Deadly Similarities
Early in the history of the Human Life Review, we published an essay by the German psychiatrist and attorney Prof. Helmut Ehrhardt of Marburg University detailing similarities between abortion and euthanasia.[1] Then, it may have seemed alarmist; twenty-one years later, it seems unduly optimistic. The similarities are now unmistakable; indeed, there is even a parallel to a seemingly-unrelated phenomenon, the practice of homosexuality.
The Austrian economist Prof. Hans Millendorfer of Vienna puts it bluntly: "Abortion, like euthanasia, is a method in which killing represents a solution."[2] If people are the problem then such a method represents a solution. (And if people are the problem, then homosexuality, which does not produce more of them, is also in a sense a solution.) Prof. Ehrhardt defined as one of the similarities between the two procedures "usurpation of authority": in the case of abortion, the authority of the unborn child to determine whether life is worth living is usurped by the would-have-been mother or her "advisors." In the case of involuntary euthanasia, that of the sick person is usurped by relatives or "care-givers." In the case of "voluntary" euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, the sick person supposedly is acting autonomously, but it is becoming increasingly apparent just how vulnerable to suggestion, not to say outright pressure, dangerously-ill or handicapped people can be. Apparent autonomy may really be only submission to usurpation of authority over his or her own life and death by someone else, of course always with the person's "best interests" at heart.
In the early days of the "abortion-rights" movement, appeal was always made to hard cases. Abortion, it was assumed, was generally undesirable, even criminal, but in certain selected hard cases, it was a sad necessity. However, once Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide—throughout all nine months of pregnancy—it suddenly was generalized, to the point where virtually one-third of all "conceptuses"—babies conceived—in the United States are "terminated, safely and legally" instead of being born into the world. At the present time, euthanasia is always argued on behalf of the hard cases, just as abortion once was. Generally, it must be conceded, this is easy to do with euthanasia, for all the cases are harder and more heart-wrenching than most abortion cases.
But in virtually all of the hard cases put forward in arguing for abortion, other alternatives are available. In the hard cases of euthanasia, there usually is no long-term alternative to the exitus lethalis; the only questions are "How long?" and "How painful?" If there is any analogy to abortion—and the Ninth Federal District Court in California recently based its doctor-assisted suicide decision explicitly in part on Roe—then it is certainly reasonable to expect that what is permitted in the hard cases will rapidly spread to more general cases and that euthanasia will suddenly take off in the United States as abortion did after 1973—as it has already done in the Netherlands. The expression "slippery slope" is too weak to describe what happened to abortion on demand after Roe; it was more like free fall, or even an air-to-ground missile. With respect to euthanasia, the development may be slower, but it is inevitable that what is permitted will soon become common and, ultimately, even obligatory.
One of the more puzzling developments in the current presidential election campaign is the way in which the Republican governors of New Jersey and Massachusetts, Mrs. Christine Whitman and Mr. William Weld, in their zeal to make abortion rights acceptable in the Republican Party, praised President Clinton's veto of Congress' ban on late-term craniotomy, i.e. "partial birth" abortions. Why should Republican leaders rally to an opponent who has placed himself squarely behind a procedure for which there are no plausible medical indications and which most of those who know it find detestable? It would have been more in keeping with the "moderation" they advocate to say, "We're pro-choice, but partial-birth abortions go too far!"
Why did they not do so? There seem to be two reasons. First, they cannot just be seeking a space for moderate abortion rights advocates in the party, because there is no such thing as "moderate" abortion rights advocacy. If any abortion is to be accepted, every abortion must be.
The second reason explains the first: it was pointed out by a Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn, on June 13.[3] The only really telling reason for outlawing the partial-birth procedure is not its gruesomeness; after all, certain life-saving surgical procedures are very gruesome. It is instead the fact that if this procedure is to be outlawed, it will be because one has admitted that the gruesomeness is being perpetrated on a human being, on a member of our species, such as every one of us once was. In other words, to outlaw abortion at any time in pregnancy, even at the very end, is to admit what everyone actually knows but so many cannot admit, namely, that the child en ventre de sa mere is a human being.
This is precisely the thing that one cannot admit at any point in pregnancy, for if one does, then one is faced with the impossible task of defining the point in pregnancy at which that which was not yet human, and thus subject to elective abortion, becomes human and deserving of legal protection. It can be argued that very early in pregnancy, before the first brain waves have appeared, the embryo is "not yet human." This argument is flawed, but not totally absurd. However, if it is ever admitted to be human at any point while still in the womb—and this is the implicit reason for banning the partial-birth procedure—then it will have to be admitted that it has been human for a while, and that many or most abortions, even earlier in pregnancy, irresponsibly and indefensibly take human lives. Mr. Zom is an advocate of abortion rights, but he acknowledges that this line of thinking, which he himself has now brought to public attention, has greatly disturbed him. Because Governors Whitman and Weld do not want to be disturbed, they support President Clinton's advocacy of abortion at any time during pregnancy: it's never too late, if it's not human. But if it is ever human, it will get too late far too soon to suit them.
