RIGHT TO LIFE
Excerpts from:
MANDATORY MOTHERHOOD – THE TRUE MEANING OF RIGHT TO LIFE.
By Garrett
Hardin, printed 1974
CONTENTS
RIGHT TO LIFE EQUALS MANDATORY MOTHERHOOD
ABORTION PROHIBITION
THE INDISPENSABLE BACK STOP
MARGARET’S STORY
PREGNANCY AS PUNISHMENT
SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE IS SAUCE FOR THE GANDER
TRUTH’S DAY IN COURT
YOU CAN’T PHOTOGRAPH MORALITY
RIGHT TO LIFE EQUALS MANDATORY MOTHERHOOD
Mandatory motherhood? Surely this isn’t serious! But it is. Dead serious: a small but energetic minority is dedicated to forcing motherhood onto women who don’t want to be mothers. These passionate people wouldn’t dream of trying to bring back compulsory servitude (i.e., slavery). But, strangely, they see no inconsistency in trying to institute mandatory motherhood for women whose birth-control methods have failed them.
The passionate minority just may succeed.
The Constitutional amendments offered by Right-to-Lifers vary, but one will serve as a typical example. In 1973 Representative Lawrence Hogan of Maryland offered the following bill:
Neither the United States, nor any State shall deprive any human being, from the moment of conception, of life without due process of law; nor deny to any human being, from the moment of conception…the equal protection of the law.
If such an amendment should become the law, how would it change our lives? In countless ways, all following from the radical act of defining all stages of development, “from the moment of conception,” as human beings in the full meaning of the law. The ultimate results of such a law are revealed in the following logical sequence.
1. There is no due process of law whereby one human being, or the state, can deprive another and innocent human being of life. (Capital punishment is only for the guilty.)
2. A Right-to-Life Amendment asserts that all embryonic stages, from the fertilized egg onward, are human beings period.
3. An embryo is certainly “innocent” of all wrongdoing.
4. Therefore, an embryo cannot be deliberately aborted or killed.
5. Therefore, a woman who found herself unwillingly pregnant would be compelled by law to become a mother. That is mandatory motherhood.Suppose the Right-to-Lifers turn public opinion around and persuade, say, 75 percent of the populace that we should have an abortion-prohibition amendment. Suppose the amendment were passed and ratified. Would that be the end of the matter? After all, it’s “majority rule” in a democracy. Isn’t a majority all we need for stable law?
Is there anyone so naïve as to believe that? Have we so soon forgotten Prohibition?
The Volstead Act - the alcohol-prohibition amendment - was passed in 1919 and became effective in 1920. What legacy did it leave?
1. Organized crime.
2. A widespread contempt of the law among non-criminal elements of society.Alcohol prohibition didn’t work. Shall we now embark on abortion prohibition?
The abortion-reform movement began about 1960 in the United States. In 1967 two states passed the first reform laws. And in 1973 the Supreme Court outlawed abortion prohibition. If an abortion-prohibition Amendment were passed now, would this merely end a brief interlude, setting the clock back to where it was in 1960?
No: the clock of history can never be set back. We “accepted” (so to speak) the prohibition of abortion before; but it is doubtful if we ever will again. The way we used to accept the law was by secretly violating it. It was estimated that about a million abortions were illegally performed every year, around 1960. The reason so massive a violation of the law did not lead to reform action was because of the personal, secret nature of the act.
Those who violated the Volstead Act did so together, in good fellowship. They stimulated one another to take political action. By contrast, abortion prohibition was violated in a lonely, nonsocial way. Victorian taboos interfered with public action.
Now all this is changed. Since 1960 the following significant changes have taken place:
1. The word abortion is no longer censored. (As of 1960 the stylebooks of many newspapers did not allow the word to be printed. “Illegal operation” was the commonest euphemism.)
2. The word abortion is no longer tabooed. (Most “nice” people - even women who had abortions – couldn’t bring themselves to speak the word in the old days.)
3. The women’s movement has greatly altered women’s attitudes toward repressive laws and practices.
4. The concern for social justice is much greater now. (Under the old illegal system poor women could not get safe abortions. Many impoverished women aborted themselves, and some died. Such discrimination on the basis of income is no longer regarded as tolerable.)
5. Doctors are no longer ashamed to perform abortions. (Thousands of physicians now appreciate the woman’s point of view. It is unrealistic to suppose that they all passively accept a new prohibition law.)
6. Women now know that abortion is not as dangerous as its alternative, childbirth. (At the last reading, an early abortion was only one-eighth as dangerous as a normal childbirth. The risk continues to be lowered by further improvements in abortion technique. Requiring a woman to complete her pregnancy is requiring her to take a greater risk rather than a lesser.)
