All Who Support Slavery Are Free;
And All Who Support Abortion Are Alive
Some time has passed since Canada disgraced itself by conferring its highest citizen honour upon Henry Morgentaler, a doctor who has devoted his entire adult life to legalizing abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy as a political right. Ironically, at the press conference for this nefarious presentation, he offered the opinion that abortion has helped to reduce violent crime, because “there are people out there who would otherwise have been murdered.” In the days that followed, there were a few cries of moral outrage concerning who, exactly, was doing the murdering and a number of distinguished citizens returned their Order of Canada pins. But the spectacle of erudite leaders locked in passionate public debate, even courageously risking their political careers for profoundly held moral beliefs on this disturbing matter, was not to be.
What is true of our leaders is even more true of the citizenry. There is today such angry polarization on the question of abortion that consensus is considered impossible and if Canadians share anything, it is a sense of relief that this and similar morally difficult topics (gay “marriage” is another) are now routinely decided by the edicts of courts, the activities of which seem aimed precisely at deflecting genuine public debate.
And that is why we need to ask: what happened? How did we change from a people who once so valued human life that we criminalized abortion (with only a few exceptions having to do with rape or a real medical threat to the life of the mother), to a people who now permit and publicly subsidize the right to terminate human life in the womb at any stage of pregnancy up to the moment of birth?
Some will immediately object to the phrase “human life” on the ground that many courts have declared that a “fetus” is not a “person” or a “human being” until it is “born alive.” That is true, but I think the facts will expose the bogus use of these terms for the following reasons.
Even if we all were to agree that what a pregnant woman is carrying is not a fully-developed “person” or “human being” we nevertheless cannot deny that in every case, what she is carrying is alive, for if this were not so, there would be no need for anyone to claim a right to “terminate” their pregnancy. In other words, we are talking about actual life and not in any degree (as Justice Bertha Wilson so archly declared) a “potential life.” And so now, once we have secured what must be unavoidable agreement on this point, we are then forced to agree that in every case, absolutely, the life a pregnant woman is carrying, is a human life. No one believes she is carrying a developing puppy or a swan.
So having come this far, and only once we decide to face this singular truth as honestly as possible, any reasonably informed person will be led to the ultimate question of whether or not it is morally acceptable for one person in full possession of his or her own human life to terminate another human life at any stage of development.
Reasonably informed? By any measure, most people who adamantly support abortion are grievously uninformed. They simply don’t know how we arrived at the new moral ground we seem to be standing upon; what changes in the law have enabled such a strange about-face; or what the current practices of abortion are that this very recent thinking has permitted.
The answers, explored below, are each followed by a plain question that readers are challenged to think deeply about and to answer as honestly as possible.
1. How we got this way – the change
in our moral thinking
Until about the middle of the 19th century, all philosophers, and all religious and political leaders in the Western world, accepted as obvious the idea that we live – and ought to live – under a common moral bubble, so to speak. Which is to say that moral standards were considered public by their very nature, rather than private. The mere idea that morality should be something sourced in a personal point of view aimed at serving the purposes of solitary individuals or, even more fickle, something constructed to suit the occasion, had always been considered absurd, if not a sign of moral sickness.
But with the advance of egalitarian democracy came an increasingly shrill demand for individual rights divorced from duties and, with this, a weakening of shared moral consensus and an entirely new idea: that each human being lives under his or her own private moral bubble. The most famous articulation of this historically bizarre alteration in the public conception of morality was by J.S. Mill in his little booklet On Liberty in 1859. Within certain confusing limits, he basically argued that morality is a private matter and the only case for concern is when we directly harm someone else by our conduct. This is today called Mill’s “harm principle” and it has rapidly become the most common ideal of what it means to live a free and moral life. Indeed, Canada’s own Supreme Court, in R. vs. Labaye (2005), in which a citizen complained that it was indecent and against community standards to allow a swingers’ sex club in a residential neighbourhood, ruled in favour of the club and in doing, so wrote that “The philosophical underpinnings of the … harm-based approach are found in the liberal theories of J. S. Mill. This philosopher argued that the only purpose for which state power can be rightfully exercised over a member of the community is to prevent harm to others.”
And so it has come to pass by edict of our highest court that there is no longer a common moral bubble; that we have no duty to be concerned for others, nor for the greater good, nor for society as something comprised of real relationships that are far more than the sum of their individual parts.
