Dr. Curtis Boyd, Abortionist: the Tower of Abortive Choice, Anarchy, and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Introduction: The Hanging Chad of the Unborn

            Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Dr. Curtis Boyd, is a cult hero to some. To others he is the devil incarnate. Boyd is an abortionist. He performs third trimester and even partial birth abortions as it is legal within the Albuquerque city limits.  Tragically, when the issue was submitted as a referendum to the citizenry of this predominantly Hispanic Catholic city, ashamedly, it passed. I am told by Elisa Martinez, Executive Director of the New Mexico Alliance for Life that Boyd’s very modest and unspectacular looking clinic in the center of town will often have its tree-lined asphalt parking lot full with the license plates hailing from far flung states and even other countries.

            Boyd unabashedly proclaims his pride that this predominantly Catholic city is considered the number one partial birth abortion capital of the United States. Ironically, even though the laws allow for Boyd to practice his specialty, he remains controversial. Even though Boyd’s actions are under the protection of American and even local jurisprudence, his clinics become a frequent gathering point for marches and prayer sessions in support of the lives that are taken a stone’s throw away. To those of us who believe that there is a deep theological and even pastoral prioritization of the “right to life” as the highest of values to protect, it seems oxymoronic that the ending of lives of real flesh and blood persons in a womb is considered politically and culturally acceptable. (Ref: Evangelium Vitae) Because of the error of American jurisprudence, we see a concomitant inordinate subordination by the Church of that priority compared with other social justice issues of concern. It is nothing less than acquiescence from an ecclesial, pastoral, and moral perspective. It seems that Rerum Novarum’s proffered “preferential option for the poor” appears not to apply to the most innocent of human lives.

            In New Mexico, the extensive arms of the Pro-choice movement embrace an even more abhorrent phenomenon in Christian and Catholic society, the zealous, profuse, and abrasive support of some New Mexicans who claim to be religious leaders consisting of mostly of mainline liberal protestants.  Such a stance would be anathema to evangelicals. And based upon magisterial church teaching, you would think that such as stance would be anathema to Catholics.

             But while the majority of participants in the unholy alliance with abortionists are ecumenical protestants and schismatic catholic enclaves, there are mainline Roman Catholic laity who are in positions of political power who themselves offer up and support legislative mandates that are for abortive rights and work to defeat initiatives that run counter the alliance’s purposes.

There are no Roman Catholic ordained church leaders who would admit to even tacit support of abortive rights efforts; however, it seems that even ordained leadership obfuscates the issue’s importance by a strong emphasis on other social justice issues seemingly of immediate concern. The Church’s acknowledgement of the priority of life over other issues is often written and spoken in articles and homilies; however, following not long afterward is the perennial “but,” that precedes their real focus, the immediate issues of immigration, poverty, and social injustice. These “sequiturs” are an excuse for the "political" church to remain open to a “political base” of support that indeed is in lock step with the church on these issues; but out of sync with regard to the issue of the "hanging chad” of the unborn life. In this way, the Church has unaware, defrocked themselves of spiritual authority and have abrogated a spiritual responsibility; they have subsequently vested themselves in the secular robes of “political authority.” Leaders have become less shepherds of souls -- and more political operatives.

 This explanation is the only possible argument  that sheds light on why a majority Catholic/Christian region with strong roots in traditionalism would have veered off the road of the ancient Judeo Christian ethic and morality that has always honored life in the womb and abhorred all violence against it.

Of course it is understood that a strong impetus causing this phenomenon in this state is the long standing regional identification of Hispanic culture in New Mexico with the party of the New Deal, the party of President John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, of Senator Joseph M. Montoya, and for many years considered the titular party of the poor, the working man, the immigrant, and the down trodden. This phenomena is what has given rise to cultural Catholicism much in the same way we see cultural Judaism.

         But let me return to the famous or infamous Dr. Boyd. As a Catholic Deacon of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, I do not see Boyd as a cult hero; nor do I give him the polarizing notoriety he seeks by calling him Satan. I am no apologist for the abortionist. I certainly dedicate my prayers for Boyd’s conversion so that he either becomes a Christian or quits misrepresenting that he is one. The clock is ticking and Boyd is not getting any younger being already in his 70s.

