Several years ago, we learned from an explosive exposé of Planned Parenthood and its organ-trafficking partners that some of the pregnancies which they ended were so far along that the children whose body parts they harvested were nearly or fully viable at the time they were killed. As one of the profiteers in the ninth video of David Daleiden’s earth-shaking series admits, she witnessed procedures during which the “fetus was already in the vaginal canal. Whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.”

O unhappy fall! Those children fell out of the womb, not into life but unto a death that was not profitless, thanks to Planned Parenthood and its allies — who finally answered Jesus’s ancient question: “For what will it profit someone to gain the whole world and yet lose his life?” (Mark 8:36 CSB). Now we know the answer: “$340 per second-trimester fetal tissue specimen.”

Step back for a moment and consider this question in the light of Our Lord’s words. He spoke of losing one’s life to sin. Did He only mean the afterlife, or was He also speaking of this one? The Kingdom of Heaven begins for the blessed on earth, so perhaps the converse is true. Dante was bold enough to speculate in the Inferno that some of the damned can be glimpsed in Hell while their bodies still move and function on Earth. He did not mean that literally; anyone can still repent up to the last minute he draws breath. But while we are resisting God’s grace and clinging with cold, bitter fingers to our justifications for evil, what else are we doing on Earth but rehearsing the Great Refusal, preparing our souls for Hell?

What can the merchants of baby parts possibly think about their own lives, as they sort through human organs and total up the profits? As they count on their fingers how many hands they will need to amputate to spare the sensibilities of the techs who will open those coolers, what do these people make of their own hands, their own feet, their very existence in human bodies? The logic of abortion implies an answer, but it’s not one they’re happy with: We are nothing more than animals, and when our brains flatline, we too will wink out like birthday candles.

But abortionists don’t really think that or act on that assumption. They claim for human beings something “heroic” and unnatural: the right of absolute choice, the freedom to harness the joy of sex quite unhinged from its biological purpose. What animals manage that, or even try to? In the natural world, no ape, however brainy, has thought to sterilize himself. No species routinely destroys its healthy young the better to maximize sexual pleasure. In the wild, mothers fiercely defend their offspring; they do not find strangers and reward them for tearing them out. Only man has thought to claim such a curious privilege — curious indeed, if we are merely animals. At best, it is a profound maladaptation, a symptom that our species has undergone some strange mutation and will likely die out quite soon.

Gods of Our Own Making

Or else it is a sign. A perverse proof that we are not just another species in a series that begins with bacteria. Who else but a god, like Zeus, would see his own children as a threat to his autonomy and so decide to consume them? We would be as gods, and envious gods at that. We begrudge the next generation its chance to walk on this earth at all. How else can we interpret the fact that more human beings have been aborted across the world in the past 40 years than died in wars or genocides over the course of the past 100? That explains why unborn children are public enemy number one.

If we are envious gods, then what do we make of the fact that we are encased in these fragile bodies? What can the abortionist, who uses his human body to dismember other human bodies, possibly think his body signifies? Is it anything more than a cage for a godlike spirit, which is sometimes gilded with pleasure?

There’s an ancient way of looking at the world that makes perfect sense of all this. No, it’s not Christianity, but something much more mysterious and exotic, which makes no demands of obedience or self-renunciation. It’s called “Gnosticism,” and you can see it portrayed amusingly in 2014’s train wreck of a movie, Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky, the “not religious” auteur who called it the “least-biblical biblical film ever made.” In that antibiblical epic, there are angels who have fallen for disobeying the Creator. And their punishment is to be trapped inside bodies and sent to earth. That is the Gnostic theory of every human’s biological existence. We are actually angels, bodiless spirits of endless potential and perfect freedom, whom an evil god (or gods) have plunged into the quagmire of flesh and blood, sperm and egg. It is our task to free ourselves by seeking out secret knowledge, to regain our godhood by any means necessary.

Like those poor butchered babies who “just fell out” of the womb, we fell out of the heavens, according to the Gnostic vision, and got trapped inside these bodies. What better way to resist, to shove our refusal back in the face of our hateful Creator than to show Him exactly what we think of this cruel arrangement?

We will destroy these bodies whenever we like; we will “modify” and mutilate them; we will use them however we like (and with whomever we like), and even try to change our sex when that suits our spirit. We will craft bizarre hybrids of humans and animals, and in labs make hundreds of thousands of tiny bodies to keep in freezers for our convenience. And when our bodies have worn themselves out, we will not even bury them, but burn them. Why leave behind a sad, decaying reminder of our shameful sentence on Earth when our spirits deserve so much more? (The practice of cremation in the West, which died when Rome converted, was revived by Enlightenment philosophes to rebuke the resurrection of the body.) The best way to emphasize the spirit’s radical freedom is to punish and degrade the flesh.

The Marquis de Sade understood that. That is why his books are at once Gnostic diatribes and viciously cruel pornography, riddled through with gratuitous scenes of Eucharistic blasphemy, crass attacks on the Body of Christ. His anti-erotic sex books, which one might think would only appeal to the tiny percentage of frustrated serial killers out there, have instead been hailed by secular intellectuals as philosophical classics. One of de Sade’s central tenets, the linchpin of his plan for “liberating” us from nature and its Creator, was access to abortion. And his writing is just as gruesome as anything you’ll see in a Planned Parenthood freezer.

It took the activist Margaret Sanger to turn de Sade’s dark fantasies into practice, to institutionalize and bureaucratize his evil. She played Lenin to his Marx. Her votaries today maintain de Sade’s temples in every ghetto. And now we see the fruits of their acts of sacrifice.

Originally published September 2, 2015

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.