ABORTION AND IDEOLOGY

Raymond Dennehy A survey of the justifications advanced by scientists, philosophers,

and other members of the elite class, such as judges, to justify the legalization of induced abortion reveals that they have abandoned rational inquiry in favor of ideology. For although their arguments have the trappings of the objectivity of scientific method and other marks of rational inquiry, it is clear that they subvert reason and manipulate evidence to actualize an ideal that they perceive to be above all rational criticism. This enslavement to ideology is but a reenactment of what happened in ·Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to the detriment of science and philosophy, not to mention the degradation of human life. Sophistical Arguments for Abortion Two months after the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Roe v. Wade1 when the public debate on abortion was white hot, a political cartoon appeared in the editorial section of what is now called The San jose Mercury News, depicting two departed souls standing on a cloud and sporting the obligatory wings. All about them tiny fetuses, also sporting wings, are standing. One of the souls says to the other: "Fetus, Fetus. I never knew sq manykids named 'Fetus'." 1 A couple of days later, the paper printed a letter to the editor from a representative of a local feminist group complaining about the cartoon's "insensitivity to women who have had abortions." A plausible interpretation of the cartoonist's motive is that, rather than intending to bruise anyone's feelings, his aim was to caricature what was then the recent entry of "fetus" into everyday language as a replacement for the term unborn baby. Thereby hangs a tale. The success of the pro-abortion movement depended on diverting the public's attention from the fact that induced abortion is the direct killing of an innocent human being. Replacing "unborn baby" with "fetus" was a good start, for the latter term is sufficiently abstract to deflect public consideration from the homicidal consequences. But

1

San]ose.News (San)ose, CA, March 12, 1973).

265

266

RAYMOND DENNEHY

changing the p~blic's thinking about abortion would require more th,::o making "fetus" the preferred term in everyday discourse. It would : be necessary to spread a fog of confusion over the positions of sci~ on the status of the fetus. Bernard Nathanson writes that, before\ conversion from pro-abortion advocate to champion of human life,·t\t and his colleagues worked hard to convince people that it is impos{ .... to determine when human life begins by insisting that it is a m().~4 .• theological, or philosophical question, not a scientific one.2 Planned Parenthood, under the leadership of the late Ar·:-,;~ Guttmacher, was apparently so devoutly committed to this proje~t'lf: disinformation that neither he nor his organization was embarr~{ by contradicting themselves. For example, before he had becon{_,. promoter of abortion on demand, Guttmacher wrote the following: .>r-· We of today know that man is born of sexual union; that h~ · starts life as an embryo within the body of the female; and tha~ the embryo is formed from the fusion of two single cells, the: ovum an~ the sperm. This all seems so simple and evident to us that it is difficult to picture a time when it was not part of common knowledge.3 He wrote these words in 1933. And as late as 1963, Planri~dL Parenthood proclaimed essentially the same position in its offi~i~l~' pamphlet: "Is birth control an abortion? Definitely not. An abortjqii.{i kills the life of a baby after it has begun .... " But by 1973, Guttmach~~t:§~ writings show that he had apparently undergone a conversion: · -Scientifically all we know is that a living human sperm unites;:. with a living human egg; if they were not living there could be no~i union .... Does human life begin before or with the union of the··~

Bernard Nathanson, "Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist," http://www. aboutabortions.com/Confess.htn; also see his book, Aborting America (Garden;:~] City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979). 3 Quoted in Robert Marshall &Charles Donovan, Blessed Are the Barren: The SoCieiW Policy ofPlanned Parenthood (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 294-95., 2