            While abortion is an overriding concern, I am more concerned over the misrepresentation of so called religious and politico-religious leaders that they display the banner of Judeo- Christian ethics and morals for their political ends. They are less concerned about winning souls and more about winning elections and holding power. In so doing, the pseudo religionists, along with American jurisprudence, are the storm cell that eventuates in a Category 5 hurricane.  Boyd, his array of apprentice abortionists, and his political supporters huddle, sheltered within Roe vs. Wade’s eye of the monstrous storm.

And here we lie, “Etherized on a Table…”

            In a recent article in the Santa Fe New Reporter by Joey Peters, Boyd “goes to work every day clad in his gray surgical gown.” He becomes almost invisible as the world around him, numbly lie “etherized upon a table” as described in T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Boyd fits squarely into the modern moral nooks and crannies of today’s “fifty shades of gray,” a politically correct and legally acceptable world of hyper-tolerance. Unfortunately, we as a society, find ourselves in Boyd’s and his supporters’ political and moral anesthesia.  We find ourselves in the wake of a river of dead babies that flow from his scalpel.

            The story of abortion in the sparsely populated state of New Mexico, and how it has become a political live wire is much deeper than Boyd’s individual perspective as a single abortionist. Perhaps he is a bit cleaner in his trade than his colleague Kermit Gosnell. But essentially their day to day life was essentially the same.

            The tacit acceptability of abortion in our time is a mode of human behavior, that cooperates with an underlying hubris in going beyond what had long been considered taboo. This acceptability under the valley of the shadow of Roe vs. Wade is like an extreme sport in which limits are tested for no reason other than to test them. This penchant for the testing of frontiers reminds me of the biblical story of Tower of Babel. Men of knowledge came together to reach for heaven to grab God by the heavenly whiskers to claim equality to him. (See Phil 2:6) Likewise, the construction of the tall Tower of Abortive Choice finds its massive foundation made with the concrete and steel rebar of what John Milton’s Paradise Lost calls “man’s first disobedience.”

            Boyd’s craft and its political and legal support beams, footings and stem walls find their basis in what many have called a fairy tale -- the often times chagrined story of the fall of man and his famous disobedience in the Garden of Eden.

The Nahash and Mans First Disobedience (Genesis 3)

            The Hebraic version of the story speaks of a “nahash:” a serpent at minimum, and a behemoth at most, who beguiled the first generation of parents with regard to their use of the gift of free will. At the center of the protagonists’ crisis of decision was this chronic question of a “choice” to be made. In the story as related in the Book of Genesis, there were admonitions of moral clarity regarding what the first parents were free to do or not do. The great temptation as it was then is as it is now. According to the story, to follow the beguiler’s advice resulted in the first global catastrophe of man’s existence. It was the precursor to the Tower of Babel as it represented a supreme trespass upon a higher realm of both knowledge and an existence not yet meant for this created species. (Genesis 11:1-9)

            Informed Judeo-Christianity faces the same affront of “choice” in the beguiling disguise of freedom. Those who believe the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition must ask whether or not a “choice” to end the “life” of an unborn child is a gross trespass into the celestial purview of God. How do Boyd and his religious supporters reconcile this kind of act with a faith that recognizes such boldness as pride?  Peters’ interview with Boyd reveals that Boyd actually concedes that “life” begins at conception. According to Peters’ article, Boyd says “life” begins even before conception, in the fact of a living sperm cell.  So if abortion kills life (Hebrew: L’Chaim), how do Boyd and his nominal supporters reconcile this killing with the Mosaic Law, specifically the sixth commandment of the Decalogue? (Exodus 20:13)

            The history of the world has been subject to what Milton, the blind poet, writes was “man’s first disobedience” aka, “choice.” This is the foundation of this Tower of Abortive Choice, and it appears to be nearing its completion. In Peters’ article, Boyd states that all of what he does has its foundation in what “comes down to a notion that has flowed through it (presumably time or history) like water for decades: choice.” Boyd conflates “choice” as an ultimate good. Yet looking a little closer renders the “choice” as no end in itself. The end is what follows in the long train of consequences that follow that decisive moment. The choice is a means to the ends that either are “good” or “bad,” to a “virtue” or a “vice.”

