A ‘Choice’ That Defines Our Inhumanity

Today marks the 28th anniversary of the day the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the abortion laws of every state and ignited a cultural conflagration. The flames still rage.

The decision immortalized as Roe vs. Wade is widely regarded as a poorly reasoned and constitutionally unfounded opinion. But it lives on, not least because, as the court has progressively made clear in more recent rulings, the power of precedent and the social turmoil likely to result from its overrule are too great to countenance.

But the regime of Roe is hardly a peaceful one, especially for the 39 million preborn human beings whose lives it has violently claimed. Nor can it be, because it requires the American people to engage in destructive, massive self-deception and to deny what contemporary medical advances of ultrasound, fetal therapy and fetal surgery emphatically demonstrate: Prenatal human life is qualitatively identical and continuous with postnatal human life.

The very word “fetus”--Latin for “offspring”--has developmental, not ontological significance. That is, it denotes a definite and fully established type of being at a certain stage of its existence, not a being which is different in kind from what it will later become. Indeed, it is an objective, genetic reality that the fertilized human egg--and then the embryo, fetus and full-term baby--is completely and exclusively human. From conception until death, only water, nourishment and oxygen are necessary for that human life to flourish on its own terms. As the renowned geneticist Jerome LeJeune said: “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. . . . The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”

Eventually, the stress of the national delusion we have entered into regarding the inhumanity of the preborn will become too much for our body politic to withstand. Just as on a personal level, one lie always leads to others, so it is socially. The fiction of a baby magically becoming a full human being at birth creates other inhumanities we are loath to bear: gruesome partial-birth abortions; the brutal abandonment of newborns; pregnant women freely drinking alcohol, the leading cause of birth defects; and a train of other pathologies linked to the abortion license, from increased rates of breast cancer and sexually transmitted disease to the refusal of men to accept responsibility for paternity (“She could have had an abortion,” he reasons).

Now, the horrific specter of cloning looms on the technological horizon. From human clones kept by the rich for heart and liver transplants to clones simply auctioned off organ by organ, the anarchic rationale, “My body, my choice,” will be the anthem of justification for amoral consumers and unethical scientific “providers.” And for them, it is even stronger than for the “empowered” women of today, because unlike those who abort, those who are cloned truly are operating on only their body and no one else’s.

No social order can encode into law the coarse contempt for nature and organic human relationships that is abortion on demand and expect its fabric to remain intact. The unmatched love of a mother for her child has, throughout history, stood as the archetype of personal devotion and selflessness. It is nature’s deepest bonding and culture’s highest calling. The abortion license turns mother against child, unleashes a perverse antagonism toward the unexpected or imperfect preborn and corrupts this most intimate of human affections. All lesser loves are inevitably carried away in the corrosive tide of self-absorption that swells from abortion.

In one of the post-Roe era’s greatest ironies, the woman who pseudonymously gave the decision its name gravely lamented its consequences, saying women “have literally been handed the right to slaughter their own children.” Can we withstand another three decades of this debased liberty?