Life after Roe

I t is a myth about the Spartans and babies.

You can blame Frank Miller’s 300 — or, if you are a more literary type, you can blame Plutarch — but the legend of Spartans’ killing sickly or deformed newborns by throwing them off a cliff or abandoning them to die alone in the wilderness doesn’t seem to be true. A spot once thought to be the place where unwanted children were thrown to their deaths did turn out to be full of human bones, but these were mostly the bones of adult men, and the site seems to have been a place of execution for criminals and prisoners of war. Another site was indeed found to be full of the bones of children, some of them newborns and some of them many months or a few years old, a discovery that is horrifyingly consistent with what we know and what we can guess about infant and childhood mortality in the ancient world, when as many as half of the children born died before reaching puberty.

Perhaps the Spartans were not quite as savage as we have been led to believe. But ours is a savage world, and it always has been. In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer explored the subject of human sacrifice at great length in paragraphs such as this one:

The Indians of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The people of Cañar (now Cuenca in Ecuador) used to sacrifice a hundred children annually at harvest. The kings of Quito, the Incas of Peru, and for a long time the Spaniards were unable to suppress the bloody rite. At a Mexican harvest-festival, when the first-fruits of the season were offered to the sun, a criminal was placed between two immense stones, balanced opposite each other, and was crushed by them as they fell together. His remains were buried, and a feast and dance followed. This sacrifice was known as “the meeting of the stones.” We have seen that the ancient Mexicans also sacrificed human beings at all the various stages in the growth of the maize, the age of the victims corresponding to the age of the corn; for they sacrificed new-born babes at sowing, older children when the grain had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men.

Frazer’s main interest was in the rites of prehistoric Europe, which largely were focused on fertility: the rites of human fertility, the rites of spring, and, later, the rites associated with agriculture. The animating idea of these rites was “homeopathic” or imitative magic, the idea that one can achieve a desired result in the real world by performing the act, or an analogous act, in a ritual setting. (Think of the voodoo doll, an effigy of an enemy to which violence is done in order to torment the victim represented.) Hence the practice of orgies at planting time and the cutting down of sacrificial victims at the harvest.

We moderns — we modern Americans, anyway — execute our criminals much as the Spartans did. Like the ancients Frazer documented, we sacrifice the young when it suits some perceived social purpose, and we increasingly are prone to follow the example of our European cousins in sacrificing the elderly and the sick for the same reasons of convenience. The Nazis, among other 20th-century eugenicists, cited the Spartan example of exterminating those whose lives might be considered a drain on the state, rhetoric which echoes even down into our own time, when abortion-rights advocates demand to know who is going to foot the bill for all those unwanted children, as though lack of financial resources was what ails these United States of America. The law in the United Kingdom permits abortion up to 24 weeks into the pregnancy in most cases — but it permits abortion up until the moment of birth for babies with Down syndrome. Heidi Crowter, a British woman with Down syndrome, lost an effort to have that practice ended on the grounds that it is discriminatory and a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. There has been some debate in the United Kingdom in recent years over the meaning of the word “European,” but I had not thought that the words “convention,” “human,” or “rights” were so mysterious.

The hard eugenicists of the 1930s and the soft eugenicists of the 2020s would argue that they are different from their superstitious antecedents in that their purposes are social and economic, matters of public health and the public good. But the hatchet-bearing priests who practiced human sacrifice in the darkness of our ancestral shadows also believed themselves to be seeking economic, political, and social ends, and to be acting in a self-evidently rational way. The great lesson of Frazer’s work is that we ought not sneer at the primitive ways of our forebears, who were making the best inferences they could from the knowledge and understanding they possessed — in the tragic human way, they were in the very earliest stages of fumbling toward science.

Evolutionarily speaking, we have not advanced much at all from those ancestors. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been walking the Earth for something like 300,000 years, meaning that 98 percent of the human experience is what we now call “prehistoric,” while the years in which we have had the benefit of electric lights represent about 0.04 percent of the human era. Of course we are savages — the miracle is that we are not so much worse than we are.

We are still sacrificing the young and the old, the weak, the disabled, the sick, the prisoners — the unwanted. We are, in fact, doing so on a scale that probably would have shocked the ancient Spartans, who never would have dreamed of putting to death 65 million mostly healthy and viable babies in one man’s lifetime, Plutarch’s libel notwithstanding. If we seem to ourselves any less bloody, it is because we have co-opted and perverted the medical profession, which does our killing for us, in a sterile clinical setting, when it comes to babies and prisoners both.

Homeopathic magic is still very much with us, too: A generation ago, young women who wished to eliminate their secondary sexual characteristics and prevent menstruation did so by starving themselves nearly to death. Anorexia was, for a few years, positively fashionable, and it was invested with religious significance; today, the same ends are served by different means, more efficiently medicalized, under the name of “transgenderism,” a phenomenon that recapitulates many of the practices of ancient mystery cults: the taking of a new name and, sometimes, a new birthday associated with the emergence of one’s “true” mystical identity, ritually prescribed changes in dress, ritual mutilation, etc. As always, this functions in some part through social contagion, as Frazer observed:

While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.

The Dobbs decision overturning the savage ruling in Roe v. Wade is not the end of the abortion debate in the United States, or the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. And abortion is not about what everybody pretends it is about. There are many ways of achieving bodily and sexual autonomy without the willful extermination of human life. There are ways of treating the medical conditions that arise from troubled pregnancies — which is why such situations account for a vanishingly small share of the abortions performed in this country every year. And there are at any given time something on the order of 100 or more families looking to adopt for each child voluntarily relinquished by a mother each year. The purpose of abortion is to put children to death in the false belief that this will somehow mitigate social, economic, or spiritual problems — something we human beings have been doing for a very long time.

The Dobbs decision will not end abortion in the United States; it will give Americans the opportunity to vote on the question. We should understand what it is we are voting on, which is the enduring question of whether we are to be savages, albeit high-tech savages, or if we have it in us to be something else.

Eros, too, is a jealous god.