Abortion vs. Reality

Recent events in Massachusetts have put me in mind of one of the state’s most honorable sons, though now I am sure that both a majority of her people and a near unanimity of her politicians would wish he had never been born.

In the January 1859 issue of The North American Medico-Chirurgical Review, an article appeared which would be the first salvo in a campaign, soon to be led by the American Medical Association, to criminalize abortion in the United States. The author was Horatio Storer, M.D., a graduate of Harvard Medical School, taught by Quakers in his early years and as yet a Unitarian, though he would enter the Roman Catholic Church 20 years later. If you turn to the Wikipedia page on Dr. Storer, you will find almost nothing on his foundational work to establish gynecology as an important field of American medical study. You will find nothing at all about his Catholic faith, other than that he became a Catholic because of the Church’s strictness on the matter of abortion—an invidious and, I think, absurd reduction because Storer was a man of careful and precise thought.

You will find evil motives attributed everywhere, including racism, though Storer had been an abolitionist—we find him late in life writing to the city fathers of Newport, Rhode Island, where he lived, urging them to forbid the staging of the play The Birth of a Nation, whose purpose he said was to “fan the flames of race prejudice.” Dr. Storer pointed toward the source of the playwright’s ideas:

The real author [Thomas Dixon], a peculiar kind of clergyman, is through his reprehensible books The Clansman, The Leopard’s Spots, etc., said to have become a millionaire. Who can estimate the harm these have done to us all in a national way? Who can compute the mental suffering and the check to their enliftment they have caused to our colored brethren? 

Storer goes on to recall that Newport had, only a few years before, forbidden a similar play and refused to buy Dixon’s books for its public library, thereby making some small but just gesture of reparation for the city’s central role in the old slave-and-rum trade, a part of her “old inglorious and most regrettable history.” And now, he says, “Every cent paid for admission would be to further encourage the worst negro hater in this country, and be a tribute to his prolonged defiance of all Christian precept.”

Storer was a moralist to the core. He opposed abortion because he saw that it was simply wrong. Here are the moral conclusions he arrives at in that 1859 article, after he has demonstrated by scientific fact that so-called “quickening” (the word means “coming to life” but refers to the time when the mother can feel the baby’s movement) corresponds to nothing important in fetal development:

We need not…consider that the movements of the fœtus in utero, and its consequent attitude and position, are signs of an already developed and decided sentience and will, nor is it requisite to suppose them the effect of an almost rational instinct. But that they are wholly independent of the will and the conscience of the mother, and…decidedly animal [that is, not vegetable] in their character; that they are not explainable by gravity…nor on any other supposition save that of a special and independent excito-motory system, distinct from that of the mother, brings us directly down to this—the existence of as distinct and independent a nervous centre, self-existing, self-acting, living.

We set aside all the speculations of metaphysicians regarding moral accountability of the fœtus, the “potential man,” and its “inanimate vitalities,” as useless as they are bewildering. If there be life, then also the existence, however undeveloped, of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature, the inalienable attribute of humanity, is implied.

If we have proved the existence of fœtal life before quickening has taken place or can take place, and by all analogy, and a close and conclusive process of induction, its commencement at the very beginning, at conception itself, we are compelled to believe unjustifiable abortion always a crime.

And now words fail. Of the mother, by consent or by her own hand, imbrued with her infant’s blood; of the equally guilty father, who counsels or allows the crime; of the wretches who by their wholesale murders far out-Herod Burke and Hare; of the public sentiment which palliates, pardons, and would even praise this so common violation of all law, human and divine, of all instinct, of all reason, all pity, all mercy, all love,—we leave those to speak who can.

To “out-Herod Herod,” as Hamlet puts it, is to shout louder and rave more wildly than did the actor playing that child-murderer in the old mystery plays, which Shakespeare saw when he was a boy. William Burke and William Hare were two murderers who, in 1827 and 1828, killed 16 people to sell their bodies to a professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. Their names became bywords for unspeakable evil and cruelty. To “out-Herod Burke and Hare” is to slaughter more innocent lives than Herod ever did—and with a cruelty that might make even those two monsters of Edinburgh pause.

And now we come to the present. Maura Healey, governor of Massachusetts and at least nominally a Roman Catholic, has signed into law a measure that would permit abortion up to the last tick of the clock before birth. As she did so, she was surrounded by beaming women, not one of them, apparently, thinking of the specifics of the deed and of the fellow human being made to suffer it.

Meanwhile, hundreds of cheering women showed up near the courthouse in Plymouth in support of Lindsay Clancy, who, after sending her husband out of the house to pick up some food for lunch, strangled her three small children. The erstwhile Mrs. Clancy’s defense was that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.

Massachusetts law requires that the prosecution, against such a plea, prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was not insane. I do not know, practically, how that can be done, since it would require full knowledge of someone’s state of mind, inaccessible except to God alone. Be that as it may, why would you cheer someone who has done so ghastly a thing? Where is the sense of sobriety or even of terror before a deed so dark?

Dr. Storer attributed the commonness of abortion more to ignorance than to malice. People actually did believe that the child was not yet alive before the mother felt the baby’s flutter in the womb, for that is what the word “quickening” means, “becoming quick,” “becoming alive”—see the old phrase “the quick and the dead,” meaning “the living and the dead.” But Storer showed that that was biological nonsense. He assumed that once people knew that the child was alive—and a self-existing, self-acting, and developing human being—they would draw the inevitable moral conclusion: the child should not be murdered, which is what we call it when someone kills an innocent human being directly and intentionally.

But just as we have retreated from that high and clear moral sense, so we have deliberately fuddled the biology itself, resorting to scientific nonsense, calling the embryo a “clump of cells”—as if it were not a developing and unitary and complete organism at an early stage of development; or a “parasite”—as if it were an invader of a different species and not the healthy and natural result of reproductive action. Meanwhile, as the mood fits, we apply veils of scientistic and pseudo-intellectual gauze over what we do not want to see, making ourselves, especially in matters regarding human sexuality, deliberately stupid.

As always, the Church must stand up for reality. She might also try to remember that true nobility entails a high moral standard; low standards debase and corrupt. Mercy is for sinners, and since we are sinners all, we all need mercy.

But the moral law is what it is, independent of our opinions or feelings, which so often are but selfishness in fancy dress. For the sake of mankind, she must stand up for that law, which no one can violate with impunity—no more than can one ingest aconite and pretend that the poison will not have its effect regardless of what we call it.