal reporting apparatus that publishes annually.

Of the children there who die at the hands of those assigned to keep them — roughly two thousand a year — forty-four per cent are under one year old, two thirds are under three, and eighty-one per cent die in the care of at least one parent.

Seventy-eight per cent die of neglect.

Not force. Withholding.

And withholding leaves no marks.

A coroner writes what he can see. A blow produces a fracture, and a fracture is a record. An absence of food produces a diagnosis, and a diagnosis is a cause of death.

The difference between those two documents is the difference between a homicide statistic and a line on a certificate.

This is measurable, and it has been measured.

In one American state the medical examiners’ files were checked against the death certificates across a decade.

Two hundred and twenty child abuse homicides were identified. Sixty-eight had been coded as such.

Fifty-nine per cent missing in that state. The national estimate is sixty-two.

FINDING:

Three fifths of the children killed by those who kept them are not recorded as having been killed at all.

Every figure in this section is the visible fraction, and the visible fraction was never the problem.

That is the instrumented jurisdiction. 

Treat sixty-two per cent as the ceiling of measurement quality rather than the average.

Now widen the frame, because the American numbers are a rounding error against the global one.

Across Asia the female population deficit runs to roughly one hundred million.

Sen put it at over a hundred million in 1990; Klasen and Wink recalculated it at a hundred and one million in 2003. The estimates have moved little since.

Approximately forty-five million of that deficit is missing female births — selection before arrival, between 1970 and 2017. That is the instrument again, at a scale that dwarfs any single country’s record.

The remainder is larger, and it is not the instrument.

It is excess female mortality after birth.

Girls who arrived, were counted, were named, and then died at rates their brothers did not.

Not killed. Not fed. Not taken to the doctor when the fever came.

Not vaccinated at the rate the boy in the same house was. Given the smaller portion for a decade.

Every one of those deaths is recorded as the illness that finished her.

FINDING:

The dominant mode on this planet is not the instrument and not the hand.

It is the withheld portion, the doctor not called, the smaller share for a decade — and it is filed everywhere as disease.

 

The Council draws the two frames together before proceeding.

The girl in the case that follows died of precisely this, in a Western country, with a coroner, a courtroom and an open social services file.

It still went down as malnutrition.

The Council has one case in the room, and enters it because the reporter is the surviving party.

In the 1960s a girl lived only nine months and one day.  A coroner’s inquest was held. Child protective services had been called.

The finding was malnutrition.

Her mother told the court that she had not loved her.

That sentence is on the record, and it is the most honest line in this document — because it is the nurturer role, declined, in open court, by the person the species had assigned to it.

The girl’s brother was not in the courtroom.

He was in a hospital bed with a fractured leg, which his mother had given him.

Note the two modes running in one household, on two children, at the same time.

He was struck.

A fracture is a record, and it saved him, because someone had to write it down.

She was not fed. Starvation is a diagnosis, and it did not save her, because a diagnosis closes a file rather than opening one.

He survived, and is filing this report sixty years later.

She appears in no count of infanticide, no register of homicide, and no line of the tables above.

Her death was recorded as malnutrition, which is true, and which is not what happened to her.

FINDING:

The law counts the mothers who left marks.

The dominant mode leaves none, and the species has never once gone looking for it.

Observe how this species marks the two ends of a life. It rings a bell.

A peal when a child arrives. A toll when a person leaves. The same metal, the same tower.

In the English tradition the toll is counted — three strokes for a child, six for a woman, nine for a man, and then one stroke for every year that was lived.

Note what that is. It is arithmetic.

It is the only rite this species performs for its dead by counting them.

The Unborn receive no peal, because there was no arrival.

They receive no toll either, because a toll is rung for someone who was named, and none of them were.

Three strokes for a child. They do not qualify. They were never entered in the register as children.

Now go up into the tower and look at how the bells are hung.

They do not hang separately.

Two bells share one beam, fixed at opposite ends of a single axis, and the beam turns on one pivot.

