A few things stand out after reading through the federal Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision, along with its concurrences and dissent, which returned the regulation of abortion to each of the 50 States.
-Beginning with the dissent, it becomes clear that the insistence on a ‘right’ to abortion is deeply rooted in the desire of some women to reject their place in the hierarchy God created. Pro-abortion women do not want to be mothers, caregivers, or subordinates to and dependents upon husbands; they want to make themselves into the equivalent of men by being able to kill their children if and when it is necessary so they can pursue their careers, participate in the economy, etc., just like men.
The sin of envy is clearly at work here. The Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church have some memorable things to say that bear directly on this situation. St John Chrysostom (+407) says that envy leads to murder, which needs no further comment:
https://www.orthodoxchurchquotes.com/2014/10/09/st-john-chrysostom-envy-is-the-mother-of-murder/
The Holy Elder Anatoly of Optina Monastery (+1894) relates the following:
‘Wherever God is — there is peace. And the opposite is self-evident: where there is envy, enmity, impatience, self-love — there is the devil. Wherever the devil is — there, everything is ruinous, proud and hostile.’
Ruinous, proud, hostile – this is a good description of family life in the age of feminist/abortion ‘rights’. When men and women reject their places in the God-ordained hierarchy of the family and society, there will be chaos. But different roles for men and women do not mean that one is more valuable than another. Men leading in the family, in politics, in the Church; men being the primary bread-winners; men acting as protectors of their wives and little ones; women nursing and raising the children, watching over their homes, giving support to their husbands; the children obeying both mother and father – these are all equally noble when done in the spirit of Christ-like love and humility.
The Orthodox Church speaks quite powerfully on these points.
‘"Equality is known to produce strife. Therefore God allowed the human race to be a monarchy, not a democracy. And the family is constructed in a similar way to a monarch’s army, with the husband holding the rank of monarch, the wife as general, and the children also given stations of command."
‘— St John Chrysostom, Homily 34 on First Corinthians.’
And from a contemporary priest, Fr Sergei Rybakov:
‘"A lot depends on how the the hierarchy is setup. Previously, families had a patriarchal structure, in which a wife traditionally came to her husband each morning to request a blessing for the day. She also brought the children, who would receive blessings from their father. He would bless each of them with his right hand. This is the patriarchal way of the Orthodox family.”
‘“But then, due to spiritual impoverishment and the influence of liberal ideas, the man ceased to be recognized as a patriarch. As a result, a modern woman rarely fulfills what the apostle has commanded — not to teach, but to learn from her husband at home (1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians 14:35). There is no one to learn from now, and worldly wisdom is not enough. The soul of the woman remains hungry, and thus a kind of madness begins. She desires to seize power in the family. The child is often used as an excuse."
‘"And thus there is a restructuring of the entire family. The child becomes the head of the family, who is served by the mother. The child becomes an idol, the woman becomes his priestess, and the man becomes an economic appendage. As a result, the entire family structure is destroyed, and the man leaves the family to find a place where he feels more comfortable. Thus the family falls apart.”’
The sources of the two quotes have much more of value in them on this subject:
https://russian-faith.com/hes-king-shes-queen-christian-marriage-patriarchal-community-n1926
The family as God made it is bright and beautiful and joyful. To apply the hammer of renovation to it only brings ugliness and sorrow. The miserable condition of the family in the uS offers abundant proof of that.
-For all the common sense in the Dobbs ruling, there is a horrible absence: The words God, Christ, and Christian are nowhere to be found in it. It is an entirely secular decision, which confirms yet again that the ‘American experiment in ordered liberty’ is not a Christian enterprise. It uses Christianity (and religion in general) to prop up the political and economic systems that it finds desirable, but its usefulness ends there.
This is an inversion of the traditional view of Church and state, wherein the state acts as a protector and supporter of the Church. And it is a perversion of the end for which man was made: union with God through Christ and His Body the Church, preparation for the next life, not an earthly life of comfort and happiness through the acquisition of much property, not the creation of a this-worldly utopia.
The sparsity of monasticism in the States illustrates fairly clearly where the focus of their peoples is: this world, this life, not the life after death where we will be forever in the presence of God.
-One word that is very much present throughout Dobbs, however, is the word ‘nation’; it is used 113 times according to Adobe’s PDF search feature, which is a little more than once every two pages. This shows a gross misunderstanding of the federal Supreme Court justices about the nature of the united States. They are not one nation, indivisible; they are 50 nations joined in a voluntary union; they are several unique cultural regions, co-existing with one another. If more people held a broader view of what the States are and how they should be organized and governed, there would probably be fewer nightmarish rulings like Roe to contend with.
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We are glad, of course, to see the cancer of Roe v Wade and its offspring cut out of the body of uS law, but what Dobbs ultimately shows is that the South, New England, and the rest of the States have need of more, not less, repentance in the weeks and years ahead.
Yet this was already the case. For the effects of murdering 63 million babies are not quickly nor easily cleansed from our collective soul.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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