7. People now know that early abortions can be performed by competent personnel in very simple (but clean) surroundings. (No need for fancy hospitals. It is easy to hide illegal setups that are quite adequate.)Legal or illegal, it is doubtful if abortion will ever again be as dangerous as it once was. For many years the Los Angeles county hospital, for example, had one ward devoted entirely to septic abortion cases. These were women who had been aborted by rank amateurs (sometimes themselves), and had ended up with massive infections. The ward had 90 beds, and it was always full.
Three years after a permissive California law was passed, this ward was phased out of existence. Once women could get legal abortions from proper doctors they stopped resorting to illegal, incompetent ones.
If abortion prohibition is re-established the septic rate will probably never again go as high as it once was. Better methods of abortion have since been developed. (Note: these improvements in medicine were made in places where abortion was legal. An illegal system seldom produces medical advances.) Knowledge of the new methods is now widespread, and could survive recriminalisation. The infection and death rates from illegal abortions would probably be less than they used to be.
The clock of history can never be turned back to exactly where it was before. A new abortion-prohibition law would surely be flouted on a far larger scale. Police would be required to enforce abortion prohibition. What would the consequences be?
Al Capone the Second?
A new Mafia?
At the very least, a new disrespect for the law. Can society afford more disrespect?But why push for abortion? Isn’t birth control always preferable?
Let us grant that it is. But does that mean that if all women use the best method of contraception we can get rid of abortion? Not at all: pills, diaphragms, condoms, foams and IUDs can all fail.
Since the reason for using contraception is to avoid having a child at a particular time, when contraception fails, the woman still wants to avoid motherhood at that particular time. The term birth control, strictly speaking, means the prevention of births and includes abortion. In the total system of birth control, abortion is the backstop that corrects for contraceptive failure.
Is the backstop really needed?
The most effective contraceptive method we have to date [1974] is the contraceptive pill. Its failure rate is approximately 1 percent. That is, if a hundred women use the pill faithfully for a year, one of them, on the average, will be pregnant before the year is out.
One percent? That’s not much.
Oh, yes it is. There are about 54 million fertile women in the United States. About 3.5 million women bear a child during any given year. Let’s assume that every one of these children is wanted. (This is certainly not true.) That leaves about 50 million women exposed to the risk of unwanted pregnancy each year.
If the minipill is used, to minimize unwanted side effects, the failure rises to about 3 percent. That would produce three-quarters of a million unwanted births per year.
Other methods have even higher rates of failure. The worst is the rhythm method, which fails about 15 percent of the time.
Before birth control, mandatory motherhood was the common fate of married women. And of many unmarried ones as well. A woman may have wanted a few of her children, but seldom did she want all of them.
Good contraception goes most of the way toward freeing women of unwanted motherhood, but it by no means frees them from the fear of it. This is a fact little realized by most men.
H. G. Wells tells us how he became educated to this truth when he read his mother’s diary after her death. Her family was perpetually in need, and Mrs Wells lived “in perpetual dread of further motherhood”. As the end of the intermenstrual period approached, her gnawing concern was, Will I menstruate this time? – That is, Have I escaped pregnancy one more month?This story is told in the woman’s own words, without alteration. The time is about 1960. I will call the woman Margaret. She wrote:
“I had an illegal abortion 2 ½ years ago. I left my church because of the guilt I felt. I had six children when my husband left me to live with another woman. We weren’t divorced and I went to work to help support them. When he would come to visit the children he would sometimes stay after they were asleep. I became pregnant. When I told my husband, and asked him to please come back, he informed me that the woman he was living with was five months pregnant and ill, and that he couldn’t leave her, not at that time anyway.
I got the name of a doctor in San Francisco from a Dr. friend who was visiting here from there. This Dr. (Ob. and Gyn.) had a good legitimate practice in the main part of the city and was a kindly, compassionate man who believes as you do, that it is better for everyone not to bring an unwanted child into the world.
It was over before I know it. I thought I was just having an examination at the time. He even tried to make me not feel guilty by telling me that the long automobile trip has already started a spontaneous abortion. He charged me $25. That was on Fri. and on Mon. I was back at work. I never suffered any ill from it.
The other woman’s child died shortly after birth and six months later my husband asked if he could come back. We don’t have a perfect marriage but my children have a father. My being able to work has helped us out of a deep financial debt. I shall always remember the sympathy I received from that Dr. and wish there were more like him with the courage to do what they believe is right.”
Any person of compassion cannot but feel sympathy toward Margaret. But those who want, at all costs, to retain or reinstitute abortion prohibition have objections to make. We must listen to them.