A Liturgical Blood Sacrifice for a False Freedom

            In the same interview, Boyd states that he does his work with “a great sense of pride” and that what he does is a “privilege” and that it is a “powerful experience.” Boyd has even said that he “values pregnancies.” Boyd goes on to describe his role in providing for the spiritual welfare of a mother about to undergo his procedures. According to Peters’ article, Boyd has admitted to “blessing” both the mother and the “fetus.” Boyd’s having been a Christian Universalist preacher presumably allows him that comfort. How cozy! But such is what happens when builders of a great tower zealously lay brick upon brick without first noting that they are using torn flesh and spilled blood for its mortar.

            By hearing his own words, you would think Boyd was instead, the Reverend Dr. Boyd, conducting a kind of high church liturgy, a “sacrificium taurobollium” once used by ancient Mithra worshipers. So thus, simple choice dawns the green “scrub” vestments of a new priesthood – the priesthood of “holy choice.”

Ancient Mithraic sacrifices were bloody affairs conducted by pagan societies to purge away sin. These rites were a blood baptism, extracting with surgical precision the internal organs of a bull. Likewise, the steady hand of the high priest Boyd extracts a heart, a lung, or maybe even a pancreas in order to adore the holy tower of choice while at the same time allegedly bartering the parts to a local university for research sans consent of the mother whose rights they acted to protect. Boyd is now in district court over his lack of disclosure to a mother who has since regretted her mistake.

            The secular world and its political envoy Planned Parenthood, consider Boyd a folk hero of this ultimate statue of the goddess, Choice, to venerate as she grasps upon her own child’s heart in place of a torch, not unlike the Aztecs of old. This is the goddess of whom Boyd invokes his macabre blessings of dead fetuses. And along with the pro-choice lobby are the community organizing, pseudo catholic and Christian social justice lobbies that put on the masque of Christianity. Some hide or disguise their political play by placing other social justice concerns as a higher priority than abortion. In this way they attenuate the full force of the magisterial church’s opposition.

            Worse, there are legislators who are Christian who are members of a political party that has more than adopted the “pro-choice” mantra within its party platform. This party calls those who follow Christian teachings to protect life in the womb as heretical and exclude them from their numbers. Members of that party think nothing of running for candidacy for governor, senator, or representative at any level of government and minimize the issue of ending life in the womb as a secondary issue that does not rise to the level of standards of living, economics, and so called social justice (i.e. immigration, inclusive rights for women and minorities).

Buying Holiness and Redeeming Corrupt Consciences

            Many so-called Catholics are celebrated as strong parochial members who overtly do “good things” for the poor. They want to be recognized and noticed for this. And yet, they are not lovingly corrected for their failure to understand that there is no good they have ever done that can pay the price for the loss of one solitary life. They are not counseled by church leadership that they cannot buy their holiness, or buy their fidelity to the Church by giving time, money and talent to immigration issues while at the same time taking money from abortion lobbies, and claiming that they are freed by their consciences because they go on missions to other countries.

            A group of various ecumenical Christian clergy called the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice lobbies heavily for their revered “choice.” While thankfully the group has no known members from Catholic clergy, they have the tacit support of those who are looking for any excuse to say that Christianity approves of their stance. The Coalition and its followers have justified this notion of “choice” as some quixotic approach to being kind and merciful to the Dulceneas of the world.

These workers in the vineyard of death have done far worse than support the killing of unborn babies; they have lied to themselves about the wrongness of it. They have become prisoners to a party platform of death, and they have come to love their own incarceration. The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice has become the abortionist’s megaphone amplifying ancient serpentine whispers of the nahash. They are under a delusion that they are truly advancing women’s health, equality for women, and access to health care for the poor while they are really reaching up trying to pluck the whiskers of God Himself.

            The builders of the Tower of Abortive Choice are like the “flying monkeys” of the Wizard of Oz, doing a malevolent bidding meanwhile mocking the truth and obscuring the reality that life is life; and death is death; good is good, and evil is evil.

