The Queen’s English takes a beating whenever our politics turns
to abortion. The most recent instance of this distortion of
language — obfuscation, really — is the discussion of “partial
birth” abortion. This barbaric practice is neither partial, nor is
it an abortion. It is nothing short of infanticide.
During the last week’s oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court,
over a federal law seeking to ban this latest assault on the
integrity of the human person, my ears perked up when I heard that
the lawyers and judges used the term “fetal demise” to describe the
fate of the doomed subject of the horrendous practice.
The “fetal” part refers to a baby. The “demise” refers to the
killing of the baby, by means of crushing her skull, in the course
of a breech delivery.
It should be of no consequence whether this outrage occurs
immediately before, during, or after the actual “birth” of the
child. It is abhorrent throughout. In terms of the continuum of the
child’s existence, which begins with conception and ends with
death, birth is an entirely arbitrary, fleeting moment in time, a
non-event in terms of the child’s inherent worth. What in God’s
name is the principle of science, law, or morality which dictates
that a human being is worthless one moment, before birth, and
entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness the very
next, that is, after birth?
Listening to judges and lawyers arguing whether or not this
tragedy occurs in utero is to descend into the theatre of
the absurd. At this late stage in pregnancy, no sane human should
be disputing the child’s expectation of a safe harbor in the arms
of the mother.
Seizing upon the moment of birth as a litmus test for
ascertaining a person’s humanity is bizarre at best, obscene at
worst. It is our postmodern version of debating the number of
angels dancing on a pinhead, driven by the errant nonsense in the
controlling precedents of Roe v. Wade, its companion case,
Doe v. Bolton, and their legal progeny, if I may use that
term.
Recall that Justice Blackmun in Roe and Doe
jury-rigged an arbitrary and capricious legal fiction to deprive
the state of any real authority to protect pre-born human life. He
superimposed a minimalist regulatory scheme on the customary
division of a woman’s pregnancy into trimesters, allowing varying
degrees of protection, or lack thereof, based on milestones over
the nine months. He theoretically posited viability as the point,
usually at the seventh month, when the state could protect the
“potentiality of human life” including outright prescription of
abortion at that stage.
Viability, of course, is a relative concept, supposedly grounded
on the ability of a “fetus” (Latin for “offspring”) to survive
outside the mother’s womb. This condition of survivability is
radically dependent on the state of medical science, but is also
beside the point, at least in terms of determining a child’s
humanity or personhood.
A week ago my fifth grandchild was born. Guess what? She is
totally dependent on her parents to feed her, keep her warm, and to
sustain her life, even though she is completely outside the womb.
No doubt, you know many a family with a beloved child born
prematurely, often in extremely risky cases, who is just as human
as anyone else despite having been dependent on life support
systems outside the womb.
And consider the first time you and your spouse saw the
ultrasound pictures of your child, pre-viability. One of you didn’t
say, “Oh look, Honey, it’s our fetus!” No one calls an unborn child
a fetus except when the subject of abortion comes up. Then the
mental filters go up, screening out the humanity of the being about
to be destroyed.
What Justice Blackmun gave in Roe, he took away in
Doe. If the mother wants to abort her baby, past the point
of viability, the state may not prohibit her from doing so if it is
for reasons of health. He then took a broad (I am being charitable
here) view of health to encompass “all factors — physical,
emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant
to the well-being of the patient.” In practical terms he blocked
the state from restricting so-called post-viability abortions,
establishing abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy
based on this infinitely elastic definition of health. Why else are
we arguing in the Supreme Court, for the second time, over partial
“birth” abortion?
The ideology of abortion on demand defaces the language.
Abstract and clinical formulations trump concrete, self-evident,
and embodied facts, veiling or de-humanizing the true nature of
children in the womb
I struggle to find a new term, other than Orwellian, to describe
this ongoing corruption of Shakespeare’s tongue. The Nazis’ eugenic
concept of “life unworthy of life” captures what I am trying to
describe.
I console myself with the realization that our country allows us
to exercise freedom of speech, if only we have the courage to do
so, while harboring the hope of persuading those who are resistant
to liberating truths. The truth, as they say, will set us free.
