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Baby on a Shelf: It’s Perfect Next to the Vahz
How pronatalism dehumanizes children
Not too long ago, I watched an episode on one of the many true-murder channels that chronicled the case of a “beautiful young woman” who was brutally murdered by a young man. Because there are so many episodes on so many channels of so many “beautiful young women” killed by men, I can’t remember the woman’s name — just that she was White and blond. I don’t remember the man’s name, either. He was also White and, I think, blond. Or maybe strawberry-blond.
The story itself, up until the last five minutes of the program, wasn’t different from the others — just the standard coverage of the young woman’s life and the role the man played in her life until he killed her. (Again, there are so many of these, and the male killers are either obsessed strangers or controlling boyfriends or, occasionally, psychopaths striking from out of nowhere… He, I believe, knew her. Was probably her boyfriend.)
In the last five minutes, though, for the first time in any of these programs I’ve been watching for far too long, a narrator’s voiceover playing over images of a courtroom offered background on the killer: he had been abused throughout childhood, the narrator said, and probably didn’t know how to respond to whatever the girl had done (she’d broken up with him, if I…
