Kingdom under siege.

Feminist journalist Anne Collins once praised Canadian conservatism for rejecting American add-ons ... a right-wing image of God and family which relegated women to the kingdom of the home." Whatever one might think of this assessment of Canadian "conservatism", one can deduce that, in speaking of the "kingdom of the home" Ms. Collins's feminine intuition unconsciously triumphed. For the home is indeed a kingdom, and fortunate is the woman who can reign there as wife and mother, or, as Catholic author G. K. Chesterton wrote:

"To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness." (What's wrong with the world, The emancipation of domesticity)

Many a woman today would reject such a point of view as irredeemably quaint. If successfully socialized, so to speak, the Canadian woman, when embarking on married life, will anticipate not decades at home raising children, but a life in the work-force, possibly interrupted once, twice, at most thrice, by maternity leave. Generally, a husband, too, will expect his wife to spend her child-bearing years primarily occupied with gainful employment outside the marital home.

American pro-life activist, Kathie O'Keefe, has revealed the hidden hand of eugenicists behind the adoption of these "anti-natalist" attitudes as normative (see "Eugenics vs. Democracy", www.eugenicswatch.com). Eugenicists, O'Keefe warns, have a "radical social agenda" to reduce population everywhere, and relentlessly employ any means to achieve that end. If this sounds too sinister and Machiavellian for those with little taste for conspiracy theories, be assured that O'Keefe's research is impeccably documented. She relates that Kingsley Davis, "the second American representative to the UN Population Commission" advocated "changes in the structure of the family, in the position of women and in the social mores" as means by which to curb population growth. In a 1967 article, Davis elaborated: "Women could be required to work outside the home, or compelled by circumstances to do so. If, at the same time, women were paid as well as men and given equal educational and occupational opportunities ... many women would develop interests that would compete with family interests." And so they have.

O'Keefe quotes another population-control enthusiast, Prof. E. Grebernik, who breezily advocated such public policies as to "squeeze consumers through taxation and inflation; make housing very scarce by limiting construction; force wives and mothers to work outside the home to offset the inadequacy of male wages, yet provide few day care facilities ..."

Ah. Professor Grebernik, who penned these delightful ideas in 1970, might well be pleased to note that in Canada we've moved beyond those rudimentary social policies that discourage large families or, put another way, that encourage the use of contraception, sterilization or, as a last resort, abortion for those families who, caught up in a burden of debt and taxation, and relying on two incomes to sustain their existence, may well view the arrival of another child as nothing short of a calamity. Canada, one could argue, has further social-engineering ambitions: ensuring that Canadian children are placed in a universal, i.e., tax-funded, daycare system, courtesy of the current Liberal government.

One can thank Andrew Coyne for a clear-sighted analysis of the Liberals' proposed universal daycare program ("Please, Mr. Dryden: Less candour", National Post, July 2, 2005). Coyne noted that Ken Dryden, the Minister of Social Development, was astonishingly forthright in revealing that while $5 billion has been allocated for starters, the Liberals don't know how much the program really will cost, nor does Dryden know exactly how it will be administered, except he's confident that once the provinces have received federal largesse for five years, they will, in effect, be hooked and unable to turn back. As Coyne sums it up: "The minister is committing the country to fund a program whose cost he admits are open ended, whose design is subject to change at federal whim. But it's all right because by then it will be too late for anyone to object."

Oh, but Liberal flexibility has its limits: Dryden will not countenance the money going to parents "as [it would] in the Tories' proposed child tax credit," writes Coyne. "The Liberal program would benefit only those parents who choose to leave their children in the care of providers the government approves of: non-profit, licensed, ideally unionized." In fact, as Dryden currently envisions the plan, the only way stay-at-home parents could directly benefit from this enormously expensive program, is (and even this is doubtful) if they are trained and regulated, and if their home meets government standards. "I cannot believe," concluded Coyne, "even the famously candid Mr. Dryden meant to suggest that daycare was actually preferable to parental care; that parents should, in effect, have to get a licence to look after their own children. But what other interpretation is possible?"

The kingdom of the home, then, is a kingdom under siege. It would seem that extraordinary courage is required of men and women in Canada who seek to create homes in which children are welcomed, cherished and formed in the faith. It takes prudence, good husbandry, heroic self-sacrifice, and the support of extended family and a community of like-minded persons to withstand the encroachment of the culture of death. Small wonder, then, that parents so occupied have little time to combat anti-life social policies. And yet, one cannot discount Kathie O'Keefe's observation that, "If abortion was made necessary to the social fabric by a series of engineered social changes, then it is just as important to undo those social changes as part of the creation of a culture of life as it is to undo the abortion laws."

Lianne Laurence writes from Burbany, BC, and is the author of the fascinating book Borowski: A Canadian Paradox. To order call 1 [phone].