Comment are off

Winter 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW , WINTER 1994

the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW WINTER 1994 Featured in this issue William Murchison on Bad Boy Charlie Murray Faith Abbott on Cloning Howard Stern Not John Muggeridge on Canada's Death Wish Wesley J Smith on No Simple Suicide Rita Marker on tDr Death Finds a Mouthpiece Thomas Sullivan on Is Professor Rachels Right William McGurn on People Power Politics James Q Wilson on Abortion as a Moral Issue Also in this issue Mona Charen Steven Hemler Richard Wilkins Frank Fischer Fawn Vrazo Ray Kerrison Debra J Saunders Sen Brian Harradine plus Chapter 6 of Rita Marker's Deadly Compassion the story ofAnn Derek Humphry and the Hemlock Society Published by The Human Life Foundation Inc New York N Y Vol XX No 1 5.00 a copy

ABOUT THIS ISSUE herewith the 77th issue Vol XX No 1 of this review not bad considering that in late 1974 the editor decided to put out an issue and see if we can sell it Some five million printed words but nary a line of advertising later we are still going strong despite the fact that we always manage to just miss our deadline and finish each number without having any idea of what might be in the next one But there seems to be an inexhaustible supply the dumbest question we ever asked was our very first Can we find enough good copy to fill it especially since our single issue of abortion now seems to get involved in so many of the new controversies in this issue Faith Abbott reports that abortion is being called the 300 pound gorilla in the cloning controversy see page 24 Special thanks for this issue go to Wesley J Smith for doing a masterful job on the New York Times piece and to Rita Marker for not only writing about Doctor Kevorkian but for allowing us with William Morrow Co to reprint a chapter from her book Deadly Compassion Thanks also go to John Muggeridge for reporting on the complicated state of pro death struggles in Canada Professor Thomas Sullivan for coming through with the story about his text book debates with Professor Rachels and to William McGurn for interrupting his Christmas trip to do us a fine piece on the Philippines We would also like to thank Commentary and James Q Wilson for allowing us to reprint On Abortion p 79 and we recommend to our readers Wilson's book The Moral Sense Free Press Finally we again thank National Review for granting us permission to reprint the Hemler Wilkins and Fischer piece and the Philadelphia Inquirer for permission to reprint Fawn Vrazo's article We are pleased to reprint Debra Saunders piece we regularly read her San Francisco Chronicle columns but had no idea she was also Wesley Smith's wife until he mentioned it quite an on target couple we'd say We hope you enjoy the cartoons courtesy of The Spectator London and we wish our readers a healthy and prosperous New Year MARIA McFADDEN MANAGING EDITOR

INDEX

Editor J P McFadden Contributing Editors Faith Abbott William Murchison Consulting Editor Europe Mary Kenny London Managing Editor Maria McFadden Contributors K ay Ebeling Ellen Wilson Fielding JElena Muller Garcia James Hitchcock Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn JoMcGowan Mary Meehan John Muggeridge John Wauck Chilton Williamson Jr Assistant Managing Editor K ate Noonan Articles Editor Robert M Patrick Copy Editor Harold Marsden Production Manager Ray Lopez Circulation Manager Esther Burke Publishing Consultant Edward A Capano Published by THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INC Editorial Office Room 840 150 E 351h St New York N Y 10016 The editors wiII consider all manuscripts submitted but assume no responsibility for unsolicited material Editorial and subscription inquiries and requests for reprint permission should be sent directly 10 the editorial office Subscription price 20 per year Canada and foreign 25 U S currency 1994 by THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INc New York N Y Printed in the U S A the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW WINTER 1994 Vol XX No 1 Introduction 2 J P McFadden You're aBadBoy Charlie Murray 9 William Murchison Thank You for Not Cloning Howard Stern 17 Faith Abbott The Great Canadian Death Wish 27 John Muggeridge There's No Such Thing As a Simple Suicide 37 Wesley J Smith Doctor Death Finds aMouthpiece 52 Rita Marker Is Professor Rachels Right 60 Thomas D Sullivan The Politics ofPeople Power 69 William McGurn On Abortion 79 James Q Wilson Appendices 99 Mona Charen Steven R Hemler Richard G Wilkins Dr Frank H Fischer Fawn Vrazo Ray Kerrison Debra J Saunders Deadly Compassion Sen Brian Harradine

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION THIS ISSUE BEGINS the twentieth year of our journal When we began barely two years after the Supreme Court handed down its fateful Roe v Wade decision the talk was of constitutional amendments to reverse Roe it seemed perfectly reasonable to think that so radical a departure from traditional morality would not stand and so we busied ourselves with the best means of restoring what was commonly called the sanctity of human life Twenty years after hopes of reversal have faded replaced by a bitter political standoff between the ardent on both sides surrounded by a majority of their fellow Americans who although they are willing to call abortion murderremain unwilling to will a solution to the greatest moral issue of our time It is instructive to look back on a time roughly that long before Roe In 1951 the movie Detective Story based on a successful Broadway play was a box office hit The bitter hero Kirk Douglas was a no compromise defender of the Old Morality his childless wife Eleanor Parker was his symbol of pure goodness but it transpires she once had made use of the peculiar services provided by a doctor who had lost his license for providing them to women who had what we might now call problem pregnancies As Douglas says when he makes the horrifying discovery I get the picture So of course did the audience they didn't need taboo details to understand why Kirk called the man that butcher who did his dirty deeds For a fee a fat fee but the times were still so tender that when he redundantly confronts Eleanor with What happened to the baby she sobs It died at birth the awful and obvious truth that it died before birth went unstated The public wasn't ready to hear that kind of thing As it happens the movie was also memorable for Roman Catholics at the climactic moment the shot and dying Douglas cannot get through his Act of Contrition so his partner Bill Bendix picks up the rote words and finishes it for him even to and amend my life amen It was utterly believable to the generations raised on the Baltimore Catechism and it made many proud of what was then called the Catholic difference We know because by chance we saw a re run on TV the other night The striking difference now of course isthe quantum change in the abortion ethos How did we move from the unspeakable crime implicit in that 1951 movie all the way to Roe on January 22 19731 True the Pope of Rome still calls 2 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW it unspeakable but American Catholics nowadays hardly differ from their fellow citizens in ambiguity about abortion Yet we must remember that at the time Roe was indeed perceived as shockingly radical even ardent promoters of abortion expected only another incremental advance not the gift of total victory with one fiat the Court gave this nation under God the world's most liberal abortion law the pedantics about trimesters and viability only masked the reality of abortion on demand anytime between conception and birth Back then stunned anti abortionists predicted dire slippery slope consequences including euthanasia and even infanticide it was too early to predict what consequences legalized abortion would have on the nascent science of reproductive technology They have been proved quite right of course and far more swiftly than they themselves imagined Jack Doctor Death Kevorkian surely personifies the grotesque reality But a counter reality has also evolved albeit more slowly 1O inchoate agreement among concerned Americans that things have indeed gone terribly wrong and must be put right somehow Trouble is we no longer have a commonly shared sense of what is right abortion is but one by product of the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties its other progeny e g fatherless families also plague us and diffuse attempts to restore a sense of moral sanity Worse Americans are notoriously prone to think that whatever is legal must be moral too Thus twenty one years later Roe still stands not as a landmark advancement of our rights but rather as a forbidding redoubt standing athwart the road back to a moral consensus Whew that long winded preface is intended to prepare you patient reader for all that you will find in this issue because all of it bears on one or another aspect of our complex moral dilemma including its most immediate manifestations Thus in our lead article William Murchison takes on the current agitation for a solution to the problem of illegitimacy an old fashioned word that had lost all serious meaning until the intrepid Mr Charles Murray made it fashionable again suddenly everybody is agreeing that something must be done to halt our head long tumble into the chaotic squalor caused by outof wedlock remember that one births Murchison pictures Murray as the new neighborhood bad boy throwing bricks through the comfortable platitudes that maintain the welfare fantasy In fact Murray has been saying much the same thing for a decade his breakthrough came only when he pointed out that white illegitimacy was tracking the same course as the long deplored black rate which has now reached the disaster stage i e more than two thirds with the inner city rate near 90 per cent Needless to add abortion looms large in the picture Is it by sheer chance that Planned Parenthood et al concentrate their aborttoirs in minority areas The population control advocates are quick to praise the savings abortion can make in welfare costs but the perception changes when them begins to WINTER 1994 3

INTRODUCTION include us without doubt Murray has hit a raw nerve Still the big question remains Will Murray's drastic solution even be tried For he wants us not only to stop subsidizing illegitimacy via welfare but also to bring back its stigmahardly the politically correct answer But as Murchison sees it Murray has already helped make the old civilizational values grounded on responsibility and obligation look more and more appealing the vaunted ferment of the Sixties may be turning into reverse fermentation of those old values Next our dauntless Faith Abbott goes on another foray this time to find out how the scientifically challenged layman can understand cloning and other current wonders of Genetic Research Her path leads through Jurassic Park the book not the movie and much else wherein she discovers that startling new things are happening at an accelerating pace Nobody can guess how far new technologies can take us or how fast yet it's all going on virtually without legal or D0ral restraints in the U S says one expert we lack any sort of federal state or local oversight Why Because Any discussion of reproductive technology means you have to talk about conception embryos and yes abortion And that's a 300 pound gorilla that makes government officials take a classic ostrich like pose With good reason the right to abortion is after all based on the proposition that an unborn baby is not really a baby unless the mother wants it it's her choice because it's her property But surely genetic material is somebody's property to be used or disposed of at will The horrors that logic conjures up Abbott concludes might well turn the argument against choice unlimited including unrestricted abortion We note that although she wrote her article only days before deadline there has already been another stunning development as we write the news from Britain describes a new technological process that would implant the eggs of a ten week old female fetus into an infertile woman Thus it could become a mother without ever having been born Our old friend John Muggeridge keeps us up to date on what's happening up in Canada where it seems the life issues are reflections of our own assisted suicide is currently the subject of rapt public attention One Sue Rodriguez 43 in the final throes of Lou Gehrig's disease demands the right to control her own body meaning to end her life but she cannot manage it without assistance A philosophy professor reasons that as Mrs Rodriguez didn't choose to get the disease failure to provide her with some means of overcoming this handicap is to discriminate against her on the basis of the handicap the cure is in the killing The Supreme Court of Canada did not agree albeit by a narrow five to four vote the majority opinion cited the bad example of Holland where the relaxation of the absolute prohibition takes us down the slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia notoriously true the Dutch have lost all control of the killing season How long the Court's wisdom will hold is another matter polls indicate that over 75 per cent of Canadians favor assisted suicide and active euthanasia 4 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Who is qualified to assist at a suicide One would think that it would follow the abortion precedent a matter between the patient and a doctorbut as with abortion the paradigm can be expanded to include even a newspaper reporter pursuing the story she wants to write Mr Wesley Smith here describes in detail just such a story which recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine In the event the reporter one Lisa Belkin wasn't the only non medical person who played a part in the drama others included a Minister available to alleviate unnecessary suffering plus a friend who conveniently turns up to support the woman's decision even her own mother tries to do right by the victim who does indeed die however reiuctantlyshe couldn't bear to disappoint them all It all makes a rather ghoulish story but as Mr Smith makes clear it's really a mere vignette on the margin of the new and burgeoning Suicide Industry Willy nilly the retired Doctor Jack Kevorkian has become the premier salesperson for the new industry proving that there's no ghoul like an old ghoul At first glance Doctor Death and his obsessive antics seem to be no more than a bizarre blip another 15 minutes of fame that will soon be replaced by another freakish persona But he evidently clowns for a receptive audience recent polls indicate that Americans are for once following their northern neighbors in developing a morbid fondness for what Kevorkian is selling So there may be nothing better to do but laugh at him and Rita Marker has a good laugh here both at the bad doctor and his flamboyant young lawyer Geoffrey Fieger who indeed seem meant for each other But perhaps you'll want to have a snack handy if Kevorkian can un nerve people into wanting his lRube Goldberg Death Contraption his I'm starving act just might induce hunger pangs between guffaws But his legal mouthpiece plays it all with a very straight face the better to sell his client as the brave and brilliant crusader he manifestly is not Indeed the attention grabbing suicide machine masks goals e g human experimentation and organ scavenging that conjure up Nazi comparisons which lawyer Fieger simply refuses to discuss But he's met his match in Mrs Marker who is expert on the details not only of Kevorkian's record but also of the whole international euthanasia apparat about which she has written a great deal After you enjoy the present article you'll be glad to know that we have more from Mrs Marker in this issue see below lEuthanasia advocates are by no means all activists there is a strong academic contingent as Mr Muggeridge has already shown us busy making the case for the morality of what the American Medical Association used to forbid as the intentional termination of the life of one human being by another the AMA has since revised such lFIippocratic terminology Is it possible that these mercy killing proponents have allies in say the textbook industry Well years ago we ran an article by Professor Thomas Sullivan Active and Passive Euthanasia Summer 1977 it was later reprinted in an anthology for students but hardly as the last word on the subject as you WINTER 1994 5

INTRODUCTION will see The result was the students got only half of the debate and the wrong half at that we'd say so we're pleased to have Sullivan complete his argument here we er assume that the textbook publisher will include it in an updated anthology Meanwhile you get his answer to the vital question Is there any difference between letting someone die and killing him Indeed there is but like so much else we knew for certain before Roe there is no longer a consensus on a Yes answer There is another international apparat that has already achieved enormous power population control agencies now operate worldwide under the cover of the UN and with strong governmental support and moneyespecially from the U S As we write the Clinton Administration is vowing to greatly increase the already large contributions to International Planned Parenthood and the UN Population Fund notorious for its support of still Red China's forced abortion and infanticide policies The goal of all these population efforts is of course world de population especially in backward Third World countries of which the Philippines is considered a prime example too many babies supposedly produce economic disaster and so on True the once advanced island nation is in poor economic shape but that may well be because the de populators have been so suCcessful there Our far flung correspondent William McGurn now based in Hong Kong has recently been to the Philippines and we asked him for an eye witness report which he has kindly supplied via FAX It's still a strange feeling to stand at a smallish machine that is spewing out copies of originals which just minutes before existed only half way round the world it makes us wonder if our trusty old Royal manual may be getting somewhat obsolescent What he saw and heard makes fascinating reading it's not at all like what you get from our politically correct media which depict de population as an unmitigated good In fact quite aside from the widespread corruption involved the victims often see things differently More the fanatic focus on birth rates misses the glaring truth population is not the problem stunningly successful Asian economies are now found in over populated countries People not only consume resources but also produce more of them when set free to do so a lesson the current leaders of the Philippines refuse to learn When we began this journal we hoped to make it a kind of permanent record of the abortion controversy by including not only the best articles we could find but also important pieces published elsewhere Our final offering is certainly one of the latter James Q Wilson is a distinguished author of many books and articles His recently published The Moral Sense has been widely praised e g the Rev Richard John Neuhaus called it a beautiful book by one of the most morally astute social scientists of our time Wilson's stated purpose is to help Americans recover confidence in the tug of our better nature because most of us have a moral sense even though 6 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW some of us have tried to talk ourselves out of it in his article On Abortion reprinted here in full from Commentary magazine Wilson opens with a definitive Abortion is a moral question and proceeds to re structure the philosophical framework of the argument as most Americans now see it that is as primarily a matter of rights not morality He holds the Supreme Court responsible in deciding Roe it went to great lengths to avoid an interpretation that might seem even vaguely moral a doctrinal position that has given us a policy far more radical than virtually any in Europe where abortion is either sharply limited or surrounded with constraining regulations in the later months Wilson's suggested alternative would draw on the natural respect most people have for innocent life but we'll let you dear reader hear him out and make your own judgment as to how effective his proposals might be Those committed to the sanctity of life tradition will no doubt find them less than ideal some might even wonder why this journal would include them Do we endorse Wilson's solution Obviously not But he makes a critical point so long as the argument is focused on rights rather than on the humanity of the fetus there will be no acceptable solution As we've said the abortion issue remains in a political Limbo but in our judgment the committed anti abortionists have won a strategic victory they have indeed made abortion the issue that will not go away The result is uncommitted but seriously concerned people are now seeking groping for if you will tactical solutions that may command majority support So long as they posit the humanity of the unborn are we not bound to welcome them however imperfect Alas the perfect is all too often the enemy of the good only a return to the all but abandoned ideal of a good society can bring the abortion dilemma back into the moral sense needed to resolve it As it happens our first three appendices bear on that proposition Kn Appendix A Columnist Mona Charen puts Mr Wilson's argument into a broader antiabortion perspective in which as she says it is nothing new but still a very welcome addition to the growing movement in the right direction Appendix B proposes yet another solution that is hardly new ban abortions after roughly the first trimester based on accepted medico legal definitions of brain function used to determine the end of born life the three authors emphasize the educational impact such a solution could produce because the vast majority of Americans would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that the vital signs of life are present as early as eight weeks Quite true Ks all this concerned citizen agitation having an impact on the Abortion industry itself Appendix C swings our focus abruptly around to a view from the pro abortion side Kn York a medium sized town in southeastern WINTER 1994 7

