By Paul (John) Russo
Recently, a friend
celebrated Planned Parenthood on social media by sharing a story that the
organization had received 20,000 donations in protest of the election of a
pro-life vice-president. Politically motivated posts are fairly frequent in
these times, however this particular post caught my attention because it always
causes me to pause when good people, people I respect, don’t just tolerate, but
actively advocate such a terrible practice like abortion. I was moved to make
the observation: that with 699,202 unborn
people killed each year (the figure from 2012), Planned Parenthood, the leading
advocate of abortion, only needed to get an additional 679,202 donations more
to match 1:1 the number killed. Her reply was
not unique, and one that I had actually heard before. But this time, as
sometimes happens, it was heard with new ears. The response was simply that Planned Parenthood does other things too
besides abortion. That seemingly benign comment, one that might serve to
find common ground, initiated a conversation and intense path of thought that proved
difficult to ignore.
That statement is really just a factual statement. But it is
sometimes offered as a reason to support Planned Parenthood, while avoiding the
issue of abortion itself. We often recognize there are positive and negative
characteristics about things, places, organizations, even people. Often we take
the positives while ignoring the negatives. In this case it seems different.
Why?Killing with Benefits
One of the first things that struck me about the comment was
that it did not even attempt to dispute that people were being killed. Rather
it simply moved on. It moved on to the claim that there were other things,
presumably other things of benefit, that the organization engaged in that
warranted supporting it. Though I had heard this phrase before, I don’t think I
had thought about it quite that way. If we take for granted the organization is
actually killing unborn human beings, what kind of redeeming benefit could
balance the moral equation? And how do you even formulate such an equation that
balances 699,202 deaths of innocent human beings on one hand, with some other
benefit to human kind on the other? What would the equation look like?
A few weeks prior I had been reading about an American bioethicist
named Peter Singer in a book by Patrick Madrid. Peter Singer is a tenured
professor at Princeton University, and author of the book Practical Ethics(1). Mr.
Madrid was discussing possible justification for euthanasia and refers to one
of the assertions made by Mr. Singer about hemophiliac infants:
When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another
infant with better prospects for a happy life, the total amount of happiness
will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life
for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second
[even if not yet born]. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no
adverse effects on others, according to the total view, it would be right to
kill him.
According to an equation of total happiness, outlined in Practical Ethics, he makes an argument
for the justification of killing one baby to maximize the happiness of another,
even if the other is merely potential and does not yet exist.
Reflecting on our conversation, was my friend suggesting that
there was some equation of total happiness, which Planned Parenthood was
effecting that balanced the lives of unborn children on one hand, with the
happiness of others through some unspecified programs on the other? Peter
Singer was just an academician, surely no one would actually attempt to put
this into practice? Unfortunately this is not true. Mr. Madrid goes on to
discuss that Mr. Wesley J. Smith wrote a letter to the editor in the May 2002
issue of First Things Magazine that describes a time when this was indeed put
into practice (1):
The
first officially sanctioned infanticide in Germany occurred in 1939 after the
father of a disabled baby, “Baby Knauer,” wrote to Chancellor Hitler seeking
permission to have his son euthanized. Hitler, believing the time was ripe to
begin eradicating the “defectives,” sent his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to
inform Baby Knauer’s doctors that there would be no legal consequences for
killing the infant. This was done, so pleasing Hitler that he issued a secret
directive, licensing doctors to kill disabled infants.
The father of Baby Knauer was later interviewed in 1973, and
his remarks were published by Robert J. Lifton in The Nazi Doctors:
He [Brandt] explained to me that the Fuhrer had personally sent him,
and that my son’s case interested him very much. The Fuhrer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future
– whose [lives were] worthless. From then on, we wouldn’t have to suffer from
this terrible misfortune, because the Fuhrer had granted us the mercy killing
of our son. Later, we could have other
children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud. [Emphasis
added]
Now these cases discuss euthanasia of infants that have been
already born. But this makes the examples that much more striking. It does
indeed seem that some people are able to balance the killing of certain
individuals, even born individuals, to other
benefits received by an individual or group.
Before proceeding much further, I would like to pause at
this point to state something that is obvious me, but perhaps not to others.
