Through the influence of one ideology or another, the devil has been subtly sowing many doubts about motherhood into the delicate souls of women.  

Newsroom (01/02/2022 12:35, Gaudium Press) Mother is the sweetest word there is and, although a small word, it is filled with enormous meaning. One’s mother is a person’s first and, almost always, most important connection to life. We come into the world through our mother, we are nurtured by her, and it is she who teaches us how to speak, walk and relate to each other.

The mother is the first person we think of when we are in difficulty, afraid, lonely, sad, hungry, cold, or just wanting to be held and snuggled. It is with her that we want to share our successes and console ourselves for our failures.

When we are small, it is our mother who leads us, educates us, encourages us, introduces us to the world, teaches us the difference between right and wrong, good and evil; who shows us what we should and should not do, the dangers we should avoid, and how we should behave in the most diverse situations.

A mother is the person we most fear losing, the one we know will always understand us and for whom we are capable of fighting if we see her offended. She is the symbol of care, affection, delicacy, delicious food, lullabies, unforgettable stories, and of wounds healed with a kiss.

A mother is the support during childhood and the reference in adult life, and among our greatest regrets are often the times when we do not follow her advice, because by a supernatural gift, a kind of sixth sense, she always know what is and what is not good for us.

A mother is the one who defends us, who does not measure sacrifices in the care of her children; the only creature who is capable of giving her life for us.

Well, that is how it once was, but this is changing…

Simone de Beauvoir

Various revolutionary movements have given other configurations to the role of motherhood, and the devil, subtly, through the influence of one ideology or another, has been sowing many doubts about motherhood into the delicate souls of women. The first of these ideologies was the one that discussed the existence of the maternal instinct and which had as one of its great defenders the French writer, Simone de Beauvoir.

One of Beauvoir’s most famous positions was that “as long as the family, the myth of the family, the myth of motherhood and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed“. According to her, the desire to be a mother is not something natural, but results from conditioning.

She compared a child generated in the mother’s womb to a “parasitic body” and argued that the vocation to motherhood was something “constructed to make a woman wash the dishes”.

She defended pro-abortion campaigns as “useful for destroying the idea of the woman as a reproduction machine” and said that, “just like men, women do not need to give birth.”

God created man and woman

Undoubtedly, this is a complex subject that cannot fit into a simple article, so we won’t go down that path: speaking of abortion, the choice not to have children and the choice – or, most of the times, the need – to let them be raised in nurseries instead of with their own mothers.

I am not saying that being a mother is easy or that there are no bad mothers, but, however much they say otherwise, motherhood is the role given by God to women and is their most sublime gift. To try to deconstruct this is to want to subvert the natural order of life and to act in harmony with evil.

Today we are experiencing such a great inversion of values that biology itself is being questioned, and what a frenzied militancy wishes is that, in a short time, the human being will cease to be classified as man and woman.

It is obvious that this is a totally ideological question, and those who are concerned with it do not seem to have a solution yet for resolving the condition of male and female in the animal kingdom.

A good alternative to this may be the mass extinction of animals, so that no evidence remains that threatens the theory that tries to throw away thousands of years of history and prove that the Bible is wrong, that God didn’t create man and woman, that this is just an imposed concept and that each one can choose the sex they want to have.

Really, I cannot see any other solution than the extinction of all the representatives of the animal kingdom, as well as the vegetable kingdom, to also erase all traces of the sexual reproduction of plants, which requires the union between the feminine and the masculine.

I love my son, but I hate being a mother!

Whenever a new ideology arises, it is launched experimentally, subtly at first. It tests the initial reaction and then moves forward, between retreats and advances, until it gains ground and reaches the point where individuals begin to have doubts about right and wrong and get lost between what was, what is, and what may come to be.

Some time ago, sporadic manifestations began to appear, based on the statement: “I love my son, but I hate being a mother!” This began in a subtle way and has been gaining substance, creating support networks, forming discussion groups.

And the trend is that, like a dormant volcano, this movement will have an explosion in the coming months, especially after the release of the film “The Lost Daughter.” This film, which seeks an Oscar Award, discusses the dilemmas of motherhood, giving voice and space to women who do not like being mothers, who want to live their own lives unencumbered, and do not see any harm in abandoning their children.

There are activists who go beyond even this, as is the case of Canadian feminist Shulamith Firestone, who died in 2012. She defended the idea of a total severing of the link between mother and child, and that the child’s upbringing should become the full responsibility of the State. In her delirious utopia, she went even further, dreaming of the possibility of some kind of artificial human reproduction, so that the act of having and raising children would no longer be the responsibility of parents and/or relatives, but a matter for the State or the community.

Inversion of values

We are not discussing women’s rights here, nor do we intend to erase the oppression suffered by them for a long time. What we are discussing is the absurd inversion of values that has taken hold and has already begun to reach tragic extremes, with increasing cases of mothers who kill their small children with an unimaginable level of cruelty.

In the last few weeks alone, we have learned of a mother who killed a three year old and a six year old son in Baixada Fluminense, and another who killed her three year old son in greater São Paulo. Both stabbed the children to death. Another was convicted in Mato Grosso do Sul of asphyxiating and burying her 10-year-old daughter alive to cover up the rape by the child’s stepfather. These horrors are just some examples; there are many others.

On the one hand, there are women who will do everything to have children, from making commitments to undergoing sophisticated treatments; on the other hand, there are many who abort, others who abandon their babies, and a good number who take up space on social networks to talk about the discomforts of motherhood and how much they hate their condition as mothers. And some are simply murdering their children.

God’s intervention

I am no longer young and will probably die without seeing the depths to which human baseness will descend, increasingly open to the suggestions of darkness, disguised as legitimate struggles for equal rights. When will the flag be raised for the right of children to have fathers and mothers who bring them into the world, assist them, raise them, educate them and, above all, love them and make them worthy citizens, builders of a better world?

No, I am no longer young, but I never thought I would live to see the sorts of things that we witness in the world today. Of course our mothers had faults, for after all, you learn to raise children by raising them. But most of our mothers did their best and managed to live their role with dignity, satisfaction, and happiness.

In past days, when a child was afraid of the dark, she would call her mother, who would take away the fear and make everything right again. But judging by the direction in which we are now going, in the near future perhaps the best thing for a child to have will be a good lock on the door of his room, so that he might close it tight before going to sleep and escape the danger of being attacked by the one who has the sweetest name in the world. The one who, as she was created to do, would give her life to protect those she has given birth to.

I hope from the bottom of my soul that, with His Blessed Mother, Our Lord will intervene and return all things to order before we reach that point.

Afonso Pessoa

Compiled by Sandra Chisholm