Why didn’t Margaret use contraception?
This is an interesting question, but an irrelevant one. We can’t undo the past. Margaret is pregnant now; now what should she do?
If we let this woman have an abortion, others will be careless, as she was. We must make an example of her to deter others.
The same argument has been used for capital punishment. But criminologists are pretty well agreed that there is no positive evidence that capital punishment deters. (Capital punishment may or may not be justified on other grounds – that’s not our question here.)
Why should we let a woman have an abortion just to satisfy her selfish desires? Mere convenience is no excuse.
Scolding others for selfishness is very popular. But is selfishness wholly wrong? Each of us is descended from an unbroken line of selfish individuals. Our ancestors thought enough of themselves to fight against “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” They survived. The utterly selfless ones were not our ancestors: the perished.
Besides: look again at Margaret’s story. Is this the testimony of a very selfish woman? Do we not see here a great deal of loving concern for both husband and children? Note that Margaret was repelled by the thought of abortion, but she went ahead and had an abortion for the children’s sake. Abortion was a loving gift to her family. Margaret saw her alternatives as these:
A. Abortion, leaving her with six children and a difficult but manageable situation. She could keep her job; and might be able to get her husband back; the children would have a father; they should be able to muddle along. Muddling along is often the best we can do in this life.
B. No abortion. Child No. 7 is born; Margaret loses her job; her husband likely throws in the sponge and disappears; the children lose a father; the mother, over worried, ends in a mental hospital, and the seven children are farmed out to foster parents. This is not a certain scenario, but it is a highly probable one.So the options are these: six children tolerably well cared for versus seven miserably treated. Quality of life versus quantity…
Margaret’s choice: abortion for the children’s sake.A young unmarried couple (I will call them Anne and Michael) came to my office seeking help in arranging an abortion. They were both seniors in college, both biology students, and both had been admitted to medical school. They weren’t sure just when would be the best time to get married, but they planned to have two children after they were financially established.
Anne had just learned that she was pregnant. What of the future now? The probable alternatives were these:
A. Abortion. With luck and hard work, the scenario as planned before.
B. No abortion. Anne stops school, bears the baby, then has to go to work to support the child and help put Michael through school. There is a good chance she will never become a doctor.Are they selfish? Is it selfish, is it contrary to society’s interests, for a woman to want to be able to afford a child before she has one?
My last story is of quite different sort of person. I will call her Juliette. From the moment she walked in the door I was repelled by her. I was convinced that she was an utterly materialistic, utterly foolish, and completely self-centered person.
Well, you’ve made your bed, now lie in it – this is what I wanted to say to her. Fortunately I didn’t. My assessment of Juliette’s character may have been completely wrong. But even if I was completely right in my judgement of Juliette, the proposal to punish with pregnancy is indefensible.
“You’ve made your bed, now lie in it” – whom are we punishing? The woman, certainly. But if the woman is as bad as we think, we are also punishing the child. What sort of justice is that?
And if the child is punished unjustly it will likely grow up twisted and pass some of the punishment on to society.
A good woman deserves to be released from unwanted pregnancy precisely because she is good.
A woman thought to be bad deserves this release even more – lest she punish those who are innocent of her wrongdoings and shortcomings, her child most of all.
In fact: is there any class of women for whom mandatory motherhood is to be recommended? Any group who will make the world a better place in which to live if they are compelled to bear children they don’t want?SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE IS SAUCE FOR THE GANDER
When Justice Byron R. White dissented from the majority of the Supreme Court he condemned his brethren in law for their “improvident and extravagant…exercise of raw judicial power.” The majority, as he saw it, held that “ the Constitution of the United States values the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the fetus…”
Let us imagine a court of law presided over by Judge Byron R. White.
The wife is the complainant. John and Mary Doe already have three children. John makes only $125 a week, but he is a careful manager, and the Does have no debts beyond the mortgage on the house and the time payments yet to be made on the car. Mary is light-headed and leaves everything up to John. Well, almost everything: religion is her department, and she believes it is her duty to have as many children “as God sends her.” So when John takes to wearing condoms during intercourse she balks and hauls him into court. She asks that he be enjoined from using condoms.
“What do you have to say for yourself John?” asks Judge White.
“It’s all right here, Your Honor,” says John, handing up his household account book. “After I’ve budgeted for all the necessities, $10 a month for vacations and entertainment, and $5 for unforeseen emergencies, there’s not a cent left from my wages. If we have one more child, Your Honor, we’ll have to go into debt. And how will we ever get out?”
The Judge scowls.
