The Right to Life and the Natural Law

Frequently, advocates of abortion argue that we live in a multi- cultural, pluralistic society with a wide spectrum of opinions on many controversial subjects; therefore, no one individual or group should impose its opinion or morality on others. This attitude praises tolerance and diversity as the ultimate virtues and denies the validity of absolute truths and unchanging moral norms. In this view the meaning of good and evil become relative to political trends, the swing of the pendulum, ideological movements, and the will of those in positions of power and influence. Thus the Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in America and changed the traditional, time-honored meanings of good and evil, allowing the killing of pre-born children on the basis of a woman’s right to privacy, reversing 2,000 years of custom, tradition, law, and religion and capitulating to feminist special-interest groups. This view of abortion, however, as a matter of opinion and relative truth avoids the reality of natural law that binds all men and transcends political trends.

To say “You are entitled to your own opinions on abortion; however, you should not try to impose your opinions, morality, or values on others” contains two errors. First, it implies that abortion is simply a matter of opinion rather than a question of truth or an issue of knowledge. Second, the statement suggests that the abortion question is non-debatable, so divisive and controversial a topic that it is not open to an appeal to reason or conscience or tradition or science or the authority of God’s word. In other words, any person who defends the right to life or the unborn or argues that abortion is the killing of innocent, helpless children is accused of dictating like a tyrant, “imposing” or forcing his unwelcome personal views upon unwilling subjects who resent having their own ideas questioned. However, abortion is neither a matter of arbitrary opinion nor heavy-handed dictatorship. For two thousand years, from the beginning of the Roman Empire, the Christian tradition consistently defended the sanctity of life from conception until death. Historian John T. Noonan writes: “As soon as the Christian community in the Roman Empire became vocal (from the 2nd century on) … they emphatically and unanimously proclaimed their complete rejection of abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The grounds were that it was a horrendous evil which would seriously lead to hell.ii

Abortion is also condemned by all of the world’s great religions, not merely by the Catholic Church or the Christian tradition. Vedic spiritual writings from India that date from about 1000 B.C., Hinduism, conservative and orthodox Judaism, and Islam have all acknowledged abortion as an heinous evil and grave crime. Even Hippocrates, a pagan Greek physician, writes in his famous Oath, “I will give no deadly medicine even if asked, nor suggest to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.” This universal consensus about the evil of abortion, then, can hardly be termed a matter of subjective opinion, cultural bias, or relative truth. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of America, Rabbi Marvin S. Antleman, describes the problem of abortion as one of “universal morality,” and he adds, “It is neither a Catholic problem, nor a Jewish problem, nor a Protestant problem. It involves the killing of a human being, an act forbidden by universal commandment.”iii

The basis for this universal agreement on the evil of abortion prior to 1973, however, is not merely religious but also philosophical. All people do not share the same religion, but all people possess the same human nature and the same desire for justice. All people belong to the human race and are endowed with the gift of reason and born with a conscience, an innate moral law that is God-given and natural, the basis for natural law. St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans that the Gentiles, having not the Law–that is, the Ten Commandments as revealed by God to the chosen people of Israel–“do by nature the things contained in the Law.” That is, they honor the moral teachings found in the Ten Commandments: do not steal, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not bear false witness. The explanation for the morality of Gentiles and pagans who have not received the Mosaic Law or the Gospel from the revealed Word of God is the natural law that is “written in their hearts,” as St. Paul says, adding that “their conscience bears witness to them” (Romans 2:14-15). The natural law, then, forms the basis for all morality and virtue, and it establishes the foundation for the higher truths of religion. Thus both the testimony of all the world’s great religions and the universal evidence of the natural law argue that the pro-life position in the abortion controversy is not some eccentric, idiosyncratic, outdated, minority opinion but is founded on moral truth and ancient wisdom based on reason, experience, and authority.

For example, in the Greek tragedy Antigone Sophocles illustrates that the natural law is higher than any individual opinion, man-made law, or arbitrary ruling of a tyrant or political body. In the play King Creon has by decree forbidden anyone to bury the body of Eteocles, the brother of Antigone who fought against the king. In defiance of King Creon’s arbitrary laws that imply that “might is right,” Antigone feels obligated to give her brother the dignity of a decent burial and appeals to the natural law as having greater binding authority than man-made laws that do not conform to justice. As St. Thomas Aquinas explained in his treatise on law, mala lex, nulla lex: a bad or unjust law is no law at all. In her self- defense for breaking the official law of the land, Antigone appeals to

“The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven.
Not now or yesterday they have their being,
But everlastingly, and none can tell
The hour that saw their birth.”iv

