Would late actor Alec Guinness have survived legal abortion?
by Carder
In 1914 Agnes Cuff, a flighty and unstable young woman with few prospects and little money found herself pregnant. The father didn’t want to be involved. She was alone, shamed, poor and pregnant.
Today she would be encouraged to get herself to an abortion clinic and end the unwanted pregnancy.
Instead a little boy was born….
If abortion had been easy and legal in England in 1914 the world would never have experienced the witty, smart, subtle art and the quiet, steady witness of Alec Guinness…
… and Star Wars would have had an enormous void.
~ Fr. Dwight Longenecker on the backstory of the late actor Alec Guinness, Standing On My Head, January 21
Jan.28, 2015 6:00 am |
Pop Culture |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I did not know the story of Sir Alec Guinness’s birth….
Chestertonians all know the story of Sir Alec Guinness’s conversion to Catholic faith after his experiences portraying Chesterton’s simple priest/detective, Father Brown.
Father Longenecker is a convert himself, having been an Anglican priest before becoming a Catholic priest. As such, he is one of those rare exceptions — a Roman priest with a wife and children.
In June 2015, I will be joining Fr. Longenecker and Joseph Pearce (another Catholic convert, from that strange religion of neo-Nazi white supremacism) on a pilgrimage to England. We will visit the sites of St. Thomas More and other English martyrs, several Catholic writers (including Shakespeare, Chesterton & Belloc), and the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
That is interesting indeed.
Not long ago, a friend directed me to this website which lists some famous people who were conceived in rape. At least one of them would insist that babies like him should be aborted.
I don’t recall seeing Ethel Waters’ name on the list (perhaps I missed it), but she was too — and went on to be a renowned singer and entertainer.
http://www.rebeccakiessling.com/famous-people-conceieved-in-rape.html
Travelling on the Santa Maria Del? :-)
Reality says:
Travelling on the Santa Maria Del? :-)
GK Chesterton wrote books that make you think.
You’ve probably never heard of him.
Or books.
Lots of people have written books that make us think. William Golding, Harper Lee, Dickens.
Oh you think I haven’t heard of books do you. How droll. Have you heard of the internal combustion engine?
I have heard of GK Chesterton but no, I have not read his books.
What might that have to do with your means of transport anyway?
Reality says:
Lots of people have written books that make us think. William Golding, Harper Lee, Dickens.
Interesting: Dickens was on his way out, almost a forgotten and insignificant writer like so many lost to history after the Victorian era. Except that GK Chesterton wrote a significant biography and literary review of Charles Dickens in 1906, which led to a great revival of interest in Dickens’s work. Without Chesterton, we would have no Dickens, no Oliver Twist, no Scrooge, no Tale of Two Cities. In fact, Chesterton says that The Pickwick Papers was his favorite book.
William Golding — how depressing. Did he write anything besides Lord of the Flies? I never would have heard of him, except that Sister made us read that back in 8th grade.
I wish we could have read Chesterton. He makes us think, and he makes us laugh! When I was first encountering Chesterton, I wondered if a modern teen could apprehend his style from a century ago. I called my son over (then 14 years old) and opened to an essay entitled What Do They Think? I said, “Son, I’m doing an experiment. Start reading out loud and don’t stop until I tell you to. About two pages.”
He made it through the exercise…. but just barely. He was laughing too hard to continue! And he wouldn’t give the book back to me, either. He wanted to finish the essay.
Chesterton wrote over 4000 essays, mostly published in newspapers and magazines — in the days before radio and well before television. Reading smart and funny people in the papers was the major form of mass entertainment, and Chesterton was a master. Also more than 100 books, some popular poetry, a few good plays — one of which was quite successful on the East End (London’s version of Broadway), detective stories (including Father Brown’s mysteries), biographies, histories, travelogues, and more.
CS Lewis, as a young atheist in the trenches of WWI, was reading Chesterton and realized for the first time that Christianity actually made sense. Mahatma Gandhi read some essays by Chesterton and was inspired to start a peaceful independence movement in India. Michael Collins read Chesterton’s Napolean of Notting Hill and was inspired to lead a rather more militant movement for independence in Ireland. Alec Guinness, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ian Fleming, JK Rowling… all of them greatly influenced by GK Chesterton.
You’ve never read him? You poor, poor man….
http://www.chesterton.org
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Fr. Dwight Longenecker spoke at the Annual Conference of the American Chesterton Society in St. Louis, 2011. His blog, Standing on My Head, is titled after a frequent image used by GKC — who insisted that we should stand on our heads and look at the world upside-down, with the hope of seeing it right for perhaps the first time.
All very interesting. Many other authors’ lives and impact would read similarly.
I dare say I’ve read a number of books that you have not, yet I don’t feel the need to consider you poor for not having done so.
Funny that, I do view the world from an inverted perspective from time to time. Obviously it worked for me :-)
Oh, and Golding is a bit more of a literary figure than you seem to be aware. I still won’t refer to you as poor though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Golding
Where are the authors mentioned above now?
Where are they now?
We are in the early stages of determining whether Gilbert Chesterton should be canonized among the Saints in Heaven.
I don’t know about the rest.
“who insisted that we should stand on our heads and look at the world upside-down, with the hope of seeing it right for perhaps the first time.”
And those who have been upside-down so long that they can’t think straight need to be careful about where they look in case someone in a kilt is walking nearby. (:
Where are the authors mentioned above now? – I think that pretty much all of them have acquired non-existent person status.
I’ve heard that those who inhabit bars a bit too much sometimes end up ‘on their ear’, so I suppose that may avail them of a peek up a kilt.
William Golding — how depressing. Did he write anything besides Lord of the Flies?
I had to read that book at that age too, and absolutely hated it. Later, as an adult, I could appreciate his point. But IMHO, that was too young an age to read it.
I learned a few years ago that a name/title used in the Bible for the devil – Beelzebub – literally means “lord of the flies”. I assume Golding knew that.
Sorry to throw cold water on this but a lot of assumptions are being made.
1. Today she would be encouraged to get an abortion.
Who’s to say no one encouraged her to back then?
2. If abortion was easily available Alec would not have been born.
Not necessarily. Perhaps his mother would not have aborted under any circumstances. Also, there was certainly illegal abortion. She might have found a sympathetic physician.
Also, there is some question as to Alec’s sexual orientation, which some may condemn.
BTW, I thought he was great in Star Wars.
Mary,
The point is, the likelihood of her being encouraged to abort is higher now than it was back then. And the possibility she’d be talked into it is probably higher these days than it was back then, too.
The fact is, she didn’t and I’m glad because he was awesome in the originally released STAR WARS movies!
I named one of my sons after G.K. Chesterton (his initials are G.K., and his middle name is Keith).
Also, my husband and I were confirmed into Catholicism on his birthday. :) He is such a fantastic writer! I highly recommend the book “The Apostle of Common Sense” by Dale Alquist as an excellent introduction to Chesterton’s works.
Hi MIT,
Again that is speculative. If anything, there may have been more pressure to abort in that era. We have only the vaguest knowledge of her life, and never actually spoke with the woman.
I’m just saying what would or would not have happened is speculation and assumption.