Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  The question of whether abortion is the termination of a human life is a relatively simple one. It has been described as a question requiring no more than a knowledge of high school biology. There may be doubt that high school biology courses are clear on the subject these days, but consider what we know. The male sperm and the female egg each contains twenty-three chromosomes. Upon fertilization, a single cell results containing forty-six chromosomes, which is what all humans have, including, of course, the mother and the father. But the new organism’s forty-six chromosomes are in a different combination from those of either parent; the new organism is unique. It is not an organ of the mother’s body but a different individual. This cell produces specifically human proteins and enzymes from the beginning. Its chromosomes will heavily influence its destiny until the day of its death, whether that death is at the age of ninety or one month after conception.

  The cell will multiply and develop, in accordance with its individual chromosomes, and, when it enters the world, will be recognizably a human baby. From single-cell fertilized egg to baby to teenager to adult to old age to death is a single process of one individual, not a series of different individuals replacing each other. It is impossible to draw a line anywhere after the moment of fertilization and say that before this point the creature is not human but after this point it is. It has all the attributes of a human from the beginning, and those attributes were in the forty-six chromosomes with which it began. Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate and biophysicist, is quoted as having estimated that “the amount of information contained in the chromosomes of a single fertilized human egg is equivalent to about a thousand printed volumes of books, each as large as a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica”1 Such a creature is not a blob of tissue or, as the Roe opinion so infelicitously put it, a “potential life.” As someone has said, it is a life with potential.

  It is impossible to say that the killing of the organism at any moment after it originated is not the killing of a human being. Yet there are those who say just that by redefining what a human being is. Redefining what it means to be a human being will prove dangerous in contexts other than abortion. One of the more primitive arguments put forward is that in the embryonic stage, which lasts about two months after conception, the creature does not look human. One man said to me: “Have you ever seen an embryo? It looks like a guppy.” A writer whose work I greatly respect refers to “the patently inhuman fetus of four weeks.” A cartoonist made fun of a well-known anti-abortion doctor by showing him pointing to the microscopic dot that is the zygote and saying, “We’ll call him Timmy.” It is difficult to know what the appearance of Timmy (or Theresa) has to do with the humanity of the fetus. I suspect that appearance is made an issue because the more recognizably a baby the fetus becomes, the more our emotions reject the idea of destroying it. But those are uninstructed emotions, not emotions based on a recognition of what the fetus is from the beginning.

  Other common arguments are that the embryo or fetus is not fully sentient, or that it cannot live outside the mothers womb, or that the fetus is not fully a person unless it is valued by its mother. These seem utterly insubstantial arguments. A newborn is not fully sentient, nor is a person in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease. There are people who would allow the killing of the newborn and the senile, but I doubt that is a view with general acceptance. At least not yet. We will see that our culture may be on the road to accepting such killings. Equally irrelevant to the discussion is the fact that the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. Neither can a baby survive without the nurture of others, usually the parents. Why dependency, which lasts for years after birth, should justify terminating life is unexplainable. No more apparent is the logic of the statement that a fetus is a person only if the mother values its life. That is a tautology: an abortion is justified if the mother wants an abortion.

  My wife dealt with a hypothetical in a way that to me seems decisively to rebut all of these abortion justifications. In discussing abortion, James Q. Wilson wrote: “The moral debate over abortion centers on the point in the development of the fertilized ovum when it has acquired those characteristics that entitle it to moral respect.“2 He did not, apparently, think the cell resulting from conception was so entitled. Wilson used an example of when moral respect persists in difficult circumstances: “An elderly man who has been a devoted husband and father but who now lies comatose in a vegetative state barely seems to be alive, … yet we experience great moral anguish in deciding whether to withdraw his life support.“3 My wife was moved to observe: “But suppose the doctor told us that in eight months the man would recover, be fully human, and live a normal life as a unique individual. Is it even conceivable that we would remove his life-support system on the ground that his existence, like that of the fetus, is highly inconvenient to us and that he does not look human at the moment? There would be no moral anguish but instead a certainty that such an act would be a grave moral wrong.“4

  It is certainly more likely that a woman or a man would refuse to countenance an abortion if a sonogram showed a recognizable human being than if only a tiny, guppylike being appeared. But that is an instinctive reaction and instinctive reactions are not always the best guide to moral choice. Intellect must play a role as well. What if biology convinces us that the guppylike creature or the microscopic fertilized egg has exactly the same future, the same capacity to live a full human life, as does the fetus at three months or at seven months or the infant at birth? “It is difficult to see that the decision in the imagined case of the comatose elderly man who in time will recover is different from the abortion decision.”5 The elderly man in this condition may not look human (if necessary, we could add other details to his appearance to make that even clearer). He is not sentient, and could not live without artificial life support. If we alter the hypothetical so that he has not been a devoted husband and father but rather a philanderer who refused to support his children, I don’t think our answer changes. Killing him would still be a moral wrong. The embryo or fetus, like the comatose man in this hypothetical, will soon be recognizable to the eye as a human being, will be fully sentient, and will be able to live outside the womb. In both cases, it is only a matter of time. The difference is that the death of the elderly man would deprive him of a few years of life while the aborted embryo or fetus loses an entire lifetime.