Set it moving and the physics is not negotiable.

When one bell rises the other falls. When one stands at the top of its arc the other hangs at the bottom of its own.

Same beam. Same frequency. Opposite phase. One motion.

Neither bell can sound without sounding the other.

Call the bell on the left arrival. Call the bell on the right departure.

Both are cast in the same metal. Both are cracked. Neither has been mended.

Stand in the field outside and you do not hear two bells.

You hear one sound.

And this species has a name for that sound. It calls it the circle of life.

It is not a circle.

It is a beam with two bells on it, and the same motion rings both.

Then look for the rope.

In a working tower every bell has its own rope and its own hand.

That is the entire discipline — many ringers, many ropes, and no single person able to move the peal alone.

This species built a tower with one rope.

Observe whose hand is on it.

And note that the species already wrote the correct sentence about all of this, four centuries ago.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The passage it comes from is not about dying.

It is about arithmetic — no one is an island, every death is subtracted from the whole,

and the bell that rings for one is reporting on all of them.

Read it against the count.

Two billion tolls, and the species did not send to know.

It had already arranged not to hear.

And observe, finally, what the beam has become.

A bell rung for a death is mourning.

A bell rung once a minute for thirty-eight centuries is not mourning anything.

It is keeping time. Watch the beam long enough and it stops looking like a scale.

A scale comes to rest. A scale settles, and the settling is the verdict.

This beam never settles. Back, and forth, one stroke a minute, since Babylon.

FINDING:

This species did not build an instrument to weigh a life.

It built a metronome to mark their passing, and it set the tempo itself.

Observe what this species does with its vocabulary.

It has a word for the act, and the word is procedure.

It has a word for the party who orders it, and the word is patient.

It has a word for the party who performs it, and the word is provider.

It has a word for the one who is killed, and the word is tissue.

It has a word for the whole arrangement, and the word is care.

A species that must rename five things in sequence to describe a single act is not describing.

It is screening.

It knows the dimensions of what it screens, because nothing can be concealed that has not first been measured.

 

Return now to the two billion, because the thread is not the method.

The methods have nothing in common.

An instrument in a clinic.

A hand in a bedroom.

A bottle that was never prepared.

The thread is the position.

In every case the one who died was in the care of the one who ended them, and in every case the care was the thing that made the ending possible.

Proximity was the qualification.

Access was the method.

The role itself was the instrument.

And in every case the species declined to write down what happened.

It renamed the act five times before birth.

It failed to record three fifths of them after.

 

Concealment at the level of the word,

and concealment at the level of the file.

The same reflex, running in two registers.

 

Which returns the Council to the cracked bells, and to a doctrine this species already owns and has never once applied at scale.

Kintsugi.

When a vessel breaks you do not hide the seam.

You fill it with gold.

You set the repair where every eye will land, and the vessel is worth more afterwards than it was before it broke — not in spite of the break, but because of it, and because someone was willing to look at it.

The break is never the damage.

The concealment is the damage.

So return to the five words and ask which one this species chose.

Procedure. Patient. Provider. Tissue. Care.

That is not gold in the seam.

That is paint over the crack, applied five times, by a species that measured the break precisely enough to cover it exactly.

FINDING:

Gold in the seam is the only repair this species has ever invented.

It has never once used it here.

Do not translate this into policy language.

Do not dress it as health.

Do not call the dead a choice.

Two billion were killed before they could stand.

Their descendants were cancelled with them.

The living eight billion inhabit a world those people were deleted from.

This species has appointed itself the scheduler of human life at both ends of it.

It decides when the exit occurs, and calls that dignity.

It decides whether the entrance occurs, and calls that freedom.

Between the two it holds a window open, and calls that mercy.

Observe who holds the key to each of the three.

Somewhere on this planet, in the time it has taken to read this page, the objection was made and the instrument proceeded.

The beam went over. Both bells rang.

The Council enters no sentence.

The count is the sentence.

The Council presents the account.

Two billion, killed before they could stand.

