Baby, the rock n’ roll spirit should be on your side
I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life. I revered Lennon and Dylan because they tuned into that cry and sought to mobilise its power into the modern world. For a few years in my youth I nestled into the cool embrace of modern rock ‘n’ roll culture of protest and hope. But then I began to sense something amiss. Rock stars were talking about a woman’s ‘right to choose’ as if, as with slavery, this was a straightforward matter of freedom from oppression, as though the unborn child was the equivalent of the slave master. I grew uncomfortable. I listened to Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit and heard a different song to everyone else: Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh/Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
I heard the dying cries of the hanged slaves, strange fruit hanging from those southern trees. But I heard, too, the silent cries of the children torn out from their nests of expectation, in Graham Parker’s unforgettable phrase, ‘with talons of steel.’ I began to experience a profound alienation from the idea that the annihilation of these children was part of some agenda of coolness to which I was expected to subscribe. I baulked. I didn’t stop listening to the music – some of it anyway – but I stopped subscribing. I’ve never thought of myself as a pro-lifer – a reductive piety to my ears – but as pro-baby.
A diminishing part of me is appalled at where I’ve ended up: I can’t think of myself as ‘right’ or ‘alt’ or ‘reactionary’ or ‘neo’ or even ‘conservative’, although I have come to accept that these labels will follow me to the grave. I don’t feel any of those things. I would love to be cool again, but there is an insurmountable problem: the truth. Facts that block the way. Abortion is the killing of the innocent and most defenceless. I have looked at it every which way and cannot find another way of looking. I accompanied my own baby as she grew from a quark to a queen and today I see her as nine months older than the world counts her to be.
Continue reading at The Spectator.