  The issue is not, I think, one of appearance, sentience, or anything other than the prospective life that is denied the individual by abortion. There used to be a question put: If you could obtain a hundred million dollars by pressing a button that would kill an elderly Chinese mandarin whom you had never seen, and if nobody would know what you had done, would you press the button? That seems to me the same issue as the abortion decision, except that the unborn child has a great deal longer to live, if you don’t press that particular button. Most of us, I suspect, would like to think we would not kill the mandarin. The characteristics of appearance, sentience, ability to live without assistance, and being valued by others cannot be the characteristics that entitle you to sufficient moral respect to be allowed to go on living. What characteristic does, then? It must lie in the fact that you are alive with the prospect of years of life ahead. That characteristic the unborn child has.

  That seems to me an adequate ground on which to reject Professor Peter Singer’s argument that supports not only abortion but infanticide.6 He writes that it is doubtful that a fetus becomes conscious until well after the time most abortions are performed, and even if he or she is conscious, that would not put the fetus at a level of awareness comparable to that of “a dog, let alone a chimpanzee. If on the other hand it is self-awareness, rather than mere consciousness, that grounds a right to life, that does not arise in a human being until some time after birth.“

  Aware that this line leaves out of account the potential of the child for a full human life, he responds that “in a world that is already over-populated, and in which the regulation of fertility is universally acc
epted, the argument that we should bring all potential people into existence is not persuasive.” That is disingenuous. If overpopulation were a fact, that would hardly justify killing humans. If overpopulation were taken to be a justification, it would allow the killing of any helpless population, preferably without the infliction of pain.

  The regulation of fertility through most methods of contraception does not raise the same moral issue as abortion, because they do not permit the joining of the sperm and the egg. Until the sperm and the egg unite, there is no human being. Singer goes on to make the unsubstantiated claim that “just as the human being develops gradually in a physical sense, so too does its moral significance gradually increase. “That contention is closely allied to the physical appearance argument and is subject to the same rebuttal. One wonders at measuring moral significance by physique. If a person gradually degenerated physically, would his moral significance gradually decline?

  Many who favor the abortion right understand that humans are being killed. Certainly the doctors who perform and nurses who assist at abortions know that. So do non-professionals. Otherwise abortion would not be smothered in euphemisms. Thus, we hear the language of “choice,” “reproductive rights,” and “medical procedures.” Those are oddly inadequate terms to describe the right to end the life of a human being. It has been remarked that “pro-choice” is an odd term since the individual whose life is at stake has no choice in the matter. These are ways of talking around the point that hide the truth from others and, perhaps, from one’s self. President Clinton speaks of keeping abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” Why rare, if it is merely a choice, a medical procedure without moral problems?

  That there are severe moral problems is becoming clear even to many who favor abortion. That is probably why, as Candace C. Crandall observes, in the last half of 1995 “the morale of the pro- choice side of the abortion stalemate has visibly collapsed.”7 The reason: “Proponents of abortion rights overcame Americans’ qualms about the procedure with a long series of claims about the benefits of unrestricted abortion on demand. Without exception, those claims have proven false.” The pro-abortion side claimed that Roe v. Wade rescued women from death during unsafe, back-alley abortions, but it was the availability of antibiotics beginning in the 1940s and improved medical techniques that made abortion safe well before Roe. It was argued that abortion on demand would guarantee that every child was a wanted child, would keep children from being born into poverty, reduce illegitimacy rates, and help end child abuse. Child poverty rates, illegitimacy rates, and child abuse have all soared. We heard that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her doctor. The idea of a woman and her personal physician deliberating about the choice is a fantasy: women are going to specialized abortion clinics that offer little support or counseling. (Crandall does not address the point, but it is difficult to see that bringing a doctor in for consultation would change the nature of the decision about taking human life.) She does note, however, that many women use abortion for birth control.

  Crandall says she sympathizes with abortion-rights advocates. But on her own showing, it is difficult to see why. No anti-abortion advocate could make it clearer that human lives are being destroyed at the rate of 1.5 million a year for convenience.