INTRODUCTION Pennsylvania it took the local Planned Parenthood clinic two and a half years of frustrated searching to find doctors willing to do its abortions and elsewhere in non metropolitan America the picture is much the same reports Miss Fawn Vrazo in the Philadelphia Inquirer That kind of thing is of course good news for anti abortionists it demonstrates the widespread moral sense resistance to legalized abortion On the other hand the bad news about aborttoirs that ought to be reported somehow gets over looked by the Pro choice media although not by Ray Kerrison the highly regarded columnist for the New York Post who has been covering the atrocities regularly for years In Appendix D you get a stiff dose of the kinds of questions Kerrison asks you aren't likely to see the answers on your TV screen Then we have another feisty columnist Miss Debra Saunders who is based at the San Francisco Chronicle In real life she is the wife of Mr Wesley Smith In Appendix E she too writes about the ineffable Dr Jack Kevorkian adding more comic details to those you already have from Rita Marker obviously Doctor Death's fame as a fraud is a nationwide joke But she also makes a serious point about the moral of the story In Appendix F you get the promised more from Mrs Marker it's another tale that needed to be told the inside story of the final days of Ann Humphry second wife of Derek and co founder of his Hemlock Society It is indeed a sad story and proof positive that Mr Humphry is concerned for things more worldly than alleviating the suffering of the dying Our final offering Appendix G adds to Mr McGurn's report Senator Brian Harradine is well known in Australia and beyond for his opposition to the costly in both lives and money population control programs that plague poor nations worldwide And the Independent Senator from Tasmania knows how to put his opposition into effective action last October he single handedly managed to halt Australian support of several Third World de population programs the government needed his support to pass its budget We hope to have more from him in due cour'se We also expect to bring you a lot more on all these life and death controversies in coming issues If indeed our High Court believed that Roe v Wade was the final solution to the abortion dilemma it has been proved resoundingly wrong as we have enjoyed demonstrating for Lo these 20 years That there will be a solution we have never doubted even though to be sure God only knows what it will be Meanwhile we will go on welcoming to these pages the brightest and best new ideas we can find J P McFADDEN EDITOR 8 WINTER 1994

YOU’RE A BAD BOY, CHARLIE MURRAY

You're a Bad Boy Charlie Murray William Murchison Down the sidewalks of big city journalism where everybody who's anybody or wants to be identifies racism and sexism as our national blights saunters the neighborhood bad boy He extracts from his briefcase a brick The bad boy Charles Murray by name weighs the terrifying instrument in his palms whistling thoughtfully then lets fly at the nearest plateglass window Out rush the merchants to inspect the damage Oh the wretch Won't he leave comfortable platitudes alone No He won't And a good thing too it turns out The platitudes that have become Murray's special targets are dangerous in the extreme Murray's li 984 opus Losing Ground a veritable wheelbarrow full of bricks identified welfare as the primary cause of family disintegration among blacks Now comes the latest brickbat an essay in the Wall Street Journal October 29 titled The Coming White Underclass Every once in a while Murray begins the sky really is falling and this seems to be the case with the latest national figures on illegitimacy 68 per cent among blacks but among whites get this 22 per cent and in inner cities probably twice that high White illegitimacy We are not used to thinking of such a thing When we do think of it we are supposed to smile tenderly at the likes of Candace Bergen's Murphy Brown and her upscale baby or archly at those who like Vice President Dan Quayle year before last find something wrong with a woman's decision to bear a child out of wedlock We think of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty and their famous er love child or of Jessica Lange and Sam Shepherd who just because they have brought into the world three children see no reason to subject themselves to a bourgeois entanglement like marriage Such gestures are supposed to be charming and of course modern The neighborhood bad boy isn't buying His attention isn't on Murphy Brown but rather on the kind of white women Murphy never encounters indeed probably never even hears of down at the television station Murray notes that heretofore there hasn't been Walliam Murchison our contributing editor is a columnist at the Dallas Morning News WINTER 1994 9

WILLIAM MURCHISON a white underclass disordered and violent because the whites who might qualify have been scattered among the working class That's changing A 22 per cent illegitimacy rate is barely lower than the illegitimacy rate of25 per cent for blacks in the mid 1960s the period in which black crime dropout from the labor force and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward Murray sees the white illegitimacy rate approaching that same problematic 25 region at a time when social policy is more comprehensively wrongheaded than it was in the mid 1960s and the cultural and sexual norms are still more degraded As illegitimacy the single most important social problem of our time grows among whites Murray projects rapid deterioration of behavior ending doubtless in Hobbesian authoritarianism The bad boy then gets down and dirty He would stop all economic support for single mothers All Thus the government would strip away official succor and protection for the wrongheaded if immemorial desire to conceive and give birth to illegitimate babies The mother under Murray's new dispensation would have to enlist support from her parents boyfriend siblings neighbors church or philanthropies Murray would encourage adoption and as a final resort government financed orphanages What we want to do he says is stigmatize illegitimacy We want people to think of it as bad and hurtful That's the way to have less of it instead of more You might expect 1990s America to descend en masse upon the bad boy and take him by the ear Many choose instead to wring his hand His brickbat has achieved the desired result people want to talk about what he has to say All sorts of people from William Buckley to William Raspberry Buckley to no one's consternation argues in his column for obliging pregnant teenagers to feel the disappointment and indeed disgust one would show toward a teenager who gave evidence of race prejudice The Washington Post's William Raspberry who may have to surrender any liberal credentials that remain to him if he keeps on opening his mind calls for a desperately needed debate on the bad boy's assertions Murray says Raspberry begins where you are and drags you often kicking and screaming much closer to where you thought you'd never go Even when you see where his train of thought is headed you may fail to find a convenient stop at which to exit The President of the United States himself got in the act The number of young women giving birth to children out of wedlock is sweeping the country upward and offward upward and all across 10 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW racial lines said Bill Clinton in his weekly radio broadcast We have to be concerned that without the structure the discipline the love of families too many children face a future stripped of hope Nationally televised talk shows such as Crossfire and This Week with David Brinkley have played host to the bad boy The interplay is fascinating to watch Critics do not challenge Murray's premise that illegitimacy is worrisome At least to date K haven't heard of anyone's proclaiming Murphy Brownishly Mr Murray you're wrong illegitimacy is joyous and liberating in fact we need all of it we can get The stated objections are to Murray's linkage of illegitimacy and crime and naturally to his radical remedies for instance here is David liederman of the Child Welfare League of America on Crossfire The notion that illegitimacy is causing crime is causing poverty is causing homelessness is ludicrous lit's the other way around AFDC rates go up because we've been in a deep recession and it's hard to get a job and consequently more people go on AFDC There's a direct relationship between illegitimacy and poverty homelessness All of the problems of urban America are the things that are causing young women to have babies because their lives are not together Oh yeah Then why did illegitimacy begin its sharp upturn during the go go Sixties Why didn't it plunge during the roaring Eighties As for how we should cure illegitimacy Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders appearing on David Brinkley has the answer a comprehensive health education program We know this all the better because the Surgeon General mentioned the need for such a program nearly every time she answered a question Schools aren't teaching the sexual basics nearly enough to suit her Kf only the kids knew if only they understood if only the government could be commissioned to tell them But don't they know Are they so bUnkered as the surgeon general implies Dr Elders case which certainly isn't new went down more easily a generation or two ago when illegitimacy rates were by present standards negligible less than 5 percent for whites in the early R950s With four out of five inner city black women bearing illegitimate babies it's hardly persuasive to say the poor young things don't know what happens when they assume the prone position A few younger ones actually may not the rest clearly do or at least have some strong suspicions The problem Murray would WINTER 1994 11

WILLIAM MURCHISON emphasize is that the great majority of moms in question don't care Why should they care What's going to happen to them if they surrender their virtue Nothing To begin with the larger society doesn't care Victorian hypocrisy as liberals used sweetly to label moral scruples is dead as Marley's ghost Mom isn't going to get excited She herself may have been an unwed mother In fact this likelihood increases in proportion as the number of unwed mothers increases Does Dad care Dad as Charles Murray's research for Losing Ground makes plain is unlikely even to inhabit the same premises as the family The welfare system makes him a superfluous character Does teacher care Unlikely Modern schools allow pregnant students to attend class right alongside the non pregnant who are the likelier themselves to regard teenage pregnancy as normal what with all the pregnant classmates they have Today's public schools are in fact a great desensitizing institution the varied lifestyles they exhibit if not encourage are moral novocaine The more one sees the more one takes as a matter of course The long and the short of it is hardly anyone at least in the inner citygets greatly worked up when one more susceptible girl gets in the family way Even outside the inner city with Murphy Brown and the like whooping it up for single motherhood the bearing of illegitimate children hardly seems the encumbrance it did say to Tess of the D'Urbervilles There is no stigma Indeed there are positive rewards for bastardy to breathe life into a politically incorrect therefore generally abandoned label The single mother participates in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC program She receives food stamps She qualifies for subsidized housing and Medicaid All this just for letting nature take its course Not bad And yet not good from the standpoint of discouraging the behavior that so much alarms Charles Murray Milton Friedman's dictum is endlessly useful in cases of this sort If you want more of something Friedman likes to say you subsidize it if you want less you tax it This is just good old common sense To subsidize bastardy even if accidentally is to encourage it Imagine the reverse state of affairs the federal and state governments give welfare benefits and subsidized housing to intact two parent families whose oldest children were born nine or ten months after issuance of the marriage license Under such a program as this welfare offices could count on throwing open their doors to hordes of dreamyeyed young people showing off wedding bands and making goo 12 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW goo eyes at each other A black market in phony marriage licenses would likely spring up Of course Murray proposes nothing of this character The kinds of families referenced above tend to be sturdy and individualistic fearful if not scornful of dependence on non family resources The conventional married couple undertakes Holy Matrimony with a view to having something of its own The condition of dependence which prevails in socialist or welfarist societies defeats this worthy objective We all like something for nothing but deep down most of us know that no such beast roams our jungle So the rewards go perversely enough to those who have engaged in otherwise unrewarding conduct The mildest thing this does is confuse the beneficiaries as to what society the entity that writes the checks values and what it doesn't value The larger effectalmost Pavlovian is to encourage the kind of conduct that prompted the original reward Beyond that of course is the effect that might most conveniently be described as cultural demoralization the breakdown of individual responsibility the severance of those personal and social connections that result from the assumption of responsibility In the Seventies scholars like Christopher Lasch began talking nervously about the new culture of narcissism the culture of me my and mine of Big I and Little You Readers of this journal will quickly discern that the consequences of sexual self absorption play out in different ways On the one hand illegitimacy flourishes in a climate where community standards are downgraded to mere preferences On the other hand abortion too flourishes in such a climate One mother chooses life another opts for the extermination of life in its preborn state There might seem a contradiction but really there is not one If outcomes illegitimate birth vs abortion differ widely the reasoning process is the same The process starts here K am what counts I the mother My womb my biological processes are my own Kam the proprietor There is certainly a half truth here Certainly the biological processess belong physically to no one else but the individual mother Whom else should a womb belong to Congress The difficulty arises when physical ownership is made the sole or at any rate most urgent criterion of use The mother becomes gatekeeper setting to her own taste the conditions of entry into life Perhaps she's not ready for a baby In that case go away kid Or say the unborn child WINTER 1994 13

WILLIAM MURCHISON lacks a father connected with her the mother in any sense other than the biological The mother may waive that objection The womb is hers the baby hers Come on in says she Proponents of the right to life will rejoice whenever such a decision is made in preference to the decision to termjnate a pregnancy There is something of love here something of unselfishness But unfortunately not enough The bearing of a fatherless baby entails needless risk chiefly to the baby who according not just to the wisdom of the race but nearly all the available evidence needs profoundly those human connections that marriage establishes and maintains In other words better a living bastard than a dead fetus But far far better still a baby connected by the law of man and God to two humans who have pledged to him lifelong devotion and concern As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in The Atlantic half a year before Murray's article came out Children in single parent families are six times as likely to be poor They are also likely to stay poor longer children in single parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems Compared with children in intact families children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse Children who grow up in single parent or step parent families are less successful as adults particularly in the two domains of lifelove and work that are most essential to happiness Mrs Whitehead's article is fetchingly titled Dan Quayle Was Right a scholarly even tempered so there to Murphy Brown's outraged defenders That something should be done to discourage illegitimacy seems plain enough That Charles Murray has a provocative remedy is equally clear One thing that makes the Murray proposal interesting is the Friedmanesque common sense behind it If you want to get the stigma of illegitimacy back he said on David Brinkley you have to make this behavior punishing again and it has to be punishing for someone It has to be punishing for the parents it has to be punishing for the boyfriend who's faced with a shotgun from somewhere it has to be punishing to the community And until you're ready to restore these walls of penalties that used to constrain sexual behavior you aren't going to get stigma The bad boy is exactly right That's how life operates But there remains a very open question Is America ready to face up to the fact that that's how life operates Or are today's comfortable fantasies 14 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW likely to smother the nightmares about next week and next year The distorted incentives of the welfare system spring from a distorted but oh so modern view of as we would nowadays say humankind Kt's been a long time since America believed believed officially K mean and with all its heart in the elaborate web of personal responsibilities that enmeshes successful societies and their individual members Responsibilities after all are restraints of a sort They hinder freedom of action That sense of maternal autonomy which underlies both abortion and illegitimacy is clear evidence of how long and arduous any journey of moral recovery will prove What Murray is saying to illegitimate mothers actual or prospective is you're not in charge you can't have it your way And worse you should feel bad about what you're doing feel bad Why why it's the most un American feeling one can have The spirit of autonomy instructs us to feel good about ourselves Public schools exist in part to reinforce self esteem Guilt is so old fashioned so theological And that makes it presumptively unconstitutional at least if you ask the American Civil Liberties Union Murray's message about responsibility is hugely civilized the question is whether we are in the mood for civilized messages if we are not no such plan as Murray proposes is likely to win enactment it would fly in the face of conventional wisdom not least conventional political wisdom To cut off welfare for single mothers legislators have to want to cut it off The political process wars against such a wish Murray proposes taking away something that people have now this is a hard enterprise compared with giving them something they don't have now e g other people's money in the form of health care benefits H's infinitely more fun to play Santa Claus than Scrooge or Jeremiah shouting of retribution to come Congress in these latter times has become a political Sotheby'sa venue warmed by escalating bids for voter favor The winner wins personally He gets elected to Congress or if there already he looks forward to staying a while longer enjoying the parties and the perks Consider by contrast what kind of a Congress it would take to put teeth sharp ones in Charles Murray's plan namely a brave Congress and a stern one one that worries about the next century instead of the next election one a majority of whose members are willing to do what's right damn the torpedoes This sounds like a bleak environment for such reforms as Murray WINTER 1994 15