A final "deadly similarity" can be seen in the exaltation of autonomy. The term autonomy, from Greek autos, self, and nomos, law, means that one is a law unto oneself, that there is no external law of God or of nature by which one is bound. In Our Right to Choose[4] Professor Beverly Wildung Harrison, of New York's Union Theological Seminary, argues that a woman is not treated as a responsible moral agent if she is not allowed to terminate a pregnancy at wish. The laws of biological nature determine that in the great majority of cases, a pregnancy will result in birth; this is a violation of a woman's autonomy, and abortion removes her from subjection to this law. Restrictive human laws against abortion would likewise violate her autonomy: therefore they must be relentlessly opposed, not just in the hard and difficult cases, but in every case, even when the arguments in their favor might seem most compelling, as immediately prior to or in the course of the delivery of the child. The iron laws of nature demand that each of us die; we cannot violate the law by living indefinitely, but we can in a way preempt it, by determining that we shall die before it requires us to do so: again, an assertion of autonomy.
Here too, there is a parallel to homosexuality and the "gay rights" movement: here too individual autonomy has to be preserved and exalted, regardless of the laws of nature, of society, of religion, or of tradition. The latter three kinds of laws can be set aside by human enactments, but the laws of nature cannot be. As the late Dr. Jerome Lejeune used to say,
"Seul Dieu pardonne vraiment; l'homme pardonne parfois; la nature ne pardonne jamais" ("Only God truly pardons, man sometimes pardons, nature never pardons"). A consequence of male homosexuality, unintended, it is true, but nevertheless one that occurs with regularity if not inexorably, is the transmission of the lethal immune deficiency disease AIDS as well as of many other serious and even fatal illnesses.[5] The spread of AIDS and of several other destructive maladies could be dramatically checked by obedience to certain moral laws, those of the Bible, for example. Unfortunately, those who obey laws, whether they be the laws of nature, of God, or even of hygiene, cannot claim to be autonomous.
Autonomy, being a law unto oneself, has a very bad name in Christian and other religious circles, but Christianity—and any other religion with a strong component of law—has a bad name in contemporary society.
Thus we see that three of the major social and biomedical issues of our day, abortion, euthanasia, and AIDS, possess several deadly similarities. The first two are, as Professor Millendorfer says, "methods in which killing represents a solution." Homosexuality may not kill, but if people are the problem, at least it produces no more of them. All three depend on the concept of autonomy, which is contrary to common sense, to the realities of nature, and to most religious doctrine, but which has become the battle-cry of our "late, degenerate sensate society"[6] at the end of the millennium.
It is autonomy that justifies abortion at will, at any time; it is autonomy that justifies the taking of one's own life, rather than leaving the time to nature and to God. And it is autonomy that authorizes the reshaping of sexuality in ways unintended by nature or by God, and that demands of government and the medical profession extreme efforts to forestall its common consequences. "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, be the end thereof are the ways of death" (Proverbs 14:12).
NOTES
1. See "Abortion and Euthanasia: Common Problems," in our Summer, 1975 issue (Vol. I, No. 3), the article was adapted from Prof. Ehrhardt's address to the Third World Congress for Medical Law (held in Geneva in August, 1973), with revisions reflecting changes in West German abortion law in 1975.
2. From a lecture delivered at a Pro Vita conference in Vienna in Easter Week, 1987.
3. See the Chicago Tribune, June 13, 1996, Section 3, p. 1.
4. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.
5. It may be objected that male homosexual acts can transmit disease only when one or more of the participants carries the infection; this is true, but it is also true that the general pattern of male homosexual behavior exposes those who practice it to multiple contacts, with the predictable consequence that not only AIDS but other sexually transmissible diseases become epidemic.
6. The expression was coined by Pitirim A. Sorokin in The Crisis of Our Age (Oxford, England: Oneworld, 1992: First edition, 1941) and will be discussed in detail in my own [forthcoming, due July 23] work. The Sensate Culture (Dallas: Word, 1996).
Rev. Harold O. J. Brown, a well-known theologian, teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, Illinois); he is also director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion & Society. He was an Associate Editor of this journal in its early years.
© The Human Life Review, The Human Life Foundation, Inc., Editorial Office, Room 840, 150 E. 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016.
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