The pro-life movement is essentially Antigone’s argument: Roe v. Wade is an unjust law and therefore no law at all. Even though at the time all fifty states forbade or restricted abortion, the Supreme Court, in what Justice Byron White called “an exercise in raw judicial power,” overrode the long-established decisions made for people in their own legislatures. The Supreme Court decision also subverted the whole Western Judeo-Christian moral tradition that forms the basis of American government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created with certain unalienable rights…that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These famous words express the natural law. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” means that the moral law is clear to the light of reason and the voice of conscience. “Unalienable rights” means that humans are endowed by their Creator with natural, God-given rights that no government, tyrant, or man-made law can deny to them. Unalienable rights have priority over government policies and Supreme Court decisions. The legalization or institutionalization of a practice or policy such as abortion-on-demand does not make it moral because the natural law and God’s justice have greater weight than Supreme court decisions. Roe v. Wade is just as immoral, cruel, and inhumane as the Dred Scott decision that sanctioned slavery and classified blacks as the “chattel” or property of slave-owners. As Sophocles’s play Antigone illustrates, when human laws do not conform to the natural law, justice loses its meaning, man presumes to be God, and tyranny in the form of “might is right” or “raw judicial power” violates the most natural rights of all, such as Antigone’s brother’s right to a burial and the pre-born child’s right to life.

To say that the pro-life argument is an attempt to impose, force, or dictate ideas upon others is just as preposterous as referring to the evil of abortion as a private opinion. The pro-life position is an appeal to reason, conscience, justice, and divine authority as the final arbiters of this issue. How reasonable is Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion in the light of the court cases cited by columnist George Will in the June 19, 1983 issue of The Washington Post? His first example shows that under the law the fetus has a right to protection. In Baltimore, a pregnant drug user was placed under court orders to protect the health of the fetus. She was ordered not to inflict harm upon the pre-born child through the use of drugs. However, while the court could hold her liable for impairing the health of the child in her womb, Roe v. Wade allowed her to kill this same child because of her right to privacy. Will’s second example proves that under the law a fetus has a right to inherit property. In Maryland, if the fetus is conceived before the death of the person from whom the property is inherited, the fetus may be a beneficiary. The child that is entitled to an inheritance, however, is not entitled to the right to life if a woman chooses to abort. Will’s third example demonstrates that a fetus has a right to prenatal medical care. He writes, “Malpractice cases are establishing that a child born injured as the result of negligent prenatal medicine can claim violation of rights it had as a fetus.” In another case in 1983 in California a police officer who killed the fetus of a woman in a drug raid was convicted for the killing of the child in the womb. So how can a pre-born child have a right to protection, a right to inherit, and a right to prenatal care and yet have no right to life? Non sequitur. It is illegal to deny the pre-born child pre-natal care and criminal to shoot the child in the womb, yet it is perfectly lawful for a woman to pay an abortionist to destroy the very child that other laws protect. This is the kind of tortured logic that George Orwell in 1984 calls “doublethink” (such as the slogan that “War Is Peace”). Is it reasonable that Dr. Abu Hayat is convicted of malpractice for a botched abortion that resulted in a child’s loss of one arm while his successful killing of the child would prove him innocent of crime? In asking these questions, the pro-life position is not expressing opinion or imposing morality but demonstrating the courage to think, the desire for justice, a love of the truth, and intellectual honesty.

How much thought or logic does the pro-abortion position reflect when it introduces such topics as overpopulation, rape and incest, unwanted children, the right to privacy, choice, and women’s rights into the abortion debate but avoids asking the central moral questions, namely, is the fetus an innocent and living human being? Is the killing of innocent and living human beings wrong? The whole weight of scientific evidence, the discoveries in fetology, and the technology of ultrasound demonstrate the undeniable truth that the pre-born child in the womb is a unique human being. Dr. Bernard Nathanson states, “The life processes begin a fertilization, when the sperm unites with the egg to create a unique genetic entity for each fetus that can never be repeated.” Is abortion the killing of a human being? The procedures of abortion themselves answer this question. In the technique known as Dilation and Curettage (D&C) a sharp loop-shaped knife is inserted, and “the placenta and the child are then dismembered and scraped out into a basin.” In the technique known as Dilation and Evacuation (D&E), “a pliers-like pair of forceps is then used to crush the child’s skull and snap its spine.” In saline Amniocentesis “a solution of concentrated salt is injected. The child breathes in, swallowing the poisonous salt. After an hour of convulsing and struggling, the child is overcome and the mother goes into labor. About an hour later she will deliver a corpse.”v Is the child innocent? The pre-born child, like the newborn infant, is helpless, weak, dependent, and in need of protection and nourishment. No one could be more innocent. The pro-abortion argument ignores these facts and self- evident truths, rejects common sense, evades reality, and suppresses the truth.

