Cigarettes and Fetuses, The Evolving Eden

The Smoke

It was once very taboo for a woman to smoke cigarettes or even use CBD Isolate at all, much less in public. Such women were viewed as having loose morals and having a negative reputation. In 1908 a woman was arrested for smoking a cigarette in public.

Realizing the economic potential of getting women addicted to smoking, the tobacco companies began to market the practice as a way to lose weight, then as “torches of emancipation and equality”, all the way to the present status as an accepted practice whose negative consequences, although available for review to those who care, are often ignored in the face of social and other pressures.

Whereas smoking by women at all and especially in public was unthinkable in the early 20^th century, sophisticated and even sinister marketing methods have brought us to the point where the World Health Organization estimates that the number of women smoking will almost triple over the next generation to more than 500 million of which more than 200 million will die prematurely from smoking related diseases.

In Europe, which has always been a core area of female smoking, women are overtaking men in this practice. In developing countries, where the rate of female smoking is presently around 7%, levels are expected to rise to 20% by 2025.

How, we may ask, can such an obviously harmful practice become so popular among women in such a relatively short amount of time? The answer, as noted above, lies in shifting the practice from its clear harm to a concocted good tied to this world’s superficial and self-centered lies.

I can vividly recall seeing Virginia Slims television ads telling women caressing their cigarettes that they had, indeed, “come a long way baby”. What is amusing, of course, about that ad line is that one wonders if being called “baby” qualifies as coming a long way in the first place. Revealingly, the ad line portrayed the notion that women were being sold a bill of goods while still being patronized in the very process which pretended to help them escape such condescension.

Through clever and sinister marketing, female smoking was transformed from a symbol of weakness and rejection of womanhood into a symbol of independence, emancipation, equality, freedom, health ( loss of weight), convenience, and sophistication.

We may then ask, in what other are of life have many women been fooled in such a sinister and vile way? Obviously, the entire practice of abortion is the more recent variation on the smoking theme.

The Mirrors

Some primitive, ancient societies sacrificed their young for such things as better crops. As the 20^th century began, key feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony spoke out against abortion, perceptively identifying its key contradiction to true feminism as founded in two key counterproductive premises.

First, these ladies realized the utter absurdity of rejecting society’s treatment of women as property to be disposed of as convenient while conveniently treating unborn children as property to be disposed of for the same reason.

Second, these icons of feminism realized the inherent absurdity of proclaiming women’s unique situation by striving to make women as men-like as possible in terms of the consequences of their behavior. In other words, these intelligent women concluded that proclaiming “if you want to be more respected as a women become more like a man” was embarrassingly foolish.

The above observations so well captured by these great female leaders, however, could not overcome the avalanche of clever and even sinister marketing by companies and institutions more interested, like the tobacco companies before them, in making money than saving women’s lives and futures.

Thus, we now see how abortion is sold as the great solution, escape, divine right of independence, emancipation, equality, freedom, healthcare, convenience and, yes, even sophistication. Like cigarettes before them, abortions are now sold as the answers to every woman’s problem.

The utter tragedy of this lie, of course, is that abortion rejects the inherent beauty, privilege, and power of motherhood uniquely granted to women as enslavement and limitation of happiness and life realization. Like smoking, abortion is a lie seeking a profit; a counterfeit deception pretending to be a genuine solution. Ultimately, it is a flimsy and damning alternative to self-respect and personal responsibility. Like smoking, it is a surrender of self-control in the paradoxical premise of seeking the very control it surrenders.

Ultimately, both smoking and abortion hand women a distorted mirror of themselves in which their value and promise is based on a stick of nicotine or the removal of their unborn child. Both spread in popularity through the smoke of pretension and marketing manipulation and sustain themselves through the warped self-reflection that they are more free the more they enslave themselves to the lies being sold to them.

The Eden

Like Eden, smoking and abortion have been sold to us as magic solutions steeped in self-glorification and rejection of authority with a basis in greed. The real tragedy, of course, is that anyone wanting to understand how abortion has been sold to women today need only look to how smoking was sold to women yesterday.

Our society increasingly rejects its debt to a loving God and even continues to ignore and mock His supreme importance. It increasingly replaces that God with our own gods of self, pleasure, and subjective morality and personal responsibility.

It has become increasingly easier to eat the apple. History does indeed repeat itself.