Inconvenient Lives
Robert H. Bork
Judging from the evidence, Americans do not view human life as
sacrosanct. We engage in a variety of activities, from driving
automobiles to constructing buildings, that we know will cause
deaths. But the deliberate taking of the life of an individual has
never been regarded as a matter of moral indifference. We debate
the death penalty, for example, endlessly. It seems an anomaly,
therefore, that we have so easily accepted practices that are the
deliberate taking of identifiable individual lives. We have turned
abortion into a constitutional right; one state has made assisted
suicide a statutory right and two federal circuit courts, not to
be outdone, have made it a constitutional right; campaigns to
legalize euthanasia are underway. It is entirely predictable that
many of the elderly, ill, and infirm will be killed, and often
without their consent. This is where radical individualism has
taken us.
When a society revises its attitude toward life and death, we can
see the direction of its moral movement. The revision of American
thought and practice about life questions began with abortion, and
examination of the moral confusion attending that issue helps us
understand more general developments in public morality.
The necessity for reflection about abortion does not depend on,
but is certainly made dramatic by, the fact that there are
approximately a million and a half abortions annually in the
United States. To put it another way, since the Supreme Court's
1973 decision in <Roe v. Wade>, there have been perhaps over
thirty million abortions in the United States. Three out of ten
conceptions today end in the destruction of the fetus. These
facts, standing alone, do not decide the issue of morality, but
they do mean that the issue is hugely significant.
The issue is also heated, polarizing, and often debated on both
sides in angry, moralistic terms. I will refrain from such
rhetoric because for most of my life I held a position on the
subject very different from the one I now take. For years I
adopted, without bothering to think, the attitude common among
secular, affluent, university-educated people who took the
propriety of abortion for granted, even when it was illegal. The
practice's illegality, like that of drinking alcohol during
Prohibition, was thought to reflect merely unenlightened prejudice
or religious conviction, the two being regarded as much the same.
From time to time, someone would say that it was a difficult moral
problem, but there was rarely any doubt how the problem should be
resolved. I remember a woman at Yale saying, without any
disagreement from those around her, that "The fetus isn't nothing,
but I am for the mother's right to abort it." I probably nodded.
Most of us had a vague and unexamined notion that while the fetus
wasn't nothing, it was also not fully human.1 The slightest
reflection would have suggested that non-human or semi-human blobs
of tissue do not magically turn into human beings.
Qualms about abortion began to arise when I first read about fetal
pain. There is no doubt that, after its nervous system has
developed to a degree, the fetus being dismembered or poisoned in
the womb feels excruciating pain. For that reason, many people
would confine abortion to the early stages of pregnancy but have
no objection to it then. There are, on the other hand, people who
oppose abortion at any stage and those who regard it as a right at
any stage up to the moment of birth. But in thinking about
abortion-especially abortion at any stage-it is necessary to
address two questions. Is abortion always the killing of a human
being? If it is, is that killing done simply for convenience? I
think there can be no doubt that the answer to the first question
is, yes; and the answer to the second is, almost always.2
The question of whether abortion is the termination of a human
life is a relatively simple one. It has been described as a
question requiring no more than a knowledge of high school
biology. There may be doubt that high school biology courses are
clear on the subject these days, but consider what we know. The
male sperm and the female egg each contains twenty-three
chromosomes. Upon fertilization, a single cell results containing
forty-six chromosomes, which is what all humans have, including,
of course, the mother and the father. But the new organism's
forty-six chromosomes are in a different combination from those of
either parent; the new organism is unique. It is not an organ of
the mother's body but a different individual. This cell produces
specifically human proteins and enzymes from the beginning. Its
chromosomes will heavily influence its destiny until the day of
its death, whether that death is at the age of ninety or one month
after conception.
The cell will multiply and develop, in accordance with its
individual chromosomes, and, when it enters the world, will be
recognizably a human baby. From single-cell fertilized egg to baby
to teenager to adult to old age to death is a single process of
one individual, not a series of different individuals replacing
each other. It is impossible to draw a line anywhere after the
moment of fertilization and say before this point the creature is
not human but after this point it is. It has all the attributes of
a human from the beginning, and those attributes were in the
forty-six chromosomes with which it began. Francis Crick, the
Nobel laureate and biophysicist, is quoted as having estimated
that "the amount of information contained in the chromosomes of a
single fertilized human egg is equivalent to about a thousand
printed volumes of books, each as large as a volume of the
Encyclopedia Britannica." Such a creature is not a blob of tissue
or, as the Roe opinion so felicitously put it, a "potential life."
