[First reprinted in our Spring 1978 issue, Clare Boothe Luce’s “Letter to the Women’s Lobby” was an explanation as to why, after decades advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, she was dismayed that its passage was being jeopardized by the abortion lobby. This letter was entered into the Congressional Record on March 7, 1978, by Congressman Henry J. Hyde.]

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YOUR LETTER of December 19th asking me for a contribution to the Women’s Lobby campaign against anti-abortion Congressional candidates was buried under the Christmas and New Year’s mail. It has now surfaced in my in-basket. Having read it, I must ask you to drop my name from the Women’s Lobby list of sponsors . . .

First, I do not care to be identified with a campaign that has already done so much to jeopardize the passage of [the Equal Rights Amendment]. If ERA fails to pass, as I now fear it will, a large part of the blame must fall on those misguided feminists who have tried to make the extraneous issue of unrestricted and federally-funded abortion the centerpiece of the Equal Rights struggle.

Secondly, I do not accept the extraordinary proposition that women cannot achieve equal rights before the law until all women are given the legal right to empty their wombs at will—and at the expense of the taxpayer.

I have been a supporter of ERA for 55 years. Indeed, I went to work in Washington for Alice Paul, the mother of ERA, the year the Amendment was sent up to the Hill. ERA was conceived as a bill to wipe out, in one single stroke, all the laws on the books which denied equality before the law to women. In the past half-century, women have won many rights they did not have when ERA was dropped into the hopper. But even so, I believe that the passage of ERA would bring the evolutionary process of legal equality to completion.

If the Amendment fails to secure ratification, I very much doubt that Congress will vote to extend it seven more years of grace.

As you are a sincere and dedicated feminist, I owe it to you and the Women’s Lobby to explain why I am for ERA and, at the same time, against legalized unrestricted abortion.

As you so well know, all of the democratic liberties and civil rights Americans enjoy under our Constitution—and indeed, the Constitution itself—rest on the validity of a single proposition, which was first set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Now on what facts or circumstantial evidence did the Signers base this extraordinary—and politically revolutionary—assertion? In 1776, anybody with eyes in his head could see that some were masters, others slaves; some were rich, others poor; some fair of form and sound of limb, others ugly, blind or crippled; some wise, and others fools from the cradle. Nothing in 1776 seemed less “self-evident” in fact than that “all men are created equal.” And nothing—in fact—is less self-evident today.

But “these truths we hold” were not based on evident facts about the human condition. They were based on philosophical and religious truths which transcended what people call “the realities.”

The American proposition that created the United States and the Constitution was based—the words of the Signers—on “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”

The Founding Fathers reasoned thus: All men are born equal in one undeniable respect—they are all born equally human. (No man is any less human than any other.) All men have the same nature. It is in the very nature of Man—it is his “human nature” to desire (“among other things”) Life, Liberty and Happiness. (No man naturally desires to die before his time, to be the “creature” or slave of another, or to live a life of suffering or misery.) Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness were “unalienable” rights, because the desire and the need for them had been implanted by Nature, and Nature’s God in the minds and hearts of all men. A government that denied these natural human rights to its subjects was an unjust, unnatural and ungodly government. Furthermore, our Founding Fathers reasoned, Nature and Nature’s God had also endowed human nature with the capacity to reason. Man had the natural capacity to plan, guide and correct his own courses of action. Consequently, the Law of Nature and Nature’s God entitled all men to self-government.

I mention all this simply to remind you that the Natural Law (and the Divine Law) is the rock on which the Constitution was founded.

At this point, let me say that the case for the equality of all human beings can be rationally adduced from the Laws of Nature alone. It is not necessary to call on Divine Law or religion, to defend equal rights for women—or to attack unrestricted abortion.

It is a self-evident truth that women are no less human beings than men, and that it is no less in their nature to desire Life, Liberty and Happiness. Women, being equally human, are equally endowed by Nature with the gift of reason. (A gift, by the way, that is best developed in them, as it is in men, by education in the intellectual disciplines.) All this being so, all women are equally entitled with all men to all the rights existing under the Constitution. The purpose of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution is to guarantee that all women will enjoy these rights.

Now what does the Natural Law have to tell Americans about sexual equality and abortion?

Well, anybody who isn’t altogether an idiot knows that what the Law of Nature has made unequal—or different—neither the laws of men, nor the desires of women, can make equal, or the same.

Men and women, who have the same human nature, have the same instincts for self-preservation. They display the same human (and animal) emotions—fear, hate, love, etc. They have the same procreative urge. They equally desire to “make love” with a member of their opposite sex. It is the Law of Nature that they should “pairbond” or mate.

But now we come to the stubborn and quite unalterable fact. Men and women are biologically different, or not equal, in respect of their reproductive organs and sexual functions. Nature made man to be the inseminator, woman to be the child-bearer. And the Laws of Nature decreed that the natural—and normal—consequence of the love act, or coitus, is the conception in the womb of woman of a new human being, who is “flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone” of both parents. It is natural—and normal—for the woman who conceives to carry her child in her womb to term, to give birth to her, and her mate’s baby. Involuntary abortions, or miscarriages, are also natural, in the sense that they are nature’s way of expelling naturally unviable fetuses from the womb of the mother. But voluntary miscarriages are not the norm of nature.

