ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WITNESS
Presbyter Neketas S. Palassis, Editor
March 30/April 12, 1998
PALM  SUNDAY
Vol. XXXI, No. 16 (1439)
Epistle: Philippians 4: 4-9. Gospel: John 12: 1-18.

    A quarter century has passed since the Supreme Court struck down the laws of every state in the nation, in the name of a constitutional right to abortion it had just discovered. In Roe v. Wade, the Court prohibited any regulation of abortion in the first trimester, allowed only regulations pertaining to the health of the mother in the second, and mandated that any regulation in the third make an exception for maternal health. In the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, the Court insisted on the broadest definition of health—economic, familial, emotional. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon describes the result as the most radical pro-abortion policy in the democratic world. It permits abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason or for no reason. It has licensed the killing of some thirty-five million members of the human family so far.

    The abortion regime was born in lies. In Britain (and in California, pre-Roe), the abortion lobby deceptively promoted legal revisions to allow “therapeutic” abortions and then defined every abortion as “therapeutic.” The abortion lobby lied about Jane Roe, claiming her pregnancy resulted from a gang rape. It lied about the number of backalley abortions. Justice Blackmun relied on fictitious history to argue, in Roe, that abortion had never been a common law crime.

    The abortion regime is also sustained by lies. Its supporters constantly lie about the radicalism of Roe: even now, most Americans who “agree with Roe v. Wade” in polls think that it left third-term abortions illegal and restricted second-term abortions. They have lied about the frequency and “medical necessity” of partial-birth abortion. Then there are the euphemisms: “terminating a pregnancy,” abortion “providers,” “products of conception.” “The fetus is only a potential human being”—as if it might as easily become an elk. “It should be between a woman and her doctor”—the latter an abortionist who has never met the woman before and who has a financial interest in her decision. This movement cannot speak the truth. Roe’s supporters said at the time that the widespread availability of abortion would lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies, hence less child abuse; it has not. They said that fewer women would die from back-alley abortions; the post-l940s decline in the number of women who died from abortions, the result of antibiotics, actually slowed after Roe, probably because the total number of abortions rose. They said it would reduce illegitimacy and child poverty, predictions that now seem like grim jokes.

    Pro-lifers were, alas, more prescient. They claimed the West had started down the slippery slope of a progressive devaluation of human life. After the unborn would come the elderly and the infirmómore burdens to others; more obstacles to others’ goals; probably better off dead, like “unwanted children.” And so now we are debating whether to allow euthanasia, whether to create embryos for experimental purposes, whether to permit the killing of infants about to leave the womb.

    And what greater claim on our protection, after all, does that infant have a moment after birth? He still lacks the attributes of “personhood,” rationality, autonomy, rich interactions—that proabortion philosophers consider the preconditions of a right to life. The argument boils down to this assertion: If we want to eliminate you and you cannot stop us, we are justified in doing it. Might makes right. Among intellectuals, infanticide is in the first phase of a movement from the unthinkable to the arguable to the debatable to the acceptable.

    Everything abortion touches, it corrupts. It has corrupted family life. In the war between the sexes, abortion tilts the playing field toward predatory males, giving them another excuse for abandoning their offspring: She chose to carry the child; let her pay for her choice. Our law now says, in effect, that fatherhood has no meaning, and we are shocked that some men have learned that lesson too well. It has corrupted the Supreme Court, which has protected the abortion license even while tacitly admitting its lack of constitutional grounding. If the courts can invent such a right, unmoored in the text, tradition, or logic of the Constitution, then they can do almost anything; and so they have done. The law on everything from free speech to biotechnology has been distorted to accommodate abortionism. And abortion has deeply corrupted the practice of medicine, transforming healers into killers.

    Abortion-on-demand has, however, also called into being a movement comprising millions of ordinary citizens, whose efforts have prevented countless abortions and whose witness has helped maintain a pro-life ethic that has stopped millions more.

    Of all the arguments a against the legalization of abortion, the one that always struck me as the most questionable is the most consequential: that the widespread acceptance of abortion would lead to a profound moral shift in our culture, a great devaluing of human life. This seemed to me dubious on general principle: Projections of this sort almost always turn out to be wrong because they fail to grasp that, in matters of human behavior, there is not really any such thing as a trendline. People change to meet new realities and thereby change reality.

    Thus, for the environmental hysterics of the 1970s, the nuclear freezers of the 1980s, and the Perovian budget doomsayers of the 1990s, the end that was nigh never came. So, with abortion, why should a tolerance for ending human life under one, very limited, set of conditions necessarily lead to an acceptance of ending human life under other, broader terms?

    This time, it seems, the pessimists were right. On Sunday, November 2, an article in the New York Times, the closest thing we have to the voice of the intellectual establishment, came out for killing babies. I am afraid that I am sensationalizing only slightly. The article by Steven Pinker in the Times’ Magazine did not go quite so far as to openly recommend the murder of infants, and printing the article did not constitute the Times’ endorsement of the idea. But close enough, close enough.