As someone has said, it is a life with potential.
It is impossible to say that the killing of the organism at any
moment after it originated is not the killing of a human being.
Yet there are those who say just that by redefining what a human
being is. Redefining what it means to be a human being will prove
dangerous in contexts other than abortion. One of the more
primitive arguments put forward is that in the embryonic stage,
which lasts about two months after conception, the creature does
not look human. One man said to me, "Have you ever seen an embryo?
It looks like a guppy." A writer whose work I greatly respect
refers to "the patently inhuman fetus of four weeks." A cartoonist
made fun of a well-known anti-abortion doctor by showing him
pointing to the microscopic dot that is the zygote and saying,
"We'll call him Timmy." It is difficult to know what the
appearance of Timmy has to do with the humanity of the fetus. I
suspect appearance is made an issue because the more recognizably
a baby the fetus becomes, the more our emotions reject the idea of
destroying it. But those are uninstructed emotions, not emotions
based on a recognition of what the fetus is from the beginning.
Other common arguments are that the embryo or fetus is not fully
sentient, or that it cannot live outside the mother's womb, or
that the fetus is not fully a person unless it is valued by its
mother. These seem utterly insubstantial arguments. A newborn is
not fully sentient, nor is a person in an advanced stage of
Alzheimer's disease. There are people who would allow the killing
of the newborn and the senile, but I doubt that is a view with
general acceptance. At least not yet. Equally irrelevant to the
discussion is the fact that the fetus cannot survive outside the
womb. Neither can a baby survive without the nurture of others,
usually the parents. Why dependency, which lasts for years after
birth, should justify terminating life is inexplicable. No more
apparent is the logic of the statement that a fetus is a person
only if the mother values its life. That is a tautology: an
abortion is justified if the mother wants an abortion.
In discussing abortion, James Q. Wilson wrote, "The moral debate
over abortion centers on the point in the development of the
fertilized ovum when it has acquired those characteristics that
entitle it to moral respect." He did not, apparently, think the
cell resulting from conception was so entitled. Wilson gave an
example of moral respect persisting in difficult circumstances:
"An elderly man who has been a devoted husband and father but who
now lies comatose in a vegetative state barely seems to be alive,
. . . yet we experience great moral anguish in deciding whether to
withdraw his life support." In response, my wife was moved to
observe, "But suppose the doctor told us that in eight months the
man would recover, be fully human, and live a normal life as a
unique individual. Is it even conceivable that we would remove his
life-support system on the ground that his existence, like that of
the fetus, is highly inconvenient to us and that he does not look
human at the moment? There would be no moral anguish but instead a
certainty that such an act would be a grave moral wrong."
It is certainly more likely that we would refuse to countenance an
abortion if a sonogram showed a recognizable human being than if
only a tiny, guppy- like being appeared. But that is an
instinctive reaction and instinctive reactions are not always the
best guide to moral choice. Intellect must play a role as well.
What if biology convinces us that the guppy-like creature or the
microscopic fertilized egg has exactly the same future, the same
capacity to live a full human life, as does the fetus at three
months or at seven months or the infant at birth? "It is difficult
to see," my wife added, "that the decision in the imagined case of
the comatose elderly man who in time will recover is different
from the abortion decision." In both cases, it is only a matter of
time. The difference is that the death of the elderly man would
deprive him of a few years of life while the aborted embryo or
fetus loses an entire lifetime.
The issue is not, I think, one of appearance, sentience, or
anything other than prospective life that is denied the individual
by abortion. In introductory ethics courses, there used to be a
question put: If you could obtain a hundred million dollars by
pressing a button that would kill an elderly Chinese mandarin whom
you had never seen, and if nobody would know what you had done,
would you press the button? That seems to me the same issue as the
abortion decision, except that the unborn child has a great deal
longer to live if you don't press that particular button. Most of
us, I suspect, would like to think we would not kill the mandarin.