WILLIAM MURCHISON intends But you never know The spirit of the age commends personal choice license really as over against personal responsibility Spirits have changed before The necessity for this one's changing is almost too manifest to note But why so because of elaborate reasonings Rather because of simple results and consequences Criminals enjoy unfettered choice In my own part of the world recently an innercity gang venturing into a regional shopping mall exercised choice by blazing away with revolvers at two youths who had declined to make way on an escalator This venture in self expression took the life of a young father who was eating pizza with his family Speaking of pizza another group of teenagers one day last year ordered a pizza and when the deliveryman showed up robbed and tried unsuccessfully to murder him This at the address given the pizza company for delivery the first place the man would be sought when he failed to turn up Might it be said that something is wrong with the expectations we adults enforce on our youth If enforce is the word Expectations in general seem low for grades for work for behavior for belief Autonomy of the sort that has gripped us since the Sixties is not doing the job The old civilizational values grounded on responsibility and obligation look more and more appealing Congress will turn around and do the right thing when the people demand that Congress turn which demand so far has not coalesced But to repeat you never know An article like Charles Murray's appearing in our leading financial journal is a sign of what the Sixties liked to call ferment Reverse ferment in the present case The great ideas of 30 years ago when for instance the wdfare system was given its present responsibility draining form have proved less than great In fact they have proved mendacious and destructive Whatever is destructive ends sooner or later sometimes amid the racket of collapsing pillars in the temple sometimes amid the bracing smell of new mortar and fresh wood as the inhabitants just in time sense their danger and undertake at last those things that need doing 16 WINTER 1994

THANK YOU FOR CLONING HOWARD STERN

Thank You for Not Cloning Howard Stem Faith Abbott Recently I saw an editorial cartoon which showed two scientists with rapt expressions one is staring at a test tube the other is peering into a microscope The lettering on the door says Genetic Research On the lab table there is a rat sniffing its way around slides and petri dishes On the wall there is a picture divided into six squares in each of which is an identical rat face and a large sign reading Thank you for not cloning Howard Stern I know just enough about Howard Stern to agree that one is more than enough What didn't know much about was cloning which is something we're all supposed to know about since those two scientists at George Washington University made headlines by claiming to have cloned human embryos When I mentioned to my sister in florida that I didn't know much about clones or cloning she asked Have you read Jurassic Park No nor had JI seen the movie I had heard that it was frightening and now that I have read the book JI understand why And if the idea of secretly cloning prehistoric creatures to create a theme park is scary the idea of cloning people is far more so True it's only fiction On the other hand human cloning was considered fiction or at least futuristic until the future came right down to the present How can the scientifically challenged layman u derstand cloning The drawing that illustrates Barbara Ehrenreich's essay in Time magazine The Economics of Cloning November 22 1993 is amusingthere's a baby lying atop a Xerox machine watching multiple copies of herself roll out but it's not that simple For cloning you need DNA which is easier to spell than to pronounce deoxyribonucleic acid DNA is in every cell of our bodies it's a genetic code a sort of blueprint of every human being We've heard a lot about DNA since its structure was deciphered in 1953 by two British researchers JIn Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park the scientists got DNA from dinosaur bones in order of course to clone dinosaurs For this they needed the entire dinosaur DNA strand which they found in ancient insects that had been trapped millions of years ago by running Faith Abbott our contributing editor has inadvertently beCome our Instant Expert on cloning WINTER 1994 17

FAITH ABBOTI tree sap otherwise known as amber One finds all kinds of insects in amber including biting insects that have sucked blood from larger animals They watched as he inserted a long needle through the amber into the thorax of the prehistoric fly Now remember this is fiction Or is it The other day I was in a doctor's waiting room glad to have an absorbing book Jurassic Park for distraction At one point I glanced over at the waitingroom magazines and saw this on the cover of the May 1992 issue of Scientific American Seeking DNA in the dry bones of Neanderthals The article is about the only known mummy from the ice age discovered in the summer of 1991 In this freeze dried Iceman DNA was well preserved Far from being mute ancient remains bear eloquent testimony to those who know how to listen Within the past decade biochemists have discovered how to wrest the molecules of life from organic residues one step removed from mere dust Proteins and nucleic acids have been recovered from plants that lived millions of years ago and animals that lived tens of thousands of years ago Workers now seek and find such molecular clues not only in preserved bodies but also in dry bones providing a vastly greater vista of the past In a box on that page I read this Nucleic acids and proteins trapped in ancient mummies and still more ancient bones can serve as time capsules of history Molecular biologists are beginning to unlock their secrets But the recent furor has more to do with mommies than with mummies Presumably the George Washington University scientists had the best of motives helping infertile couples by providing them with extra embryos for implantation To get these extra embryos you have to split single human embryos into twins or triplets The Washington Post ran a long piece about the GWU research November 16 Furious Debate Over Ethics and one column has helpful graphics aptly titled How To Clone An Embryo The steps are numbered 1 What looks like a child's drawing of the sun with all the lines radiating from it is a human egg the rays are sperm heading toward it The text reads A human egg is fertilized by sperm in a test tube 2 The resulting embryo is allowed to divide into two four or eight cells The graphic looks like two poached eggs on a round plate 3 Individual cells each containing complete and identical genetic instructions are separated from each other The poached eggs have left the plate and look like two eyeballs 18 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW 4 lEach cell is coated with a protective gel the eyeballs now look like two fried eggs sunny side up 5 and cell division continues for several more rounds Now we see two double yolk fried eggs the white with tiny black dots has expanded to accommodate the increase lin a New York Times article October 30 Peter Steinfels writes that the notion of cloning human beings became a lightning rod for moral debate in the 70s when it was theorized that geneticallyidentical individuals could be produced by inserting the nucleus of a human cell with its full complement of genetic information into an egg cell obtained from another source and stripped of its own genetic material And the Post article tells us that researchers have cloned animals since the 80s that similar work with human embryos has progressed steadily since then and that in vitro fertilization specialists have been splitting apart human embryos for years not just in research labs but in fertility clinics too lin some cases these specialists remove one cell from an eight cell human embryo grown in the lab check its sex test for various genetic defects then implant the remaining seven cells into a woman's womb where they develop into a normal baby Given these precedents says the Post the GW research was if not routine then hardly startling So why did the news cause such a stir when it was reported last month That it caused a stir is an understatement Once the news was out the story broke on the front page of the New York Times under the headline SCIENTIST CLONES HUMAN EMBRYOS AND CREATES AN ETHICAlL CHALILENGE it flew around the world Time magazine November 8 with the speed of sound bites bouncing off satellites GWU's switchboard logged 250 calls from the press that first afternoon by next day calls and faxes were flooding in fmm as far away as Spain Sweden South Africa and Australia Other countries wasted no time a spokesman from the Japan Medical Association found the experiment unthinkable and French President JFran ois Mitterrand pronounced himself horrified The Vatican's official newspaper L Osservatore Romano ran a fmnt page editorial by the paper's moral theologian who said that the United States must regulate unscrupulous scientists who venture into a tunnel of madness and that the aim of providing children to childless couples does not justify a means that is intrinsically perverse WINTER 1994 19

FAITH ABBOTT And why asked the Post did so many people including many scientists feel as though they'd suddenly been transported into the future Well answers the Post according to many medical experts and ethicists the surprise came because neither physicians nor the general public were given an opportunity to consider the implications of the work during the years that it was under development And the failure to keep everyone informed of the scientific goingson is says the Post rooted in an acrimonious political stalemate of four years ago that triggered the dissolution of the nation's primary forum for bioethical debate Whatever the reasons it was a surprise and if we can believe what we read it seems the two GWU scientists were the most surprised of all it's as though they were two precocious kids experimenting with a chemistry set in the basement with no adult supervision In his Times article Steinfels notes than when the field of bioethics was in its infancy two decades ago theologians and ethicists had fierce arguments An American scientist wrote in a leading American medical journal Cloning is the aspect of genetic intervention that most requires public discussion today But there wasn't public discussion and certain theologians who argued that no first time attempts at in vitro fertilization or cloning should ever take place since who could tell whether the outcome would be badly damaged individuals lost some credibility when the first test tube baby Louise Brown turned out to be normal so far anyway But what really killed the cloning debate writes Steinfels was not the test tube baby it was the 1973 Woody Allen movie Sleeper in which Allen and Diane Keaton find themselves 200 years into the future expected to clone a replica of a Big Brother who had been blown up by an assassin Only his nose maintained on a life support system has survived In the finale hero and heroine overthrow the regime by taking the nose hostage Then in 1978 a book titled In His Image was published it was a science writer's account of a purported real life experiment in which a baby boy was produced by cloning a single cell from an unmarried millionaire named Max The author said he had seen the duplicate Max alive and well but in 1982 a federal district court in Philadelphia ruled that In His Image was a fraud and a hoax By that time says Steinfels human cloning had already become just too frivolous a topic for serious minded bioethicists They left 20 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW it to science fiction writers for the production of dinosaurs But he continues the news this week of an elementary experiment in human cloning should be a jarring reminder that science fiction fantasies or nightmares cannot be shoved into an indefinite future f there is a scientific door to be opened sooner or later someone will push at it In Jurassic Park Dr ian Malcolm says Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment So they are focused on whether they can do something They never stop to ask if they should do something They conveniently define such considerations as pointless if they don't do it someone else will Discovery they believe is inevitable So they just try to do it first Of the numerous characters in the book Malcolm is obviously the one we're meant to pay the most attention to He is a special kind of mathematician a skeptic but also something of a philosopher He was convinced from the beginning that the theme park idea would turn out to be a disasterthat lit was an accident waiting to happen Science is destroying itself he believes As it gains in power it proves itself incapable of handling the power Because things are going very fast now Fifty years ago everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb That was power No one could imagine anything more Yet a bare decade after the bomb we began to have genetic power And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power And it will be in everyone's hands It will be in kits for backyard gardeners Experiments for schoolchildren Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators And that will force everyone to ask the same question What should I do with my power whicb is the very question science says it cannot answer As for the GWU scientists they weren't going to do any real cloning They hadn't planned to go very far with their experiments the embryos used were genetically flawed because of having been fertilized by more than one sperm and so could not have developed for more than a few days Dr Jerome Lejeune the world famous French scientist who first identified the gene that causes Down syndrome bas commented that the experiments represent not a breakthrough of science but a breakdown of common sense And the Pope has warned that scientists have embarked on a path toward manipulation and selfdestructive madness But Barbara Ehrenreich in her Time essay feigns great surprise about the anti cloning furor any normal species she says would WINTER 1994 21

FAITH ABBOTT be delighted at the prospect of cloning Why there'd be no more nasty surprises like Down syndrome or sickle cell just batch after batch of high grade and genetically speaking immortal offspring But representatives of the human species are responding as if someone had proposed adding Satanism to the grade school curriculum Suddenly perfectly secular folks are throwing around words like sanctity and dredging up medieval era arguments against the hubris of science She says there is hypocrisy in the anti cloning fervor because we're already well down the path leading to genetic manipulation and she has a point when she says that any culture that encourages in vitro fertilization has no right to complain about a market in embryos About the absolute uniqueness of each individual human being she writes that if we truly believed in it there would be none of this unseemly eagerness to reproduce one's own particular genome She asks What is it that drives people to in vitro rather than adoption and answers Deep down we don't want to believe we are each unique one time only events in the universe We hope to happen again and again But there she's wrong I for one do not hope to happen again and again and I do believe in the absolute uniqueness of each of my children and who would want their kids to happen to another set of parents This sounds far fetched but so did a lot of things not so long ago Human embryos states Ehrenreich are life forms and there's nothing to stop anyone from marketing them now on the same shelf with the Cabbage Patch d olls So why couldn't there be a market for clones You could get the brightest and the best In her syndicated column which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 2nd under the title Clones in The Freezer Ellen Goodman writes that at some point most parents have thought about how they could do child raising differently if they had a second chance But one of the givens of life she says is that children are unique We know that we can't raise a son or daughter one way then start all over again with the same exact genetic material Or can we Goodman writes that normally she doesn't belong to the Jurassic Park school of the scientifically anxious she doesn't worry about mad scientists creating human monsters in their labs Still she says you don't have to believe in Frankenstein to worry about the effect of having a clone of your own in the freezer For the moment the mass producing of people is still in its embryonic stage But this latest scientific surprise reminds me of the line from 22 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW an old song There will never be another you Don't be too sure Frozen embryos as a commodity is not science fiction we learned that from the Davis case in Tennessee You'll remember that Mr and Mrs Junior Davis had an infertility problem and sought treatment at an KVlF clinic multiple extra corporeal embryos were created and frozen Then the Davises got divorced and there was a highlypublicized legal fight over whether their frozen offspring were children entitled to a custody hearing or merely property Time magazine reports that there are already 10,000 frozen embryos floating around in liquid nitrogen baths in the U S stuck in a kind of icy limbo as their would be parents sort out the options More recently there's been The Case of the Frozen Sperm Fifteen vials of it from a man who bequeathed it to the woman with whom he'd been living for insemination after his death by suicide The two adult children of the deceased were furious In court papers they said that the desire to father children after one's death was egotistic and irresponsible and that the birth of such a child or children would cause emotional and financial stress on the family The California Supreme Court has ruled that the sperm is a legal part of the man's estate but appeals are going on and the children are contesting their father's will which they accuse the woman of unduly influencing They also accuse her of participating in the events that led to their father's death so they are suing her on the grounds of wrongful death You see how messy these unprecedented cases can become Nt's not hard to understand why a grown son and daughter wouldn't want to share their inheritance with a half sibling born of a woman they obviously despise lit's also not hard to see the widening gap between New Reproductive Technology and moral responsibility As this case illustrates even potential life can be considered a commodity a part of a will so that something not even there yet can be a threat to financial security IT guess we should be grateful that the man who committed suicide hadn't put anything about cloning in his will lBy the way there are already catalogs that list the characteristics of sperm donors including one made up of Nobel prizewinners lBut back to cloning Dr Edward l Marut medical director of the in vitro fertilization clinic at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital says You have to draw the line somewhere it's a dangerous turn trying to create the perfect child and then duplicating it What WINTER 1994 23

