Facing Up to Infanticide
J. Bottum
Every philosopher knows, at last, that not all ethical systems are
equally good. We demand that a general ethics conform, as
philosophers put it, to both truth and logic--which is to say, we
demand that it not contradict the facts we hold about the universe
and that it not contradict itself. And to these difficult demands not
all ethical systems respond equally well. Relativist claims such as
<It's wrong to say anything is wrong> are simply incoherent; no grand
talk of "embracing contradiction" or "containing multitudes" (a la
Walt Whitman) is going to make a workable ethics out of them. The
number of possible ethical systems is actually quite small.
For over twenty years in America, the legality of abortion has
primarily been defended with an ethical system that most Americans
now recognize as philosophically incoherent--a system based on taking
the constitutionally acknowledged right to possess private property
and translating it into rights of personal privacy and possession of
the body. The system may originally have been forced upon abortion
supporters by the Supreme Court's use of it in <Roe v. Wade>, but it
has proved false in both the ways ethical systems prove false: as
being both externally and internally inconsistent, as both
contradicting what we know about human reproduction and contradicting
itself.
And for these same twenty years, defenders of unborn children have
battled abortion primarily by pointing out the inconsistencies of the
ethical system on which abortion defenders rely: the notion of the
body as a possession is meaningless; the fact that a fetus is a human
life is medically demonstrable; the language of rights, extended to
the taking of life, simply contradicts itself.
As the American public's faith in the "rights talk" of radical, Me-
Generation individualism decreases, the pro-life movement has
steadily advanced. Many Americans may still inhabit "the mushy
middle," as it was recently called by Norma McCorvey (the "Jane Roe"
of <Roe v. Wade>, who defected last year to a prolife position). But
that middle has substantially shifted toward the limiting of
abortions, and some abortion proponents have begun to change their
ground, seeking a new ethical system with which to defend unlimited
abortion.
What's frightening, and what the pro-life movement must face, is that
they may find what they're looking for. Though it is true that there
are not many possible ethical systems, the history of philosophy
reveals that there is more than one. And in the stern philosophies of
the ancient world--a world that accepted slavery, infanticide, and
gradations of human life--the pro-abortion movement may find the
coherent general ethics it currently lacks.
Since the 1970s, abortion rhetoric has been dominated by euphemisms
whose dishonesty and disingenuousness increase with each new medical
technique for saving prematurely born children. By displaying
sonograms, heart-beat monitors, and even the corpses of aborted
children, pro-life activists have been able to employ the simple
strategy of exposing the truth beneath "pro-choice" euphemisms. And
though this relentless exposure is called pornography by pro-abortion
activists and strikes many in "the mushy middle" as distasteful, it
has had its intended effect of revealing the willfulness of such
terms as "potential life," "product of conception," and even "fetus"-
-and it leaves abortion rhetoric sounding increasingly heartless in
response to America's million and a half abortions a year. After she
was reported as saying "abortion is a bad thing," Kate Michelman, the
director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action
League, denied it utterly: "I would never, never, never, never, never
mean to say such a thing." In a high-water mark of moral and
political inattention, the Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders declared,
"We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus." The
refusal to admit any moral gravity to the act of abortion--a logical
consequence of abortion taken as a right of privacy-- has put pro-
abortion activists outside the actual discussion of abortion in
America.
Some liberal writers and analysts have begun at last to recognize
this. The historian George McKenna claimed last fall in the <Atlantic
Monthly> that a truly liberal position would agree that abortion is
guaranteed by the Constitution, but nonetheless see it as a wrong
that ought gradually to be eliminated-- much as Lincoln before the
Civil War acknowledged the constitutionality of slavery but sought
through education, legal limitation, and moral suasion its eventual
elimination. In an essay last October in the <New Republic>, the
well-known feminist Naomi Wolf asserted that abortion activists, by
sticking to the old rhetorical lines, condemn their followers to
"three destructive consequences--two ethical, one strategic: hardness
of heart, lying, and political failure." Only a month earlier, Peter
Singer (the radical British activist for animal rights) suggested in
the London <Spectator> that we acknowledge "the fetus is a living
human being."
