‘Unplanned’ Reaction Shows the Culture War Against Families and ‘Choice’

A poster for "Unplanned" (Courtesy unplannedfilm.com)

Commentary

“Unplanned,” a movie that shows the pro-life side of the abortion argument and takes on Planned Parenthood, is making waves after bringing in $6.1 million on its limited opening day. It now plans to open in more theaters across the country.

The film is based on the memoir of Abby Johnson, who worked in an abortion facility, but turned against the abortion industry and became a pro-life activist after seeing a baby struggle for its life in the womb as it was killed by doctors. It was produced by the creators of the “God’s Not Dead” franchise.

Talk around the film, however, is less about its success and more about its subject. Many legacy news outlets have lashed out at it for attacking the sacred cow of Planned Parenthood. TV networks refused to sell ads for the film. Twitter initially banned the film’s account, but eventually reinstated it.

What this really highlights is the culture war that has been ongoing in the United States since at least the ‘60s. The leftist narrative, mainly fed by communism’s concepts of destroying family, tradition, and belief, has introduced a new type of morality: It’s a morality of immorality, and anyone who questions it is deemed immoral.

Marx and Engels, themselves, wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” that under their system, “the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course”; and stated clearly their goal that “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.”

And it was the Marxist scholar, Herbert Marcuse, who introduced the idea in his essay “Repressive Tolerance” that this new brand of false “tolerance” touted by communists should only extend to those who agree with their goals. Everyone else should be met with the most severe intolerance.

Thus we have the current situation, where the same people preaching “choice” and “tolerance” are the ones censoring and attacking anyone who thinks differently.

How can women be expected to make a choice so serious—with such long-term emotional consequences—without being able to hear both sides of a debate?

The idea of democracy, after all, is based in each person’s ability to make informed decisions. It was likely because of this that the founders of the United States made protections of free speech their First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

Censorship is only deemed necessary, of course, when those who feel the need to censor do so because they can’t challenge an argument in calm and rational discourse.

The reality is that the debate on abortion is no longer just about abortion. It’s now very much a debate around the value of human life.

In New York, it is now legal to kill an infant up until the time of birth. These are fully developed infants, fully capable of being born, fully capable of surviving, and fully able to feel pain.

Some even push for post-birth killing of infants. Democrat Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam recently proposed on video that if a mother gave birth, the baby could be kept comfortable, and “resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.”

The debate around Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, is now on whether an organization founded in eugenics (and race-based eugenics, at that) should be able to cull the population of a country while also drawing a profit. Yet, as the “Unplanned” film has now shown, even questioning this organization can get you attacked from all directions, and censored.

Something to keep in mind is the trajectory of culture. Twenty years ago, purveyors of abortion claimed that any rumors of wanting late-term abortions, or “partial-birth abortions,” were far-flung conspiracy theories. Now, not only has this happened, but the purveyors are now even preaching post-birth killing of infants.

From the standpoint of socialist and communist goals, discussed earlier, this is merely the dialectic at work—that “slow march through the institutions,” envisioned to gradually transform a free country into a state of communism.

The direction this culture is heading toward should concern most people. And it’s not far-fetched. Under the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy, abortion was very much legal, but women didn’t have “freedom of choice.” They were free to abort their infants, but if they had a second child, that child was often taken, after birth, and killed.

While China has rolled back its one-child policy to an extent, it should still serve as a warning of what a society can become when human life is no longer regarded as sacred—because sacredness of life is what’s really being debated.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.