The characteristics of appearance, sentience, ability to live
without assistance, and being valued by others cannot be the
characteristics that entitle you to sufficient moral respect to be
allowed to go on living. What characteristic does, then? It must
lie in the fact that you are alive with the prospect of years of
life ahead. That characteristic the unborn child has.
That seems to me an adequate ground to reject the argument made by
Peter Singer last year in the London <Spectator> that supports not
only abortion but infanticide. He writes that it is doubtful that
a fetus becomes conscious until well after the time most abortions
are performed and even if it is conscious, that would not put the
fetus at a level of awareness comparable to that of "a dog, let
alone a chimpanzee. If on the other hand it is self-awareness,
rather than mere consciousness, that grounds a right to life, that
does not arise in a human being until some time after birth."
Aware that this line leaves out of account the potential of the
child for a full human life, Singer responds that "in a world that
is already over-populated, and in which the regulation of
fertility is universally accepted, the argument that we should
bring all potential people into existence is not persuasive." That
is disingenuous. If overpopulation were a fact, that would hardly
justify killing humans. If overpopulation were taken to be a
justification, it would allow the killing of any helpless
population, preferably without the infliction of pain.
Most contraceptive methods of regulating fertility do not raise
the same moral issue as abortion because they do not permit the
joining of the sperm and the egg. Until the sperm and the egg
unite, there is no human being. Singer goes on to make the
unsubstantiated claim that "just as the human being develops
gradually in a physical sense, so too does its moral significance
gradually increase." That contention is closely allied to the
physical appearance argument and is subject to the same rebuttal.
One wonders at measuring moral significance by physique. If a
person gradually degenerated physically, would his moral
significance gradually decline?
Many who favor the abortion right understand that humans are being
killed. Certainly the doctors who perform and nurses who assist at
abortions know that. So do nonprofessionals. Otherwise, abortion
would not be smothered in euphemisms. Thus, we hear the language
of "choice," "reproductive rights," and "medical procedures."
Those are oddly inadequate terms to describe the right to end the
life of a human being. It has been remarked that "pro-choice" is
an odd term since the individual whose life is at stake has no
choice in the matter. These are ways of talking around the point
that hide the truth from others and, perhaps, from one's self.
President Clinton speaks of keeping abortion "safe, legal, and
rare." Why rare, if it is merely a choice, a medical procedure
without moral problems?
That there are severe moral problems is becoming clear even to
many who favor abortion. That is probably why, as Candace C.
Crandall observed last year in the <Women's Quarterly>, "the
morale of the prochoice side of the abortion stalemate has visibly
collapsed." The reason: "Proponents of abortion rights overcame
Americans' qualms about the procedure with a long series of claims
about the benefits of unrestricted abortion on demand. Without
exception, those claims have proved false." The proponents claimed
that <Roe v. Wade> rescued women from death during unsafe, back-
alley abortions, but it was the availability of antibiotics
beginning in the 1940s and improved medical techniques that made
abortion safe well before <Roe.> It was argued that abortion on
demand would guarantee that every child was a wanted child, would
keep children from being born into poverty, reduce illegitimacy
rates, and help end child abuse. Child poverty rates, illegitimacy
rates, and child abuse have all soared. We heard that abortion
should be a decision between a woman and her doctor. The idea of a
woman and her personal physician deliberating about the choice is
a fantasy: women are going to specialized abortion clinics that
offer little support or counseling. (Crandall does not address the
point, but it is difficult to see that bringing a doctor in for
consultation would change the nature of the decision about taking
human life.) She does note, however, that many women use abortion
for birth control.
Crandall says she sympathizes with abortion-rights advocates. But
on her own showing, it is difficult to see why. No anti-abortion
advocate could make it clearer that human lives are being
destroyed at the rate of 1.5 million a year for convenience.
The author Naomi Wolf, who favors the right to abort, has
challenged the feminists whose rhetoric seeks to disguise the
truth that a human being is killed by abortion. In a 1995 article
in the <New Republic>, she asks for "an abortion-rights movement
willing publicly to mourn the evil-necessary evil though it may
be-that is abortion." But she asks a question and gives an answer
about her support for abortion rights that is troublesome: "But
how, one might ask, can I square a recognition of the humanity of
the fetus, and the moral gravity of destroying it, with a pro-
choice position? The answer can only be found in the context of a
paradigm abandoned by the left and misused by the right: the
paradigm of sin and redemption."
