Part one of two parts
“I ask you now to welcome a man who knows all about the warfare in our present society and who depends on Divine Power to overcome the enemies of life, Congressman Henry Hyde.”
Thank you Dr. Brown for the extravagant (but I enjoyed it) introduction. Every once in awhile someone reads that introduction, that biographical material, and I relive my life in a few minutes. It brings back things I had long forgotten.
Dr. Sheehy, Sylvia Boband, Kitty Pond, of course Joe Borowski and the clergy that are here, the reverend sisters, I am really delighted to come up here. It is such a refreshing experience to breathe your beautiful clean air and to speak to you enthusiastic people. You have a saying in your Tourist advertisement, “The United States border on the beautiful,” and it’s quite true. I have been to Vancouver and was very touched by the sheer beauty of the place and I’ve been to Toronto a few times but never here to the beautiful East Coast. I know there is some occasional diminished enthusiasm for people from the United Sates, with good reason on occasion, I must say. But I can truthfully say that in my country, Canadians are thoroughly admired.
We share so much. You are our biggest trading partner, we are yours. The heritage that we all gained from the Mother Countries, the respect for individual rights, for freedom, for human dignity, is something we share in common. Canada has always been first to defend freedom when it has been attacked. You were involved in World War II, long before we were. We know that and we appreciate that.
Nobody…here is on an expense account.
So permit me to say that it’s real delight to get my personal batteries recharged by coming up here and visiting with you folks. And please understand I’m not to lecture you about what you ought to do or how you ought to think. I’m here to explain to you why I feel as I feel and to try to discuss with you some of the problems and the prospects for defending that tiny little atom of humanity surrounded by a woman we call mother; that cause that we all share.
Let me tell you how I admire you people in the pro-life movement. It is the only movement on the globe that has no self-interest. Every other movement is looking for better insurance benefits, better pay, longer vacations; some goal that makes human life more easily lived. The pro-life movement is totally without self-interest, it is the most unselfish movement – people fighting for other little people they’ll never see and they’ll never know. It has been well described as “loving people who can’t love back.” Nobody here this afternoon is here on an expense account.
You’re here because you want to be here, because you want to commit yourself to defending the most vulnerable, voiceless, voteless of God’s creatures. The pre-born can’t rise up in the streets, they can’t escape, they can’t vote. If you don’t defend them, they’re without defence. When the mother, the pregnant woman, who should be the natural guardian of her unborn child, becomes its adversary, then it’s your duty, it’s our duty to, it is the duty of the government to intervene to try to protect the unborn child.
People say, “You conservatives are against government intervention. What are you doing in the bedroom? What are you doing intervening in that sensitive, delicate personal decision – the ultimate in privacy – between a woman and her doctor as to whether or not she should carry this child to term?” I suggest the fundamental duty of government is to protect innocent human life; it doesn’t matter whether they build good roads, or whether they have bridges that don’t crumble at the first rainstorm. The law exists to protect the weak from the strong. That’s what we have courthouses for. Lawyers, legislators and law books are there to protect the weak from the strong.
If you diminish life at one end…you diminish it all over.
The Pro-Life Movement is caught up in a titanic struggle. It’s a struggle that never will be won but it’s a struggle that you can have success in. Your success is measured incrementally – not in great victories – but in a few lives saved here and there and so it is well worth the whole of your life.
And, by the way, I failed to acknowledge Joe Borowski whose fame is legendary in the United States and who has taught me and all of us so much about persistence in the pursuit of a cause that is worth pursuing. I want to acknowledge his presence here and his great leadership in this enormous cause.
A way of exploring this great struggle is to compare the quality-of-life ethic to the sanctity-of-life ethic. To look at it in those terms, you suddenly understand that people who espouse and advocate the quality-of-life ethic do so from motives that can only be described as “compassionate.” They look at this problem in terms of trying to provide a woman (with an unwanted or distressed pregnancy) with some opportunity to salvage her life and not to saddle her or society with an unwanted child – “every child a wanted child.” That slogan has a certain ring to it – every child a wanted child.
I think of Jesus Christ on the cross. Here’s the most perfect man who ever lived because in addition to being a human being He indeed was the Son of God, (the Second Person of the Trinity).
Talk about being unwanted when society takes you – all he did was heal the sick, create loaves and fishes for the hungry, and preach brotherhood and love – and this society that He lived in, nailed Him to the cross.