Is it just to deprive women considering an abortion truthful information regarding the fetal development of their children or to deny them a full knowledge of abortion techniques and their consequences? Is it reasonable to refer to abortion as a “safe, legal” procedure when it has caused a multitude of problems from infertility to infection to an increase in the risk of cancer, and is it honest to speak of abortion as “safe” when it often leads to such psychological disorders as post-abortion-stress syndrome that produces guilt, anger, despair, and nightmares? Is it fair- minded of the media to suppress the visual evidence of aborted babies and conceal from the public the bloodshed and violence of the Holocaust while the media graphically represent wars in all their carnage? How much sense does it make when abortion advocates like Planned Parent- hood claim that the natural events of pregnancy and childbirth are more dangerous to a woman’s health than the violent, unnatural act of abortion–the propaganda that killing children is safer than having them?

All these questions appeal to common sense, the power of reason, the natural law, and the dictates of conscience. They are not the questions of extreme religious bigots who are manipulating evidence to superimpose their narrow, unenlightened views and idiosyncratic personal opinions upon a pluralistic society. Rather they are bona fide and legitimate questions that honor the universal moral norms of civilization that recognize the blessing of children and the sanctity of human life. They are questions that expose the fallacies, contradictions, unreasonableness, propaganda, and immorality of the pro-abortion mentality.

If the pro-life position is firmly rooted in the natural law, in the inherited wisdom of the human race, and in ancient moral traditions, what is the basis or foundation of the pro-abortion view? First, it is rooted in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, a decision that is no more than 20 years old compared to the eternal nature of the natural law. Roe v. Wade has been consistently compared to the 1857 Dred Scott decision that legalized slavery by denying the personhood of black slaves just as Roe v. Wade rejects the personhood of the unborn. Roe v. Wade based a woman’s right to an abortion on the so-called “right to privacy” that allows a woman and her physician to determine the death of the pre-born child without any choice or involvement on the part of fathers or grandparents. Roe v. Wade reversed 200 years of American moral tradition and 2,000 years of Western civilization. It deemed all state laws forbidding or restricting abortions as “unconstitutional,” thus legislating new law and inventing a new morality instead of interpreting the Constitution as the Court was designed to do.

The pro-abortion position is also rooted in the politics of radical feminism that attacks the dignity and vocation of motherhood and blames patriarchy as the root of all evil, interpreting all of history and culture as the conspiracy of men to oppress women. Radical feminism does not acknowledge the inherent, natural God-given distinctions between men and women as complementary differences designed for the enrichment of husbands and wives and for the moral and emotional well-being of children who need the influence of both a mother and a father. Radical feminism argues that women have a right to their own body, disregarding the truth that the child in the womb is a unique being with a separate life and destiny of its own. Radical feminism is an ideology that attempts to alter the very structure of reality and to re-invent nature as it seeks to separate women from their gender, biology, and motherhood in the name of a false equality and a distorted sense of freedom. The politics of radical feminism that advocates the abortion pill RU-486 (“the first human pesticide”) and also promotes the Freedom of Choice Act (abortion-on-demand) that prohibits any form of restriction such as 24- hour waiting periods or parental notification also promotes lesbianism, witnessed by the leadership of the National Organization for Women.

The pro-abortion view, however, has roots deeper than Roe v. Wade and radical feminism. It can be traced to the eugenics movement of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and the author of the notion that only the “fit” should live and the “unfit” be eliminated. By “fit” Sanger meant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and by “unfit” she meant Jews, blacks, Slavic peoples, and Italian immigrants. In her crusade to promote birth control, sterilization, and abortion her mottoes were “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds” and “No Gods, No Masters”–phrases that appeared in magazines that she founded.vi In a letter she wrote to Dr. Clarence Gamble dated December 1939, she wrote, “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man to straigh- ten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious mem- bers.”vii In her magazine Birth Control Review she wrote, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically unfit.”viii