  The author Naomi Wolf, who favors the right to abort, has challenged the feminists whose rhetoric seeks to disguise the truth that a human being is killed by abortion.8 She asks for “an abortion-rights movement willing publicly to mourn the evil—necessary evil though it may be—that is abortion.” But she asks a question and gives an answer about her support for abortion rights that is troublesome: “But how, one might ask, can I square a recognition of the humanity of the fetus, and the moral gravity of destroying it, with a pro-choice position? The answer can only be found in the context of a paradigm abandoned by the left and misused by the right: the paradigm of sin and redemption.” That seems an odd paradigm for this problem. It is one thing to have sinned, atoned, and sought redemption. It seems quite another to justify planning to sin on the ground that you also plan to seek redemption afterward. That justification seems even stranger for repeat abortions, which she says are at least 43 percent of the total. Sin plus redemption falls short as a resolution of Ms. Wolf’s dilemma. If that were an adequate resolution, it would seem to follow, given the humanity of the fetus, that infanticide, the killing of the elderly, indeed any killing for convenience, would be licensed if atonement and redemption were planned in advance.

  Nor is it clear why the evil is necessary. It is undeniable that bearing and rearing a child sometimes places a great burden on a woman or a family. That fact does not, however, answer the question of whether the burden justifies destroying a human life. In most other contexts, we would say that such a burden is not sufficient justification. The fact is, in any event, that the burden need not be borne. Putting the child up for adoption is an alternative. The only drawback is that others will know the woman is pregnant. If that is the reason to choose abortion, then the killing really is for convenience.

  But it is clear, in any event, that the vast majority of all abortions are for convenience. In those cases, abortion is used as merely one more technique of birth control. A 1987 survey of the reasons given by women for having abortions, made by researchers with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is very much pro-abortion, demonstrated this fact. The following table shows the percentage of women who gave the listed reasons.9

  Reason Total

  Woman is concerned about how having a baby could change her life 76

  Woman can’t afford baby now 68

  Woman has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood 51

  Woman is unready for responsibility 31

  Woman doesn’t want others to know she has had sex or is pregnant 31

  Woman is not mature enough, or is too young to have a child 30

  Woman has all the children she wanted, or has all grown-up children 26

  Reason Total

  Husband or partner wants woman to have abortion 23

  Fetus has possible health problem 13

  Woman has health problem 7

  Woman’s parents want her to have abortion 7

  Woman was victim of rape or incest 1

  Other 6

  The first eight and the eleventh reasons given fall into the category of birth control for convenience. It is clear that the overwhelming number of abortions were for birth control unrelated to the health of the fetus or the woman. Moreover, of those who were concerned about a possible health problem of the fetus, only 8 percent said that a physician had told them that the fetus had a defect or was abnormal. The rest were worried because they had taken medication, drugs, or alcohol before realizing they were pregnant, but did not apparently obtain a medical confirmation of any problem. Of those aborting because of their own health, 53 percent said a doctor had told them their condition would be made worse by being pregnant. Some of the rest cited physical problems, and 11 percent gave a mental or emotional problem as the reason. Only 1 percent cited rape or incest.

  “Some 77 percent of women with incomes under 100 percent or between 100 and 149 percent of the poverty level [in 1987, the federally designated poverty level for a nonfarm family of four was $11,200] said they were having an abortion because they could not afford to have a child, compared with 69 percent of those with incomes between 150 and 199 percent and 60 percent of those with incomes at or above 200 percent of the poverty level.“10 The can’t-afford category thus included a great many women who, by most reckonings, could afford to have a baby and certainly could have put the baby up for adoption.

  This demonstration that abortion is almost always a birth control technique rather than a response to a serious problem with the mothers or the fetus’s health must have been a considerable embarrassment to the pro-abortion forces. Perhaps for that reason no survey by them seems to have been reported since. More recent statistics by anti-abortion groups, however, bear out t
he conclusions to be drawn from the Guttmacher Institute study. The reasons most women give for having an abortion are “social”: a baby would affect their educations, jobs, lives, or they felt unable to handle it economically, their partners did not want babies, etc.11

  Perhaps the most instructive episode demonstrating the brutalization of our culture by abortion was the fight over “partial birth abortions.” These abortions are performed late in the pregnancy. The baby is delivered feet first until only the head remains within the mother. The aborting physician inserts scissors into the back of the infant’s skull and opens the blades to produce a hole. The child’s brains are then vacuumed out, the skull collapses, and the rest of the newly-made corpse is removed. If the head had been allowed to come out of the mother, killing the baby then would be the criminal act of infanticide.

  When it was proposed to outlaw this hideous procedure, which obviously causes extreme pain to the baby, the pro-abortion forces in Congress and elsewhere made false statements to fend off the legislation or to justify an anticipated presidential veto. Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League stated that the general anaesthesia given the mother killed the fetus so that there is no such thing as a partial birth abortion. Physicians promptly rebutted the claim. Local anaesthesia, which is most often used in these abortions, has no effect on the baby, and general anaesthesia not only does not kill the baby, it provides little or no pain-killing effect to the baby. The vice president of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology said that the claim was “crazy” and that “Anesthesia does not kill an infant if you don’t kill the mother.“12 Two doctors who perform partial birth abortions stated that the majority of fetuses aborted in this fashion are alive until the end of the procedure.13