First Question: How is it possible for a civilization to thrive and for a people to arrive at any consensus of the common good when the most fundamental questions are to be decided solely by self-interested individuals without regard to the common good?
2. The flimsy legal right
Unfettered abortion in Canada has been possible since 1988, when the existing law placing minimal conditions on abortion was struck down as “unconstitutional.” Several efforts were subsequently made to replace it with a compromise law that failed due to a tie vote in the Senate (where 23 senators did not bother to vote at all). The result is that Canadian law does not presently say that abortion is right or wrong. It says nothing at all – even though no poll has ever shown that a majority of Canadians accept unlimited abortion on demand. Quite the reverse. Strong majorities oppose exactly that.
The conjuring began the moment judges decided, mostly for radical feminist reasons having to do with the growing demand for individual freedom and moral autonomy (as explained above), that a woman ought to have a “right” to abort. This meant that all unborn human life had to be redefined as a valueless thing without humanity, or personhood, so as to remove it from legal and public concern. As it happened, the legal category of non-personhood was well-known. It is a very old device introduced throughout history whenever states, tribes, or courts want to justify the elimination of an enemy. As such, it was easy to adapt for the purpose of facilitating abortion.
For example, slave-holding regimes (Canada and the United States were no exception) have always defined their slaves as less than fully human to make enslavement morally acceptable. They even developed a separate category of laws to define and defend the master-slave relationship and to justify the unequal rights and obligations of each party. Jews, and many other groups in the horrific Nazi and Soviet regimes, were defined as non-persons, or more aggressively, as sub-human (if not as vermin or some such despicable creature).
Such linguistic and moral contortionism and the official justifications for it have been almost exactly duplicated by the abortion regimes in all Western nations and this parallel is far more than an analogy. For with the sole distinction of the existence of the victim either inside or outside the womb, there is no difference between a declaration of non-personhood that creates a class of born-alive victims that enables, sustains and makes invisible to its perpetrators a regime of chattel slavery and a declaration of non-personhood that creates a class of alive but not-yet-born imminent victims, that enables, sustains and makes invisible to its perpetrators the abortion regimes currently defended in the name of egalitarian democracy.
The reasoning produced in Canada for granting a pregnant women a “right” to decide the life or death fate of her unborn child, a right that has priority even over the will of society at large (and, not incidentally, even over the will of the child’s own father), is that if the mother does not want her child, then the “security” of the mother’s person (which now means her psychological “health” as a self-flourishing and freely-choosing individual) has been put at risk (ironically, also by her own will). She is, therefore, said to be justified in protecting herself from such a threat by demanding the tax-funded professional removal of the offending object, or enemy, from her womb.
The same sort of legal and verbal legerdemain was used in the United States, where the justifying ground for this practice was not security of the mother’s person, but her right to “privacy.” There, if the life within is unwanted by its mother, it is considered a kind of enemy “occupying” the mother’s womb without her consent, an illegal trespasser invading her privacy.
This is a very brief overview of the constitutional artifice required in both countries to justify ending human life in the womb. Note that in both cases, whether with respect to the artificial grounds of security or privacy, what I have called a developing human life, once considered sacred and of the highest value in itself, and without regard to the opinion of the moment of any other human being, may now by the sole and god-like edict of its own mother be declared of no value whatsoever – or, of a supreme value, as she decides, calling, if necessary, upon the unlimited and heroic resources of the medical profession and the state (and the taxpayer) to save its life.
Question Two: Can it be right and good for any civilization that the most fundamental question – whether or not another human life has value and so, whether it is to be protected or terminated – should be decided by the private and changeable will of a single individual?
3. The practice of abortion
Now let us ask what is actually being done to unwanted human life. How many unborn lives are ended? How large are they? What are the methods? Once abortion enthusiasts learn a little of the bald truth, many are horrified, backpedal a lot, and start to suggest ways to severely restrict abortion, if not to end it entirely. This grisly aspect will only be touch upon here. However, those who want a more detailed description of how abortions are performed may want to read the relevant chapter of The War Against the Family (which can be obtained directly from www.williamgairdner.com).
Suffice it to say here that of the average of approximately 106,000 abortions performed annually in Canada over the past decade (that’s about 290 per day, or 1,060,000 per decade, the vast majority of whom would have been perfectly healthy citizens), most are in the first trimester of pregnancy. The routine methods of abortion at this stage involve injecting saline solutions that burn and kill babies, to scraping the womb and so on. Many people who don’t know much about this subject say abortion is acceptable because they falsely believe all abortions take place during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and that this involves getting rid of what they consider to be a microscopic cluster of valueless human cells.