Sanger’s eugenics movement in the early 20th-century clearly influenced Hitler’s ideas of the pure Aryan race and Hitler’s eugenics policies of exterminating Jews and Poles as “vermin” or “lice” that contaminated the human race. Many black leaders today view abortion as a continuation of the eugenics movement and have referred to abortion as “black genocide.” Indeed, of the 1.6 million abortions in the United States each year, the greatest victims are black children. Wherever the ideology of eugenics takes control, the methods of population control always involve contraception, sterilization, and abortion. In a 1942 conversation Hitler said, “In view of the large families of the native population, it could only suit us if the girls and women there had as many abortionsaspossible. Activetradeincontraceptionsoughttobeactually encouraged in the Eastern territories, as we could not possibly have the slightest interest in increasing the non-German population.”ix

Beyond Roe v. Wade, radical feminism, and the eugenics programs of Margaret Sanger lie other historical precedents for unlimited killing of children. In the Old Testament the Bible lists child sacrifice, along with homosexuality, as one of the abominations practiced by people inhabiting the land of Canaan which the Israelites were to conquer. Likewise, in the Punic Wars the Romans waged war against the Carthaginians and their god Baal, who also required child sacrifices. In the Aztec empire of Mexico in the year 1487, the ruler Tlacaellel promoted the practice of human sacrifice to the devil god of the Mexicans called Huitzilopochtli. Every year the law of the Aztec empire required a thousand sacrifices to this god in every town with a temple. The total number was at least 50,000 sacrifices a year, and one early Mexican historian estimates that one out of every five children was a victim of this demonic practice.x Every day in America some 4,000 children are killed in the abortion mills of the nation, and every year some 1.6 million children are sacrificed on the altars of pleasure, greed, selfishness, convenience, and ideology. Despite its legal status and the support of such organizations as Planned Parenthood, the National Organization of Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Medical Association, abortion in 20th-century America is just as savage and demonic as the practices of the Canaanites, Carthaginians, and Aztecs.

The background of the history of abortion and its precedents are not as respectable or flattering as the terms “pro-choice,” “right to privacy,” and “equal rights” suggest. Abortion has no venerable, honorable tradition in religion, law, or custom. Unlike the natural law, whose defenders include great minds like Sophocles, St. Paul, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Founding Fathers of America, Edmund Burke, and C. S. Lewis, abortion is related to radical left-wing movements, totalitar- ian policies, and demonic practices. The Supreme Court’s exercise of “raw judicial power,” radical feminism’s will to power, and the eugenics policies of Sanger and Hitler all attempt to substitute ideology for truth and to subvert the ancient moral order with wild-eyed, unthinkable propositions.

Ideology, as Russell Kirk explains in The Politics of Prudence, regards politics as “a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature,” and he remarks that ideology opposes “religion, tradition, custom, convention, prescription, and old constitutions.”xi Whether it is Communist ideology that denies man’s spiritual, religious nature or feminist ideology that rejects the maternal, nurturing nature of womanhood or abortion ideology that does not recognize the reality or personhood of the pre-born child, ideology defies the truth of things and the structure of reality. It attempts to remold human nature according to its own pre-conceived, arbitrary definitions and fabrications, and it invents new language, jargon, and euphemisms to change reality. Thus the reality of a mother or father paying someone to destroy their own flesh and blood becomes the euphemism of “the right to choice.” The medical procedure of crushing the pre-born child’s skull or ripping apart its arms and legs is euphemistically called “termination of pregnancy.” Abortuaries that kill babies and then dispose of them in waste baskets and rubbish dumpsters prefer to call themselves “women’s health services.” This transformation of reality through the manipulation of language is called “newspeak” by George Orwell in 1984. It is the age-old technique of making evil appear good and good evil through verbal ingenuity. Thus words like clean-up, removal, evacuation, cleansing, and disinfection were used in Nazi Germany to conceal the reality of extermination and genocide, and terms like “fetal tissue,” “protoplasmic rubbish,” “fetal-placental unit,” and “product of preg- nancy” become the “newspeak” of abortion rhetoric.xii

Ideology, as Russell Kirk noted, not only attempts to transform human nature but also to redesign society–to restructure it by elimination of whole classes of people as in the French Revolution that attacked the aristocracy and the clergy, by the annihilation of certain races of people as in Margaret Sanger’s eugenics movement and Hitler’s Germany, and by the wholesale slaughter of the innocents in a world that accepts abortion as a way of life. In the name of promoting a brave new world in the march toward utopia, ideology has overturned the most venerable institutions of civilization. It has corrupted the practice of medicine, the meaning of law, the purpose of education, and the integrity of the family.

The Hippocratic Oath is no longer honored, the words of the 14th Amendment (“nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”) are contradicted, the National Education Association has committed itself to the abortion lobby, and the family is in a state of crisis.