Nowhere in my thoughts, either while pondering the consequences of abortion, or
as I prepare the words on this page do I have negative thoughts or feelings towards
my friends, neighbors, family, or others who might not see this subject as I
do, and especially not towards women who have had abortions. And the reason for
this is simple: my interest is not in the individual actions, and more in the
institution of abortion practice within the society in which I live. I personally
don’t think much about abortion as the act of an individual alone, because an
individual cannot actually do an abortion alone. Not safely anyhow. It requires
the collective medical industry. No entity owns all of the knowledge used to
perform safe abortions. They are the product of a social medical-complex, the
employment of which, in a democracy, every member participates. That said, I am
interested in how individuals view abortion, tolerate it, and even advocate for
it, since it perpetuates the social behavior.
Personal Reflection
With this fresh in my mind, and my own inner conviction
there is no such equation to balance the killing of one with the benefit to
another, I searched for a simple way to express the error I perceived in my friend’s
statement. At that moment, I reflected
on a memory when I was in high school. During a lecture on Holocaust history,
the teacher made the comment that a great mystery of the tragedy is how the
German people, by and large, did nothing. He mused that however they had
internalized what was happening, it wasn’t well understood. He speculated if it
were some kind of mass brain washing. And he commented that most Germans were
people who loved their children, pet their dog, had dinner at 6, and would
otherwise seem like normal people. How
does this happen to a society? He concluded that we need to study the Holocaust
to be sure it never happens again. As I rewound this memory from over 30 years
ago, I thought how today, at this very moment, normal people, MYSELF INCLUDED, go about our business all the while
systematic killing of human beings is occurring somewhere near us. Here in my
home town of Monterey it happens on Fridays, over on Hilby Avenue in Seaside.
This isn’t some obscure German town that existed 70 years in history. It’s a
few miles away, this week. It’s a town right in our community. And on Fridays,
unborn human beings people are systematically killed. Could it be a Holocaust
right next door?
Clearly, normal people cannot really accept human beings are
being systematically eliminated. Right? Not every Friday. There would be a huge
social media outcry. And certainly nobody would be celebrating the organization
doing it. If that were happening, we would all instantly become Brad Pitt in
our own version of Inglorious Bastards, roaming though the towns and forests,
mercilessly hunting and killing these Nazis.
We’d NEVER agree with the Fuhrer’s physician in solving the problem of people with no future by
killing them, would we? So it must be that the fundamental premise, that
abortion kills innocent human beings, is incorrect. But if we believe it
is not killing, is our belief defensible? Of course it is. Let us turn
to Science.
The Judgement of Science
This will be easy. I
have often seen abortion advocates characterize pro-life beliefs as being
faith-based. Not founded in science. They are criticized for being science
ignorant, and backwards. This is well known. In fact, not just faith-based, but
base-less. Everyone knows a fetus is
just “a mass of cells”. Even just saying the word “cell” immediately invokes
science to your side. Cells are just things, and even living cells simply
invoke an image of a quivering clump on a slide under a microscope. Not a
person. The microscope can’t prove these little ovals with dots is a human
being, right? Even the landmark Roe v Wade decision said that we have no test
to tell what these cells are. Perhaps in 1973 when Roe v Wade was decided. Science
has now progressed considerably. And with each advancement it gives us new
evidence for reevaluation. In 1973, we did not have ultrasound. We could not
see the fetus inside the woman. We could not see that it had a head, arms, legs…
Wait, that sounds like a person. But just seeing the human form has been
unconvincing to many. After all, it could be just a piece of play dough shaped
like a human. A doll. Dolls aren’t people. But science keeps moving forward. Now
we have genetic testing. We can look deep into the cell nucleus and see exactly
what it is! Genetic identification is used forensically all the time to
identify clumps of cells left behind at crime scenes. It is solid enough to
convict (or exonerate) accused murderers and rapists. What can it tell us about
an unborn baby? Two very important things. (1) It is a human being. Not
a doll. Definitely not a doll. Not a dog, not a cat. It is human. (2) It is
not the mother. That means it is a distinct human being. Not part of
someone else’s body. Attached it may be, but a distinct individual it is. And
there is a third thing we can tell scientifically: It is ALIVE. It is
growing, it has a beating heart, and if you leave it alone, it will eventually
look just like you and me. And finally, we can tell that after the abortion, it
is NOT ALIVE. Now let us use some basic deductive reasoning. When you take
something alive and make it not alive, you kill it. What does science say we
killed? Not a doll, not an organ of the mother. A distinct human being. Oh. My.