Meanwhile, the Reverend Dr. Boyd has become a master of allusion, illusion, and delusion, perhaps for the sake of some inner pride of personal social achievement. Perhaps his goal is to be at the very top of the Tower of Abortive Choice in order to achieve equality with the author of life and death. After all, he is a former minister who speaks, as it is written in Peters’ article, “with a twinge of an accent that betrays the small east Texas town he grew up in,” –Texas motherhood and apple pie, and all things truly American. He can’t be all that bad, can he?

An Odd Consensus: “Life Begins at Conception”

            To the surprise of many who hold similar views on the topic, Boyd has openly opined that life does begin at conception. However, with a philosopher’s gravitas, he then explains that the life-entity in the womb has no soul until the fetus (Latin: offspring) is born. In Peters’ article, he said: “Birth is when you take a breath of life.” he has said. “In our culture personhood has always begun at birth” and Boyd states that is the “legal basis” of his own support for doing this. Of course, we can easily forget, he performed abortions prior to Roe vs. Wade, according to Peters’ biopic. Boyd even waxes theological stating that the “ensoulment” of a child “happens when the child takes its first breath.”

            I wonder whether or not Boyd considered whether or not the baby Jesus in the womb had a soul and therefore might not be a real person conceived by the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of Luke. You can’t be Christian and believe a soulless incarnation is true. Boyd should stick to mincing flesh and stay away from mincing words.  There is no word in Hebrew for soul, but there is the word for life. If Boyd admits that human life begins at conception, then his “ensoulment” argument does not fly. The Platonic concept of “Soul” is Greco-Roman, and it was foreign to both the Semitic culture and language. So when he admits that “life” begins in the womb, he is conceding he is killing. He is offending the long continuum of the Mosaic Law and all that has made western civilization civilized.

            The moral struggle we all face in the context of legal infanticide is more than a polemical conflict between life, and this proffered “choice;” of the mother to kill her living child, geography aside. Infanticide by “mother” is oxymoronic since to be a “mother” is to have a child, and if you abort the child, then the so called mother is no real mother at all. The result is a future cognitive dissonance that is pronounced, deep, and long lasting, and thus, truly tragic.

This mirage of “choice” is a trap that leads to an ultimate Warholian vision of retiring societal norms for the sake of an eventual deconstructionist societal anarchy.  The proponents of this dystopia see time tested mores, rules, and normative codes as shackles of intolerance that need to be broken for the sake of liberty. Anarchists simply say, “Break the shackles” and do away with the rules for the sake of holy liberty. Not to do so is anathema.

The Wages of Abortion is Anarchy

            The wages of abortion will indeed be anarchy if we carry the “choice” mantra as far as it can go. Using one’s personal power to jump off a cliff does not make the jumper more powerful. The word “Choice” fits as well on a political bumper sticker as it does on a coffin large or small. Choice is an argument that says I have the power; and, it is mine to use even at the expense of the least powerful. As Shakespeare once wrote, “everything includes itself into power, power into will, will into appetite, and appetite, that universal wolf makes perforce a universal prey and last eats up himself.” It is the reason Mother Teresa prophesied that until we end abortion, there will never be peace. She said this receiving the Nobel Peace Prize no less.

            It stands to reason that a woman arguing for choice is the same woman who would be the first to concede that a woman’s human body is not property or chattel, a “thing” to be owned by anyone. Therefore, as she cannot be owned by anyone, the body she prizes so highly is in reality not her own body either. Thus, the body within her -- is also not hers.

Of Human Bondage, Icarus and Shakespeare’s Colossus

            Until Roe vs. Wade, Boyd along with Margaret Sanger eugenics advocates were like Eliot’s Prufrock protagonists, bucking up against their vision of a shackled universe of human bondage. In such a world, rules, order, mores, and ethical standards are authoritarian antagonists crippling a species designed to be gods. The world of “choice” which they propose is the freedom to be Icarus with wings of wax flying up to touch the sun. In such a world, rules are arcane and are obstacles to the ultimate evolution of man to be as gods.