The ideology that has condoned the killing of innocent children has also contributed to the unprecedented rise in child abuse, to a view of children as financial burdens and inconveniences, to the rise of day-care centers where children are abandoned for most of their waking hours, and to the popularity of euthanasia and Dr. Kevorkian’s death machine. This substitution of ideology for natural law, religious truth, and ancient wisdom has produced trends and practices that destroy the family and undermine civilization. Former U.S. Education Secretary, William Bennett has formulated a list of cultural indicators that reveal this transformation of culture and society since 1960. Here are the facts: there has been a 560% increase in violent crime, a 419% increase in illegitimate births, a quadrupling of divorces, a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes, more than a 200% increase in the teenage suicide rate, and a drop of almost 80 points in the SAT scores.xiii

Ideology has attempted to re-invent human nature and to reconstruct society by altering language, changing laws, and eradicating old traditions and norms; the wreckage of a world in ruins is the result. The aftermath of legalized abortion, like the fallout from the horrors of the French Revolution, Communism, and the Holocaust, is a moral wasteland in which nothing is sacred or revered and in which good and evil lose their meanings. Evil in all its insidious forms multiplies. While ideologues promote the abortion pill RU-486 and discuss overpopulation, Western nations are barely replacing themselves and are suffering the problems of under-population. While the economies of many nations face severe financial problems and tax burdens, whole generations of workers, consumers, taxpayers, school children, and human talent–a society’s greatest resources–are being destroyed through abortion and depleting nations of the power of renewal. While parents clamor for school choice and tuition vouchers or elect to home school their children, the National Education Association supports abortion rights and the killing of the very children who constitute the future of education. This is the madness and senselessness of ideology: it is utterly out of contact with reality.

“By their fruits you shall know them.” The fruits of abortion are cruelty, lies, greed, selfishness, self-destruction, and a culture of death that has led to the cancerous multiplication of evil. We have progressed from illegal abortion to legalized abortion, from the Freedom of Choice Act that ensures unlimited abortion-on-demand with no restrictions to RU-486 and partial birth abortions (infanticide). We have progressed from the view that abortion is sinful, immoral, and evil to the idea that abortion is a right and a way of life around which people organize their futures and careers, an argument that appeared in the Casey decision in 1992. We have progressed from teaching the virtue of chastity that eliminates the need for abortions to providing sex education courses that encourage “safe sex,” premarital sexuality, and the need for legalized abortion to deal with the problem of unwanted pregnancies. The words of Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France apply perfectly to America since 1973: “France has bought undignified calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings. France has bought poverty with crime.”xiv America too has bought poverty–the poverty of the culture of death and the poverty of a moral wasteland–and paid for it by wasting the richest of gifts and its most valuable treasure, her own children.

In the 19th century a French visitor to America, Alexis de Tocque- ville, wrote a classic work entitled Democracy in America, in which he offered this prophetic statement: “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” In August of 1993 a Polish visitor from Rome, Karol Wojty_a (Pope John Paul II) also visited the United States and made a similar prophetic statement:

The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless ones. The best traditions of your land presume respect for those who cannot defend themselves. If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then, America, defend life! All the great causes that are yours today will have meaning only to the extent that you guarantee the right to life and protect the human person. These great minds were not imposing their French or Polish or 19th century or religious opinions on modern Americans but appealing to the natural law, to the light of reason, to the power of conscience, and to the love of truth found in all men and women of good will.

NOTES

14 Life and Learning IX
i. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1967)

pp. 107-08.

ii. John T. Noonan, Jr., ed. The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972) p. 8.

iii. Brian Clowes, “Choice and the Jewish People” in HLI Reports II/5, p. 9. iv. Sophocles, Antigone, tr. Campbell, as quoted in Catholic Morality by John

Laux (Rockford: Tan, 1990) p. 10.
v. Bernard Nathanson, The Silent Scream (videotape).

vi. Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, Blessed Are the Barren (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991) pp. 9, 7.

vii. Ibid., p. 18.

viii. Ibid., p. 9.

ix. Clarissa Henry and Marc Hillel, Of Pure Blood, tr. Eric Mossbacher (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976) p. 149, as quoted in Rachel Weeping: The Case Against Abortion by James T. Burtchaell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982) p. 174.

x. Warren Carroll, Our Lady of Guadalupe (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 1983) p. 8.

xi. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) pp. 1, 3.

xii. Burtchaell, p. 152.
xiii. Quoted by Kenneth D. Whitehead, “Family Values, Moral Values” in

Catholic League Newsletter (July-August 1993) pp. 7-8.

xiv. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1986) p. 124.

___
http://www.uffl.org/vol%209/kalpakgian9.pdf