Do we learn by prayer, that we are not here to be loved so much as to love? Do we learn that being wanted isn’t the important thing as much as wanting? Do we learn that projecting love is more important than receiving it?
In any event, in my country, the quality-of-life ethic is dominant in the courts, in the strategic institutions, in the universities, in the major media. The quality-of-life ethic stresses the importance of not having to bring a handicapped child into the world; or the importance of finishing your education if you’re a young pregnant girl. This expedient reasoning is to hide the fact that a human being has been created and is waiting to be born.
Malcolm Muggeridge years ago called quality-of-life ethic “the slippery slope.” He said that if you diminish life at one end of the continuum, you diminish it all over throughout the whole spectrum, and so won’t be long until life at the other end of the continuum will be diminished.
All men are created equal…not born equal, created equal.
Of course we [in the U.S.] have Governor Lamm of Colorado, a handsome young man who says old people have a duty to die and to get out of the way. That’s logical if the quality-of-life ethic is transcendent. The quality-of-life ethic states that old people who are in a nursing home (perhaps they’re catatonic and they don’t communicate) are not making a contribution. They’re an emotional and financial strain on society and so the logical consequence of this quality-of-life ethic is that some lives are not worthy to be lived. Some lives are less important than our lives. Now if you accept that, fine. There are consequences which follow from that, so to accept the principle, is to accept and defend the consequences.
The baby that is born with Down’s Syndrome, or hydrocephalic, or suffering from spina bifida where the spine is not closed, and has all sorts of problems; that child then becomes a tremendous burden to the parents and what can we do about that?
The classic case was in Bloomington, Indiana a year ago or so where this little child was born with Down’s syndrome and a digestive problem where the esophagus was not connected to the stomach. Without a simple surgical procedure the child could not ingest or digest food and nourishment. So the doctors provided the parents with the management option of not performing the surgery and hence the child starved to death. The hospital went to court to protect itself and the highest court in our state of Indiana said, yes, that’s a permissible option for the parents. And so the little boy, it was a boy, we know that much (it helps the other side to depersonalize there poor little people) – Baby Boy Doe starved to death. That is a logical consequence of the quality-of-life ethic.
The sad part of that was that six families wanted to adopt the little baby. Six families offered to take the little child and to have the surgery performed so it wouldn’t starve to death.
You couldn’t starve a dog in your basement and not get arrested.
There are those who get very emotional about saving whales and baby harp seals. The snail darter is on our list of endangered species, and perhaps that’s right. I don’t know. But I do know what an unborn child ought to rank at least equal with the snail darter and have some protection in the law, rather than be expendable and disposable as a used Kleenex. A blade of grass has more legal protection in the United States than does a pre-born child. We have laws against trespassing – don’t step on the grass – but not for the protection of a pre-born child if the mother does not want to carry that child.
Now there are two questions that are inherent in this abortion controversy: a scientific question and a value question.
First, the scientific question: We had legislation in Washington that dealt with this end and the great professors of medicine came and testified, the head of the Yale Medical School, doctors and scientists with great credentials, all testified that nobody knows when human life begins. Well of course that’s a bit of semantic gymnastics. We’re not talking about creationism or the Big Bang Theory. We’re talking about when individual human life begins.
Now every human life has a beginning and an end; it ends at death and has a beginning at conception. If we talk about an individual’s human life, of course, it has a beginning. There isn’t a medical book in print in any known language that pretends to discuss the biology of conception that doesn’t say that at the moment of fertilization, when the female ovum and the male sperm unite into a new genetic package of 46 chromosomes, that this new living entity is a member of the human family, not the animal, vegetable or mineral family. They all agree that this new living entity needs only nourishment and shelter to be born as a little boy or a little girl, to grow into an old man or an old woman.
No pregnant woman has ever given birth to a goldfish or to a puppy. It’s always a baby, a member of the human family. And to deny the humanity of that little microscopic entity is to be culturally vulgar; it’s to be ignorant.
Baby boy Doe starved to death…a result of the quality-of-life ethic
You see that’s what scares the pro-abortionists – we have the medicine and the biology on our side. It used to be when people were ignorant about that; you didn’t think you had a baby until you could feel it in the mother’s stomach.