            To them “choice” is liberating. “Choice” is the ultimate good because it allows humanity to transcend humanity to become “inspirited” (vis-a-vis incarnated) and thus deified.  The watching world, like Shakespeare’s Cassius observing Julius Caesar, says: “Why man he doth bestride the narrow waters like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about." In Roe v Wade, the Chief lawgivers, Colossus-like, did not strike at mores, rules, commandments, or words, but rather flesh and blood -- “the petty men,” those with no vote, the very frontier of the margins of our species, un-namely, unborn lives.

            The Chief lawgivers have made tombs of wombs, and fumes of blooms, and by doing so, they disassemble future choices a billion-fold. They snag the principal existential thread of their argument and thereby unravel the pale vestments of their “sacred choice” that they so worship and adore. This is the work of anarchy. And as such, an anarchical world is a chaotic world – a taho wabaho, where darkness and the deep prevail. Thus, anarchy is disguised in the ghostly robes of this goddess “Choice.”

            So empowered, Boyd and company sing like Eliot’s Prufrock: “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” After Roe vs. Wade, it seems as though Eliot’s “minute of reversal” appears not yet to have arrived. But it will, no doubt -- as all reckonings do. As Shakespeare warns, appetites like wolves nihilistically self-satisfy.

Poe’s Pendulum, desert Mirages and Prufrock’s Mermaids

            The modernists and pseudo Christians would have us live and navigate our way as Eliot writes, “When the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.”  They would have us become abysmally numb to moral order defined by the weight of historical perspectives. To them, truth is dystopia. It is relative, and right is the thin sharp cutting edge of Edgar Allen Poe’s moving pendulum insensitively slicing and dicing its shackled and bound Prometheus in the pit below.  Their solution?  Ride the pendulum. Their ethic is to be above the fray even as the sharpened edge of their scalpel cuts away at the very essence of existence itself. Their success is enveloped in our etherized voyeurism of the spectacle until the slicing and dicing is no longer a spectacle and is only a bleep among the blaring horns and sirens of the normalcy of everyday traffic. Man’s new normal.

            All of this is inconsistent with Christianity. Christianity is counter cultural. Right and wrong are not on an evolutionary continuum or Hegelian dialectic. Truth is not a concept. Truth is flesh and blood. Truth is the person of Jesus Christ. Truth is the incarnation of God Himself. (John 14:6) To the Christian, life is life and death is death. A male is a male and a female is a female. They are given in marriage for the sake of offspring born of love, not convenience or even pleasure.  Wrong is a perturbation of the right. It is a corruption of what is good, though it can easily be shape-shifted in verbal jousts to appear and sound good -- but not be.

Like a mirage in a desert, water appears there ahead of us, but alas is not. Such is the skill of the real devil while his sophomoric agents litigate his desire to have us anarchically self-obliterate. The devil and his agents would have us live in a world of gray and of shadows for his comfort, not ours. But that is an age old story.

            It is Prufrock’ s stuck minute hand of a faltering clock of time that is giving the Boyd’s of the world a momentary frolic with the audacity of tyrants to surf the dead sea of false grace as they claim to be religious men in their interviews and legislative witnesses while being butchers at the cold sterile stainless steel tables. Sadly, as Eliot writes, Boyd and his lobby will hear “mermaids singing, each to each…. riding seaward on the waves…. By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.” What human voices? Could it be that Boyd, like Prufrock, could be awakened one day with a cacophony of dismembered children’s voices who were victims of the Reverend Boyd’s cruel craft?

The Unborn Immigrant --- Wherein the Church Leadership?

The lonely unborn life is no less an immigrant than unaccompanied minors crossing a treacherous border in the desert southwest. I have met them and they certainly are in need of concern, love, and protection. But ironically, unlike the unborn immigrant in the womb, the unaccompanied minor has a chance at life. However constricted it may be, no one is seeking to end it with hammer and sickle. Something tells me that this gentle heart of the unborn immigrant beats so rapidly awaiting to cross a border designed by a higher power, and their heartbeat is their visa that should not be revoked. But instead of deportations, there are “abortations” (sic).