That doesn’t work out the way it was supposed to. It turns out, that all the
evidence points to killing a human being. To think otherwise is, well, just
based on faith.
Let’s Be Reasonable
Even granted all this evidence for abortion being the
killing of a distinct unborn human being, I have heard and carefully considered
many attempts to rationalize away this inconvenient truth. Here are a few of the
ones I’ve heard most often:
(1) This human being is not a person. This is the approach
used by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Campaign during the MSNBC
interview when she asserted that unborn babies are not legal persons and
therefore have no rights. This is just a legal sleight of hand. It doesn’t
carry moral weight unless you believe everything legal is moral. She was using
the term technically, and not discussing the truth of the issue that this is an
unborn human being, like science suggests. Note in the Baby Knauer situation,
the Fuhrer removed legal consequence (made the killing of mentally handicapped
babies legal). But this doesn’t automatically remove the discomfort.
(2) This human being is a not a full human being (or it is somehow lesser of a human being than born people), either through cognitive
deficiency or biological dependency or just by virtue of being in the womb vs.
out of the womb. This one is interesting. There is no scientific test to prove one
human being is “lesser” than another. It
is still common belief that all human beings have equal worth as a human being.
But this is not unanimous. The lesser
argument is the argument of the father of Baby Knauer. His cognitive disability
made him a lesser person in the
father’s eyes and the Fuhrer’s eyes. A worth-less person. And Peter Singer came up with the same lesser argument for the hemophiliac.
That person had lesser happiness.
History is replete with lesser
examples. The Nazis viewed the Jews as lesser.
Slave owners viewed slaves a lesser.
In all of these cases, these dubious claims have been proven false. In many of
these cases they attempted to use false science to objectify lesser. All failed. And logically, it
would be foolish to assume the unborn child is lesser than any other person. In fact, they are equal to anyone at
that stage of development. Not lesser.
The dependency argument also applies to Baby Knauer too as his cognitive
disability meant he could not function independently without being a burden to
others. He is not a person, but a misfortune
to his family and burden to his country. The same dependence is true for a
healthy infant, by the way. Without frequent dependent care and feeding, a born
child will die. Any baby, even a born baby, is a dependent on someone. And so
are the elderly. The more these rationalizations are explored honestly, they appear
just that, rationalizations and vanish. They are rationalizations for
convenience. Of course, Peter Singer has an ivy league framework to justify rationalization
of convenience: the maximization of happiness. His framework just has some
sobering extended consequences. Like it doesn’t stop at birth.
For me, at this point the death-benefit equations collapse.
There is no justification of the grave evil done by killing innocents. Neither
incidental or direct benefit of their death to others nor the benefit of other
programs prosecuted by an organization that kills innocents negates the evil
done by Planned Parenthood. For example, it does not matter if an SS officer
volunteered at the SPCA on Saturdays if Monday through Friday he was doing
grave evil by killing innocents at work. The grave evil must be accounted for
independently. This is generally accepted in the prosecution of such crimes. Being
a nice person off-duty is usually not
accepted as a defense for negating the evil done on the clock. And consistently
applied, this includes Planned Parenthood too. The fact that they do free STD
testing Monday through Thursday does not negate the evil they do when they kill
human beings on Friday.
The Holocaust Next Door
Nevertheless, the use of the term Holocaust may seem like
hyperbole. Perhaps because trivial comparisons are too frequent. It is common
in these times to use the comparison even around lesser political figures with
whom there is disagreement or distaste. I can certainly understand the need to
appropriately apply such a serious comparison so as not to desensitize ourselves
to the horrific lessons of some historical events. But of all the comparisons,
this might be the one that closest parallels the true meaning of the word. Let’s
start with the definition.
Definition of Holocaust from Merriam Webster Dictionary
hol·o·caust
ˈhäləˌkôst,ˈhōləˌkôst/
Noun
1.
a sacrifice consumed by fire
2.
a thorough destruction involving extensive loss
of life especially through fire <a nuclear holocaust>
3.
a) often capitalized : the mass slaughter
of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II
—usually used with the
b) a
mass slaughter of people; especially : genocide
Considering
estimates of 50-60 million human beings killed by abortion in the United States
since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, significant loss of life does characterize
the practice. The magnitude of these numbers is actually greater than anything
we’ve really ever seen. By this standard, both definition 3 (b) and partially
definition 2 (though not by fire) might appropriately apply. If you
additionally consider that the claims of genocide are also frequently made when
it comes to the promotion of abortion practice, 3 (b) becomes an exact match. One
statistic on concernedwomen.org website cites over 54% of abortions are
performed on black and Hispanic women while they account for only 29% of the general
female population. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and
heroine of abortion activists, wrote a paper on birth control and eugenics
called Birth Control and Racial Betterment.