“That won’t do,” he says. “Your wife’s desire for more and more children is eminently reasonable. At best, your actions are governed by mere convenience, whereas your wife’s behavior springs from deep religious feelings. More likely, your attempts to avoid having more children spring from whim or caprice. The Court finds for the plaintiff and enjoins the further use of contraceptives.”
Is that what Judge White would say to one of his own sex?
Not likely!“Your Honor. My client has been accused of murder under the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Dr. Samaritan is a profoundly compassionate man. As Margaret’s physician he was deeply touched when this unfortunate woman came to him with her problem. Six children already…no financial reserves. A job that barely supported her family; and that job would be lost if she went through with the pregnancy. What man of compassion could fail to be touched by the poor woman’s plight? So he performed the simple operation the woman desired, and a family was saved from disaster.
“If you will permit it, Your Honor, I have a little demonstration for the Court. I have here in this flask” - Sequitur [the attorney] reached into the box and pulled out a two-litre flask – “a suspension of living human eggs, all fertilized and ready to be transplanted into expectant mothers.”
The attorney sloshed the liquid around in the half filled flask. “How many fertilized eggs do you suppose there are in here? Dr. B has carefully sampled this flask and made the calculations. There are, he tells me…twenty trillion. I have then, in this flask, twenty trillion human beings…Now- !”
Sequitur removed the lid. Quickly he inverted the flask and with the swinging motion sprayed the contents on the floor. The judge, his mouth open, half rose to admonish the attorney, but Sequitur continued rapidly, precluding interruption.
“Bear with me! I know I have sullied the dignity of this court room, but I will make amends. A moment ago this flask had twenty trillion living human beings in it. Now they are still alive. But they won't be for long. The most heroic efforts we could possibly mount would not save them now. They will die.
“And who has killed them? I killed them. I, John Sequitur, killed them! In front of your eyes…The Twenty-eighth Amendment says that every woman’s embryo is a human being from the moment of conception, and that my client is a murderer. I my client’s attorney, have just snuffed out the lives of twenty trillion human beings. So says the Twenty-eighth Amendment. Do not concern yourself with trifles, Your Honor. Release my client – and charge me with murder. Mass murder.”It is a grotesque little embryo, in real life no larger that one’s thumb, but now blown up six feet tall on the screen. It is in color, of course. How else can one show BLOOD? Thus the Right-to-Lifers once more use their more effective weapon – color slides of embryos.
The emotional effectiveness of photographs of embryos is rooted in ambivalence. The embryos both resemble, and do not resemble, adult human beings.
See! – there are five tiny fingers on each hand. In higher magnification you can see the wee fingernails. How precious!
Thus people “identify” with the tiny embryo, accepting it as a human being. At the same time, the whole embryo is grotesque. In its proportions it looks far less human than an adult monkey does. The grotesqueness arouses feelings of pity.
It is significant that the embryos most used by the Right-to-Lifers in their shows are late embryos – 20 weeks and older.
But only a minority of abortions occur at so late a stage. If women had their way, the number would be zero. The factors that keep the minority above zero are three:
1. Technological limitation. (difficulty of early amniocentesis, which is needed for detection of defects)
2. Administrative roadblocks (created by the pressure of those of the Right-to-Life persuasion)
3. Special cases. (human behavior is so variable we can never foresee and plan for all the situations that turn up.)The trend in abortion is steadily toward the early stages. Most abortions now are performed on embryos so imperfectly formed that only the specialist can recognize them as human beings. Photos of these early embryos don’t have the visual impact the Right-to-Lifers want, so they don’t often show them. Yet – according to Right-to-Lifers – the moral problem of aborting even the earliest embryo is the same as it is with the latest.
One other trick of the Right-to-Lifers needs exposure. Their shows feature a great abundance of mangled embryos and fragments of embryos, all in glorious and repulsive color. The inference they want the viewer to make is that he is seeing the innocent victim of a crime – the crime of abortion, the crime of murder.
But you can’t photograph morality: the picture of the result of an act doesn’t prove its cause. Looking at a photograph of the most thoroughly mangled embryo we realize that the explanation may be completely innocent (even by Right-to-Life standards).
Here’s an instance. A woman begins to abort spontaneously, but the process fails to complete itself. The embryo is dead but not expelled. The woman is taken to the hospital and a physician completes the abortion with surgical tools that mangle the embryo – which is then in fine condition for a Right-to-Life slide show.
The camera cannot reveal the innocent origin of the mangled embryo. Nor prove an evil origin, either. Only the end result is captured by the camera – but that’s all that Right-to-Lifers want.
ALSO BY GARRETT HARDIN: "The Case for Legalized Abortion Now"
ALSO SEE: Life in a Pro-Life Theocracy
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