That seems an odd paradigm for this problem. It is one thing to
have sinned, atoned, and sought redemption. It seems quite another
to justify planning to sin on the ground that you also plan to
seek redemption afterward. That justification seems even stranger
for repeat abortions, which Wolf says are at least 43 percent of
the total. Sin plus redemption falls short as a resolution of her
dilemma. If that were an adequate resolution, it would seem to
follow, given the humanity of the fetus, that infanticide, the
killing of the elderly, indeed any killing for convenience, would
be licensed if atonement and redemption were planned in advance.
Nor is it clear why the evil is necessary. It is undeniable that
bearing and rearing a child sometimes places a great burden on a
woman or a family. That fact does not, however, answer the
question whether the burden justifies destroying a human life. In
most other contexts, we would say such a burden is not sufficient
justification. The fact is, in any event, that the burden need not
be borne. Putting the child up for adoption is an alternative. The
only drawback is that others will know the woman is pregnant. If
that is the reason to choose abortion, then the killing really is
for convenience.
But it is clear, in any event, that the vast majority of all
abortions are for convenience. In those cases, abortion is used
as merely one more technique of birth control. A 1987 survey of
the reasons given by women for having abortions made by
researchers with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is very
much pro-abortion, demonstrated this fact. The following table
shows the percentage of women who gave the listed reasons.
Reason Total Percentage
Woman is concerned about 76
how having a baby could change
her life
Woman can't afford baby now 68
Woman has problems with 51
relationship or wants to avoid
single parenthood
Woman is unready for responsibility 31
Woman doesn't want others to know 31
she has had sex or is pregnant
Woman is not mature enough or is 30
too young to have a child
Woman has all the children she 26
wanted, or has all grown-up children
Husband or partner wants woman 23
to have abortion
Fetus has possible health problem 13
Woman has health problem 7
Woman's parents want her to 7
have abortion
Woman was victim of rape or incest 1
Other 6
It is clear that the overwhelming number of abortions were for
birth control unrelated to the health of the fetus or the woman.
Moreover, of those who were concerned about a possible health
problem of the fetus, only 8 percent said that a physician had
told them that the fetus had a defect or was abnormal. The rest
were worried because they had taken medication, drugs, or alcohol
before realizing they were pregnant, but did not apparently obtain
a medical confirmation of any problem. Of those aborting because
of their own health, 53 percent said a doctor had told them their
condition would be made worse by being pregnant. Some of the rest
cited physical problems, and 11 percent gave a mental or emotional
problem as the reason. Only 1 percent cited rape or incest.
The survey noted that "some 77 percent of women with incomes under
100 percent or between 100 and 149 percent of the poverty level
said they were having an abortion because they could not afford to
have a child, compared with 69 percent of those with incomes
between 150 and 199 percent and 60 percent of those with incomes
at or above 200 percent of the poverty level." The can't-afford
category thus included a great many women who, by most reckonings,
could afford to have a baby and certainly could have put the baby
up for adoption.
This demonstration that abortion is almost always a birth control
technique rather than a response to a serious problem with the
mother's or the fetus' health must have been a considerable
embarrassment to the pro-abortion forces. Perhaps for that reason
no survey by them seems to have been reported since. More recent
statistics by anti-abortion groups, however, bear out the
conclusions to be drawn from the Guttmacher Institute study. The
reasons most women give for having an abortion are "social": a
baby would affect their educations, jobs, lives, or they felt
unable to handle it economically, their partners did not want
babies, etc.
Perhaps the most instructive episode demonstrating the
brutalization of our culture by abortion was the fight over
"partial-birth abortions." These abortions are usually performed
late in the pregnancy. The baby is delivered feet first until only
the head remains within the mother. The aborting physician inserts
scissors into the back of the infant's skull and opens the blades
to produce a hole. The child's brains are then vacuumed out, the
skull collapses, and the rest of the newly made corpse is removed.
If the head had been allowed to come out of the mother, killing
the baby then would be the criminal act of infanticide.
