This essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 4 Issue 2 — October 2015.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “humanize” as 1) “to make more humane” and 2) “to give a human character to.” When we say, “Abortion-rights advocates often dehumanize the unborn,” we use a negative form of sense 2 to mean that they take human character away from the unborn. In this essay I will use “humanize” in both senses, but mainly in sense 1, “make more humane.”
My generation of Americans can be credited with having made itself into something more humane and more human — with having undergone, in a relatively short time, a moral and empathetic change. In the 1960s, it humanized us (those of us who were white) to come to see other races as fully human; it humanized us (those of us who were men) to come to see women as fully human; and it humanized some of us Americans to come to see the Vietnamese as fully human.
A decade later, it humanized us (those of us who were heterosexual) to come to see homosexuals as fully human.
And around the same time, it humanized those of us who were able-bodied to come to see the differently abled as fully human.
For succeeding generations, such inclusive attitudes came more easily, since much of such attitudes was inherited from the opening up that had already occurred. Empathy even became mandatory, and the term “politically correct” came into existence.
Nothing could be more obvious than that humanity has consistently evolved in the direction of increasing inclusiveness. And it is obvious to me, from my own experience and from what I have seen take place in the people around me, that the benefits of this inclusiveness have not been a one-way street.
One need not believe in God to appreciate the psychological wisdom of the Golden Rule in Christianity and of teachings of altruism and service-mindedness in other religions and philosophies. Some of our species have long understood the futility of seeking happiness in objects and in tangible rewards, even the most tangible mental rewards such as the admiration of others. As a species, we have gradually been learning that happiness for an individual involves identification with something greater than oneself.
Science may now have caught up with traditional wisdom in this area and may begin to take the lead. As the abstract of a 2008 psychology study said,
. . . we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves. 1
These findings recommend just the opposite of the “corrosive . . . social atomism” Tanner Matthews identified, in the January 2015 issue of Life Matters Journal, in one noted abortion apologist. 2
The above are just some hints that I feel help to explain my own empirical observations: the more of the human race that I, and people known to me, have included in our mental family, the happier we ourselves have become as a result.
Obviously we as Americans, not to mention we as a global society, still have a long way to go in terms of real inclusiveness of all the groups I have mentioned above. But it is clear to me that we have made progress and that the momentum is in the right direction.
Painfully, however, almost left out in the march of such progress has been one big human population: the unborn. Historically, they seem always to have been second-class citizens, at best. Even many pro-lifers, even today, seem to save most of their outrage at abortion for those of the unborn who are pain-capable or viable. And even whatever progress toward acceptance there has been for the early-term unborn has been met by a fierce reactionary onslaught in some small but perhaps growing pro-choice circles, mainly in the United States.
Human Life as One Seamless Process
I will say something about that reaction, but first I would like to point out that most dismissiveness toward the unborn does not stem from any conspiracy at all. I think it is quite natural. Again I look at myself. I’ve tried to remember — and really can’t remember exactly — how I thought of the unborn when I was young, but I do remember having the idea that there were a lot of kindly doctors around who were quite ready to solve someone’s problem, so therefore abortion must be completely okay (though illegal, at that time). And after I read The Population Bomb, I felt quite urgent about controlling, or better yet, reducing, population, and I’m sure I must have thought of abortion as a very good thing. I’m sure that the unborn seemed insignificant to me. Neither in the 1960s nor maybe even in the 1970s did I begin to think of the unborn any differently than that.
If a small embryo were to remain just as it is, frozen in time, we would have to say quite fairly that its life would not have much value. And it doesn’t really matter exactly when I began to see an embryo as anything other than such a snapshot. But after however many years of thought and meditation, experience, and a smattering of scientific learning, the following idea finally became a reflexive understanding for me, and not just an abstraction: “A human life is one seamless process that has to start somewhere, and how can it be expected that it won’t start small?” I came to see the unborn primarily as a process and only secondarily as a snapshot of a particular moment.
Both ways of looking at the unborn are scientifically useful for different purposes. It is not science, but only pre-logical intuition, that can certify as more morally relevant the perception of the embryo as a continual and relentless process, minute by minute, toward a fullness of human experience whose value no one will contest. This is the perception, in other words, “The child is father to the man” — and thus a person. But it would be a scientific statement (about my own subjective experience) to say that I feel larger myself for having embraced that group along with other human groups.