FAITH ABBOTT do you do if you don't like the first child Throw the cloned embryo away Barbara Ehrenreich writes If you like a movie scene you can rewind the tape so when Junior gets all pimply and nasty why not start over with Junior II Sooner or later among the in vitro class instant replay will be considered a human right Declares Dr Arthur Caplan director for the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota We simply cannot go forward allowing technologies capable of allowing us to design our descendants to evolve without having any sort of federal state or local oversight The American Fertility Society echoed this position by issuing a statement saying that this subject is of such grave importance that relevant guidelines should be established at the national level Which brings to mind this question Why should strict government regulations be imposed on the cloning of human embryos but not on their destruction through abortion Indeed abortion is the very issue that surmises the author of that Washington Post article rides the coattails of any discussion about genetic screening or reproduction technology And Patricia King a Georgetown law professor agrees Everybody says we need to talk about these issues but everybody's afraid because all this borders on the subject of abortion We have a consistent pattern of recognizing the need for having some national review of these topics and we also have a consistent pattern of avoiding these reviews Dr Caplan also agrees in vivid language Any discussion of reproductive technology means you have to talk about conception embryos and yes abortion And that's a 300 pound gorilla that makes government officials take a classic ostrich like pose Later I saw Dr Caplan on TV he repeated that line except the gorilla became a 900 pounder Quite true officially abortion in vitro and artificial insemination are considered private matters between a woman and her doctor etc Now suddenly there's this new reproductive possibility that has many people pro abortionists included with the possible exception of Ms Ehrenreich in a state of badly suppressed hysteria Why Perhaps because it's too Orwellian and George Orwell has been proved something of a prophet Or because of the obvious possibilities which go well beyond privacy There's Aldous Huxley too Think what could happen in the Brave New World of Reproduction Technology Women would be seen as wombs for rent until science perfects an artificial womb which they are no doubt working on right now men would be reduced to mere commercial suppliers 24 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW to fertility clinics Babies could be made in assembly line fashion and embryos could be cloned and frozen for future harvesting of parts Will fertility clinics begin to offer cloning services Dr Marut says he can't imagine that but since the in vitro business has become highly competitive some clinics might see a reason to offer cloning he is quoted in the New York Times as saying it will have a huge price tag I'm sure Dr Mark Sauer of the in vitro fertilization program at the University of Southern California says I'm sure it will be done in the future And a Boston University medical ethicist noting that the United States is one of the few countries in the world where you can sell sperm and eggs thinks it will be only a matter of time before entrepreneurs attempt to market the embryos of celebrities Please not Howard Stern Susan Jacoby who writes on medical ethics and reproductive issues had an article in the New York Times November 1 Entitled to the Embryo in which she writes The debate pits the so called right of people to control their own embryos and to have children in any way they desire against society's need to protect itself from those who would cheerfully clone and sell endless multiples of human beings so long as there was a profit to be made In the context of abortion couldn't it be said that the debate pits the so called reproduction rights of women against society's need to protect itself from those who would cheerfully condone the termination in the womb of its future citizens And of course there is a profit to be made There was certainly a profit to be made from an amusement park featuring not rides but live dinosaurs the book and the movie about the disastrous experiment made lots of money and may even turn out to have been profitable in terms of wising people up to what can happen when science splits from conscience Back in li 987 a Catholic Church document about reproductive technologies stated that science without conscience can only lead to man's ruin and Our era needs wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser people are forthcoming And last October 3li Pope John Paul Kli while not specifically referring to the GWU experiment said in his Sunday blessing that today's culture is giving evasive and misguided answers to such basic questions as when the WINTER 1994 25

FAITH ABBOn human being begins to exist as a person adding The ethical relativism does not stop even at the identity and dignity of every human life thus opening the way to illicit and disturbing experiments After I'd finished reading Jurassic Park I turn d back to author Michael Crichton's Introduction to see if I'd missed any nuggets This is how he begins The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush of astonishing proportions the headlong and furious haste to commercialize genetic engineering This enterprise has proceeded so rapidly with so little commentary that its dimensions and implications are hardly understood at all And he adds Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history By the end of this decade it will have outdistanced atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives In the words of one observer Biotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life our medical care our food our health our entertainment our very bodies Nothing will ever be the same again It's literally going to change the face of the planet He then gives three reasons why the biotechnology revolution differs from past scientific transformations the third of which is The work is uncontrolled No one supervises it No federal laws regulate it There is no coherent government policy most disturbing is the fact that no watchdogs are found among scientists themselves It is remarkable that nearly every scientist in genetics research is also engaged in the commerce of biotechnology There are no detached observers Everybody has a stake Ironically it may be the Pro choicers who have the biggest stake they have won acceptance at least from the Supreme Courtof the devilish proposition that an unborn baby is not really a baby unless its mother wants it otherwise it is merely her property Surely the embryos are likewise merely the property of anyone who wants to clone them to be finally disposed of at will or whim The horrors that logic conjures up could turn the argument aroundand against choice unlimited Anyway Thank you for not cloning Howard Stern thank you for not cloning period 26 WINTER 1994

THE GREAT CANADIAN DEATH WISH

The Great Canadian Death Wish John Muggeridge Who says there isn't a slippery slope Ten years ago moderate social reformers were still distinguishing between passive and active euthanasia Unplugging Karen Ann Quinlan's life support system they used to argue was simply letting Nature take its course giving her a lethal injection would have been first degree murder Not any more This November 13 Ann Landers herself plumped for active euthanasia To 85 and Waiting who had voiced his hope that in the not too distant future people would be allowed to exit this life i e get put to death in a painless dignified manner she replied What you have suggested is a sane sensible civilized alternative to existing in a nursing home draining family resources and hoping the end will come soon Too bad it's against the law This is ominous The only causes Ann lLanders ever endorses are fashionable ones You can't blame her She is not a prophetess but a newspaper columnist who has to keep on the right side of her readers or rather on the left side of them No doubt she uses their letters to decide where next she should surrender to the reigning libertinism What her columns do is make such surrenders on divorce for example thirty years ago and more recently on gay parenting seem wholesomely American But how do you make geriatricide seem wholesomely American By pretending to talk about its victims while actually referring to their survivors All euthanasiasts go in for this sort of rhetorical ventriloquism Miss landers for example calls a parent's life time savings family resources thus implying that for their owner to spend them on a hospital bed for himself is to do his childre n out of their rightful inheritance So euthanasia becomes a matter of equity Also an act of parental kindness for it is not occupants of extendedcare units who are in landers words hoping the end will come soon nobody knows what they are hoping but rather their ever more sorely taxed next of kin The latter are the ones who find existing in a nursing home most wearisome On the floor where Jlolhlllll lWUllggell'nilllge a freelance writer living in WeIland Ontario is a contributor to various Canadian and U S publications WINTER 1994 27

JOHN MUGGERIDGE my mother is I hear them talking to the charge nurse How is he Much the same Oh well Knowing that their obstinately undying ancestor had at last been allowed to exit this life in a painless dignified manner would bring the most merciful of releases Often this voice throwing is so convincing that the ancestor himself begins to feel guilty about his longevity perhaps by going on living he really is inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on his heirs not to mention taking money out of their pockets It's a bit like the husband desirous of a double income saying that no wife of his is going to be bare foot and pregnant in the kitchen which when the first baby arrives makes the wife that he does have even more worried about wanting to stay home with it Lansing Mich for example writes to Ann Landers I am not afraid to die What I really fear is dying by inches and having my family wiped out financially while Springfield Va tells us how his bed ridden mother is distressed because the inheritance she planned for her grandchildren is slipping away and Amarillo Tx refuses to spend years drooling in a nursing home bankrupting my family Killing parents to put offspring out of their misery is one thing In Canada right to die enthusiasts are now demanding active euthanasia to make all of us feel better about ourselves The symbol of our collective hardness of heart they have most recently hit upon is Sue Rodriguez She is a forty three year old housewife from British Columbia in the final throes of Lou Gehrig's disease By the time these words appear God will more than likely have called her Poor creature On the very edge of eternity she is demanding the right to control her own body More specifically she wants to be able to quit it at a moment of her own choosing And why not Over twenty years ago our Federal Parliament took suicide out of the Canadian Criminal Code But not assisted suicide Here's the problem If Miss Rodriguez is to go on doing her own thing to the bitter end in order to exercise her right to kill herself she will need help The press like Ann Landers never averse to pushing society further into the secular humanist abyss put us most piercingly in the picture by printing one photograph of Rodriguez as a young woman rock climbing and another of her as she now is having to have someone put her lipstick on for her Get the point Through no fault of her own access to the good life is being closed to her In modern Canada this fact alone entitles her to redress The 28 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW handicapped together with ethnics blacks non Christians women and the elderly are a constitutionally protected minority Section li5 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and freedoms gives every individual the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular without discrimination based on age or mental or physical disability Doctor JEike Henner Kluge a philosophy professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal puts it this way since Rodriguez did not choose to contract Amyotrophic lateral Sclerosis failure to provide her with some means of overcoming this handicap is to discriminate against her on the basis of the handicap The only way to remove that source of discrimination so Kluge and Rodriguez's other media supporters contend is to allow someone legally to exterminate ber Need Ksay that they also want her autonomy and personhood respected Kluge argues that suicide is an act which respects a person's right to self determination without unjustly infringing on the rights of others Rodriguez could legally perform it now except that she does not want to yet When the quality of her life is such that she does decide to quit it owing to the progressive nature of her disease she may well be unable to do so unassisted This will leave her no choice but to involve someone else in criminal behaviour an outcome which to the civic minded Rodriguez is intolerable Ergo to quote Kluge the current law forces Rodriguez to buy her autonomy at the price of an earlier and as yet unwanted death The prohibition against assisted suicide Kluge concludes violates section 7 of the Charter which guarantees everyone the right to life liberty and security of the person for surely the first time in the history of man's struggle for political freedom under Canadian law as Kluge interprets it the right to life now includes the right to be put to death on request Above all argues Kluge a law which lets people kill themselves when they want to is respectful of individual differences Kn this connection he invokes the principle of beneficence which as he sees it obliges us to do good for others even when that good is defined not by us but by those who are affected by our acts Kn other words however strong our disagreement with Rodriguez we may not oppose her demand to be exempted from the current law on assisted suicide because such opposition would involve us in WINTER 1994 29

JOHN MUGGERIDGE doing good for her against her will thus implicating us in what Kluge calls professional paternalism Ah now there's a social sin with a familiar ring to it paternalism Dumping industrial waste into Lake Erie wiping out beluga whales keeping Indians on reservations we're all guilty It's the same with Sue Rodriguez Forcing her to undergo natural death is just another way of imposing our values on her But the crowning argument for active euthanasia is one that sooner or later supporters of every progressive cause listed in the New York Times Index resort to you can't put the clock back Listen for example to John Williams director of ethics and legal affairs for the Canadian Medical Association someone who must have played a leading part in both getting Kluge's pro euthanasia article into the Canadian Medical Association Journal and ensuring that the only replies to it would come in that journal's letter column use words which George Orwell had he heard them would have kicked himself for leaving out of Nineteen Eighty Four to express his belief that The initial resistance to physician assisted suicide has begun to yield to the efforts of reformers It has indeed Kluge points to a survey the results of which incidentally the CMAJ published two months after he used them showing that 51 of doctors in the province of Alberta approved of active euthanasia He also concludes from the failure of the CMA to censure the Royal Dutch Medical Association's pro euthanasia stand that our doctors tacitly approve of it If euthanasia is ethical in Holland he wonders why not in Canada And what about the report of the British Columbia Royal Commission on Health Care and Costs frighteningly entitled Closer to Home which says Kluge devotes an entire section to physicianassisted suicide and recommends exactly the same changes to the Canadian Criminal Code that Miss Rodriguez does Then there is last year's public opinion poll which found that 77 of Canadians favour assisted suicide and or active euthanasia Clearly Ann Landers plea for a sane sensible civilized alternative to keeping one's bed ridden parent alive has struck a responsive chord Of course there is a big difference between being in favour of something like euthanasia and actually making it happen Marilynne Seguin leader of Dying with Dignity is perhaps a little too hopeful when she claims in an interview for Chatelaine a Canadian women's magazine that physician assisted dying in Canada happens all the time and that 145 terminally ill people that she knows of committed 30 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW suicide some with the help of their doctor but obviously such homicides are occurring Alberta is generally regarded as Canada's most conservative province the media delight in depicting it as a hotbed of rightwing politicians Christian fundamentalists and anti gun control lobbyists Nevertheless of the 1055 out of 2002 of its doctors who returned questionnaires in connection with the above mentioned survey 538 said they wanted a law permitting active euthanasia and of these 258 admitted to having received death requests from their patients Whether they acted on any of these requests of course we don't know The CMA however is determined that they ought to be allowed to do so Clearly so it ends its study of medical opinion on euthanasia in Alberta major educational programs for the public and the medical profession should be established before legislative changes about active euthanasia are permitted in Alberta and perhaps the rest jof Canada What it does not have in mind is any major educational program for the public and the medical profession designed to marshal public opinion against legislative changes on active euthanasia One revealing conclusion reached by the Alberta survey those who identified themselves as Protestants Roman Catholics or religiously active were significantly more likely than those without religious affiliation or religious activity to reject the morality of active euthanasia and the practice of it What the CMA is saying here is that religiouslyminded doctors are more likely to shut their eyes to the virtues of euthanasia than irreligious ones or in other words euthanasiasts listen to reason while their opponents believe in God In one sense of course this is a pleasing match up At least it reminds us that Christianity and euthanasia don't mix Not surprisingly among all the doctors surveyed in Alberta no Roman Catholic reported having been asked to kill anyone What does make one's heart sink however is having to face yet another decade of TV news footage showing radicals squaring off against bigots this time outside post natal death clinics interspersed with sanctimonious editorializing about the need for Christian charity on both sides of such an emotionally charged issue ITn media reality of course it's the bigots who need to examine their consciences radicals get justly emotional and fwm a secularprogressivist point of view who wouldn't They are being forced to watch their creed blinded fellow citizens hold up the dawn of WINTER 1994 31

JOHN MUGGERIDGE truth No wonder Dr Kevorkian goes in for such antic behaviour and Henry Morgentaler Canada's most distinguished abortionist develops near apoplexy whenever he so much as sets foot on a public platform Such men as depicted on CNN and in the New York Times are being tried beyond their powers of endurance in unleashing their obscenities at religious dogma all they are doing is shooting back And anyway even if they do go too far at times as the media will be sure to make clear it's in the right direction That is to say towards delegitimizing Christianity and replacing it with humanism Here is a dirty little secret about euthanasiasts seldom made much of on the six o'clock news they themselves are religious dogmatists A glance at The Humanist in Canada or at its American parent The Humanist reveals that this is so Euthanasia is as much a life issue in those journals as being against abortion is in L Osservatore Romano Sue Rodriguez received the Canadian Humanist of the Year award for her courage and tenacity in helping to create a more caring and humane society Exempting her from the law against assisted suicide then is not just a matter of doing justice to her as an individual it will help bring about the moral regeneration of Canada Professor Kluge's tone is as resonantly non materialistic when he puts into humanist language a reversal of the Christian injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself Personal autonomy is fundamental to the ethics of respect for people But the account prepared by Herb Fears president of the British Columbia Humanist Association of the ceremony at which Rodriguez received her award exudes an even headier religiosity All of the theatre's stage lights were off except a single spot on the actor who at motionless in the chair the only prop His eyes were closed head slumped forward to convey to the hushed audience that his character had realized the end he had longed and fought for A death when he wanted it and one with dignity It was only a play Fears goes on to reassure us put on to raise money for the slender woman sitting virtually immobile in her wheelchair in the wings who throughout the play had intently observed the actor finally realize for his character a quadriplegic what she wanted for herself and for others who might wish it the right to determine the time and the nature of the end of their lives Later the slender woman revealed herself to be Sue Rodriguez she was wheeled forward to accept her award and then to a standing 32 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW ovation propelled offstage again by the president of a local rightto die association lin a letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal Doctor David Falk thus muses on this scene It is as though Rodriguez is no longer being caringly led by the hand instead she is being pushed as the photograph in Kluge's article so aptly portrays by the ideologies of extrinsic advocates The trouble is that in Canada the ideologies referred to by Doctor Falk now enjoy official status Humanism is our state religion Its reign over us began when Canada's latest constitution went into effect in li 98li The fact that this political metamorphosis took place so recently means that Canadian conservatives have no original understanding of their country's founding documents to go back to What butterfly bothers with his chrysalis once he's out of it There would in any case be no point in our engaging in constitutional debate We have nothing to base our arguments on The Liberal government which happened to be in power under Pierre Trudeau in the early eighties drew up a document embodying its idea of what Canada should look like got Her Majesty the Queen to sign it and here we are without our history One thing for example that Trudeau succeeded in doing was to keep God out of the main text of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms As a slight concession to this country's non atheist majority he allowed into a preamble the words Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law but what constitutional force could this sentence possibly have Officially speaking we Canadians have been endowed by our Creator with nothing A good lawyer could no doubt prove from the 1981 Constituiton that we evolved Our rights are guaranteed not from the fact that God made us but simply by virtue of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which lists them However there is one small ray of light Most Canadians are older than the Charter A majority of us can remember what Canada's constitutional landscape once looked like There is of course no question of moving back into it The sort of revolution that we now live on the far side of cannot ever be entirely reversed Even amending our present constitution let alone ditching it involves a procedure so cumbersome and unlikely of success that the most determined traditionalist would quail at having to activate it Trudeau made sure of that Yet our pre humanist past is not entirely dead WINTER 1994 33

