Please, No More Excuses

Abolitionists Rising is a new movement afoot in America. Their target is not slavery but child-murder: abortion. I have seen many clips of their interchanges with the public, often on college campuses. They bring large posters showing the bloody results of abortion: the mangled or burnt victim. Their representatives are staunchly polite, though they defend themselves by letting aggressors know that they will press charges if they or their signs are pushed around. Of course, they are greeted with legal threats, which they parry by assuring the offended that they have already informed the police or campus security of their presence and that they know what laws or municipal ordinances they must observe.

Far more common than the attempts to dislodge them by legal means are the outbursts of screaming, bitter accusation, blasphemy, and obscenity—most of the time, not surprisingly, from women, but plenty of men join in, too. Language which I never heard my mother utter, and my father only once and when provoked beyond all patience, you may now hear commonly in the streets; and the Abolitionists seem to hear it a hundred times a day. The arguments they meet with are old and tired, usually involving one or more logical fallacies or biological absurdities.

They hear that the fetus is a mere “clump of cells,” and you know you are in a yard cordoned by barbed wire lest reason break in, when countless people use the same slogan, the same words, time and again. No, a “clump of cells” is not an organism, though the Abolitionists will toss the phrase back at those who use it, saying, “You are a clump of cells.” Not once have I seen that the opponents ask or entertain the obvious next question, which is, “What distinguishes an organism from an undifferentiated mass?” For the fetus is obviously not such a mass, nor are the debaters.

Or the men hear that since they don’t “have a uterus,” and for some reason it’s always uterus and never womb, they should have no opinion and no say in the matter. This is sheer self-absorption and an attempt to shut down all moral discussion, and it also conveniently sets aside the fact that plenty of the Abolitionists are women. Taken to its logical conclusion, the excuse implies that pregnant women are not, as such, to be held responsible for actions and motives for action that conduce to or injure the common good, let alone that involve the death of another human being—and not just any other human being but their own child. 

It also implies, as the Abolitionists are ready to point out, that no one who is not directly affected by a moral judgment has any right to advise or insist upon it. Do we really want to say that a blind man has no right to advise about the army just because he can never belong to it? Or that a farmer on his homestead has no right to deliver moral judgments about rents in Chicago? Are pregnant women to be held as islands unto themselves?

Then there is the slogan “bodily autonomy,” heard over and over, with that word autonomy as a talisman to conjure withal. But unless we are talking about a range of choices in accord with the moral law, or choices that are morally indifferent, autonomy is nonsense. I may take up shooting pool as a hobby, or bowling. I may set up an antique shop, or a woodworking shop. I may read Milton or Dickens. I may send my children to school or teach them at home. But evil is another matter, and consent in evil, if anything, complicates and spreads the harm. Duelists consent. High-stakes gamblers consent. I have no moral right to amputate a healthy limb, supposing I could find an evil surgeon to consent to the amputation. It is illegal for me to possess or to consume or to sell heroin. And so on.

In one clip, an obviously shattered Hispanic woman comes out of the crowd to speak at the mic and plead with women not to abort their children. “You can do what you want,” she says, not something that any of the Abolitionists would say.  She tells them that her husband made her get an abortion because he didn’t want a third child. The woman from the Abolitionists goes up to the mic to speak with her softly and to pray with her.

The crowd erupts into jeering and laughter, calling it “staged,” apparently unmoved by the woman’s sorrow. It is clear that they wish it to be so because the last thing they want to witness is regret for this particular sin. That is because, I feel justified in saying, many of them are implicated in it. So are we all, if we smile or shrug at fornication, or at other sexual sins that fall short of this one in its dreadful and irrevocable result.

I am put in mind of three things I was a witness to, two of them public, one of them private, two of them having to do with abortion and one with a more political form of mass murder. The first was at Princeton, in the spring semester of 1978. One of my classmates, whom I did not know personally, had left, at the doors to all the dormitories, flyers bearing the image of an aborted child, like those which the Abolitionists display.

The outrage was immediate and widespread. How dare he do such a thing, when who knows but that some of the women on campus may themselves have gotten an abortion! I was puzzled by that response. I said that surely if they had done that, they knew what they were doing. Why should an image of it bother them—unless in fact the deed was wrong and they did not want to face it?

At that same Princeton, a few years later, one of the women said to a friend of mine, also a woman, that if she got pregnant, she would have to get an abortion, “Because I like to party, and I know that if I drink, the baby might be born with a birth defect, and I couldn’t live with that.” My friend felt dizzy with moral vertigo, hearing such a thing.

Then there was the time, I believe in 1984, in the big “well” by the student center at the University of North Carolina, when a young woman set herself up with a chair and a table, selling copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Nobody came up to her to shout or curse or threaten—and that was not because the campus was full of communist sympathizers. It wasn’t. But in those days, at most places, you didn’t do that sort of thing. 

I stopped over to ask her why she was doing that, when Mao was responsible for the deaths of some 60 million of his own people during the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to hear how she would reply; I also have some respect for people who take unpopular positions. She said that the number was much exaggerated and that, in any case, every revolution is going to cost human lives. She was wearing thick glasses, a strangely powerful sign of her impenetrability. Nevertheless, as I said, nobody came round to harass her.

And then, in July of 2002, I was in the admitting room of a major hospital in Massachusetts, on a bed, unable to walk or even to sit upright, the result of some undiagnosed neural or hematological disease. In the cubicle next to mine, separated by curtains, there was a young woman waiting to get an abortion. The nurse questioned her to fulfill the legal and medical requirements. She already had a two-year-old by another father; she and the father of this child had broken up, and she didn’t feel she could take care of two babies.

She was sniffling while she spoke. Her brother was going to come and pick her up afterward. I was stunned. I had the experience, rare in my life, of being in the presence of pure, banal, stupid evil. I wish I had said—my God, I wish I had said—“Don’t do it.” Who knows but that someone might be alive now, someone then perfectly innocent, condemned to death that day.

We foolishly suppose that if we change the name we can change the reality. So a man can become a woman by saying so. Abortion can become “medical care” or “reproductive health” by laying the falsehood on thick—for there is no reproduction, and the procedure ends in death; no disease is cured, but rather, a healthy organ is thwarted in its healthy and natural function. But the reality remains.

Nor need we wait for doomsday for the reality to assert itself. It does so in the act—as all the ancient philosophers, pagan and Christian, affirmed. Only the sophists, those word-mongers, rhetoricians for hire, said otherwise. We see the effect in the darkening of the mind and the hardening of the heart. “I don’t care what Jesus says!” cries one of the Abolitionists’ opponents, except that for the verb “care” she uses a shocking obscenity I need not repeat. “It’s a parasite!” others cry, uttering biological nonsense and strangely echoing what the Nazis said about Jews and people whose birth defects rendered them of no use to the State.

Some, like the fabled crocodile, weep at the misfortune that such a child might experience in life; yet would they go up to an adopted child and say, “You would be better off dead”? Some complain about “forced pregnancies,” when the Abolitionists are advocating against deadly force. Many of the interlocutors say they do not believe in God; what they really do not believe in is the moral law that would convict them of wrongdoing. Better that the whole universe and all of human life be held as meaningless than that the inconvenient child should have a right not to be put to death at the instance of his mother, his often equally guilty father, and the rest of us who will not confess the wrong we have performed, connived at, encouraged, or condoned.

God, and God alone, can raise the dead to life. I pray that He shall do this with our nation and that he will purge all of us of our complicity in this evil.