The Invincible Family

Why the Global Campaign to Crush Motherhood and Fatherhood Can't Win

Kimberly Ells

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684510719
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Conservatorismo e liberalismo

In this shocking report, Kimberly Ells tells the story of earth's oldest institution—the family—in a way it has never been told before. The Invincible Family challenges current social doctrines, unmasks the annihilation of womanhood in the name of "women's empowerment, " and exposes the efforts of United Nations agencies to advance "sexual rights" for children. The Invincible Family is both a call to arms to defend the most essential human institution in its darkest hour and a rich source of encouragement. Kimberly Ells is a researcher on family policy and has spoken at the United Nations and around the country on international threats to children and the family. A graduate of Brigham Young University, she is married and the mother of five children.

PART I THE WOMAN AND THE MAN

CHAPTER ONE BELONGING

When I bore my first child, I knew she was mine because she was connected to me by a cord. No one in the delivery room questioned that this baby belonged to me and I belonged to her. Our connection was physically obvious. When the umbilical cord was cut and I clutched this baby’s head to my chest, we were no longer tethered to one another, but our connection was inseverable.

The story of every person’s life begins at this same place: mother, baby, and a cord connecting the two. And somewhere—often right there looking on—is a father. The father is the second person to whom the baby belongs and on whom the child has an unquestionable claim. Unless the eggs of one woman have been transferred to the womb of another, the child who emerges from a woman’s womb is her biological child, bearing her genetic material and formed from her own body. This tethering of child to mother and mother to child ensures that every baby ever born is known and, usually, claimed by at least one person: its mother. No one is born without being tethered to a specific person, and that person is always a woman.

The relationship of belonging between mothers and children has been recognized in virtually every culture in every age. Taking a mother’s child from her is a crime. It is considered a crime because we honor the belonging of children to their mothers and fathers. This applies to adoptive mothers and fathers as well as biological parents. Laws that enable adoption are modeled after the inherent belonging of children to their physical parents.

A mother’s claim on her child is singular in its origin and endless in its duration. The birth of a baby establishes an irrevocable relationship between parents and children. This biological belonging initiated by conception and birth is unique in the universe. It can be legally signed away, but it cannot be undone. Therefore, the act that leads to conception and birth—sex—has consistently been treated as a big deal.

Two Crucial Points

There are two points that must be made before going further. First, to say that a woman holds a preeminent claim on her children does not mean she cannot or should not hold a claim on other things. Women often excel at owning and managing land, homes, equipment, physical assets, and million-dollar businesses. But a woman’s claim on her child by virtue of having borne it is achievable by no one else. Men contribute to the generation of life, but they cannot bring it forth. Only women do this.

Second, I am by no means suggesting that women “own” their babies. A child is not its mother’s property, and yet it unequivocally belongs to her. We do not purchase or procure children; they are bestowed on us, usually as a consequence of our sexual choices. “Ownership” implies the right not only to possess but to sell, and there is no such right when it comes to people. No one, not even a parent, has the right to sell another human being.

A child—like every human person—has an inherent, independent, and incalculable value. The limitless, non-monetary value of any person is not calculable, purchasable, erasable, or disposable. People ultimately “belong” to themselves, of course, and each person is responsible for his or her own destiny. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it, every person is “born free” with “equal” value. But since all babies are born helpless, they must be helped by others. The two entities who generate the child—the child’s parents—are biologically selected to assist the child until it can take up the job of managing itself independently.

How Children Belong to Their Fathers

Since men do not have umbilical cords physically connecting them to their children at birth, marriage has historically been the mechanism by which fathers claim their children. Through most of recorded history, marriage has entailed a commitment by the man and the woman to engage in baby-making behavior—sex—only with each other.

The commitment of sexual exclusivity in marriage makes visible the man’s otherwise invisible parenthood. Today, if a vow of sexual exclusivity has not been made or kept, genetic testing can establish a man’s biological connection to a child. But throughout history, a man’s fatherhood of his children was made manifest through his marriage to his wife.

Two People

The umbilical tethering of babies to mothers is a reasonably reliable mechanism for ensuring that every child who appears on earth is claimed by at least one person: its mother. Marriage takes things a step further. Marriage seeks to ensure that a child is claimed by two people: its mother and father, the two people who gave it life. Marriage has historically entailed a lifelong commitment, because the parent-child relationship is lifelong.

Other familial relationships—such as aunt, uncle, cousin, grandfather, grandmother, niece, and nephew—also hinge on biological connections that cannot be dissolved. In cases of adoption, the biological mother and father of a child remain its biological parents, but responsibility for the child is legally assumed by adoptive parents. Since marriage is not a biological relationship, it is potentially the most brittle relationship in families. A marriage can be legally dissolved, but children do not become “ex-children” to their parents. A marriage may disintegrate, but biological relationships forged through sex, conception, and birth do not. Because they cannot.