It is not the nature of all women to abort their progeny. If it were, the human race would have long since disappeared from the planet. It is natural and normal for women to bring their unborn children to term, and woman has a natural desire to do what nature intended. It is unnatural for woman to interrupt the natural process of pregnancy, in the only way she can do so—by killing the child in her womb.

Induced abortions are against the nature of woman. They are also against the nature of the unborn child, who, like all living things, instinctively desires to go on living. (Even a cockroach instinctively tries to evade your lethal foot, and if you half-squash it, tries to crawl away for another second of life.)

There is no logical process of thought by which the unnatural act of induced abortion and the destruction of the unborn child in the womb can be deemed to be a natural right of all women.

Induced abortion is against the Law of Nature. There are, to be sure, a great many unnatural things which it is in human nature to desire and to do, even though they are against the Law of Nature. And Man, who was also endowed with the gift of free will, does many of them. Sodomy, homosexuality (defined in the dictionary as “unnatural carnal copulation”), adult sexual intercourse with infants, sexual sadism, masochism, are some of the sexual ways in which people go against the Natural Law, which designed the sexes to copulate with their adult opposites.

But of all the human acts that “go against nature,” the killing of a child by its own mother has—throughout human history—been viewed with the most revulsion.

The Supreme Court pointed out in its 1973 abortion decision that “the weight of history is on the side of abortion.” And that is true enough. But the Court failed to point out that the weight of history is not only on the side of abortion, it is even more heavily on the side of infanticide. The killing of helpless infants has been practiced in many societies, especially in impoverished or overpopulated societies. The “weight of history” is also on the side of theft, murder, torture, war, and above all, tyranny. We ourselves are living in one of those tragic eras in history when the “weight of history” seems to be very heavily on the side of a great many obscene, cruel, violent and criminal acts which we would not like to see the Supreme Court legalize simply on the grounds that the “weight of history” is on their side. (If the Founding Fathers, who lived at a time when the weight of history was heavily on the side of tyranny, had followed the reasoning of the Supreme Court, they would have acknowledged the right of King George to abort the birth of America.)

Is there no other way to determine the rightness or wrongness of a man-made law than to refer it back to the Laws of Nature? Well, there is what Immanuel Kant called the test of the “categorical imperative.” The philosopher wrote, “There is . . . but one categorical imperative, namely this: Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Consider, for example, the act of murder. Hate, fear, greed—the thirst for revenge, the desire for gain, as well as the desire for justice, are powerful human emotions that have again and again led people to commit murder. Indeed, the impulse to kill someone who is destroying one’s liberty, or making one’s pursuit of happiness impossible, is probably experienced sometime in life by everyone. One might argue that as these emotions and desires are natural, the law should recognize everyone’s right to commit murder. Why, on the contrary, are laws against murder universal? Because anyone with a shred of common sense knows that to grant a legal right is to recognize it as a right course of action. But no one in his (or her) right mind has ever willed that everybody should be free to kill his neighbor.

Does the “right of abortion on demand for all women” pass the test of the categorical imperative? If abortion is a right to which all pregnant women are entitled, then it would be right (and not wrong) if all women aborted their fetuses. It would be the right course of action for all women to take. (There’s this to be said for universal abortion. It would soon solve all the problems of mankind by ending the human species.)

Obviously, you do not believe—no one can believe—that abortion is a right course of action which all women should pursue. What you believe is that there is no danger whatever that all women will abort their children, because you instinctively know that it is not only natural for women to conceive, but natural for them to want to bear the children they conceive. And you think (do you not?) that all women have the right—the natural right—to bring their unborn children to term. And you think (do you not?) that anyone who interfered with this right by aborting a woman against her will would be guilty of a criminal action. What you really think (if you stop to think) is that some women, in some circumstances should be given the right to abort their unborn children, and that for these women, in these circumstances, abortion would be a right course of action.

The great and historic case that men have made against women is that they are incapable of thinking logically. And logic now requires those feminists who believe that abortion is a natural and right course of action for some women, in some circumstances, to categorize the women, and describe the circumstances in which the right to abortion is justified.

At this particular moment of history, the American public (and the Congress) are doing a much better job of thinking about abortion than the Women’s Lobby.

A recent Gallup Poll shows that only 22 percent of Americans think that abortion on demand should be legal. The Gallup study shows that those who hold this view feel that a human fetus is not a “human being” until the split second of its birth.

Only 19 percent think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. These believe that the fetus is a human being from the moment of conception, and that abortion is, in all circumstances, “murder.”

But 55 percent—the majority—think that abortion should be legal, but only in certain circumstances. Of this majority, 77 percent would allow abortion during the first three months, providing the woman’s life is endangered by the pregnancy. And 65 percent would allow abortion if pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

A majority of those who would legalize abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy would disallow it in the second and third trimester, except to save the life of the mother.

And only 16 percent think that the fact the parents cannot afford a child is grounds for abortion at any time.

The capacity to think (as opposed to the capacity to “feel”) involves the ability to make distinctions. The American people, God bless ’em, seem to have it, in the abortion question. Clearly, the Women’s Lobby doesn’t.

I repeat, I wish to disassociate myself from your campaign to purge Congressmen who do not agree with your misguided efforts to make induced abortion a legal, normal and moral course of action for all women in all circumstances.

I do not doubt that these efforts will be repudiated by the American people. What I regret is that they will succeed only in wrecking the chances of ERA.

With kind personal regards—and from Hawaii, the first state to ratify ERA,

Aloha,

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE