We are told it is bad form to act as if we know what motivates our political and ideological adversaries. It is called “imputing motives.” I agree: we should deal with their arguments on their own terms. A reprehensible human being can make sense, at least some of the time.
We know the clichés: Even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while. A broken watch is right twice a day.
We all would rather have a money-hungry mechanic who knows what he is doing fix our car than an altruistic neighbor who doesn’t know a lug nut from a spark plug. A politician on the take from manufacturers or labor unions may end up arguing for what is best for the country in a particular instance, even if he doesn’t believe a word he says. Hitler was a vegetarian. That does not make carrots and broccoli bad for us.
Where is all this leading? I have been convinced for some time now that our fellow citizens who are “pro-choice” know full well that abortion takes a human life, but pretend otherwise to carry the day in the political arena; that they make their case for abortion dishonestly. I suspect that they use terms such as “fetal material” to describe the unborn child in a conscious attempt to insulate themselves from the arguments pro-lifers make about why abortion is immoral and why it should be illegal; that they are consciously manipulating the language in order to get their way in the courts and in legislative bodies, using the tactics of a lawyer for an organized crime figure trying to beat the rap.
But the point is that it does no good to say those things; to get indignant and proclaim that they “know they are killing children and don’t care” — even if it is the truth. We can’t act as if we can read their minds. We have no choice but to argue the case against abortion as if our opponents are sincere and open to reason, by using the best medical evidence available about what is going on inside the womb and by applying accepted philosophical and legal principles to establish what society’s responsibility should be to the life of the unborn child – even if we suspect it is going to make no difference to those who are determined to keep abortion legal.
That is, of course, how the leading pro-life groups in the country go about their business. You don’t see their representatives ranting and raving that pro-abortion activists and politicians are “liars” and “dishonest.” Instead, the pro-lifers focus on the obvious signs of human life present in the fetus from its earliest stages of development; they refrain from ad hominem attacks even when the proponent of legal abortion is defending late-term abortions. It is the “pro-choice” crowd that throws around terms such as “religious bigots,” “fanatics” and “the American Taliban.”
This is not a surprising a turn of events. It is easier to argue a case when you have the facts on your side, and science is making it clearer with each passing day that the fetus is a child, especially with the sonograms that prospective parents now routinely receive from their doctors. The parents-to-be know they are looking at a picture of “their baby.” So does everyone else.
Having said all this, there are times when the temptation can be overwhelming to throw up one’s hands and stop arguing rationally with the pro-abortion crowd and growl something like, “Cut the nonsense… You know it is a baby and you don’t care!” One of those times is when they defend partial birth abortions by pretending that the child on the delivery table — except for his head — is not a child. They know they are playing word games to defend infanticide. They are trying to win the political debate, not sincerely seek the truth.
Another time is when those who favor legal abortion decide to use the humanity of the unborn child for personal or political gain. John Edwards is a case in point. We all have heard by now that Edwards made his millions as a trial lawyer. There has not been as much attention paid to the kinds of cases that Edwards specialized in. One of his specialties was babies born with cerebral palsy. In his lawyer days, Edwards would argue that these babies would not have been afflicted with the disability if the doctor delivering them had opted to perform Caesarean sections.
Is that true? It doesn’t look that way. As a result of suits brought by Edwards and other lawyers working in this field, there are now four times as many Caesarean sections performed as in 1970. Nevertheless, there has been no change in the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy. The New York Times concludes, “Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins.” Which means that all these malpractice suits did little more than raise malpractice insurance rates and make lawyers like Edwards rich.
But I don’t want to argue the medical merits of C-sections. I can’t think of anything else I know less about. I offer something else for your consideration: the technique Edwards would use in his trials to win the sympathy of the juries. Believe it or not, he would focus on the personhood of the unborn child. The transcript of the trial of one of his clients, Jennifer Campbell, was recently made public.
Picture Edwards at his most earnest, staring soulfully at the jurors, asking them to picture him as the unborn child in the hours before her birth, starting at 3 o’clock: “She said at 3, ‘I’m fine.’ She said at 4, ‘I’m having a little trouble, but I’m doing ok.’ At 5, she said, ‘I’m having problems.’ At 5:30, she said, ‘I need out.’
“She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now — I didn’t plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you. Jennifer cannot speak for herself. She can only speak through me. She doesn’t ask for your pity. She asks for your strength. She doesn’t ask for your sympathy, but for your courage.”
This man is telling the jury that he is feeling the “presence” of an unborn child, a child he would be willing to permit an abortionist to tear to pieces at that very moment of her existence. Only the fact that this child’s plight is the path to a multi-million dollar contingency fee changes Edward’s perspective on her right to live.
Maybe there are some uneducated Americans somewhere who genuinely believe that an unborn child is not a human life. Anything is possible. There are people who believe that Elvis is alive and that the United States never landed on the moon. But the lawyers and politicians and activists who defend legal abortion know full well that they are defending the killing of an unborn child. And they don’t care. Their dilemma is that they do not think society as a whole is ready to come to the same conclusion about infanticide. So what we get from them is a crassly dishonest manipulation of the language and the law in a holding action.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