The belonging of babies to their mothers has been and remains key to the ordered functioning of society. The preexisting and preeminent biological connection of mother and child undergirds the political, economic, and social structure of the world. If we alter or challenge the anatomical sovereignty of mothers and fathers, the consequences may prove politically, economically, and socially catastrophic.

CHAPTER TWO TRUE POWER

Feminists and others have long been hacking away at the bonds between women and their children. Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012), a leader of the second-wave feminists of the 1970s, wrote, “The heart of a woman’s oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role.”¹ The conviction that a woman is inescapably shackled by her own body has become deeply engrained in the feminist mind.

According to feminist theory, since men are not physiologically bound to their children, they enjoy a position of greater freedom, eminence, and power, and women are doomed to eternal inequality with men. In this paradigm, a woman is a second-rate human being with reduced power by inescapable biological design.

Another strain of mid-twentieth-century feminism, articulated by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), rejects the idea that the woman’s body is responsible for her unfortunate situation in life. Women are impaired, in Beauvoir’s view, not by their bodies but by the gendered culture in which they live. According to Beauvoir, a woman’s body (or a man’s, for that matter) dictates absolutely nothing. She argued that if we changed society’s views on anatomy and gender, the woman would be freed from the dictates of culture and could imagine herself to be anything she wished. We will return to this idea later.

Anatomical Shackles

Feminist writings are peppered with statements bemoaning the disparities between male and female bodies and the resulting “disadvantages” to women:

• Shulamith Firestone wrote, “It was woman’s reproductive biology that accounted for her original and continued oppression.”²
• Kate Millett (1934–2017) wrote, “So long as every female, simply by virtue of her anatomy, is obliged, even forced, to be the sole or primary caretaker of childhood, she is prevented from being a free human being.”³
• Linda Gordon has called a woman’s ability to reproduce her “only significant biological disadvantage.”⁴

Margaret McCarthy sums up this strain of feminism: “It is the woman’s body that opposes her existence as a person. It is therefore ultimately her own body that the woman must resist.”⁵ This view could be called the “Tragedy of the Female Body.”

To be sure, being pregnant and nursing a baby are physiological realities that tend to keep a woman near her children when they are young, in turn keeping her farther from the boardroom, the courtroom, the field, the operating room, the laboratory, the cubicle, the construction site, the factory, the assembly line, the driver’s seat of a semi, or the checkout counter for a portion of her life.

Since by edict of biology men are not required to bear or nurse young children and can therefore more readily plow fields, attend meetings, argue cases, perform surgery, fit pipes, work on assembly lines, drive trucks, sit in offices, and stand behind checkout counters, the woman is said to be at a great disadvantage. “Freeing” the woman from this disadvantageous biological position has become the goal of feminists and social engineers the world over.

Advantageous or Disadvantageous?

But much hinges on what is considered advantageous and what is considered disadvantageous. Not everyone agrees that bearing and nurturing children puts women at a disadvantage. Many world leaders, ancient and modern, have held a different view of what position is most advantageous. Political leaders, philosophers, and other public figures—including some generally considered “good” and some generally considered “bad”—have maintained a surprisingly consistent perspective on where power lies and what drives the destiny of the world:

• Aristotle: “All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind are convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”⁶
• Mahatma Gandhi: “If we are to reach real peace in this world… we shall have to begin with children.”⁷
• Mao Zedong: “The young people are the most… vital force in society.”⁸
• Nelson Mandela: “Children are our greatest treasure. They are our future.”⁹
• Confucius: “If your plan is for one year, plant rice; if your plan is for ten years, plant trees; if your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.”¹⁰
• John F. Kennedy: “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”¹¹
• Sir Herbert Read: “Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.”¹²
• Vladimir Lenin: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”¹³
• Adolf Hitler: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”¹⁴

These statements expose the great “secret” shrewd leaders and philosophers have figured out: Gaining the allegiance of the young is the key to directing the destiny of the world. If a political or social philosophy is going to take hold and persist in a society, the children in that society must embrace it in their youth. And so the race to “own” the young, as Hitler put it, is always on. Nurturing the young in their very first life lessons is the goal of every savvy social reformer, politician, activist, and revolutionary.

She Alone

With this secret in mind, power-hungry leaders have battled to control the minds and hearts of the young and thus to control the future of the world. The Nazis’ Hitler Youth program was intended to secure the minds of the youth, and similar efforts have been launched by other eager leaders hoping to educate the young in their respective philosophies. The great battle is to own the young, and he who wins this battle wins the world.

For all the clamoring of competitors through the centuries, women have in large part remained the first possessors of the young. For millennia, women—mothers—have gained and maintained the allegiance of the very young. Mothers have taught children their first life lessons and secured in their minds the philosophies they chose to put there. Thus, it could be argued that women have been and remain prima...