Toward the new future

Human Life Review, Winter 1999 by McFadden, J P

This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives."

That sentence appeared in the article by President Ronald Reagan in the Spring [1983] issue of this review. Mr. Reagan was of course linking the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held in effect that blacks could have no rights as citizens under the Constitution. The President is by no means the first to draw the obvious parallel between abortion and slavery: in both cases, a discrete class of human beings were denied not only the rights of citizens, but also the fundamental right to life itself. Just as, now, a woman holds life-and-death power over her unborn child, so, then, a Master held the same power over his human "property."

As Mr. Reagan also noted, his predecessor (in the presidency, as well as in the championing of human rights) Abraham Lincoln struggled long and hard to find a peaceful solution to the slavery dilemma. Admitting that Dred Scott had affirmed it as "the law of the land," Lincoln triumphed, but not peacefully. Yet long before he was president, he had argued that the solution lay not in the Constitution-subject then, and infinitely more so now, to meaning what the Supreme Court says it means-but rather in the Declaration of Independence, the document that truly founded the American nation, and which holds unambiguously, indeed as a "self-evident" truth, that all men are created equal.

"Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence," Lincoln said once in Illinois, and with it "the practices and policy which harmonize with it." Do that, he said, and "we shall not only have saved the Union, but have so saved it, as to keep it forever worthy of saving."

Certainly the slavery-abortion parallel is strongest at this point: that human beings possess "Unalienable rights" that cannot be rightfully denied; that it is the fundamental duty of government to secure these rights. Thus the purpose of all the serious anti-abortion efforts of the past decade has been to achieve what would amount to citizenship for the unborn (indeed, in certain cases-inheritance, injuries and the like-the courts have long treated the unborn as citizens), because human rights begin at the beginning of life. This, Lincoln said, was the "majestic interpretation" the Founding Fathers wrote in to the Declaration, because "In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on . . "

Yet these same noble fathers did not eliminate slavery. In fact, they actually wrote it into the original Constitution, albeit not by name, and only to prohibit its prohibition for several decades-their successors were left to deal as they might with this glaring violation of the Declaration's principles. The final solution was, of course, the bloodiest war in our history, and even that failed to destroy the many lesser injustices that the "peculiar institution" had spawned, many of which remain with us still.

It is well to remember another parallel in the slavery-abortion equation. He who possesses the power of life and death over another feels compelled to justify that power. Just so, the Slave Power was not content to merely defend its practice as a justified evil. No, it must be declared good, even extended into new areas, and accepted by all. In short, slavery claimed its own ethic.

Those who now defend the peculiar institution of legalized abortion on demand also have their own ethic. This journal has reprinted several times an editorial-a Declaration, really-that first appeared in 1970 (in California Medicine, the official journal of the California medical association). The anonymous editor wrote that "The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life" and that this "sanctity of life" ethic-which has had "the blessing of the Judeo-Christian heritage"-has been "the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy" as well as "the keystone of Western medicine"all quite true. But, he went on, this "old" ethic was being eroded by a new quality of life one which would place only "relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives" [our emphasis].

Like a moth around a flame, the editorialist instinctively hovered about abortion as the crucial issue: "Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-- uterine until death." (Just as curiously, the fact of the slave's humanity was "avoided.") Not doubting that the old ethic was doomed, he concluded with this counsel for his fellow-doctors: "It is not too early for our profession to examine this new ethic, recognize it for what it is, and will mean for human society, and prepare to apply it in a rational development for the fulfillment and betterment of mankind in what is almost certain to be a biologicallyoriented society."