Such suggestions are not entirely new. In the late sixties and early
seventies, several future neoconservatives argued that true
liberalism requires the rejection of abortion: "The pro-abortion
flag," wrote the then-liberal Richard John Neuhaus in 1967, "is
planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide."
There were few on the left willing to listen to such an argument in
1967, and there are fewer now, when support for abortion has became
<the> test for liberal credentials. Governor Robert Casey of
Pennsylvania found himself barred from the dais of the 1992
Democratic Convention simply because of his pro-life position. The
recently organized "Feminists for Life" was founded by a group of
otherwise orthodox feminists who argued that true feminism ought to
reject abortion and found themselves summarily ejected from the
National Organization of Women. The various 1960s projects for
radical liberation were perhaps correct, in terms of immediate
results, to place sexual liberation at the center of their rhetoric:
nothing was more likely to lure young converts or more pleasurably to
satisfy the adolescent impulse to rebellion. But since the sixties,
during the years in which radicalism hijacked liberalism, the task of
maintaining the centrality of sexual freedom has condemned liberals
to the uncompromising defense of unlimited abortion--in order to
eradicate the costs of what used to be called "free love."
And if the tatters of the left have inescapably tied themselves to
the abortion license, general American culture may have as well.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, though denounced by pro-
life activists for her part in the 1992 <Planned Parenthood v. Casey>
decision, was at least right when she observed that in the years
since <Roe v. Wade> an entire generation has grown up expecting to be
able to rely upon abortion to terminate not merely pregnancies
resulting from rape or incest and pregnancies that threaten the life
of the mother, but also pregnancies resulting from inattention or
contraceptive failure and pregnancies that threaten a deformed child,
an unwanted child, or even a child of the wrong gender. Any medical
procedure performed a million and a half times a year--at a rate far
outstripping any other developed nation--argues a cultural investment
of enormous proportions.
Perhaps even the Republican plans for social renewal rely in some way
upon the continuing reality of abortion. A conservative writer, Jerry
Z. Muller, recently announced his defection from mainstream
conservatism by publishing "The Conservative Case for Abortion" as a
cover story last summer in the <New Republic>. His utilitarian
argument that "the right-to-life position undermines [the]
fundamentally conservative effort to strengthen families" is unlikely
to persuade many on the right. It may be true, as Muller writes, that
"conservatives have long assumed that government should promote those
social norms that encourage the creation of decent men and women,"
but conservatives have long assumed as well that decent men and women
don't slaughter their young.
Muller's "Conservative Case for Abortion" harkens back, in a perverse
way, to the old liberals' claim that the abortion flag properly
belongs with the heartless Republicans. And yet, his point that
"unsocialized children are at the heart of our social deterioration"
deserves some notice. The disrespect for life engendered by an
abortion culture probably deserves larger notice. But abortion
(particularly when subsidized for the poor and unmarried) is in fact
likely to decrease somewhat the risk to society, and the kind of
quick social reform that the American public seems to demand from the
Republican Congress may rely in part on plenty of abortions to
decrease the number of unwed mothers and unsocialized children. Some
rifts have already begun to appear between the economic and law-and-
order conservatives, on the one hand, and the pro-life conservatives,
on the other; not as many rifts or as important as the liberal press
delights to claim, but real rifts nonetheless.
The current entanglement with abortion--by political liberals, the
general culture, and perhaps even by political conservatives--is
finally what distinguishes the recent essays by George McKenna, Naomi
Wolf, and Peter Singer from attempts in the late sixties and early
seventies to speak honestly about abortion. Unlimited abortion is now
the reality, and honesty about abortion's murderousness no longer
necessarily means its rejection. Some supporters of abortion, having
rejected the old, incoherent ethical system of privacy rights, are
now willing to acknowledge that abortion kills babies. But they are
willing to claim the necessity for allowing abortion anyway.
