A Return to Repugnance

Matt Emerson argues that rationalizing away the repugnance of abortion hastens society’s decline :

In high school, I had to read Brave New World and other literature that portrayed a future filled with the results of fundamentalist science. Whether Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , the works tried to warn audiences that the drive to conquer nature, human or otherwise, could lead to great, irreparable harm, or to a society where humans would be homogenized and programmed, like iPads with lungs and limbs.

Though I sympathized with the writers’ concerns, I found the stories strange. They seemed only partially relevant. We were a long way off, I thought, from dystopian days.

Eleven years later, quite suddenly, all that literature seems not only interesting, but terrifyingly real. Why now?

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