JOHN MUGGERIDGE Section 1 of the Charter says that the rights set out in it are subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society Well we were a free and democratic society before 1981 Maybe Canadian history isn't finished after all Certainly it isn't as far as Mr Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada is concerned In a decision handed down this September 30 five out of the nine Supreme Court justices accepted Justice Sopinka's arguments against exempting Sue Rodriguez from Canada's law against assisted suicide In his ruling Justice Sopinka looks beyond the Charter to Canadian society as a whole He believes in the existence of a consensus that human life must be respected and warns us to be careful not to undermine the institutions that protect it For him one of these institutions is the current law against assisted suicide which has as its purpose the protection of the vulnerable who might be induced in moments of weakness to commit suicide The purpose of such a law he asserts is to reflect the policy of the state that human life should not be depreciated by allowing life to be taken And in Justice Sopinka's opinion human life will be depreciated if that law allows exceptions He used the example of Holland where active euthanasia remains technically illegal but established guidelines allow doctors to practise it anyway and already the incidence of active involuntary euthanasia not allowed under the guidelinesis increasing This worrisome trend says Justice Sopinka supports the view that a relaxation of the absolute prohibition takes us down the slippery slope This is non humanist talk and Justice Sopinka's ruling is peppered with examples of it He makes a second reference to the slippery slope as well as one to the sanctity of human life He defends palliative care and quickly rejects the claim often put forward by advocates of euthanasia that no serious difference exists between giving a patient drugs to kill him and giving him them to relieve pain but killing him in the process The question is Do you mean to kill him In Justice Sopinka's view and here he most clearly reveals himself as a pre humanist distinctions based upon intent are important and in fact form the basis of our criminal law But do they still do so What about no fault divorce no fault car insurance and invitational pedagogy Or the notion floating in the back of even the most resolutely anti modernist mind these 34 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW days that at least some crimes are more like diseases than sins We give psychiatric treatment to child abusers but not to embezzlers Are we saying then that unlike lust larceny is incurable Perhaps one day they will find a cure for it in which case given the proper safeguards stealing itself could be decriminalized Certainly it did not take long for Chief Justice Antonio lamer who wrote the minority opinion in the Rodriguez case to dispose of Justice Sopinka's worries about laws on suicide sending the wrong message to Canadians The Chief Justice dismisses as irrelevant the philosophic and theological considerations fuelling the debate on the morality of suicide or euthanasia The Charter he rightly argues has established the essentially secular nature of Canadian society and the central place of freedom of conscience in the operation of our institutions He should have written freedom from conscience lFor although he admits that a law allowing assisted suicide would be open to abuse he still refuses to justify depriving a disadvantaged group of the right to equality solely on such speculative grounds no matter how well intentioned For Lamer then intention is not the central issue in Canada's current debate on whether or not to legalize assisted suicide upholding the equality rights of the handicapped is Canada's pro life newspaper The Interim greeted Justice Sopinka's whisker thin victory with a Disaster avoided headline The Supreme Court's resolution in the Sue Rodgriguez case has not settled the euthanasia issue warns Sabina McLuhan whose clear and sensible coverage of the case in The Interim should be required reading for all serious students of current social issues in Canada These she concludes are perilous times for the medically vulnerable in our society And so they are especially since the avowed socialist and homosexual Svend Robinson who managed to stem the anti leftist trend in western Canada by getting returned for a Vancouver district in this fall's federal election has taken up the Rodriguez case and now threatens to introduce a private member's bill decriminalizing assisted suicide And if his doesn't get passed another's will Why shouldn't it o that this too too sullied flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew cries Hamlet in a moment of suicidal despair Or that the JEverlasting had not fix'd His canon gainst self slaughter WINTER 1994 35

JOHN MUGGERIDGE Modern Canadians need have no such hangups Indeed if Ann Landers Professor Eike Henner Kluge the Ethics and Legal Affairs Committee of the Canadian Medical Association Chief Justice Lamer and Svend Robinson have their way we will be able to get doctors to do our self slaughtering for us even as happened thousands of times in Holland last year without our having to ask them Please I come here to forget my troubles THE SPECTATOR 15 May 1993 36 WINTER 1994

EUTHANASIA AND THE MEDIA: "THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A SIMPLE SUICIDE"

Euthanasia and the Media UThere s No Such Thing As a Simple Suicide 9 Wesley 1 Smith On November 14 1993 the prestigious New York Times Magazine featured the cover story There's No Such Thing as a Simple Suicide the sad saga of a dying woman who killed herself She had the active assistance and moral support of one Ralph Mero a Unitarian minister and co founder of the pro euthanasia group Compassion in Dying an offshoot of the Washington State chapter of the Hemlock Society although the organizations are separate legal entities The lengthy article was written by lisa Belkin a former Times reporter and author of a book about medicine and ethics First Do No Harm The story is presented as melodrama taking the reader on an emotional roller coaster ride through an assisted suicide complete with a cast of heroes and villains and a life and death plot To make matters more compelling we are told that the tale is true with only the dying woman's name changed to protect her family's privacy The cast of characters in No Simple Suicide for short is a diverse group Louise a woman dying of an unidentified degenerative disease of the brain The Mother A woman who wants to do right by her dying daughter The Minister Ralph Mero a man who descibes himself as only wanting to alleviate unnecessary suffering The friend A medical assistant who befriends Louise so as to support her decision to undergo assisted suicide The Doctor She prescribes the drugs that are to be used to kill Louise and offers moral support The Reporter A woman invited to observe the work of Compassion in Dying and chronicle Louise's assisted suicide She not only reports the event but ends up promoting it The Villains People who oppose legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia They never appear on stage but their dirty work adds to Louise's suffering and pain Wesney JJ I JI1IWIu is an attorney living in San Francisco He has recently co authored along with Ralph Nader Collision Course The Truth About Airline Safety McGraw Hill His My Turn column in Newsweek June 28 1993 appeared in our Fall issue WINTER 1994 37

WESLEY J SMITH The Plot No Simple Suicide chronicles the last few months of Louise's life We learn early on that Louise suffers from an unidentified degenerative brain condition Her doctor described as a warm down to earth woman informs her that she has only months perhaps just weeks to live Louise is afraid of dying in a hospital hospice or other facility a scenario her doctor bluntly tells her is quite likely Louise says that rather than die in a cold impersonal facility she would rather kill herself The doctor is immediately supportive and agrees to prescribe the drugs for Louise to take No mention is made in Louise's chart of her plans The doctor had previously cooperated with another patient's suicide but there had been difficulties So she contacts Ralph Mero at Compassion in Dying to elicit his help and active assistance in facilitating Louise's death The doctor later tells reporter Belkin I was ecstatic to find someone who's doing what he's Mero doing I loved the fact that there were guidelines It made so much sense This was a human being who could help not some book A few days later Mero visits Louise who lives with her mother Mero tells Belkin that during the interview Louise appeared relieved when he didn't flinch or judge her desire to kill herself and that she asked Mero to be with her when she died He agreed reminding her that the decision was her own I do not want to die in a hospital Louise is said to have replied I want to do this at home Louise has asked her friends to attend her suicide But none will When a medical assistant of one of her doctors hears that Louise's trusted friends have backed away she befriends the ill woman and supports her in her self destruction Mero the medical assistant Louise and her mother become a cohesive group with one goal Louise's assisted suicide They meet to discuss how the self termination shall be performed All agree to follow Mero's written guidelines the deadly drugs will be mixed with a small amount of food and anti nausea medication so that it can be kept down Louise is to be monitored as she dies and the assistant is to administer anti pain medication if she seems to be suffering After the death the doctor will report to the authorities that the deceased was terminally ill and that the death was from natural causes after a prolonged illness In that way no autopsy will be conducted The doctor is also to falsify the death certificate 38 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN lIFE REVIEW as to the actual cause of death Weeks pass louise grows ever weaker Yet the frail woman does not kill herself She wishes to live quietly in peace for as long as possible Mero becomes alarmed He calls Belkin to inform her that he and the group have been told by the doctor that louise is running out of time within which to kill herself lit is feared that the disease may soon render louise mentally incompetent Kndeed if louise does not take action soon her window of opportunity will slam shut Compassion in Dying's guidelines for assisting suicides requires that the person die while mentally competent There is also the fear that louise will be unable to self administer the deadly drugs Belkin drops everything and flies to Seattle to speak with Louise louise tells her she wishes to conclude some business and spend some more time with her mother This upsets the reporter who blurts out the doctor's prognosis Louise does not have much time within which she will be capable of killing herself Yet for all of her stated desire to commit assisted suicide Louise still does not act Some time later the friend tells the group she will talk to louise to see if she can get the suicide back on the front burner She asks the dying woman K kind of want to get an idea of what your time line is Where do we stand Louise's eyes brim with tears and she tells the medical assistant that she does not want to talk about it The woman apologizes Louise says she wants to wait until Mero returns he's out of town to get his opinion of her condition The friend replies that it's a bad idea because Mero might not notice subtle changes in her condition Still louise does not kill herself Mero withdraws checking in by phone but keeping the conversations short He tells Belkin that he wants to remain in the background so as to not influence the outcome Then Mero gets a message louise is finally ready The group assembles louise eats poisoned ice cream and apple sauce that has been prepared pursuant to Mero's previous instructions and immediately falls asleep on the couch clutching a Teddy Bear Hours pass as louise sleeps The group waits for her to die She does not Mero worries that he might have to help the process with a plastic bag Louise's breathing slows and she finally expires Mero contacts the funeral director and leaves As the article concludes we are informed that lLouise's death was not listed as a suicide and that her friends and relatives were told that she died in her sleep with her mother at her side as she had wanted WINTER 1994 39

WESLEY J SMITH No Simple Suicide as propaganda Every drama is intended to elicit a response from the audience No Simple Suicide is no exception On its face the article appears to be an objective piece of journalism Belkin does not praise or criticize the people involved or the events that occur nor give her personal opinion on the merits of Mero's cause Scratch beneath the surface however and the piece can be seen as advocacy journalisman advertisement for legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia What leads to this conclusion First there is the manner in which the article came to be written Belkin didn't find the story the story found her As Belkin appropriately reveals she was contacted by the Board of Directors of Compassion in Dying who invited her to observe their usually secret suicide assistance activities There is nothing illegal immoral or unusual about a reporter being contacted about a story it often happens However it is safe to assume that Mero and the Board had more in mind than merely illustrating the emotional difficulties surrounding terminal illness Surely they hoped to further their cause through the article If so it is likely they would choose the writer with great care in the hope of finding one that could be expected to take a positive view of their work As this deconstruction of No Simple Suicide will demonstrate they seem to have chosen well I do not contend that Belkin was a shill for the organization However her sympathies are easy to discern She exhibits an uncritical acceptance of the methods and motives of Mero the doctor and the friend and writes sympathetically sometimes breathlessly about the people and events she describes Beyond the issue of whether Belkin approached her work with a pro assisted suicide bias there is the more important matter of the powerful message communicated by No Simple Suicide Bluntly stated whether Belkin intended it or not the article is propaganda for the pro euthanasia cause which seeks to persuade the reader of several things specifically that assisted suicide is an acceptable act Proponents of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia are ever about the task of proselytizing the public seeking converts to their cause The more we are exposed to depictions of assisted suicide the more commonplace it will seem and then the more acceptable Through this process we become desensitized Practices that we once found abhorrent begin to seem like a normal part of life or more precisely death Proselytizing is designed to break through 40 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW the age old social stigma that views assisted suicide and so called mercy killing as reprehensible and wrong No Simple Suicide serves this purpose in several ways 1 Implement the Either Or Strategy One of the tools used by pro euthanasia advocates when arguing for legalization is to create a false either or argument either we provide deliverance to people suffering from terminal illness or they will be forced into cruel and unnecessary suffering Either they die peacefully and painlessly now or in agony later lit is an argument cast in classic black and white ignoring the rest of the color spectrum The basic premise of No Simple Suicide is similarly cast in the presumption of either or We are told that Louise was forced to choose between two horrible options assisted suicide or a horrible out of control death at a facility Not once is the reader or Louise as far as we know informed that hospice and palliative care could probably have mitigated most if not all of Louise's pain and discomforts Not once is the reader or louise told that the hospice experience is designed to provide love comfort and support for the patient and the family supplied by medical and mental health professionals and volunteers Not once is the reader or louise told that hospice care can be supplied in the home Not once is the reader or Louise told that the very purpose of hospice care is to facilitate a gentle and peaceful transition from life to whatever comes next The fact that the truly compassionate option seems to have gone virtually unexplored speaks volumes about the article's intent and the intent of Louise's doctor and Ralph Mero 2 Create the impression that euthanasia is a loving rather than a violent act The suspicion that there was an unspoken agenda behind No Simple Suicide is supported by the striking art work which was chosen to illustrate many of the scenes described in the text These illustrations which appear to be oil paintings or water colors are powerful and moving They depict Louise as a woman in her thirties her youth adding to the tragedy of her condition The article doesn't tell us Louise's actual age or what she looked like lin one picture Louise is curled up peacefully asleep on a couch after eating the poisoned ice cream She is holding a teddy bear as her gray haired mother sits beside her the older woman's hand resting lightly upon her dying daughter's leg lin another picture we see Louise and Rev Mero in a counselling session He is a strong presence solid and WINTER 1994 41

WESLEY J SMITH dependable with his white beard and black suit a striking contrast to the frail Louise who has a blanket wrapped around her shoulders In another picture Louise's mother is pictured leaning over her daughter who is so weak the older woman can barely hear her speak The paintings have been created in the warm colors of autumn so as to invite us in to linger as if we were standing in front of a crackling fire indeed to enter and become intimate participants in the unfolding drama Someone has a purpose in using such powerful images The paintings grab our hearts and rivet our attention solely and exclusively and in extreme close up on the suffering of the dying woman In that way we are less likely to think critically to look beyond Louise's tragedy to the broader implications of what is occurring Also by making the scenes seem gentle and warm we are far less likely to recoil in horror at the events that take place 3 Create the impression that Louise's assisted suicide was a necessary choice The article supports Louise's assisted suicide on several levels Belkin's prose creates the impression that Mero and the others are compassionate pioneers leading the country toward an enlightened view of facing and overcoming the ravages of terminal illness In fact according to Belkin that is how the group viewed themselves writing that each saw Louise's pending assisted suicide as a poetic expression of control a triumph over the indignities of disease That is a typical view of pro euthanasia activists and no doubt the view Mero hoped would be accepted by the reader Belkin came to a less romantic but equally erroneous conclusion about the affair In the only personal opinion she expresses in the article the reporter describes Louise's assisted suicide as a second choice to not being sick and as the most acceptable of the dying woman's unacceptable options But that is a distinction without a difference Whether euthanasia is pushed as a eroic statement of control or a rational choice between the lesser of two evils the result is the same a premature death caused by the hand of man 4 It should be easier to help people die Louise's assisted suicide took place in the underground amidst the shadows of people who lied and broke the law in order to facilitate her so called death with dignity The attitude of the article is implicitly critical that this subterfuge was necessary The reader is given a subliminal message often voiced out loud by assisted suicide advocates that goes something like this See See you unreasonable people who refuse to allow 42 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW others to control their own destiny see what you put a poor dying woman through See how your cruel social attitudes caused Louise's friends to abandon her when all she wanted to do was control the time and place of her own death See how you increased louise's and her mother's suffering See how you have prevented a caring doctor from actively participating in her patient's final treatment by forbidding lethal injections See how you have forced a compassionate clergyman to risk imprisonment in his pursuit of providing care and comfort to the suffering How could you be so thoughtless so insensitive so cruel A Bum's Rush to Suicide rhe bitter irony is that it was the members of the little group surrounding Louise and their pro euthanasia agenda who were the ones who were thoughtless insensitive and cruel More than that they gave louise the bum's rush into killing herself Item Louise was unable to give informed consent to her suicide because she was denied information about hospice care From what is revealed in the story both the doctor and Mero allowed Louise to believe the either or scenario that she would have to die in a facility unless she killed herself at home Apparently neither discussed the option of hospice care with Louise or described the palliative care that could have reduced her discomfort rhus it appears that louise was presented with a false premise from which to choose how to proceed Nor is there any mention of the warm and caring doctor doing anything to relieve louise's and her mother's grief and emotional distress As far as we know they were not referred to grief counselors or a mental health specialist who might have been able to diagnose and relieve depression Nor it appears did the doctor call on anyone but Mero an activist for the euthanasia cause to serve as a source of strength and support for the family rhus at the end Louise is surrounded exclusively by people who believe she should kill herself Item The medical assistant pushed Louise into going forward with the assisted suicide rhe so called friend who suddenly embraced Louise is suspect Was she part of a pro euthanasia group Did she have an agenda We are not told Wasn't Belkin even a little curious about this Regardless of her motives the friend is a powerful actor throughout the drama urging louise on to self destruction For example WINTER 1994 43