The traditional pro-life strategy of exposing pro-abortion euphemism
relies on the tacit assumption that under any Jewish, Christian, or
even post-Christian ethical system, the knowledge that it kills a
living baby would suffice to end the practice of abortion. That
assumption may no longer be true. Certainly McKenna's use of
Lincoln's pre-Civil War position on slavery suggests the assumption
is no longer obvious, for Lincoln harbored some hopes of rescuing the
generation then enslaved--and the living slave has some small chance
of manumission, while the aborted baby has no more chances. Wolf
tells the story of arguing, while she was pregnant, against an
opponent of abortion and snapping at last in frustration, "Of course
it's a baby.... And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had
to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be
between myself and God." Her opponent, as she tells the story, was
silenced because she had at last said something that made sense to
him. But the truth is more likely that she had at last said what
penetrates to so fundamental a clash between ethical systems that any
sort of argument becomes impossible.
In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the
Victorians and "little moralistic females a la [George] Eliot" as
"English flatheads" for thinking that they could preserve Christian
morality without God. Nietzsche was no proponent of a Christian
ethics, but he saw clearly that such ethics relies on the publicly
held proposition of God's existence. Neither Jews nor Christians have
always lived up to their ethical systems, but the notion of reverence
for individual lives is born (in the West at least) solely from a
Judeo-Christian impulse. In his <Spectator> article entitled "Killing
Babies Isn't Always Wrong," Peter Singer writes, "Pope John Paul II
proclaims that the widespread acceptance of abortion is a mortal
threat to the traditional moral order.... I sometimes think that he
and I at least share the virtue of seeing clearly what is at stake in
the debate."
If we are so entangled with the practice that legal and probably
common abortion is now inescapable, and if we acknowledge that
abortion kills, then we live in the tragic, redemptionless sort of
world imagined by the Ancients from the Greek tragedians to the Roman
Stoics--a world which had at various times, we must admit, an ethical
system consistent both externally and internally, consistent with the
commonly accepted facts of the universe and with itself. In moves
that ought to have been predictable, Wolf and Singer both begin to
seek a way to accept infanticide by recreating, consciously or
unconsciously, the stern philosophies of the ancient, pre-Christian
world.
Wolf argues that pro-abortion rhetoric, by denying life to the unborn
child and gravity to the act of killing it, has deprived women of a
"moral framework" with which to understand abortion--and thus has
driven middle America to embrace the pro-life movement that has
monopolized all moral discourse. Feminists need to admit, she
asserts, many of the perfectly true points they are foolishly
committed to disputing: that the fetus is a child, that the current
abortion rate is a terrible social evil, that "pregnancy confounds
Western philosophy's idea of the autonomous self, [for] the pregnant
woman is in fact both a person in her body and a vessel." The blind
adherence to privacy rights and "the refusal to use a darker and
sterner and more honest moral rhetoric" have robbed women of a "sense
of sin," and consequently of the possibility of grief, atonement, and
healing.
Some philosophical and theological naivete seems inevitable even in
otherwise well-educated writers nowadays--Wolf herself bemoans
contemporary "religious illiteracy"--and it is perhaps unfair to
complain about skewed uses of terms like "soul," "sin," "guilt," and
"atonement" in what is admittedly a popular essay. And yet, all the
elements are present in Wolf's analysis for a full-blown
philosophical Stoicism and a Stoic acceptance of infanticide: not
just the ethical elements of self-possession, resignation to a tragic
world, and stern moral rhetoric, but all the metaphysical elements as
well. When Wolf writes first of "what can only be called our souls,"
but then later in her essay calls it "'God' or 'soul'--or if you are
secular and prefer it, 'conscience,"' she is not simply confounding
philosophical terms, but aiming in an untrained way at the
metaphysical equations that stand behind the Stoic worldview.
