Many conservatives and Christians get very excited when a talented person who isn’t quite one of us shares our premises, if not our conclusions. It is for such readers that I am plugging Louise Perry’s insightful essay in First Things on ancient Rome’s resort to abortion and infanticide, abated by the rise of Christianity.
Perry argues that, in our own time, as Christianity dwindles as a dominant cultural force, we are returning to our pagan roots:
When pro-life and pro-choice advocates fight about the nitty-gritty of abortion policy, what they are really fighting about is whether our society ought to remain Christian. Most people who describe themselves as pro-choice have not really thought about what truly abandoning Christianity would mean—that is, truly abandoning Christians’ historically bizarre insistence that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” But there are a few heralds of repaganization who are willing to be confidently and frighteningly consistent.
Perry begins her essay with “Conversation with an archaeologist,” a “very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish,” which also serves as one of the epigraphs to Perry’s book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel
In her book, Perry argues that women and children are historically the beneficiaries of Christian sexual ethics and that these ethics remain gentler, healthier, and — as far as she’s concerned — more feminist, than their pagan alternatives.