We’re learning more. We’re conceiving children in test tubes. The miracle of Louise Brown and Elizabeth Jordan Carr and the rest of them occurred in a petri dish. The male sperm and the female ovum were united and that was the beginning of two little girls. The doctors take that new entity and implant that new genetic package, in the womb of a woman, where he or she receives shelter and nourishment. That was the beginning, as, perhaps, death in the nursing home ninety years later is the end. So don’t say you don’t know when human life begins. It begins at the beginning, at conception, and that’s what all the medical books say.
To move to the second question: what value should we assign to that little entity? Science can’t help us there. That’s a question of law, of philosophy, of tradition in the West. In Western civilization we have always valued human life, whether black, white, young, old, male, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men (meaning mankind) are created equal,” not born equal but created equal and “Are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Oh, how the American Civil Liberties Union chills and gets anxious about “Endowed by their creator” in our fundamental document, The Declaration of Independence. May they never see the Mayflower Compact that opens up “In the name of God, the Father, amen.” that would really drive them up the wall.
The right to life has been a human right, a civil right, the basic right. What good is the right of freedom of speech if you can’t have a prior right to exist and to live?
What value shall we give to that little entity? Well we’ll work at it from the other end. What if you say, some of them are valuable, some of them are not valuable, some are more valuable than others? If you take that approach then what you’re saying is some lives are not worthy to be lived, and other lives are. What’s the standard? Well, the Nazis had a standard, didn’t they? Jewish people were somehow subhuman and expendable and disposable. Before they disposed of them, they took the gold out of their teeth. They experimented with them. Why work on little pigs and little hamsters when you can work on “pseudo human beings?” But do you see what they came to? The logical consequence of that, says that some lives are more important than others.
The logical consequence of saying that all men are not equal was a terrible civil war in the United States. Even the Supreme Court which validated abortion in 1973, that same court, different people, but the same institution, back in 1847, said a black person is a chattel not a full human being or a citizen. They said then, that a black person is something that should be bought and sold.
Tradition says that all people, all men and women, all human beings are members of the human family and deserve equal protection under the law and are equal in terms of not having their lives taken away from them without due process of law. That has been our tradition that has been your tradition that has been the tradition of the West.
You don’t have to be a ‘holy roller…’
Suddenly, however, we have a utilitarian quality-of-life ethic coming in that says, “I don’t want any burdens. I don’t want anybody that isn’t privileged, planned, or perfect.” You’d better pass a physical. You’d better be of the right race. You’d better be of the right ethnicity. You better be strong and healthy so you can pull a plough. You see what the quality-of-life ethic leads to? It leads to animal husbandry as determining whether you shall live or you shall die. And God help you if you get into quality-of-life ethic and you get old and you get sick. I don’t want to see that happen.
The sanctity of life ethic says we’re all equal. Why? Because we’re all the object of God’s redemptive love. Each one of us, no matter who we are, we’re all of us created by God. Our parents get to act as co-creators with God. That’s what’s so special about conception: two people have acted in cooperation with God as co-creators. We’re all created by God, we’re all the object of his redemptive love, yes we’re all accountable to God in our actions. If you take that away, I challenge you to prove all men, meaning all members of mankind, are equal.
Well then, don’t you have to be a “holy roller” or a religious person to support the pre-born? I hasten to point out that one of the great pro-lifers, Dr. Bernard Nathanson is an absolute atheist. And talk about the fall of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus! Bernard Nathanson ran the biggest abortion clinic in America and was founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Who knows what worked on him? If you read his book he says, “I just kept an open mind. I opened my mind to the data.” Now he believes in the Golden Rule. “Do unto others” and he says that’s the glue that holds society together – do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. When he just got sick of what he was doing, he wrote an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said that he could not escape the notion that he had presided at 60,000 deaths. He then became the head of the Department of Perinatalogy at a big New York hospital. He studied life in the womb, and he used the ultrasonograph which utilized a small screen. Much to his surprise, he got the same blips, the same electronic picture from a baby that’s born, as from a fetus in the womb (that depersonalized word – “fetus”). They’re the same blips scientifically and he connected this observation to the very moment of implantation in the womb when a woman is measurably pregnant. She doesn’t know it yet. She has not missed a period or anything but chemically you could determine a pregnancy. He said under the Golden Rule that little tiny, microscopic, submicroscopic, entity ought to be protected, if only because of the Golden Rule. As I say, you don’t have to believe in religion necessarily to understand that the tradition of the West has been the sanctity of human life.