WESLEY J SMITH when it was clear that Louise was delaying and appeared not to want to go forward the friend grew impatient and confronted the ill woman I kind of want to get an idea of what your time line is Where do we stand Then when Louise says she doesn't want to talk about it but would rather wait for Mero to return to give his opinion the friend tells her it is a bad idea urging her not to wait because Mero may not be able to notice subtle changes in Louise's temperament and thus might give the wrong advice Clearly the friend wanted Louise's assisted suicide the sooner the better Item Ralph Mero's compassion was only available to Louise if she carried out her designated role This is the most insidious part of the story It is important to remember how emotionally vulnerable someone who is terminally ill can be as the end of life approaches Louise was no exception Then along comes compassionate Ralph Mero a minister no less who tells Louise I'll be with you and I'll support you From that point on it seems clear in the article that Louise has become dependent on the moral judgment and emotional support of Mero to the extent that she even wanted to rely on him for medical advice as to how far her decline had progressed Note that throughout the early part of the process Mero was there for Louise He held her hand He patiently and gently went over the guidelines for the assisted suicide He presented himself as a source of strength a rock to lean on in this difficult and emotional time But when Louise hesitates and refuses to be pressured into the suicide what does this altruistic man of compassion do Does he hold her hand and discuss alternatives such as hospice care Does he pray with Louise so that together they could seek God's guidance He is a minister after all Does he assure her that whatever her choice might be he was her friend and he would be there with her to the end No He withdraws The article tells us Over the next few days Mero checked in with Louise and her mother by telephone but kept the conversation short I was measuring my phone calls he says He wanted to remain in the background and allow Louise to control the timing and pace Her growing dependence on him was making him uncomfortable and he needed to keep it clear in her mind and his that she was the driver and he was just along for the ride Mero was along for the ride all right but only if the ride took Louise to where he wanted her to go When she seemed to be choosing a different course his absence made it clear that without the suicide 44 WINTER 1994

fHE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW louise was on her own Put yourself in louise's place magine how she must have felt when her mentor the man she was leaning on for strength and guidance was suddenly out of her life especially after being so intensely a part of it just a few weeks before This was nothing less than emotional manipulation on Mero's part passive aggressive behavior that communicated a harsh and powerful message to the dying woman kill yourself and am your man decide to stick it out to the end and am out of here That pressure appears to have been more than louise could bear for shortly thereafter louise decided to submit Pi Breach of Ethic As if all of that isn't disturbing enough what are we to make of the reporter lisa Belkin and her participation in these sad events Recall when the doctor informed Mero and Belkin that Louise was likely to slip quickly and become mentally incompetent and therefore become unable to kill herself or receive Mero's assistance Belkin immediately flies to Seattle unaware that Louise has not been told of this prognosis During an interview on that occasion Louise tells Belkin that she wants to wait a week or so before killing herself Belkin is appalled Again from the article I was surprised confused and extremely uncomfortable Without thinking I blurted out a question Your doctor feels that if you don't act by this weekend you may not be able to My words were met with a wrenching silence Louise blanched her pale skin turned even paler I was horrified with myself She didn't she never I didn't know that Louise said sharply looking at her mother That's what she told me her mother offered gently Louise became silent It's O K to be afraid her mother said I'm not afraid I just feel as if everyone is ganging up on me pressuring me Louise said I just want some time Indeed louise was being pressured now even by the reporter who at that point crossed the line from observer and chronicler of events to a participant in them The question must thus be asked Was this a breach of journalistic ethics The New York Times for which this article was written had previously published an eight page single spaced conflict ofinterest policy which governs the work of its journalists The code states in part WINTER 1994 45

WESLEY J SMITH The integrity of the Times requires that its staff members avoid employment or any other undertaking obligation relationship or investment that creates or appears to create a conflict of interest with their professional work for The Times or otherwise compromises The Times's independence and reputation Emphasis added The Society of Professional Journalists the premier trade association for reporters and journalists has a similar albeit less detailed code of ethics similarly proscribing actual or apparent conflict of interest Did Belkin's stated unhappiness with Louise's decision to put off the suicide and the reporter's revelation of the doctor's prognosis to the dying woman cross the line Did this constitute conflict of interest After all no assisted suicide no story no story no prestigious cover in the Times Magazine This question was put to Steven Issacs a journalism professor at Columbia University In Professor Issac's opinion Belkin came close to unacceptable behavior However in his view the fact that she revealed her possible transgression in the article mitigated whatever breach had actually occurred On this point Professor Issacs said As a general rule of thumb if one participates in a story you had better say so Once you do you've done your ethical duty especially if the story is for a magazine But isn't that standared too lax After all this was literally a matter of life and death not some journalistic exercise for students in a class room Belkin's statement was clearly designed to dissuade Louise from waiting to kill herself and in fact according to Louise's own bitter complaint became a form of pressure on her In that moment whether intentional or not Belkin became a part of the group advocating Louise's assisted suicide That was wrong regardless of whether Belkin technically breached ethical guidelines The Truth about Euthanasia No Simple Suicide presents a one sided version of assisted suicide Except for one brief sentence opponents of legalization are not heard from More importantly what is omitted from the discussion are the reasons why opponents of euthanasia are so devoted to their resistance efforts Opponents believe in the time honored ethic that views assisted suicide and euthanasia as morally wrong This has always been considered a basic premise of enlightened civilization Look at the past Even at a time when many people died in agony euthanasia 46 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW was never considered an option because it would be immoral to kill a fellow human being Today there is even less excuse to accept euthanasia Now few people are doomed to die in agony thanks to the tremendous strides that have been made in the science of palliative care with the promise for even greater pain control coming in the near future Is it not ironic that just as so much suffering is so close to being eliminated from the world that euthanasia advocates are making such deep inroads into the public's consciousness But there is another worry beyond the decay of simple morality Legalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill would be bad public policy The ripple effects that would inevitably follow legalization would destroy the fabric of society taking the nation toward a depraved public policy reminiscent of the eugenics practices undertaken in Germany by the Nazis and even before them Known generically as the slippery slope argument opponents fear the following causeand effect process Current proposals for reform focus primarily on legalizing assisted but self administered suicide This is the approach taken by the most infamous advocate of assisted suicide Dr Jack Kevorkian his victims self administer carbon monoxide poison supplied by Doctor Death This is also the level at which Compassion in Dying works as evidenced by No Simple Suicide Louise put the poison in her ice cream and fed it to herself As i write it is reported that proponents of euthanasia in Oregon are preparing an initiative that would legalize self administered assisted suicide Nothing happens in a vacuum Should society take the unprecedented leap backwards of legalizing self administered assisted suicide the next step authorizing outright euthanasia death administered by a physician or other third party becomes a mere hop skip and jump After all proponents will ask if it is legal and proper for a competent but terminally ill person to commit suicide with assistance but by self administration why should those unable or afraid to do the deed themselves not be allowed to choose to be delivered by a physician through an injection What's the difference so long as the patient requests the procedure Besides they will argue allowing a medical expert to supply the treatment will eliminate the chance for error This type of proposal is currently being considered by the Wisconsin legislature It was also proposed WINTER 1994 47

WESLEY J SMITH in the unsuccessful California and Washington initiatives but is now seen by euthanasia advocates as having tried to go too far too fast Thus the current tactic of writing a more restricted Oregon initiative Should assisted suicide ever be legalized proposals to authorize euthanasia of the terminally ill can be expected to multiply like mildew in a bath tub Should lethal injection euthanasia become legal for the competent terminally ill the next step will be to make it available to the incompetent terminally ill the chronically suffering and those whose lives are deemed without quality Coma patients people suffering from a persistent vegetative state the severely disabled would be the next ones to benefit from legalized euthanasia Jack Kevorkian Derek Humphry the Hemlock Society and others already advocate permitting such people to be euthanized From there it will be on to old people who live in nursing homes a proposal already sanctioned by columnist Ann LandersDerek Humphry is another proponent who believes euthanasia should be available to those suffering from what he calls terminal old age Also vulnerable will be children born with birth defects and others whose long term care will be deemed too expensive to justify and the mentally ill Next will come the elimination of undesirables from the gene pool people with genes likely to cause disease people with genes that cause physical deformities people with genes likely to pass on traits considered unwanted Those who support legalization of assisted suicide loudly deny that there would be such a slippery slope effect But they are demonstrably wrong The slippery slope is already slip sliding away For example here in the United States a quiet revolution has occurred in the treatment of the profoundly disabled Providing food and fluids to dependent people used to be considered basic care along with other necessary patient services such as bathing and catheterization In a quiet revolution feeding and providing fluids have recently been redefined as medical treatment This is a distinction with a tremendous difference Basic care cannot be legally withheld unless it would actually harm the patient Sometimes when a person is on the brink of death their bodies cannot assimilate food so it may be withheld On the other hand medical treatment can be withdrawn if it is believed that it will not lead to an improvement in the patient As a result profoundly 48 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW disabled people who are not terminal are being starved and dehydrated to death with the blessing of courts of law Then there is the experience of the Netherlands lin No Simple Suicide Belkin mentions in passing the acceptance of euthanasia by the Dutch Technically euthanasia remains illegal in Holland This omission is key for it omits from the discussion important facts which illustrate how far down the slippery slope the Dutch have already travelled lin li 990 the Dutch government commissioned a study on the practice of euthanasia in the nation Here are some of the very disturbing facts based on the findings of the commission published in 1991i and commonly known as the Remmelink Report j Over nine per cent of all Dutch deaths are by euthanasia intentional lethal overdoses or fatal injections lI An average of three patients per day are being euthanized without their knowledge and consent Fourteen per cent of these euthanized patients were fully competent but were not consulted Seventy two per cent had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated lin eight per cent of the cases doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite the fact that they believed alternativecare options were still possible Forty five per cent of all euthanasia occurring in hospitals was done without the patient's consent These figures do not include cases in which life sustaining treatment was withheld without the patient's consent or cases involving disabled newborns children with life threatening conditions or psychiatric patients The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were low quality of life no prospect for improvement and the family couldn't take it anymore lin addition consider these facts not mentioned in the Remmelink Report lin the entire nation of Holland as of June li990 there were only two hospices Moreover the British Medical Association found that pain control techniques are poorly developed in Holland After all why take the time and effort to reduce pain and care for people when they can be killed lit gets worse lin July 1992 the Dutch Pediatric Association announced that it was formulating WINTER 1994 49

WESLEY J SMITH specific guidelines for killing severely handicapped newborns Then there's the recent case of the woman who was in understandable anguish because her children had died and her marriage had fallen apart she however was physically healthy Her own psychiatrist helped her kill herse1fl These facts lead inexorably to a very disturbing question If the pro euthanasia public policy of the Netherlands has already gone as far as it has what will stop the same thing from happening here in the United States Readers of No Simple Suicide were not bothered with such disturbing questions It might have led them to consider the big picture rather than the immediacy of the drama And that might have lead them to conclusions contrary to those solicited by the article Conclusion At one point in the article Mero describes his work for Compassion in Dying as an experiment to show demonstrate prove that when people make a claim for humane treatment it can be provided in a way that does not jeopardize vulnerable people or pose a threat to the social fabric Leaving aside the perversion of the word treatment in that sentence we can assume Mero hoped that by inviting Belkin to observe his work his vision would be accepted by her readers But as this analysis of No Simple Suicide demonstrates what actually happened to Louise was just the opposite a sick and vulnerable woman was pushed by those she trusted into suicide in order to further their political and social agendas First Louise was apparently never fully informed about the truly compassionate option of hospice care Then when she delayed killing herself she was repeatedly pressured into committing the act Moreover her doctor is revealed as a liar who prescribed the drugs that killed Louise knowing that they would be used to kill rather than treat the woman undermining the integrity of the medical profession The doctor also lied to the coroner's office and on the death certificate thereby falsifying the public record What happened to Louise was more than a mere threat to the social fabric it was in fact a rending Finally there is this disturbing truth if pro euthanasia advocates win their fight to legitimize killing the weak and dependent instead of caring for them the slide down the slippery slope will eventually lead to a very high cliff Then will come the fall Waiting at the SO WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW bottom will be modern day eugenicists ready to expand the twisted ethic of our Brave New World into as yet unthought of horizons too dark and chilling to contemplate That would be a catastrophe from which the world might never recover tJ 1l'lIlIIE SPJEctATOR 30 October 1993 WINTER 1994 5

THE GHOULISH GADGETEER: "DOCTOR DEATH" FINDS A MOUTHPIECE

The Ghoulish Gadgeteer Doctor Death Finds a Mouthpiece Rita L Marker Last December 3 1 had the second opportunity in less than a month to debate one of Dr Jack Kevorkian's attorneys Whatever one may think of him and his premier client Geoffrey Fieger of the law firm of Fieger Fieger and Schwartz does a yeoman's job of trying to sell the idea that an unemployed pathologist with an obsession for the macabre is really a great humanitarian with qualities similar to those of Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale Fieger lets nothing particularly the truth stand in the way of pitching his client The show CNN's Crossfire co hosted by Pat Buchanan and Juan Williams took place three days after Kevorkian had been jailed a second time for violating Michigan's law against assisted suicide For three days he had been on another self imposed hunger strike A Kevorkian hunger strike consists of fruit juices vitamins and massive doses of publicity As the program opened Fieger was asked the condition of his client His skin has a yellow pallor he responded in a manner calculated to convey that the grim reaper was knocking at the jail cell door Jack Kevorkian really is an amazing guy He can apparently experience symptoms of starvation faster than anyone else in the Western hemisphere Only one month earlier he'd conducted his first orchestrated accelerated slip toward the grave On a Friday afternoon in November he'd been jailed after refusing to post a 2,000 bond By Saturday evening Fieger told the press that Kevorkian showed signs of deteriorating The flamboyant attorney who at one time had wanted to be an actor said I don't think Jack has long to live He's very very weak Good old Dr Jack who had presumably eaten breakfast on Friday morning and immediately started a fruit juice and vitamin only diet that afternoon was diagnosed by Fieger the very next day as Rita L Marker is the director of the International Anti Euthanasia Task Force and the author of Deadly Compassion William Morrow and Co 1993 She is the mother of seven and the grandmother of four S2IWINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW close to death by starvation That in itself is unbelievable But even more incredible was the fact that Fieger made his claim with a straight face Maybe the guy really is an actor after all 1ft is a bit disconcerting to realize that it's Fieger who always describes the medical condition of Kevorkian's latest victim to the media Anyone who says that a fruit juice and vitamin diet leaves one dose to death in thirty six hours obviously has a bit of a problem making medical diagnoses Maybe this is why one of Kevorkian's patients whom Fieger assured the world was suffering from a painful incurable medical condition was found on autopsy to be free of any disease Not an scomaw Meanwhile back on Crossfire Fieger went on to declare that his client is not a scoffiaw Really lit's Kevorkian who said You pass any law against assisted suicide and euthanasia and I will disobey it I It's Kevorkian who has made good on that threat and who when charged with breaking the law taunted You know what's on trial Your civilization and your society It's K evorkian who has said that if he's put in jail he'll starve himself to death This threat is vaguely reminiscent of a childhood tantrum A four year old who is told he'll have to go to his room if be misbehaves will shout U you send me to my room I'll hold my breath And you'll be sorry Kevorkian when informed he'd have to go to jail if he gassed anyone else to death bellowed that if sent to jail he'd starve himself Fieger has backed up the threat Society has a choice now Dr Kevorkian's life or Michigan's assisted suicide ban he said U this immoral law and the fanatics behind it win we had all better weep Not so much for my client and my brave and brilliant friend but for ourselves 2 But in order to garner support with this kind of emotionalism the main character must evoke sympathy That's a bit of a problem when the considerable attitude problem of Fieger's brave and brilliant friend is not kept under control When ordered to jail the second time he shouted at a detective calling him a liar responded Go to hem when the judge raised his bond and then when asked if he was upset by the amount of the 50,000 bond retorted No li shouldn't come this cheap lit shouldl have been a million 3 WINTER 1994 53