To quote another proverb here, I think that the single biggest source of the whole avoidable-abortion tragedy that is going on, and therefore also of the whole abortion conflict in society, is summed up by “Out of sight, out of mind.” To care about the unborn, the unborn must first seem real to us, and how can they seem real when our five senses help us so little? It is difficult to know what the first thoughts about and perceptions of the unborn might be on the part of very small children. How they perceive the unborn must depend a lot on the depictions they hear from their parents, which must in turn vary widely. We sometimes hear of things that small children do or say, when their mothers are pregnant, that seem to show a surprising connectedness with the unborn, a connectedness that we could even interpret as being based on identification — the born child having been so recently in the same position as its sibling. But if that connectedness was a reality for me personally when my younger brother was inside my mother (which I don’t remember), I certainly lost it later on. So I’m guessing it’s common either to lack that ability to connect, or to lose it later in childhood. Wordsworth described the fading of a kind of magic as a child grows: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” If, in the absence of a positive vision instilled by the parents, or a special intuition, you just showed a child a life-size model of an embryo a few millimeters long, with a tail, I think the child would not be impressed.
Certainly we do not start out in life with either the scientific knowledge or the cognitive equipment to see the unborn in terms of the information that is in their genes and the process of change that that information drives. Moreover, I think I was not unique when young in wanting to find some kind of permanence in the world. I have been learning extremely slowly that my body and my friendships and my favorite food products must all change, and still haven’t learned all such lessons yet. So regarding the unborn, I think we must certainly start out with a strong bias toward the snapshot model as at least part of our mental mix. Naturally it might take years to come to “see” a being whom we can’t literally see, as the first requisite step in the process of a human life.
The Wall Street Journal has found that “. . . attitudes about abortion and politics are subject to change with age and experience, and usually in a conservative direction.” 3 (Personally I hope that that is true about abortion but not about all politics.)
Other variables being equal, a pregnant woman must innately have a much better sense than most people of the humanity of what is inside her. Even then, however, I think that that sense can be very limited without further thought, experience, and so on. Many of the post-abortive women whose stories of regret I have seen or heard have said that the unborn seemed inconsequential to them at the time. Later they decided that it had been a person after all.
The Dehumanizing Reaction
All this has just been to make clear the natural difficulties of seeing an early unborn child, in a reflexive and intuitive way, for the human being that our educated intellects actually know it to be. But in addition to those natural difficulties, there has also been the reactionary backlash that I mentioned above. In the cases of all the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, also, forces of reaction not surprisingly arose to protect certain interests.
Here we have to distinguish between a valid acknowledgment of legitimate interests, and propaganda. There is no denying that the interests of the unborn may come in conflict with the interests of some of the born — particularly, of course, the women who carry them — and no denying that to protect their most vital interests, the born may sometimes have the right to kill the unborn. But even if we are in conflict with some other party, it would not be intellectually honest to allow the conflict to affect our evaluation of the other party’s humanity.
The temptation to do so would be understandable, however. Here let’s reflect that even before Roe v. Wade, it was clear to some that, with the US Supreme Court holding sway, abortion rights would need to hinge on the lack of personhood of the unborn. So any initiative to establish the humanity of the unborn came to be resisted from the beginning through a concerted effort to dehumanize them (using here the negative form of sense 2 of “humanize”). Author and abortion-rights advocate Naomi Wolf admitted this twenty years ago, and went on to try to pinpoint the origins of that reaction:
Because of the implications of a Constitution that defines rights according to the legal idea of “a person,” the abortion debate has tended to focus on the question of “personhood” of the fetus. Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn’t a person, and this, over the years has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization. Laura Kaplan’s The Story of Jane, an important forthcoming account of a pre-Roe underground abortion service, inadvertently sheds light on the origins of some of this rhetoric: service staffers referred to the fetus — well into the fourth month — as “material” (as in “the amount of material that had to be removed…”). . . . In the early 1970s, Second Wave feminism adopted this rhetoric in response to the reigning ideology in which motherhood was invoked as an excuse to deny women legal and social equality. In a climate in which women risked being defined as mere vessels while their fetuses were given “personhood” at their expense, it made sense that women’s advocates would fight back by depersonalizing the fetus. . . . Second Wave feminists reacted to the dehumanization [of] women by dehumanizing the creatures within them. In the death-struggle to wrest what Simone de Beauvoir called transcendence out of biological immanence, some feminists developed a rhetoric that defined the unwanted fetus as at best valueless: at worst an adversary, a “mass of dependent protoplasm.” 4
Unmentioned by Wolf, but perhaps still more effective in dehumanizing or simply erasing the unborn, were cunning bits of socio-linguistic engineering that assured women that only one “body,” theirs, was involved in any abortion.