ABORTION AND IDEOLOGY

267

gametes, or with birth, or at a time intermediate? I, for one, confess I do not know.• What could explain this change of thought? New discoveries in embryology since 1963? Hardly! All the evidence since then only confirms the conclusion that from the moment of conception a new individual human life is present. This gestational agnosticism takes various forms. The practice of decking oneself out in the clothes of science while speaking the language of everyday people seems to exert a powerful attraction on those in the pro-abortion ranks. For example, Psychology Today offered a fascinating account of life in the womb. The article's blurb asserted enticingly: "Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a 32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, and even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same."5 However, if the researchers interviewed by the author of those words have anything to say about the debate, it will stay the same. Their responses indicate that they would prefer the cozy and secure habitat of politically correct ambiguity. For example, johns Hopkins psychologist, janet DiPietro doubts that fetal research sheds any light at all on the abortion debate: The essence of the abortion debate is: When does life begin? Some people believe it begins at conception; the other extreme believes that it begins after the baby is born, and there's a group in the middle that believes it begins at around 24 or 25 weeks, when a fetus can live outside the womb, though it needs a lot of help to do so. Up to about 25 weeks, whether or not it's sucking its thumb or has personality or all that, the fetus cannot survive outside of its mother. So is that life-- or not? That is a moral, ethical, and religious question, not one for science. Things can behave and

4

5

Quoted in Blessed Are the Barren, p. 295. Psychology Today, October, 1998, p. 44.

268

RAYMOND DENNEHY

not be alive. Right-to-lifers may say that this research prove~ that a fetus is alive, but it does not. It cannot. 6 · Heidelise Als, a Harvard University psychologist, offers another' example saying: ····· Fetal research only changes the abortion debate for people who think that life starts at some magical point. If you believe that life starts at conception, then you don't need the proof of fetal behavior. Your circumstances and personal beliefs have much more impact on the decision .... 7 T; be sure, data that suggest or even establish that the fetli~ responds to its mother's voice with a lowered heart-beat or th~t?J€ might even dream does not allow the conclusion that it is a hum~·~ being. One might obtain the same kind of data from the obsery~~ responses of animal fetuses in utero. But for a scientist to speak·fif request who concede that induced abortion is the deliberate killing 6.(-ii human being/7 the abortion ideology could never have found sod.a.tt: political, and juridical acceptance if the evidence from the scienc~)g~ embryology had not been flouted in favor of claims that the mome'9~l when human life begins is unclear and subject to honest dispute am()h~ scientists, theologians, and philosophers, as in Roe v. Wade, whiS~ claims that human life/personhood comes into being at som-g.1 designated time after conception. In any case, an ideology ha~i,:,~;, dynamism, a mad energy generated by commitment to an ideal fq~i: humankind, that persuades the ideologue that the highest of mor~l~ imperatives is to do whatever is necessary for the realization of tl:i~t; ideal, even if that means transcending the injunctions of truth irl~ science and philosophy while maintaining the needed fa) ideologist finds himself in the position of having to admit that:' pragmatism is a true philosophical proposition about humatl;,:~ knowledge. But this conclusion is incompatible with any claim that·::: pragmatism is not ideology; instead, it must be the philosophical : foundation of ideology. An ironic outcome this: an ideological idea of..f: ontological truth as really social truth rests on a non-ideological idea of : truth about the nature of knowledge.36 ·· The internal contradiction of the sociologism embedded in ideology ·-· thus fails to dissolve ontology, which remains independent of epistemic Babette Francis, "Is Gender a Social Construct or a Biological Imperative?" Family Futures: Issues in Research and Policy, ih Australian Institute of family Studies Conference, Sydney (July 24-26, 2000), p.2. 35 Sherry Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics ofCulture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), Ch 2. 36 Martin, Metaphysics and Ideology, p. 79, n.l. 34

ABORTION AND IDEOLOGY

283

claims. On the contrary, epistemology depends on things; ontology precedes epistemology:·things are the measure ofmind; mind is not the measure of things. That independence refutes, above all, the self. destructive statement, "all knowledge is socially conditioned." Philosophy's task is not to change the world but to discover the truth of things in the world, for example, the truth about unborn humans, as the premise for how they ought to be treated.