Making Sense Out of Bioethics
The
Twisted Logic Underlying Abortion
Many influential people and
institutions in our society, including
Hollywood and the mass media, strongly
support abortion. To justify their position,
however, they must adeptly defy logic and
ignore certain obvious facts.
One example of this
side-stepping is the oft-repeated argument
for abortion that it’s all about a woman’s
body. As actress Amy Brenneman, who starred
in the TV show Judging Amy, once put
it, "Unless a woman really has sovereignty
over her own body we really haven’t come
that far."
The obvious flaw in this
argument was cleverly exposed a few years
back by supermodel Kathy Ireland (who used
to favor abortion) during a televised
interview: “Some people say, ‘Well, it’s a
woman’s body; it should be her choice.’
There’s a 50% chance the baby she’s carrying
is a male child, and he would have a penis.
Women don’t have penises. So it’s residing
in her body; it is not a part of her body.”
While it should go without saying that
babies have their own bodies, abortion
advocates seem all too ready to tiptoe
around the obvious to promote their agenda.
That tiptoeing is also
evident whenever a breaking news story about
the murder of an abortionist grabs the
headlines. After someone recently gunned
down Dr. George Tiller, the late-term
abortionist in Kansas, almost every major
media outlet extolled the genuine tragedy of
his death, while tiptoeing past the tragedy
of the 60,000 deaths that Tiller himself had
coordinated within his clinics.
Several TV commentators,
however, immediately perceived this double
standard. Ann Coulter, for example,
satirically mentioned, “…This one
random nut who shot Tiller … I don’t really
like to think of it as a murder. It was
terminating Tiller in the 203rd
trimester.” She then argued: “I am
personally opposed to shooting abortionists,
but I don’t want to impose my moral values
on others.” Coulter also couldn’t resist
exposing the faulty moral logic behind so
much pro-abortion rhetoric and sloganeering,
as in: “If you don’t believe in abortion,
then don’t have one,” to which she replied:
“If you don’t believe in shooting
abortionists, then don’t shoot
abortionists.” Perhaps no one has so clearly
summarized the deadly logic of the
pro-abortion position as Mother Teresa, when
she declared in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize
speech: “…If a mother can kill her own child
– what is left for me to kill you and you
kill me – there is nothing between.”
The moral chaos of abortion often begins
when advocates feign not to know when life
begins. George Jonas, in his cleverly
entitled essay Thoughts from an Ex-Fetus,
observed how advocates must “pretend not to
realize that life is an autonomous process,
a continuum from zygote to old-age pension,
a self-elaborating force that begins when it
begins and keeps growing unless it's
vacuumed out first…. They must pretend not
to see that if a fetus were not alive, it
wouldn't have to be killed.”
Perhaps the
most plausible explanation of
why abortion
advocates will so readily defy logic and
ignore the obvious came from writer
Dale Vree. He had been invited to a
“living-room discussion” on abortion back in
1989 which included six prominent
pro-lifers, six prominent pro-choicers, and
one or two undecideds.
Vree expected that the heart
of the debate would hinge on when life
began, but it didn't. It didn't even turn on
the hard cases — rape and incest.
When one of the
radical feminists argued that abortion is
simply about the right to make choices, one
of the pro-lifers replied that the choice
was made back when the woman agreed to have
sex. Then one of the pro-choicers
finally blurted out: "We're pro-sex and
you're anti-sex," meaning, according to Vree,
that "they're for lots of sex in lots of
forms while we pro-lifers feel it should be
limited to heterosexual marriage…. They made
it abundantly clear that they're committed
to the sexual revolution, and that
revolution will wither without the insurance
which is abortion and this is their
bottom-line concern.”
This indeed appears to be the
crux of the matter, the central concern that
has motivated radical feminists, Hollywood,
and many other advocates of abortion to
sacrifice untold millions of unborn babies
since the early 1970s. George Jonas zeroed
in on this same bottom-line explanation: “We
invent euphemisms, such as ‘choice’ for
killing, and sophomoric dilemmas, such as
pretending not to know when life begins, to
ensure that nothing hinders Virginia's quest
for Santa Claus. No obstacle must interfere
with her goal of self-fulfillment – least of
all an issue (as it were) of her healthy
sexual appetite.”
In
the final analysis, this
stands as probably the single
greatest tragedy of our time, that the
unordered and inordinate sexual desires of
men and women have been allowed to twist the
most rudimentary moral logic to the point of
death for so many of our children.
Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk,
Ph.D. earned his doctorate in neuroscience
from Yale and did post-doctoral work at
Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of
Fall River, MA, and serves as the Director
of Education at The National Catholic
Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See
www.ncbcenter.org