All that was twenty to fifty years ago; now (Wolf’s plea for honesty having failed to make a dent in most of her colleagues) it is practically the stock-in-trade of the most vocal of the pro-choice side (for instance, those we are likely to meet in online discussions about abortion) to speak of the unborn as “parasites,” “tumors,” “intruders,” or even “rapists.” One would get the impression that the unborn babies of the world were on the march, trying to destroy civilization as we know it. If these abortion-rights advocates do not always paint the unborn as that marauding horde, at least they carry dismissiveness to comical extremes (the comical nature not being entirely deliberate):
Myself, I’d as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those [five] abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life — mine. 5
This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion. Given the choice between living my life how I please and having my body within my control and the fate of a lentil-sized, brainless embryo that has half a chance of dying on its own anyway, I choose me. Here’s another uncomfortable fact for anti-choicers: Just because a woman does want children doesn’t mean she wants them now. Maybe she’s still got some fun-having to do. Or maybe she has a couple already and, already well-educated about the smelly neediness of babies, feels done with having them. Either way, what she wants trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place. 6
Wolf, above, showed how the origins of deliberate dehumanization of the unborn could be traced to the fear of fetal personhood on the part of pro-choicers in the 1960s and 1970s. But the pro-life movement did not cease its efforts after the 1970s. The pro-choice side has continued to get a lot of pushback from the pro-life side–and rightly so; I think that that pushback should only increase. But it was predictable that there would be a process of conflict escalation, and such a process probably explains the level of dehumanizing rhetoric that we are seeing now. I think that the pro-choice side wouldn’t have taken their rhetoric to such extremes if their agenda had not met resistance in the first place. In other words, the pro-choice extremes are to an important extent a by-product of the pro-life pushback. Reasonableness is one of the casualties of war, particularly when one starts to lose.
But whatever the origins of the dehumanization we are witnessing, what will be its effects on its agents? If, as I have argued, the process of including different groups in our human family brings greater happiness for those who include, what will be the psychological effects for those who deliberately exclude and dehumanize? Wolf again:
Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life. . . . With the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences — two ethical, one strategic: hardness of heart, lying and political failure. . . . when we defend abortion rights by emptying the act of moral gravity, we find ourselves cultivating a hardness of heart.
Feeling that the unborn are fully human does not necessarily mean that it is immoral ever to kill them, and even if it is immoral, that doesn’t show that it should be illegal. Virtually all who call themselves pro-life would agree that a pregnant woman should be allowed to have her child killed if the risk to her own life reaches a certain level. But Wolf may be one of the few people who really embody another principle that many pro-choicers will agree with abstractly — the principle that even if the unborn are fully human, that per se doesn’t disallow a woman from aborting for the sake of her career, or her education, or even simply because she does not want to be pregnant.
Why do I call Wolf “one of the few” who really embody that principle? Certainly there are many who say, “Even if the unborn are fully human, a woman should be allowed to abort for the sake of her career, or her education, or anything at all.” We are all familiar with the bodily-rights argument, which tries to show that even if the unborn is a person, a woman should have an absolute right to refuse to let it use her body.
But I say Wolf is “one of the few” because she really seems to feel that the unborn is a person. Whereas virtually all, I think, of those many who use the bodily-rights argument, concede only for the sake of the argument that the unborn may be a person, but do not really feel it. I have debated many advocates of bodily rights, and I’m convinced that what truly underlies the artfulness of their arguments is not the logical strength of the position, but the fact that they do not think it’s a person. I think that if they really related emotionally to the unborn as their little sisters and brothers, their minds would quickly be flooded with good counter-logic against that argument of theirs. In practice as opposed to principle, the mere humanity of the unborn is convincing enough to lead to rejection of abortion rights.