According to encyclical writings and teachings of the church, protection of unborn life takes priority in terms of voicing the church’s abhorrence to any act, political, social, or cultural, to deter, abate, defile, abuse, and extirpate that unique heart beat wherein lies the soul of the child and of mankind. Hers is the thinnest string on a guitar that if removed, is the degree Shakespeare spoke of when he wrote “take but degree away, un-tune that string, and hark – what discord follows.” In the music of the universe, the removal of one single soul by our trespass action is in fact the desafinamiento – the un-tuning of the immense symphony of the universe. Each one is as grave a sin as man’s “first disobedience.” The future consequences are enormous and incalculable but for the enormity of the mercy of God Himself.  

The unborn immigrant is attacked with absolutely no protection. For such an immigrant, the wages of crossing the natural border from what should be a real sanctuary city of the womb into the frontier of light and air is to have her brains sucked out by a syringe. And where is the church to stand and accuse the politicians, and community organizers concerning their specific acts of abuse in the protected votes they take in the hallowed halls of congress or our legislature? Ironically, convicted felons like El Chapo are treated with more respect.

It is the acquiescence of church leadership in hopes of a “cumbaya” ecumenical jamboree with religious leaders who are Christian or Catholic superficially and in name only. That acquiescence has empowered New Mexico’s supposed catholic and main line protestant legislators to be “free agents” always being guided not by any kind of spirituality or solid catequesis, but by a lack of those. Rather, they are guided by the Alinsky-ite social justice groups and a Democratic Party platform that demands their membership be enslaved to the Tower of Abortive Rights.

And so it seems as though Church leadership is only tangentially involved, standing along the sidelines as a kind of cheer leader.  Oh, they attend the national right to life rallies, appear on EWTN events and photo ops, and make grand overture pronouncements in support of the prolife movement. But there appears to be a lack of true dedicated spiritually-driven persistence on the part of the Church leadership with the end game of driving out the abortion demon from a culture that is essentially Judeo Christian.

So the resistance efforts are highly dependent upon local rag-tag groups that band together often times alone and in the rain, praying their hearts out over this great national tragedy. These groups are at the bottom of the USCCB funding chain while the social justice warrior groups eat up most of the Campaign for Human Development pie.

             It is as though Jesus is agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane, and all the apostles are snoozing. Albuquerque is simply one of many, but among the most profitable, pernicious, and pervasive battle fronts in this war. For this reason, the American political system has been wrought with a rancid zero-sum game polemic between the religious right and the secular left – between pro-life and pro-choice – between good and evil and ultimately, between God and the devil. And at the battlefront are the most innocent of souls. "Ensoulment," to use Boyd’s term, happens at the moment of conception and made manifest at the first beating of the child’s heart.

The Devil and the Reverend Dr. Boyd

            In the end, the devil need not work on the Reverend Dr. Boyd -- whose Faustian blood oath was signed years ago in the hills of east Texas perhaps near Nacogdoches, or some such quaint place where black ice on its curvy roads beguile the un-forewarned. However, that ol’ devil now undoubtedly works on those who would do Boyd’s bidding. The ancient foe’s whispers echo in the halls of power. The ancient lie convinces supporters of abortive rights that they are heroes of freedom and liberty, and their critics are bigots and xenophobes.

            The reverend Dr. Boyd’s time will someday run out.  He is an old man desperate to train a new batch of ghouls. He and his support mechanisms will have to face eternal consequences for each life terminated; but more so for their lies to themselves and their constituencies; the lies to the women who themselves are “etherized on the table” with the “good” reverend’s false blessings over a dead baby’s parts. Meanwhile several of men and women self-identified as Catholics and Christians, pridefully sit in pews. They sit in cathedrals and churches self-righteously unaware of the Nahash that slithers next to them. They are tickled delightfully with lauds, recognition, and accolades because of their overt generosity to the poor and hungry by an etherized clergy afraid to offend because it is hateful and unfashionable.

            The Reverend Doctor and his supporters will all be held accountable for their false religiosity while they continue to float downstream in T.S. Eliot’s “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Lick(ing) its tongue into the corners of the evening…”

            Such is the way of the devil’s ancient whispers concerning “choice.” And in the end, as took place with the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Abortive Choice will abort itself. It will collapse upon itself and upon all those who tried to build it as a monument to the moment they would become as god. Evil hopes for nothing less -- but it is after all -- their “choice.”