While I personally believe in the
sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic, I have not been
able to discover that these measures are more than superficial deterrents when
applied to the constantly growing stream of the unfit. They are excellent means
of meeting a certain phase of the situation, but I believe in regard to these,
as in regard to other eugenic means, that they do not go to the bottom of the
matter. Neither the mating of healthy couples nor the sterilization of certain
recognized types of the unfit touches the great problem of unlimited
reproduction of those whose housing, clothing, and food are all inadequate to
physical and mental health. These measures do not touch those great masses, who
through economic pressure populate the slums and there produce in their helplessness other helpless, diseased and
incompetent masses, who overwhelm all that eugenics can do among those whose
economic condition is better. (2) [emphasis added]
Interesting
thought that the poor are spoiling the fun of the economically advantaged and
essentially messing up the race. Bummer indeed. Hitler, as we saw above, had
his own idea of “unfit” and sought to control the “quality” of the citizens of
his country through killing. The actual contact or mutual inspiration of Sanger
and Hitler are subject of debate, but clearly the idea that some people have
more value than others underlies both of their philosophies. This is the lesser rationalization. It seems that abortion
meets the standard of gravity and scale to apply the Holocaust label. Since we
are talking about the killing of innocent human beings, and killing on a scale
of almost 10x the WWII use of the term, it seems those standards are met. This
in no way is meant to diminish or minimize the suffering and death of the Jews
in WWII, it was beyond belief. But that is the point, it puts in perspective
the magnitude of the institutionalized killing that is happening among us,
right here in the United States, every week. It is honestly shocking.
In
one discussion I had, an objection was raised that the unborn babies are not
tortured like some of the victims of The Holocaust were during WWII. I did
consider that carefully. There is no requirement that victims be tortured
before they are exterminated. In fact, in the nuclear holocaust example, death
would be quick and relatively painless. And while some of the late-term
abortions in particular are quite gruesome, and we can speculate about pain
suffered by the unborn child, I question if that is really necessary. It
remains mass slaughter of human beings.
Conclusions
Likely,
every member of a society bears responsibility in some way for the perpetuation
of the social practice. Wait. I couldn’t mean even people who never had an
abortion or worked at Planned Parenthood? Yes, everyone is likely complicit in
some way. Even those that speak out. Remember I am not discussing individual decisions,
but societal complicity in a grave evil. If we allow the collective resources
of society to be used for killing of innocents, if we do not challenge it with
every influence we have, then we bear culpability. But what can I do? Henry
David Thoreau bluntly discusses the culpability of citizens that tolerate evil in Civil
Disobedience. He speaks around the evil of his time, slavery and war. And his
words are difficult to listen to if your goal is to rationalize inaction:
There are thousands who are in
opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put
an end to them; who esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin,
sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to
do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to question of
free-trade, and quietly read the price-current along with the latest advices
from Mexico, after dinner, and it may be, fall asleep over them both.
What is the price-current of an
honest man and a patriot today?
They hesitate, and they regret, and
sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They
will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no
longer have to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and feeble
countenance and God-speed, to the right, and it goes by them. (3)
Thoreau’s
rebuke is quite harsh. If unfamiliar it is worth knowing, but the following
advice bears particular poignancy in the context of abortion:
What I have to do is to see, at any
rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. (3)
For
Thoreau, only the most basic first step would be to stop supporting the killing
of innocent human beings, and the next is to not speak out against it to everyone you can. Only
at this point do we equal to the citizen with his hands in his pockets that Mr.
Thoreau mocks. Harsh words in-deed.
I
hope that this discussion has helped see this issue in a new way and I
appreciate your interest and time to read these thoughts.
Footnotes
(1)
The Godless Delusion, Patrick Madrid and Kenneth
Hensley, pp. 95-96.
(2)
Sanger, Margaret; Birth Control and Racial
Betterment, Birth Control Review, February 1919 https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=143449.xml
(3)
Thoreau, Henry David; Civil Disobedience, p.
391, 396