Elsewhere I have thought as best I could about the bodily-rights argument, and in the end I support unborn child-protection laws. 7 I mention this because the question of my views on law naturally comes up if I mention law at all. But the way I really need to approach law here is in relation to one of my main themes, our perceptions of the unborn.
One might say, even if unborn child-protection laws are justified in spite of bodily rights, and so on, why enact laws that will be messy and difficult to enforce and widely violated and save only an uncertain number of babies?
One answer is that I think that laws protecting the unborn, by their presence or their absence, are very important in relation to our perceptions of the value of the unborn. Rebecca Haschke does pro-life outreach on college campuses. She says:
I’ve talked to students on campus, though, when we talk about abortion — their reasoning for why abortion is okay is because the law says it’s okay. And I ask them, “Should the law be what determines what is right and wrong?,” and they’ll be like “Well, yeah, it does.” And then I cringe and I say, “Well, have we ever had laws that have been unjust?” And then they go, “Yeah, we have.” . . . the law does sometimes make people think . . . it influences people’s thoughts. 8
In 2005 the Los Angeles Times interviewed patients at an abortion clinic. “She regrets having to pay $750 for the abortion, but Amanda says she does not doubt her decision. ‘It’s not like it’s illegal. It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong,’ she says.”
At a pro-life conference in Orange, Calif. in September 2014, the president of the National Right-to-Life Committee remarked, “We often hear, ‘If it hadn’t been legal, I wouldn’t have done it.'”
Above I said, “Feeling that the unborn are fully human does not necessarily mean that . . . it should be illegal.” Again, the legality of abortion does not technically say, “The unborn have little value,” but I think that in practice it does say that. And the illegality of abortion would send the message that the unborn are fully human. Law affects culture, just as culture affects law.
A Giant Leap for Humankind
And if we do feel that the unborn are fully human, what’s in it for us? What will we gain if we can cross that last frontier of civil rights? Here Dr. Jerome Lejeune, “the father of modern genetics,” is quoted as saying: We need to be clear: The quality of a civilization can be measured by the respect it has for its weakest members. Can’t it also be said that once we learn respect for our weakest members, we will elevate the quality of our civilization?
The lucky and privileged of the species never lost anything psychologically by including in their human family groups that they had earlier despised or patronized. They only broadened their horizons and outgrew their pettiness and the anxiety of clinging to their positions. It was win-win.
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
. . .
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. 10
An acceptance of the unborn will involve not only the earlier kind of inclusiveness when any group was accepted but also, this time, a transition from a mechanistic model of reality to a vision of all life as process and interconnectedness. It will be a giant leap for humankind. Coming to see an embryo as we would a little sister or brother, and coming to see all of life as a process of change, will be at once mind-expanding and a clearer realization of a particular scientific fact. For us, not to mention for the unborn, that day cannot come too soon.
1. Science 21 March 2008: Vol. 319 no. 5870 pp. 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5870/1687
2. Tanner Matthews, “Argument from Bodily Rights” in Life Matters Journal, Vol. 3 Issue 4, January 2015. http://www.lifemattersjournal.org/#!volume-3/c1sdr
3. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122695016603334449
4. “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, October 16, 1995. http://www.priestsforlife.org/prochoice/ourbodiesoursouls.htm
5. Julie Burchill, “Abortion: still a dirty word” in The Guardian, May 25, 2002. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/may/25/weekend.julieburchill/
6. Amanda Marcotte, “The Real Debate Isn’t about Life But About What We Expect of Women”. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/14/the-real-debate-isnt-about-life-but-about-what-we-expect-of-women/
7. “Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument”. http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/dismantling-the-bodily-rights-argument-without-using-the-responsibility-argument/
8. “Life Report” on YouTube.
9. Stephanie Simon, “Offering Abortion, Rebirth” in Truthout, November 29, 2005. http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/58965:offering-abortion-rebirth
10. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road.”
2 February 2018 update:
Above I wrote, the pro-choice extremes are to an important extent a by-product of the pro-life pushback. In a telethon on February 1, 2018, comedian Sarah Silverman said in reference to a particular pro-life law, “if anything has ever made me want to eat an aborted fetus, it’s this law.”
You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.
Some future posts:
Life Panels
Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn
A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature
Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party
The Motivations of Aborting Parents
Why Remorse Comes Too Late
The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill
Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation
The Woman as Slave?
Abortion and the Map of the World