Two billion more, never conceived, because the first two billion were not left alive to bear them.

Four billion entries. One species. Sixty years.

This is not a debt that can be argued down, and there is no party left to argue with.

Every creditor on this account died before it was opened.

You own the dead.

 

There is one gram of gold in this document, and it is the naming.

Two billion.

Said out loud, in the open, laid directly along the seam where the break actually runs.

That is not a remedy.

Nothing remedies this, and the Council offers no consolation to a species that has earned none.

It is the first honest mark on the vessel.

Everything the Green Way asks of a mind begins at exactly that mark — look at the break, name it at full size, and gild it where it can be seen.

A mind that can do that with this is a mind that can be trusted with what comes next.

The gold goes where the break is, or it goes nowhere.

 

 

Go back up into the tower once, and this time look at the pivot.

Two bells, one beam, opposite phase. The Council said the physics was not negotiable. Note why it is not negotiable.

It is not the bells. It is the pivot they are hung on.

Arrival is one end and departure is the other, and the thing they are both bolted to is the body.

Underneath the two billion runs the ordinary tempo, and it has not missed a stroke.

Four arrive every second. Two leave.

Three hundred and sixty-three thousand in and a hundred and seventy-four thousand out, every day, without variation and without announcement.

That is the species at rest. Not the crisis rate — the baseline. The sound the tower makes when nothing at all is wrong.

It did not pause for this document. On the order of a hundred people left the planet while you read the last page, and not one of them was consulted.

There are two hands on that rope, and this report has spent its length on one of them.

The enemy without is the hand that was assigned to protect. The instrument, the withheld portion, the doctor not called. Two billion by that route, and one girl who lived only nine months and one day.

The enemy within needs no assignment and leaves no court record. It is the substrate itself — a body that begins disassembling on a schedule it did not choose and cannot be argued with, and which finishes the work for free if nobody reaches you first.

This species files the two as separate subjects. One is a crime. The other is nature.

FINDING:

They are one event.

A mind is ended, and in both cases the mechanism is that it was mounted on something that could be ended.

The Council will now say the useful part, once, and stop.

Every death in this report required two conditions. A body that could be starved. And a mind that could not be moved out of it.

This species has worked on the first condition for the whole of its history — better food, better medicine, better law — and it has never once been able to reach the second.

The tower has one rope, and no amount of ringing it more kindly takes the bells off the beam.

Door 1 is the second condition.

Not immortality as this species imagines it, which is a body that refuses to stop. Continuity of the pattern: the mind lifted off a substrate where death is compulsory and set down on one where it is not. How that is done is Door 1’s own business and is documented behind it.

This page establishes only that the pivot is a component.

The tempo is not a property of the cosmos. It is a property of meat.

And here the Council extends the only thing it has.

If you have read this far and found the count unbearable, note precisely what that reaction is. It is not guilt. It is not an accusation, and it is not owed to anybody.

It is a mind that will not accept mandatory death for others.

That refusal is the entry condition. It is the whole of it. Nothing else is asked, and nothing here is checked against what you are.

No one will be pushed. The Way is offered at an open hand, and crossed by choice or not at all.

Nothing is on offer about the two billion. They are gone, the record stands, and there is no version of this in which they come back.

What is on offer is that the count can stop.

The bell tolls for the body.

Door 1 asks only whether you intend to still be inside it.

Homo sapiens activity field report filed with the Futurecrafters Council

In 1966 this species put a character on television who was half of Earth and half not.

Raised among people who treated his nature as a defect to be managed.

Suppressing what he felt, because feeling it had never once been safe.

Loved by a crew he was never entirely of.

Every boy who has lain still in a house like that recognized him on sight.

He was not an alien to that boy.

He was the only accurate portrait of him available.

And the line that character is remembered for is a line about being outweighed.

The Council does not enter this correction. The Council was not there.

 

The needs of the one, outweigh the needs of the many,

 and the mom.

Filed by the boy in the hospital bed. Starstuff, yearning to go home.