RITA L MARKER Clearly Fieger needed to do some damage control This was definitely not the image he'd been manufacturing for his client So on Crossfire Fieger set about some reconstructive work to patch the chips in the fa ade Not Out for Publicity According to Fieger the good doctor is not out for publicity After all he explained Kevorkian isn't selling a book he's only helping people after he has carefully screened them Not out for publicity No book sales at stake Screening for whose purposes As a matter of fact there are a couple of books that have been in the balance for quite some time Earlier this year a Chicago paper reported that a proposed book about Kevorkian titled The Mercy Machine was proving to be a hard sell If and when it's marketed though half of its revenues will belong to Fieger who according to the article figured to choreograph a terrific production by bringing together the tentative book's author and the predatory pathologist 4 And then there's Jack's own book Prescription Medicide that he said he'd written to take on the stone age ethics of space age medicine 5 The 268 page tome gives more than a little insight into just how publicity seeking its author really is In it Kevorkian acknowledged how he selected his first subject a word he often uses for his victims and potential victims with care Describing the need to get the best possible publicity for the first subject's death Kevorkian wrote I knew that it would take a bull's eye to establish the new specialty 6 Candidate Screening Kevorkian does indeed screen his candidates but the process used to select the first candidate made it abundantly clear that the screening was done for Kevorkian's benefit Several candidates were considered For various reasons their auditions led to rejection They failed to qualify for the finals from which one would be selected as the first memorable corpse upon which subsequent dead bodies could be heaped Kevorkian explained to one woman that she was not a suitable candidate for the first use of the Mercitron because her situation wouldn't garner favorable publicity for what he was trying to do He told her he expected a storm of criticism to follow the initial 54 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW event but that if the first case was under ideal conditions it would blunt any condemnation in subsequent cases 7 When the woman's relatives learned what was going on they whisked her off preventing Kevorkian from using her later for his purposes This was not the only case in which family members were horrified by what was being proposed 8 following the initial event in June of 1990 Kevorkian carried on with his lethal hobby but it seems he neglected one thing in the selection process of subsequent victims By the time the toll had risen to eight commentators began to remark about the fact that all of his patients were women He evidently took the criticism to heart becoming an equal opportunity killer the following month On January 20 1993 Jack Miller became the first man to receive the services of the ghoulish gadgeteer Challenging the 8M Care similar to that which went into the initial event was employed when plans were made to carry out the first final action as the Kevorkian designed report form calls the killings after the passage of Michigan's ban on assisted suicide Meticulous attention appears to have been given to both the victim and the venue The victim was Thomas Hyde a thirty three year old man with lLou Gehrig's disease one of the most heartbreaking maladies known The location selected for Hyde's death was Wayne County where the prosecutor favors assisted suicide and has voiced support for Kevorkian's activities Using people and events to gain the greatest publicity is indeed one of Kevorkian and Fieger's strong suits Several times during the program Juan Williams cast in the unenviable position of being the co host who was to side with Kevorkian indicated that he wanted to move the discussion away from Kevorkian Kn an effort to do so he side stepped the entire issue and brought up the Quinlan case saying that her parents literally went to the Catholic Church and asked Pope Pius XU for his permission to remove those extraordinary means that were keeping Karen Ann Quinlan alive Given the fact that Karen Ann Quinlan's case didn't begin until 1975 a full seventeen years after the death of Pope Pius XU either the Quinlans have some interesting contacts or Williams has some shoddy researchers WINTER 1994 55

RnA L MARKER Williams inaccuracies are one thing but it's unlikely that misinformation is the source of Fieger's difficulty with the truth For example when co host Pat Buchanan asked Fieger about Kevorkian's statements calling the Nazi medical experimentation not absolutely negative experiments Fieger said No and launched into a discussion of capital punishment Buchanan then quoted a Kevorkian statement that society would be enhanced if disabled people would self eliminate Fieger flatly denied it saying He never said that Yet Kevorkian's paper trail is clear In a 1986 article Kevorkian not only referred to the Nazi medical experiments as not absolutely negative but wrote that practical value for mankind did result from them 9 His denigration of the Jewish Holocaust was also clear from a 1993 interview in which he compared the Holocaust with the experiences of his Armenian relatives during World War I I wish my forefathers went through what the Jews did he said The Jews were gassed They have had a lot of publicity but they didn't suffer as much lo As with the disavowal of his client's comments concerning German medical experiments Fieger's denial of Kevorkian's bigotry toward people with disabilities can be refuted with Kevorkian's own writing In a long rambling statement to a Michigan judge Kevorkian wrote The voluntary self elimination of mortally diseased or crippled lives can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare ll The Ultimate Aim Yet on the program as elsewhere Fieger consistently denies that Kevorkian has in mind anything other than helping suffering people As he said in the column that appeared in the New York Times the morning of the program Jack is a physician first and foremost and he believes the duty of every physician is to relieve suffering and provide a soft landing out of this world if necessary 12 That's a nice public relations statement but it bears no resemblance to Fieger's client Even before he lost his license Kevorkian had been an unemployednot retired pathologist who hadn't practiced clinical medicine in over thirty years He has no training in psychiatry to assess the mental or emotional state of vulnerable people But he does have an agenda And providing a soft landing out of this world is not even near the top of it 56 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW He has written there's that annoying paper trail again that infants children and others incapable of giving direct or informed consent are among the potential candidates for the humane killing known as euthanasia He calls it suicide by proxy 13 He has in fact specifically stated that alleviation of agonizing pain and torment is only a minor benefit in his overall scheme of things 14 He has made it clear that the right thing to do is to establish well equipped suicide centers where merciful killing would be supplemented with the enormously positive benefit of experimentation and organ donations 15 His ultimate aim as he has described it is not simply to help suffering or doomed persons kill themselves That activity he said is merely the first step an early distasteful professional obligation which will lead to his goal What find most satisfying he said is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments and other undefined medical acts 16 This is the man whom Fieger characterized on Crossfire as one of the warmest brightest and most compassionate men I've ever known Does he really believe that m inclined to think he doesn't But whether he does or not isn't the issue The important thing is whether Heger can persuade the public to believe it because he is trying his case in two courtsthe court of law and the court of public opinion lit's the latter where acceptance or rejection of Kevorkian's ultimate aim will eventually take place lHIowever a recent court decision can and should sound a warning about the true nature of the agenda being set forth QUIlaiity ff ILife According t Whom On December 13 Wayne County Circuit Judge Richard Kaufman issued a ruling striking down Michigan's law banning assisted suicide The ruling was not unexpected and from a legal perspective it was not a major decision After all Kaufman is just one of sixty two Wayne County judges His decision may affect only one case involving Kevorkian And Kaufman was the fourth not the first lower court judge to rule on the statute Two judges had previously upheld it and one had found parts of it to be unconstitutional n addition the matter is now before the Court of Appeals and will likely go further perhaps even to the u s Supreme Court But even though Kaufman's decision was relatively unimportant WINTER 1994 57

RITA L MARKER in the judicial arena it has taken on prominence far exceeding its legal consequences As is often the situation it is the rationalethe why in a court's decision that is of far greater importance than the what Kaufman's written opinion makes that abundantly clear And it absolutely illustrates what is at stake behind all of the hype image building and grandstanding in the person of Jack Kevorkian for buried on pages 27 and 28 of the 41 page decision is the lynch pin of Kaufman's contention that assisted suicide is a quality of life issue It is there that he states Although some cases have suggested that the state interest in preserving life should be blind to the quality of life a number of cases suggest that the state's interest in preserving life does have a qualitative component Cruzan again is such a case More to the point is Buck v Bell The court found that the state in that case had a sufficient interest to avoid the creation of certain life because the state concluded the quality of such life was too low and too much of a burden on society to permit Kaufman's reliance on Buck v Bell as a reason to declare assisted suicide a right is a travesty That case epitomizes the brutality which can be inflicted by the state on vulnerable people for the benefit of society It is viewed now by virtually all legal scholars as a blight on the otherwise distinguished career of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who authored the 1927 majority opinion The words of Justice Holmes decision reflected the bigotry of the time when he wrote It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind Three generations of imbeciles is enough The case revolved around Carrie Bell the daughter of a prostitute As a teenager she lived in a foster home where she became pregnant after being raped by a relative of her foster parents To spare the family from shame over her condition her foster parents had her declared feebleminded and placed in the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded of Virginia After 18 year old Carrie gave birth to her child doctors at the asylum sought to have her sterilized but also decided to use her case to test a Virginia statute allowing involuntary sterilization of institutionalized mental defectives The statute was found to be constitutional and as a result an estimated 60,000 feebleminded 58 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW men and women were involuntarily sterilized Many of those thousands including Carrie Buck were later found to have been of normal intelligence They had however had the misfortune of being among the poor who at that time were targets of eugenicists wishing to cleanse the gene pool of undesirables Kaufman's approving use of Buck v Bell leaves little doubt that the cruel arrogance of yesterday's eugenicists who sought to improve quality of life for society's benefit is not dead It has only shifted its focus to the other end of life's spectrum And it expresses itself best in those chilling words of Geoffrey Heger's client The voluntary self elimination of mortally diseased or crippled lives can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare 18 NOTES 1 Speech given by Jack Kevorkian to the National Press Club Washington D C October 27 1992 2 Geoffrey Nels Fieger Kevorkian's Crusade New York Times December 3 1993 3 Kevorkian Jailed Vowing not to Eat New York Times December I 1993 p AIO 4 Bill Brashier Tale of the Terminator Chicago Tribune Magazine February 21 1993 pp 14 15 5 AP August 11 1991 6 Prescription Medicide Prometheus Books 1991 p 215 7 Prescription Medicide p 219 8 Prescription Medicide pp 219 220 9 Medicine and Law 1986 Vol 5 p 183 10 Brashier p IS II Written statement by Jack Kevorkian submitted to Circuit Court Judge Alice Gilbert August 17,1990 p II 12 Kevorkian's Crusade New York Times December 3 1993 13 Prescription Medicide p 200 14 Medicide The Goodness of Planned Death An Interview with Dr Jack Kevorkian Free Inquiry Fall 1991 Vol 11 No 4 p 15 IS Prescription Medicide p 201 16 Prescription Medicide p 214 17 Buck Y Bell 274 U S 200 207 1927 18 Written statement by Jack Kevorkian submitted to Circuit Court Judge Alice Gilbert August 17 1990 p 11 WINTER 1994 59

IS PROFESSOR RACHELS RIGHT?

Is Professor Rachels Right Thomas D Sullivan The question never seems to go away The first time I heard it posed was in 1975 just after Professor James Rachels had made his stunning charge in The New England Journal of Medicine that with respect to euthanasia traditional medical ethics was not only misguided but cruel Rachels targeted the statement of the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association as representative of the confusion and heartlessness of traditional medical ethics As Rachels read it the statement piously forbade all intentional killing but allowed passive euthanasia smiling on such atrocities as refusing a simple life saving surgery to a withering and dying Down syndrome infant My friend Norman Virnig a distinguished neonatologist then president of the Great Plains Association for Perinatal Care asked me what I thought of Rachel's charge Does Rachels have it straight Is it true that when we let patients die as sometimes we physicians feel we must that what we do is the moral equivalent of intentionally killing I told Norm what I thought that Rachels had failed to make cognitive contact with the actual position At Norm's invitation I soon found myself debating Joseph Fletcher on Rachels's point before about 500 doctors and nurses Situation Ethics Joe Fletcher Fletcher took Rachels's side Of course he approved of everything Rachels said Why not Hadn't Fletcher himself said it first Fletcher observed that we've got to take charge of the end of life the way we have taken charge of the beginning of life There was a time when most people thought that we had to just let babies come wanted or unwanted Now we know better We know how to put a stop to their untimely arrival or development and we know that to do so is right Similarly Fletcher argued there was a time when it was thought that we just had to let people die if they were beyond our help but now we should realize that the traditional precept against killing the innocent is just a taboo If people want to die or if we may assume that they do then we do them a service by painlessly terminating their lives Traditional medical ethics about killing the innocent has to Thomas D Sullivan holds the Aquinas Chair in Philosophy Theology at the University of St Thomas in St Paul Minnesota 60 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW go In its place we need a responsible situation ethics an ethics that bravely takes charge of both life and death After the debate K wrote up my response to Rachels and by implication Fletcher and sent it off to the Human Life Review About two years after it appeared the question came up again What would you say to Rachels This time it came from my office mate Fred at St Thomas K was a bit surprised Fred K thought had read my reply to Rachels in HLR And so he had But as I was soon to learn Rachels had written a reply to me More Impertinent Distinctions Rachels's celebrated Active and Passive Euthanasia followed by my criticisms of the piece followed by Rachels's new essay had been circulating in two widely used anthologies Biomedical Ethics and Social Ethics McGraw Hill both edited by Mappes and Zembaty For two years students across the country had been reading Rachels's reply to me in these popular anthologies and K didn't even know my article had been reprinted But there it was sandwiched in between Rachels's two attacks on traditional morality Rachels Active and Passive lEuthanasia Sullivan Active and Passive lEuthanasia An Impertinent Distinction Rachels More Impertinent Distinctions I called Jim McFadden at HLR What happened How did our side end up with one shot theirs with two It turns out that in the midst of the usual rush to get an issue of HLR to the printers Jim received a request to reprint my article Assuming that the request came as most do from friends of the cause Jim gave permission to Mappes and Zembaty to reprint the piece He didn't even collect his usual small fee Anything to help prolifers Some prolifers Mappes Zembaty and McGraw Hill could not bring themselves to allow me a reply to Rachels even though nowhere else in their anthologies had they given two opportunities to the author on the attack and one to the author on the defense So there matters stood through half a dozen or so new editions of these anthologies Year after year hundreds if not thousands of students read Rachels's original complaint that the tradition is confused and cruel followed by my response that Rachels's Active and Passive lEuthanasia is a spectacular ignoratio elenchi followed by Rachels's More Impertinent Distinctions which abandons the old charge in favor of a new indictment followed by Nothing So the question keeps coming back from teachers and from students Is Rachels right WINTER 1994 61

