The Fetus Games

Dystopian novels seem to be the hot thing right now considering The Hunger Games trilogy.

Though I have to wonder why we have to go to fictional stories to get our dystopian fill?  Imagine If fifty years ago somebody had written a novel of a future where we killed over a millions unborn each each year, judges overriding the people to institute same-sex marriage, Catholics loosing first amendment rights in the name of reproductive “rights”, a growing number of states  with assisted-suicide, increasing number of cases involving euthanasia where a blind-eye is turned, increased divorce rates and declining marriage rates along with sub-replacement population rates?  How would that novel have been received?  Probably would have been seen as imaginative fiction and as an unlikely dystopia. Slippery slope arguments becoming absurd.

Yet we are living in that dystopia also known as the Culture of Death.

So maybe we like dystopian novels that remind us of a different dystopia then the one we are living in?  The Hunger Games trilogy in some ways reminds me of the culture of death and involves some of the same attitudes.

In The Hunger Games kids are killing kids and not only it is alright according to the government, it is required.  We also have kids killing kids.  Many teenage mothers decide the only solution is to abort their children.  The government does not have a problem with this and they declare it as a right that must be supported by the taxpayer in the case of abortion-inducing drugs.  While The Hunger Games allows one of 24 tributes to survive, we have a much smaller percentage surviving the million-plus surgical abortions each year.

We also have our form of gladiatorial combat known as IVF.  When multiple embryos are implanted it is hoped that one will survive.  So there are plenty of “tributes” selected hoping that one will survive, if not just select some more “tributes” and try again. Or how about so-called pregnancy reductions? Again one is picked to survive the arena. Talk about Hunger Games, drugs making implantation difficult cause the embryo to starve to death.

In The Hunger Games we have the cruel President Coriolanus Snow wants to keep the status quo of gladiatorial combat among children.  In the dystopia we live in we also have a president who wants to keep the status quo of murdering children and not only voted for infanticide, but has been the greatest advocate of abortion to ever sit in the Oval Office.

We can look at The Hunger Games and be outraged by this future society, just as long as we don’t look too closely at our own.

While The Hunger Games trilogy is rather dark and gets darker as it goes, it is not without hope and the plot involves overcoming of the culture that generated the games.  We are also never without hope despite the darkness of our own culture.  God can bring good out of evil.  There should be a lot of good coming because we are certainly producing a lot of raw materials of evil for God to work with.  Thankfully though we are not living in the dystopian that would have resulted without grace.