When it was proposed to outlaw this hideous procedure, which
obviously causes extreme pain to the baby, the pro-abortion forces
in Congress and elsewhere made false statements to fend off the
legislation or to justify an anticipated presidential veto.
Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive
Rights Action League stated that the general anesthesia given the
mother killed the fetus so that there is no such thing as a
partial-birth abortion. Physicians promptly rebutted the claim.
Local anesthesia, which is most often used in these abortions, has
no effect on the baby and general anesthesia not only does not
kill the baby, it provides little or no painkilling effect to the
baby. The vice president of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia
and Perinatology said the claim was "crazy," noting that
"anesthesia does not kill an infant if you don't kill the mother."
Two doctors who perform partial-birth abortions stated that the
majority of fetuses aborted in this fashion are alive until the
end of the procedure.
Other opponents of a ban on partial-birth abortions claimed that
it was used only when necessary to protect the mother's life.
Unfortunately for that argument, the physician who is the best-
known practitioner of these abortions stated in 1993 that 80
percent of them are "purely elective," not necessary to save the
mother's life or health. Partial-birth understates the matter. The
baby is outside the mother except for its head, which is kept in
the mother only to avoid a charge of infanticide. Full birth is
inches away and could easily be accomplished.
No amount of discussion, no citation of evidence, can alter the
opinions of radical feminists about abortion. One evening I
naively remarked in a talk that those who favor the right to abort
would likely change their minds if they could be convinced that a
human being was being killed. I was startled at the anger that
statement provoked in several women present. One of them informed
me in no uncertain terms that the issue had nothing to do with the
humanity of the fetus but was entirely about the woman's freedom.
It is here that radical egalitarianism reinforces radical
individualism in supporting the abortion right. Justice Harry
Blackmun, who wrote <Roe> and who never offered the slightest
constitutional defense of it, simply remarked that the decision
was a landmark on women's march to equality. Equality, in this
view, means that if men do not bear children, women should not
have to either. Abortion is seen as women's escape from the idea
that biology is destiny, to escape from the tyranny of the family
role.
Discussions about life and death in one area influence such
decisions in others. Despite assurances that the abortion decision
did not start us down a slippery and very steep slope, that is
clearly where we are, and gathering speed. The systematic killing
of unborn children in huge numbers is part of a general disregard
for human life that has been growing for some time. Abortion by
itself did not cause that disregard, but it certainly deepens and
legitimates the nihilism that is spreading in our culture and
finds killing for convenience acceptable. We are crossing lines,
at first slowly and now with rapidity: killing unborn children for
convenience; removing tissue from live fetuses; contemplating
creating embryos for destruction in research; considering taking
organs from living anencephalic babies; experimenting with
assisted suicide; and contemplating euthanasia. Abortion has
coarsened us. If it is permissible to kill the unborn human for
convenience, it is surely permissible to kill those thought to be
soon to die for the same reason. And it is inevitable that many
who are not in danger of imminent death will be killed to relieve
their families of burdens. Convenience is becoming the theme of
our culture. Humans tend to be inconvenient at both ends of their
lives.
ROBERT H. BORK is the John M. Olin Scholar in Legal Studies at the
American Enterprise Institute. This article is adapted from his
new book, <Slouching Towards Gomorrah>, published by ReganBooks,
an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright (c) 1996 by Robert H. Bork.
ENDNOTES
1 I objected to <Roe v. Wade> the moment it was decided not because of any doubts about abortion, but because the decision was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives. <Roe> and the decisions reaffirming it are equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to <Dred Scott v. Sandford.> Just as <Dred Scott> forced a southern proslavery position on the nation, <Roe> is nothing more than the Supreme Court's imposition of the morality of our cultural elites.
2 In discussing abortion I will not address instances where most people, however they might ultimately decide the issue, would feel genuine moral anguish, cases, for example, where it is known that the child will be born with severe deformities. My purpose is not to solve all moral issues but simply to address the major ones. Abortions in cases of deformity, etc., are a very small fraction of the total and, because they introduce special factors, do not cast light on the direction of our culture as do abortions of healthy pre-borns performed for convenience.
This article appeared in the October 1996 issue of "First Things."
To subscribe write First Things, Dept. FT, P.O. Box 3000,
Denville, NJ 07834-9847, 1-800-783-4903. Published monthly except
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