Peter Singer similarly aims toward Stoicism. In the latter part of
his essay, with his sketch of the history of infanticide, he indulges
the jejune sort of cultural relativism which argues that if any
culture anywhere once performed a practice, then the practice must be
morally permissible. But he is a philosopher by training (and the
author of the article on ethics in the <Encyclopedia Britannica>),
and for the most part he sees clearly what sort of ethical system is
necessary to defend abortion coherently. It is an ethical system
admitting gradations in the worthiness and usefulness of life, and he
argues that we have already adopted such an ethics in fact if not yet
in rhetoric.
The recognition that there are "living human beings whose lives may
intentionally be terminated" means abortion activists can "at last
properly engage with the arguments of those opposed to abortion," he
observes. The real question proponents of abortion should ask is
this: "Why--in the absence of religious beliefs about being made in
the image of God, or having an immortal soul--should mere membership
of the species <Homo sapiens> be crucial to whether the life of a
being may or may not be taken?"
The sleight-of-hand in such a question is one that Americans have
encountered so often it almost doesn't bear mentioning: by fiat,
religious belief--alone among beliefs--is prohibited from public
discourse; by fiat, religious believers--alone among believers--are
prohibited from employing in rational discourse the facts they hold
about the universe. In Singer's question, however, is also something
Americans haven't often encountered, for he sees clearly (as
Nietzsche did before him) that the Judeo-Christian prohibition
against baby-killing is a tattered, incoherent, and indefensible
ethical remnant when divorced from Judeo-Christian religious belief.
We must stoically resign ourselves, Singer argues, to an unredeemed
and overpopulated world in which we have to kill useless and unwanted
human beings.
The strategy of refusing euphemism has, in one sense, won the day.
The facts about abortion are now acknowledged even by solidly liberal
and feminist writers, and the incoherence and social disaster of a
general ethics based on the right of privacy are now taken for
granted by thoughtful analysts. The pro-life movement must not
imagine, however, that it has thereby won the abortion debate. There
exist philosophically coherent ethical systems that grant no sanctity
to all grades of human life, ethical systems to which ancient history
repeatedly testifies.
Worse, beyond external and internal coherence, there are no rational,
philosophical grounds--no "meta-ethics," as philosophers call it--for
judging between ethical systems. The proponents of abortion seeking a
new, coherent general ethics seem to imagine that admitting the facts
will allow a real discussion to begin between the pro-abortion and
pro-life movements. Without such honesty, Singer concludes his essay,
"people on both sides of the debate will continue to argue past each
other." But the truth is rather that an agreement that we share no
fundamental ethical positions--that we are utterly divided, that
belief in a root American ethics is a sentimental delusion-- would
mean the end of discourse.
It may even mean the end of the culture. Philosophical discourse is
not the only way, or even the primary way, in which people are
persuaded to change their ethical systems. There is social pressure
and (many Americans still believe) conversion by the grace of God.
And there is war. The pro-life movement is undoubtedly still correct
that most Americans consider infanticide something worse than a stern
necessity: no sane politician is on the verge of saying publicly,
"Yes, they are babies, and we have to kill them anyway." But the
longer we live with abortion, the closer the day comes when all the
supporters of abortion emerge from their fog of euphemism and
incoherence to announce a fundamental rupture between ethical systems
in America. The urgency to ban abortion is, of course, an urgency to
save the four thousand babies it kills every day. But it is also an
urgency to preserve--without civil war--an ethics that holds
infanticide to be wrong.
J. BOTTUM is Associate Editor of FIRST THINGS.
This article appeared in the February 1996 issue of "First Things."
To subscribe write First Things, Dept. FT, P.O. Box 3000, Denville,
NJ 07834-9847, 1-800-783-4903. Published monthly except bimonthly
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Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN
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