But many are changing their minds because the debate surrounding abortion has been altering rapidly not, as we often think, due to religious or moral claims, but because of neo-natal science, neurology, DNA studies, cell biology, CAT scanning, surgery on infants in the womb and so on. We now know that a human heart starts beating around 21 days, because we can see it and hear it; that a human life in the womb has a distinct and unique personal genetic endowment (and thus is, in every strictly biological sense, a genetically complete and unique, if undeveloped, human life); and studies with tiny digital cameras show clearly terrified second and third-trimester babies trying desperately to escape the vacuum tube (or other devices) inserted into their mother’s wombs to suck away their lives or tear off their limbs. And who has not seen the incredible photo of Baby Samuel’s tiny baby hand reaching out of a small incision in his mother’s belly to grasp the surgeon’s finger during an operation to save his life? This itself is a bizarre situation whereupon, once taken outside the womb for surgery such a child is considered a full person with all normal human and civil rights (because he is “born alive”). But when put back in the womb to finish gestation, he again disappears as a human being, or person, and is without value, or any such defence or rights until eventually born alive once again.
These are simply facts. And so is the distressing reality that about 10 per cent of all abortions in Canada and the United States (perhaps 100,000 annually there) take place in the second trimester. At this point, many unborn babies are about 30 cm long, and weigh up to a kilogram. At this 5-6 month stage of development (when the human life to be terminated looks in every way like a small human being), there are often “evacuation” problems and so the most efficient and “safe” way to get a sizeable baby out of an unripe womb is in pieces, by first ripping off his arms and legs and crushing his head with forceps for easy extraction, after which all the pieces are counted and thrown into a garbage pail. Those who want to read a viscerally upsetting description by an American physician of his real-life accidental encounter with recently aborted babies that fell out of a hospital garbage bag from a truck onto the street in front of him, should read the essay, “The Street of the Dead Fetuses” on my website. Be prepared. And those who want to see shocking photos of babies acid-burned to death or torn apart in this way can simply Google “abortion photos” and a lot of upsetting websites will pop up.
There is more. About 40 U.S. states have restricted or banned third-trimester abortions because unborn children at this stage are very large – about 50 cm long and between 6 and 8 pounds. Canada has no law whatsoever against late abortions, and it is true that where they are allowed, many abortionists will refuse to perform them. But when it comes to women who want to get rid of their large second- or third-trimester babies, there is an especially gruesome practice called “partial-birth abortion” (formally called “intact dilation and extraction”) that I am obliged to describe briefly here, because although it was successfully banned by former president George W. Bush, president Bill Clinton before him refused outright to ban it, and it may come into use again under Barack Obama’s presidency. It is impossible to verify if, where, or when this method has been used or may now be in use in Canada. But there is nothing to stop it and no one is telling. In the last year for which I have seen numbers for America, the National Coalition of Abortion Providers estimated that there were 4,000-5,000 partial-birth procedures in the U.S. (New York Times, Feb. 26, 1997).
For this method, the unborn child’s position in the womb is manipulated until he can be pulled out of the birth canal feet first. When the abortionist sees the back of the baby’s head, he stops pulling, takes a pair of scissors and jabs them into the back of the baby’s skull. Observers have said that at that moment the child startles, as if falling. The abortionist then inserts a vacuum hose and sucks out the brains. He must do this before the child leaves the birth canal alive and is transformed by law into a person, possibly exposing the medical staff to charges of murder. An alternative method is by “disarticulating at the neck,” which means the abortionist manually breaks the baby’s neck prior to extraction. Then home for supper goes the doctor.
Question Three: Once a people is aware of such practices, which necessarily implicate all citizens morally because they are not forbidden by the laws of the people and are paid for through the tax system, is it possible for any reasonable person to say that these practices are right and good or that a country that sanctions them is right and good? And if they are evil, as they clearly seem to be, is not a country that refuses to forbid them also evil?
In any civilization such questions must be asked. By the answers, we shall be known.
William Gairdner, PhD, is a former professor of English literature at York University, a successful businessman, and Olympic athlete. He is the author of: The Critical Wager, Constitutional Crack-Up, On Higher Ground, After Liberalism, Canada’s Founding Debates, The Trouble With Democracy, Rethinking Track and Field, OH, OH, CANADA!, The Trouble With Canada and War Against the Family