Tell me the logic and science of saying a little male is part of the female body
Do you remember from history, the alchemists who spent their lives trying to turn base metal into gold and rocks into precious metal? We’ve done that in our time. We have taken what was a crime – the crime of abortion – and turned it into a “blessing,” an act of compassion, something that is really good for our society and for people.
It is incredible but – you know – abortion still hasn’t caught on. I have yet to see a doctor list abortions on his card – eye, ear, nose, throat and abortion. You don’t quite see that. For the abortionist it’s always “health,” “reproductive services” or some other euphemism like “terminate a pregnancy.” Did you ever terminate a mosquito on the back of your neck? “Terminate a pregnancy” – they don’t want to say kill your unborn child, although it is killing and it is an unborn child. They would prefer describing it as a tumour, randomly multiplying cells, or an abscessed tooth or an appendix that’s diseased.
It is biologically a new entity. It’s not a part of the woman’s body. It’s attached to the woman’s body, but it’s not a part of her body. It could be a little male. Tell me the logic and science of saying a little male is a part of a female’s body. The doctor treating a pregnant woman treats two patients. The woman has dominion over her own body, until she gets pregnant. Then there’s another person to be considered.
“Pro-choice,” oh, the games that are played with words. Pro-choice, that has a ring to it. Everyone likes to be pro-choice – that’s pluralism, that’s democracy, that’s options, that’s freedom. What’s the choice? To have a baby? Lady, when you’re pregnant, you have a baby. Now the question is will you let that baby live?
If you make a sudden sound there is a reaction
Do you want to call that question “anti-choice?” There are some things I am “anti.” I try to be “pro” as many things as I can, but I’m against killing children, born or unborn. I’m “anti” that, and I don’t think anybody ought to have the right to exterminate, to starve, to kill, to abuse or to mutilate an unborn child. Let me tell you something, the fetus feels pain. (Let’s use that word – fetus. Let’s depersonalize it, you know, as we called the Germans the “Huns” in World War II and we called the Japanese the “Japs,” you know, or “Kojo” or whatever.) That is a scientific fact. It has been proven again and again. The late Dr. Liley from New Zealand, produced some marvellous pictures and scientific papers which prove that the little fetus, floating like an astronaut in the amniotic fluid, reacts to light in the womb. If you make a sudden sound (this is before viability, before you even feel the little fetus), there’s reaction.
If you inject bitter, sour fluid in the amniotic fluid there’s a reaction. If you inject a sweet fluid there is a different reaction. The little fetus feels pain.
Now the Humane Society would not let you torture a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a rat. You don’t pull the legs off it. It’s not nice, it isn’t in good taste.
An abortion is the ultimate in child abuse. It is violent, by definition. It always happens over somebody’s dead body. That’s abortion.
How do you want to perform the abortion, doctor? A D&C? Should you use the suction machine which literally pulls the child out as a vacuum cleaner does, in pieces? Should you do a hysterotomy, a kind of Caesarean section, and lift the child out and – God help those doctors – many times the child is alive. They abandon and neglect it till it dies from lack of attention. Should you use the salting-out method which injects a saline solution into the amniotic fluid which literally scalds the fetus to death?
Pain, pain, pain, why aren’t we as sensitive to pain in the unborn as we are in animals, or whales, or baby harp seals?
Well, let’s discuss the actual humanity of the pre-born.
Well, let’s discuss the actual humanity of the pre-born. Have you ever been in any skyscrapers where the floors go 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and someone says, “Where’s the 13th floor?” You say, “There isn’t one.” You think for a minute, something is holding up the 14th floor. Sure there’s a 13th floor, but nobody wants to know it’s there. Who wants to spend a night in a room on the 13th floor in some hotel? Or have an office on the 13th. floor? Well, everyone knows it’s there, but you pretend it isn’t, and it works, doesn’t it? That’s mind over matter and we do that with the humanity of the unborn. We pretend it isn’t human. We pretend it isn’t a person. It’s a thing. It’s an “it.” “Product of conception” is what they call it at Planned Parenthood.
I have more respect for people who say, “Sure it’s human. Sure it’s not potential human life because it’s a member of the human life with potential, but it’s in the way. We’ll get rid of it until we assign more value to it.” That’s being intellectually honest.
Continued
