Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 049: The Twisted Logic Underlying Abortion
Many influential people and institutions in our society, including Hollywood and the mass media, strongly support abortion. To justify their position, however, they must adeptly defy logic and ignore certain obvious facts.
One example of this side-stepping is the oft-repeated argument for abortion that it’s all about a woman’s body. As actress Amy Brenneman, who starred in the TV show Judging Amy, once put it, "Unless a woman really has sovereignty over her own body we really haven’t come that far."
The obvious flaw in this argument was cleverly exposed a few years back by supermodel Kathy Ireland (who used to favor abortion) during a televised interview:
Some people say, ‘Well it’s a woman’s body; it should be her choice.’ There’s a 50% chance the baby she’s carrying is a male child, and he would have a penis. Women don’t have penises. So it’s residing in her body; it is not a part of her body.
While it should go without saying that babies have their own bodies, abortion advocates seem all too ready to tiptoe around the obvious to promote their agenda.
That tiptoeing is also evident whenever a breaking news story about the murder of an abortionist grabs the headlines. After someone recently gunned down Dr. George Tiller, the late-term abortionist in Kansas, almost every major media outlet extolled the genuine tragedy of his death, while tiptoeing past the tragedy of the 60,000 deaths that Tiller himself had coordinated within his clinics.
Several TV commentators, however, immediately perceived this double standard. Ann Coulter, for example, satiricallymentioned, “…This one random nut who shot Tiller … I don’t really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.” She then argued: “I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don’t want to impose my moral values on others.” Coulter also couldn’t resist exposing the faulty moral logic behind so much pro-abortion rhetoric and sloganeering, as in: “If you don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one,” to which she replied: “If you don’t believe in shooting abortionists, then don’t shoot abortionists.” Perhaps no one has so clearly summarized the deadly logic of the pro-abortion position as Mother Teresa, when she declared in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “…If a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between.”
The moral chaos of abortion often begins when advocates feign not to know when life begins. George Jonas, in his cleverly entitled essay Thoughts from an Ex-Fetus, observed how advocates must “pretend not to realize that life is an autonomous process, a continuum from zygote to old-age pension, a self-elaborating force that begins when it begins and keeps growing unless it's vacuumed out first…. They must pretend not to see that if a fetus were not alive, it wouldn't have to be killed.”
Perhaps the most plausible explanation of why abortion advocates will so readily defy logic and ignore the obvious came from writer Dale Vree. He had been invited to a “living-room discussion” on abortion back in 1989 which included six prominent pro-lifers, six prominent pro-choicers, and one or two undecideds.
Vree expected that the heart of the debate would hinge on when life began, but it didn't. It didn't even turn on the hard cases — rape and incest. When one of the radical feminists argued that abortion is simply about the right to make choices, one of the pro-lifers replied that the choice was made back when the woman agreed to have sex. Then one of the pro-choicers finally blurted out: "We're pro-sex and you're anti-sex," meaning, according to Vree, that "they're for lots of sex in lots of forms while we pro-lifers feel it should be limited to heterosexual marriage…. They made it abundantly clear that they're committed to the sexual revolution, and that revolution will wither without the insurance which is abortion and this is their bottom-line concern.”
This indeed appears to be the crux of the matter, the central concern that has motivated radical feminists, Hollywood, and many other advocates of abortion to sacrifice untold millions of unborn babies since the early 1970’s. George Jonas zeroed in on this same bottom-line explanation: “We invent euphemisms, such as ‘choice’ for killing, and sophomoric dilemmas, such as pretending not to know when life begins, to ensure that nothing hinders Virginia's quest for Santa Claus. No obstacle must interfere with her goal of self-fulfillment -- least of all an issue (as it were) of her healthy sexual appetite.”
In the final analysis, this stands as probably the single greatest tragedy of our time, that the unordered and inordinate sexual desires of men and women have been allowed to twist the most rudimentary moral logic to the point of death for so many of our children.
Copyright © 2020, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA. All rights reserved.
