"Abortion: Murder by Rationalization

My mother once asked me to clean up the back room in our basement.  Not knowing the magnitude of the task set before me, I consented.  When I finally got myself downstairs, I opened the wooden door to the back room, flipped on the light, and saw an unimaginable mess of prodigious proportion:  paper, beetles, dirt, bowling pins, toy boxes, broken tools, rags, and sawdust.  I did what any "rational" 15 year old would do.
     I shut off the light and closed the door.
     I'm not the only one who ever did that.
     Most of us, I dare say, respond to the often ugly face of reality the same way, though after years of practice we do so with a good deal more dexterity and finesse than I was able to muster at the time.  As a result, our indulgent and immoral evasions seem less obvious and less culpable.   Sometimes we try to rationalize our indolence and our guilt by telling ourselves (apparently) rational lies.  That is, rather than looking at the shocking facts and not wincing, we rationalize.  Though this ploy seems to assuage our consciences, it does not help.  It does great harm.
     Let me put it plainly.  What I mean is this:  we not only tend to hide the hideous face of abortion behind a verbal veil of inoffensive language, one that employs a plethora of euphemisms for pre-natal murder, euphemisms like “terminating a pregnancy,” “removing the P.O.C.” (product of conception), and “reproductive freedom,” we rationalize our wickedness.  We have as many excuses for this atrocity as we have linguistic feignings to hide it, none of which is philosophically respectable or morally sound.  Because two of these rationalizations for death before birth are especially prevalent and especially perverse, they need to be unmasked.
      First, one often hears the Right-to-Deathers among us insist that “Surely we may terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or by incest.”
     Surely we may not.
     A child does not lose its right to life simply because its father or its
mother was a sexual criminal or deviate.  Of course, rape and incest are atrocious crimes and those who perpetrate them must be strictly and decisively punished.  Nevertheless, a civilized nation does not permit the victim of a crime to pass a death sentence on the criminal's offspring.  To empower the victim of a sex offense to kill the offender's child is an even more deplorable act than the rape that conceived it. The child conceived by rape or incest is a victim, too.  In America, we do not execute victims.
     The Right-to-Deathers think that my argument here is insensitive to the plight of the rape victim and that I would sing another tune were I the victim of such a terrible evil.  They are wrong.
     Because ours is a government of laws and not of men, we must not consign justice or morality to the pain-beguiled rationalizations of victims.  They, of all people, might be the least able to render a just verdict or to identify the path of highest virtue.  I am convinced that the more monstrously one is mistreated, the more likely it is that revenge and personal expedience will look like goodness.  While rape victims most certainly know best the horror and indignity of the crime in question, being its victims does not confer upon them either ethical or jurisprudential expertise.  Nor does it enable them to balance the scales of justice or to satisfy the demands of the moral imperative with care, knowledge, finesse, or precision.  If one was an uninformed or inept ethicist or penologist before the crime, as most of us undoubtedly are, being a crime victim does not alter that fact at all.  Justice is traditionally portrayed as blind, not because she was victimized and had her eyes criminally removed, but because she is impartial.  Rape victims, like all other crime victims, rarely can be trusted to be sufficiently impartial or dependably ethical, especially seeing that they
often decide that the best alternative open to them is to kill the felon's child.
     Second, the Right-to-Deathers often ask, "Does a woman not have the right to her own body?"
      Of course she does.  But that is not at issue here.  It is not her body,
after all, that is being murdered; it is someone else's.  Like hers, the body
being killed is not canine, feline, equine, or bovine.  Like hers, it is human.  Like hers, it has the 23 sets of paired chromosomes.  Like hers, it is the human product of human conception.  Unlike hers, however, it is not something she can do with as she pleases.  We do not kill human bodies for personal convenience or private advantage.  As Ayn Rand taught us, the most fundamental right of all is the right to one's own property, and among the most inviolable and sacred portions of our property is our own body.  To it we have an almost exclusive right of function and disposal, a right that no one else can usurp, not even our own mothers.
         John Donne, you see, was right--because no man is an island, each man's death diminishes me.  That means, among other things, that you cannot diminish or endanger the life, liberty or dignity of one without diminishing and endangering the life, liberty and dignity of us all.  Abortionists, therefore, attack more than the unborn.  They must be resisted.  Much depends upon their defeat.  The life you save may be your child's.  The liberty you save may be your own.
     To remain free people, we must beware of every euphemism and we must unmask every rationalization.
     A murder by any another name...

date modified:
5 July 2006