    What Pinker, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote and what the Times treated as a legitimate argument, was a thoroughly sympathetic treatment of this modest proposal: Mothers who kill their newborn infants should not be judged as harshly as people who take human life in its later stages, because newborn infants are not persons in the full sense of the word, and therefore do not enjoy a right to life. Who says that life begins at birth?

    “To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other,” Pinker breezily writes. “No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there’s the rub: our immature neonates don’t possess these traits any more than mice do.”

    Pinker notes that “several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder,” and he suggests his acceptance of this view, arguing that “the facts don’t make it easy” to legitimately outlaw the killing of infants.
Pinker’s casually authoritative mention of “the facts” is important. Because Pinker is no mere ranter from the crackpot fringe but a scientist. He is, in fact, a respected explicator of the entirely mainstream and currently hot theory of evolutionary psychology, and the author of How the Mind Works, a just-published, doubtlessly seminal, exceedingly fat book on the subject.

    How the mind works, says Pinker, is that people are more or less hard-wired to behave as they do by the cumulative effects of the human experience. First cousins to the old Marxist economic determinists, the evolutionary psychologists are behavioral determinists. They believe in a sort of Popeye’s theory of human behavior: I do what I do because I yam what I yam, because I wuz what I wuz.

    This view is radical; it seeks to supplant both traditional Judeo-Christian morality and liberal humanism with a new “scientific” philosophy that denies the idea that all humans are possessed of a quality that sets them apart from the lower species, and that this quality gives humans the capacity and responsibility to choose freely between right and wrong. And it is monstrous. And, judging from the writings of Pinker and his fellow determinists on the subject of infanticide, it may be the most thoroughly dishonest construct anyone has ever attempted to pass off as science.

    Pinker’s argument was a euphemized one. The more blunt argument is made by Michael Tooley, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, whom Pinker quotes. In his 1972 essay “Abortion and Infanticide,” Tooley makes what he calls “an extremely plausible answer” to the question: “What makes it morally permissible to destroy a baby, but wrong to kill an adult?” Simple enough: Personhood does not begin at birth. Rather “an organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”
Some would permit the killing of infants “up to the time an organism learned how to use certain expressions,” but Tooley finds this cumbersome and would simply establish “some period of time, such as a week after birth, as the interval during which infanticide will be permitted.”

    And Tooley does not bother with Pinker’s pretense that what is under discussion here is only a rare act of desperation, the killing of an unwanted child by a frightened, troubled mother. No, no, no. If it is moral to kill a baby for one, it is moral for all. Indeed, the systematic, professionalized use of infanticide would be a great benefit to humanity. “Most people would prefer to raise children who do not suffer from gross deformities or from severe physical, emotional, or intellectual handicaps,” writes eugenicist Tooley. “If it could be shown that there is no moral objection to infanticide, the happiness of society could be significantly and justifiably increased.”

    To defend such an unnatural idea, the determinists argue that infanticide is, in fact, natural: In Pinker’s words, “It has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history.” This surprising claim is critical to the argument that the act of a mother killing a child is a programmed response to signals that the child might not fare well in life (because of poverty, illegitimacy or other factors). And it is a lie.

    In fact, although millions of mothers give birth every year under the sort of adverse conditions that Pinker says trigger the “natural” urge to kill the baby, infanticide is extremely rare in all modern societies, and is universally treated as a greatly aberrant act, the very definition of a moral horror. The only cultures that Pinker can point to in which infanticide is widely “practiced and accepted” are those that are outside the mores of Western civilization: ancient cultures and the remnants of ancient cultures today, tribal hunter-gatherer societies.

    And so goes the entire argument, a great chain of dishonesty, palpable untruth piled upon palpable untruth. “A new mother,” asserts Pinker, “will first coolly assess the infant and her situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.” Yes, that was my wife all over: cool as a cucumber as she assessed whether to keep her first-born child or toss him out the window. As George Orwell said once of another vast lie, “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
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    The St. Joseph of Arimathea English-language Orthodox Parish of Toronto, Canada, is sponsoring a pilgrimage to the British Isles in May of 1999.

    In the centuries before Orthodoxy was extinguished in Britain by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which imposed the Roman Catholic Faith, there were hundreds of saints in the British Isles. Today their names and exploits largely are unknown. They are part of a forgotten Britain, which, though it lies deep in the past, is an important part of the spiritual history of all English-speaking Orthodox Christians. Most of the relics of the saints and the churches they built are gone, but their presence still can be sensed at the sites where they labored.

    The pilgrimage through England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales will include Glastonbury, Canterbury, London, Lindisfarne, Iona in  Scotland, St. David’s in Wales and St. Kevin’s in Glendalough, Ireland. Pilgrims will pray before the relics of St. Edward, King and Martyr at the Orthodox monastery at Brookwood, Surrey, Sts. Cuthbert and Bede at Durham Cathedral, St. Audrey at Ely, St. David in Wales and St. Hilda at Whitby.

    For more information communicate with Fr. David Belden or Vera Kizoff, pilgrimage leaders, St. Joseph of Arimathea English Language Orthodox Church, 275 Wilson Heights Blvd., Toronto, ON, MSH 2V3; telephone: 1-416-538-6070