Las Vegas fever - pro-life philosophy - Editorial

The audience was large (1,500) and responsive, and the occasion in part ceremonial. Professor John Kenneth Galbraith had debated with me on that campus (University of Las Vegas) 15 years ago, and we were now invited back to tune the audience in on how we thought things had gone since. I conjugated the usual case against government expansion and government intrusion and government taxation; I managed an appreciative plug for Mr. Galbraith's new book (The Good Society), officially published on that very day (fine reading, reactionary thinking), and now it was his turn at bat.

His talking drew routine appreciative handclaps and other indications of support from most of the audience, but then he said something that brought the house down. "I can't understand how someone who claims to object to government action should encourage government to get in the way of a woman's right over her own body." The house went wild with cheers and delight. When the mike came back to me I told the professor with only a half-smile on my face that that was probably "the silliest" observation he had ever made in a full and productive lifetime.

The audience was now sullen, but not mutinous. Tacitly, they agreed to listen.

The role of the government is to protect human rights. The great controversy today reduces quite simply to the question whether there is a third party after conception, effected by the man in the womb of the woman causing gestation of -- what? That is the question. To quote from a letter printed in these pages only a few weeks ago, either it is a fetus en route to birth -- a human organism -- or it is a tomato.

What astonishes pro-life advocates is the refusal of so many, e.g., Professor Galbraith, to be guided by the hypotheticals in the discussion. If there are three parties, as biological objectivity would appear to certify, then the argument focuses on the extent to which the third party is entitled to protection. One view is: Totally. Another view: Not at all. In between there is the view that what began as a tomato after six months or so becomes more human than vegetable and only then entitled to protection. The big debate last week when President Clinton vetoed the partial-birth-abortion ban was engaged by Cardinal Hickey when he described the procedure that Congress sought to forbid as "one-fifth abortion, four-fifths infanticide." At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were those who opposed slavery on the grounds that blacks were human beings. As a percentage of the population, the abolitionists were fewer than those who now believe that fetuses are human beings. That does not mean that there will be a parallel development in thought and that a half-century from now an American Supreme Court is going to pronounce an Emancipation Proclamation for all fetuses. It does mean that, arguing back then with an abolitionist, it wouldn't have furthered intelligent discussion simply to say that Negroes were tomatoes, so what role has government to play?

The loud objections to the Catholic cardinals who reproached President Clinton for vetoing the partial-infanticide measure are similarly difficult to understand. There are plenty of reasons for despondency among the Catholic faithful over the energy many bishops have shown in advancing ideas about economic policy, proscribing nuclear deterrent forces, specifying correct penological sentences. Objections derive from the sad conviction that some of the bishops' statements rest on half-baked analyses of data tendentiously assembled.

But the bishops are striving to act on their moral intuitions, which is quite right, so long as these do not contravene what once was called the depositum fidei, the central deposit of the Christian faith. One does not easily recall a protest from secular organizations over public-policy declarations from the bishops or cardinals, but suddenly we are supposed to be indignant when the cardinals denounce the legitimation of what they see as the killing of infants. That is what a camera sees, by the way, and maybe the Rodney King cinematographer might lend his services to dramatize atrocities much more frequent than the harassment of black speeders on Los Angeles highways.

We are coming quickly on a derivative philosophical question which will require keen eyesight for close examination. It is of course euthanasia. Here there is no question about third parties, or second parties. John (or Jane) wishes to end his/her life. It is his/her life, not . . . whose? But the tradition is very firm, and as of day before yesterday the laws were very firm: to extinguish that life is unlawful. There is nothing you can do about the man who jumps off the bridge, but you are supposed to punish the person who expedites his suicide. Will that concern be a laughing matter in Las Vegas day after tomorrow?

COPYRIGHT 1996 National Review, Inc.
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