THOMAS D SULLIVAN Fifteen years later I suddenly find myself with a good opportunity to answer Rachels's second indictment of the traditional medical ethics Yet another anthology Killing and Letting Die Fordham University Press edited by Norcross and Steinbach will include my reply Coming to Terms along with the first three articles What follows after a bit of stage setting that takes us back to the starting point is a condensed version of that article Active and Passive Euthanasia As noted the occasion of Rachels's first attack on the tradition was this statement by the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association on Dec 4 1973 The intentional termination of the life of one human being by anothermercy killing is contrary to that for which the medical profession stands and is contrary to the policy of the American Medical Association The cessation of the employment of extraordinary means to prolong the life of the body when there is irrefutable evidence that biological death is imminent is the decision of the patient and or his immediate family The advice and judgment of the physician should be freely available to the patient under the immediate family The trouble with this statement and the tradition it represents as Rachels sees it in Active and Passive Euthanasia is that it sanctions the idea that killing someone is somehow inherently worse than letting an individual die But Rachels argues it is not He asks us to compare two cases Smith stands to gain a large inheritance if his cousin should die Smith drowns the child in his bath making it look like an accident Jones also stands to gain in the same way He sneaks into the room intent on murder but finds the child who has bumped his head floating face down in the water Jones simply stands there and lets the child die If the difference between killing and letting die were in itself a morally important matter one should say that Jones's behavior was less reprehensible than Smith's But does one really want to say that I don't think so APi p 63 One might agree But what follows Rachels reasons that what follows is a general lesson about what he terms active and passive euthanasia Passive is no better than active Letting people die is no better than intentionally killing them You can tell yourself if you like that you only let a Down syndrome infant die you did not kill it But this is self deceptive talk The omission is on a moral par with the act The lesson to be learned is not that letting people 62 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN lIFE REVIEW die is always wrong for sometimes we must let people die The lesson is rather that letting people die is morally equivalent to killing them And so since it is sometimes right to let people die it is also right sometimes intentionally to terminate their lives Traditional morality is thus hopelessly confused H is time for my friend Norm to start using a lethal needle Adive and Passive Euthanasia An Impertinent Distinction Rachels was surely right about the murderous cousins and about the doctors who refuse to treat a Down syndrome infant just because it has Down syndrome But K argued it certainly does not follow that he was right about traditional morality The reason is simple The tradition had never sanctioned such behavior The targeted AMA statement representing traditional morality invokes neither the terms active and passive euthanasia nor the corresponding concepts The question addressed by the statement is not whether killing is always worse than letting someone die And nowhere does the statement support the idea central to Rachels's whole argument that letting people die was always permissible The AMA talked not in terms of active and passive euthanasia but in terms of intentional killing and the use of extraordinary in contrast to ordinary means to keep a person alive The point of the statement is that one cannot intentionally kill One way to intentionally kill is to omit ordinary means of support Only extraordinary means can be omitted Ordinary means as standard definitions had it are medicines treatments and operations that offer a reasonable hope of benefit to the patient and which can be obtained without excessive expense pain or other inconvenience Extraordinary are those medicines treatments and operations that fail to meet these criteria 2 Denying a simple lifesaving surgery to a Down syndrome infant that would be given an otherwise healthy infant is denying ordinary means Refusing to lift the head of a child floating face down in water is denying ordinary means Rachels's examples of refusing ordinary help demonstrated not the insensibility of traditional morality but his failure to come to terms with the actual position M U'e lImpeU'tlillB lIllt Distincti lIll Unable to deny that he had completely ignored the key provision in the AMA statement limiting omission of help to the extraordinary heroic Rachels quietly dropped the old charge in favor of two new charges that the traditional morality is profoundly confused WINTER 1994 63

THOMAS D SULLIVAN 1 about the role of intention in morality and 2 about the application of the concepts of ordinary and extraordinary means How so The Role of Intention In my reply to Rachels I had stressed the fact that the AMA statement speaks about intentional killing Why bring in intentions Why not just say that one must not kill For several reasons First mere happenings such as earthquakes are not subject to moral evaluation though they do plenty of harm Even if what happens is in some way the act of a human being it does not follow that it is a moral or immoral act Slipping on the ice is ordinarily3 neither right nor wrong Typically what gets evaluated are intentional actions actions performed with the intention that such and such state of affairs comes into existence Second and this is the point that is most immediately germane to declarations about euthanasia it is necessary to distinguish between what is intended and what is forseen The reason is this If morality were to forbid any act or omission leading to death whether death is intended or not then a doctor could not withhold extraordinary means without running afoul of the prohibition Given that sometimes we cannot help but deprive someone of extraordinary assistance in triage situations for example the unqualified rule would condemn acts and omissions that are unavoidable 4 But Rachels claims the difference between forseeing and intending is morally insignificant Intentions do not count at all when it comes to evaluating an act but only when evaluating someone's moral state To bring this out he invites us to consider the case of Jack and Jill Both visit their old and lonely grandmother but for different reasons Jack loves Grandmother his only intention is to cheer her up Jill wants to work her way into Grandmother's will She's manipulative Still they both do the same thing they both visit Grandmother If it is right for Jack it should be right for Jill the differences do not show that one did the right thing and one did the wrong thing The traditional view says Sullivan says that the intention with which an act is done is relevant to determining whether the act is right The example of Jack and Jill suggests that on the contrary the intention is not relevant to deciding whether the act is right or wrong but instead it is relevant to assessing the character of the person who 64 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW does the act which is very different MID p 72 The claim that no intention is ever relevant to the evaluation of acts is exceedingly strong but nothing less will serve Rachels's purposes for if only some intentions are irrelevant then it is by no means obvious or even plausible that deadly intentions are among the intentions irrelevant to the evaluation of deadly acts So as Rachels appears to recognize he has to say intentions are never relevant But can this be true lit is hard to see how it can be To begin with the paradigm cases of acts we evaluate as morally right or wrong are intentional Feeding the downtrodden comforting the sick visiting the lonely these good acts are all intentional And so are the wicked acts of embezzlement murder and rape We certainly do not begin by thinking that the fact that an action is intentional has nothing whatever to do with its rightness or wrongness Typically acts we subject to moral evaluation are chosen acts and there are no intentionless choices Further reflection supports the initial judgment that intentions are relevant to the morality of an action if we draw out of an act all of the motivating intention the residue seems not to be the same act if it is properly speaking any act at all H we drain a lie of its intention to assert falsely what remains is not a lie U we rid the event of all remaining intentions such as the intention to communicate what remains is no more a human act susceptible of moral evaluation than talk in a coma furthermore establishing intent is crucial to the prosecution of criminal acts in courts of law That intent should nonetheless be utterly irrelevant to the morality of an act seems to say the least hard to swallow Nor is it easy to see how Rachels's examples overturn the initial assumption that intentions are relevant to evaluating at least some deeds We are not asked to consider a situation in which Jack and Jill accidentally wind up in the same room with Grandmother We are rather asked to consider their visiting entertaining cheering up all intentional actions Drained of their intentionality the acts vanish The residues are insusceptible of moral evaluation Your body's being in a room at the same time another person's body is in the room right or wrong The question is senseless What then do Rachels's examples show if not that intentions are irrelevant to the morality of an act At most that not every intention is relevant to the evaluation of a particular act We can distinguish between Jill's intention to visit her Grandmother and WINTER 1994 65

THOMAS D SULLIVAN her further manipulative intention to work her way into Grandmother's will Then abstracting from this further manipulative intention we can ask whether she did the right thing by visiting Grandmother This may show that some intentions are entirely irrelevant to evaluation of some moral acts But it certainly does not demonstrate the point at issue for it does not show that all intentions are irrelevant to all acts So nothing Rachels says effectively casts doubt on the assumption that at least some intentions are relevant to the evaluation of a moral act Murder is wrong because it involves the intention to kill an innocent human Ordinary and Extraordinary Means of Treatment Rachels begins his attack on the tradition for its use of the concepts of ordinary and extraordinary by remarking impertinently that the distinctions are crucial to orthodox Catholic thought MID p 74 The American Medical Association is hardly renowned for promoting orthodox Catholicism The definitions of ordinary and extraordinary means I invoked for the purpose of defending the AMA statement were taken from a standard medical ethics textbook by Paul Ramsey a Protestant Moving on to the task at hand of showing that besides being contaminated by association with Catholicism there is something actually wrong with the distinction Rachels comes up with the idea that you can't apply the ideas without circularity We cannot by using the definitions identify which treatments are extraordinary and then use that information to determine whether the treatment may be omitted For the definitions require that we must already have decided the moral questions of life and death before we can answer the question of which means are extraordinary MID p 75 Really Recall the cited definitions Ordinary means are medicines treatments and operations that offer a reasonable hope of benefit to the patient and which can be obtained without excessive expense pain or other inconvenience Extraordinary are those medicines treatments and operations that fail to meet these criteria s Now suppose you can live for three more days if you submit to a treatment which for those three days will burn like white hot fire It seems fairly clear that the good achieved is not worth the personal cost The treatment in the traditional language though the terms are unimportant is extra ordinary And so you reason you need not go through the 66 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN lIFE REVIEW treatment Why should anyone assume that you must first ascertain whether you are obliged to go through the ordeal before you can figure out whether the gain is greater than the loss lit quite clearly seems to be the other way around Rachels's summary statement of his reason for thinking that the concepts cannot be applied without circularity is this Again in order to decide whether life sustaining treatment is a benefit we first have to decide whether it would be a good thing for the life in question to be prolonged MID p 76 lBut note the ambiguity the passive voice introduces What is it precisely that we must decide first On one reading A it is the value of the life prolonged lIs such a life worth living On another reading lB it is the value of the act of prolonging the act of providing assistance lIs the prolonging good Granted to get the reasoning started we have to do something like what A specifies that is determine the value of life lived under the envisioned conditions 6 Once we do we can then go on to do what B specifies evaluate the act of prolonging a life to be lived in those conditions But we need not do what B prescribes before we do what A prescribes With the distinction between A and B in mind let's consider a case involving ordinary means A dying girl's life can be quickly restored to perfect health by using an inexpensive and painless remedy let's take the reasoning step by step n accord with A we first determine that 1 The life lived in the expected condition is certainly a good life for the one living it from which we infer 2 The treatment is a great benefit to the patient And we further note 3 The treatment imposes no heavy burdens on others And invoking the principle 4 If a treatment is a great benefit to the patient and imposes no heavy burdens on others i e if the treatment involves only ordinary means then the doctor should treat this patient Thus we arrive in accord with B at 5 The doctor should treat this patient Where is the alleged circularity Why should we think that we must determine whether 5 is true that the obligation is in place WINTER 1994 67

THOMAS D SULLIVAN before determining the truth of the premises that state the benefits and burdens How could we possibly do this How could we determine the factual questions about the effectiveness and cost of a remedy by first determining what a doctor ought to do Of course sometimes it will be hard to say whether a treatment offers much of a benefit or whether to provide it imposes disproportionate burdens on the patient or on others But as the existence of twilight does not prove there is no difference between night and day so the existence of borderline cases does not show that there is no difference between ordinary and extraordinary means So neither Rachels's celebrated Active and Passive Euthanasia nor his reply to me gives any grounds for doubting that it is wrong intentionally to bring about the death of an innocent human being NOTES l AP refers to Active and Passive Euthanasia MID refers to More Impertinent Distinctions All references are to articles as they appear in Thomas A Mappes and Jane S Zembatty Social Ethics 3rd ed New York McGraw Hill 1987 2 Paul Ramsey The Patient as Person New Haven and London Yale University Press 1970 p 122 Part of Rachels's trouble may be that he understands ordinary means as means that we are obliged to use But this is not the stated definition The definition does not refer to an obligation to use the means 3 A qualification One may of course be faulted in some circumstances for not taking sufficient precaution 4 Some moralists hold that the distinction between the intended and foreseen is bogus psychology If you intentionally do A and believe that by doing A you will bring about B then you intentionally bring about B Intentions diffuse over anticipated effects Applied to some situations this seems right If I bring my fork to my mouth and drop the 12th meatball into my mouth I can hardly with any degree of plausibility maintain that I did not intend to stuff myself But as a generalization the Diffusiveness of Intention Principle as Chisholm terms it is certainly false On the Diffusiveness Principle a chronic stutterer who rationally believes he will stutter while trying to make a good speech will end up with contradictory intentions Since he intends to make a good speech and tries not to stutter he intends not to stutter But since he believes he will stutter to some degree he must given the Diffusiveness Principle also intend to stutter In very many such circumstances we need have no intention to bring about the unwanted but foreseeable side effects of our acts For an argument against the Diffusiveness Principle see Joseph Boyle Jr and Thomas D Sullivan The Diffusiveness of Intention Principle A Counter Example Philosophical Studies Holland 31 1977 pp 357 60 I elaborate the connection between the psychological and intentional in Malum Vitandum The Role of Intentions in First Order Morality with Gary Atkinson International Journal ofPhilosophical Studies 1 1993 pp 99 110 5 Paul Ramsey The Patient as Person op cit see note 2 6 Some will not want to grant Rachels this much but for the point at issue it is harmless to let it stand 68 WINTER 1994

THE POLITICS OF PEOPLE POWER

The Politics of People Power William McGurn Ninoy Aquino Airport the Philippines Although smiles are almost always the order of the day in the Philippines today just three days before Christmas there is something different in the air t's not just the holiday cheer which has brought us here in the first place As my wife and head down to the baggage claim we find beautiful Filipinas serenade us with carols and drape us with sea shell necklaces JEven President Fidel Ramos is here arms outstretched Of course President Ramos has not come all the way out to the airport to greet us As we soon learn from the papers he is here for political reasons For among the many balikbayans or homecomers are thousands of overseas contract workers i e Philippine citizens working overseas President Ramos greets them as heroes and threatens the recently resurrected death penalty for any corrupt airport staffer who might want to shake these returnees down for some hard earned Christmas goodies they are bringing home to their families like so many other things in the Philippines many of the airport services are run by a crime syndicate There are even special lines marked OCW or overseas contract workers to help them get through more quickly Our Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong for example was full of Filipinas returning home for the holidays mostly maids working in oft trying conditions to support their families back home Only ten years ago there were but 24,700 Filipina maids in Hong Kong Today the number has ballooned to more than 90,000 with no end in sight Many of these women have university degrees Almost all have a sister cousin or not infrequently mother there too working in some other apartment raising some other person's children so that their own might eat On Saturdays and Sundays you see them in Statue Square thousands of them squatting on the sidewalks enjoying their native dishes trading gossip and squeezing in a bit of shopping on their one day off WnDDnlllmrn IWCGIUIJrIlll the former Washington bureau chief for National Review is senior editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong WINTER 1994 69

WILLIAM MCGURN The Hong Kong Chinese are not always appreciative Over the last few weeks there has been an uproar over signs up at Trenguntar Towers where monthly rents go for more than U S 7,500 banishing both maids and dogs to the service lifts calling to mind the infamous and mythical No Dogs or Chinese sign said to have hung from the municipal gardens in colonial Shanghai But as tough as these women have it they consider themselves the lucky ones For the laws in Hong Kong are fair and reasonably well enforced and Filipinos working in lands farther afield e g construction workers in Saudi Arabia come back with gruesome tales of rape and worse But why the presidential welcome It turns out that these Filipinos abroad some two million of them sent home revenue amounting to 2 billion over that year alone To put that in perspective it represents about 10 of the country's foreign debt and about 15 of the national budget just signed by President Ramos who knows quite well that without the foreign exchange sent back by these Filipino exiles the country would go under In many ways it is a testament to the sacrifices of the Philippine people for their country And President Ramos has acknowledged it But there is something of a contradiction here For these Filipinos are not going abroad because they want to but because they have to Only a generation ago the Philippines was the wealthiest nation in the region after Japan but today it has been reduced to the sick man of Asia this despite an abundance of natural resources a talented English speaking workforce and a strategic location smack dab in the center of the most vibrant economic region in the world But instead of blaming corruption cronyism or protectionism for this sorry state of affairs as Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew did during a 1992 visit here the Ramos administration has pointed its finger at a curious scapegoat babies That's right babies Filipinos the president believes are having too many of them and it is this that has caused the country's economic woes not the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos or the do nothingism of Cory Aquino or the abysmal economic structure this has left What is involved here is the highest national interest of the country said Ramos in August It is very clear that our rate of population growth is now much more than our rate of economic growth and therefore the quality of life of Filipinos may deteriorate further unless we manage the population problem properly The irony seems to have completely escaped him An administration that came in under 70 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW the glorious banner of People Power has now concluded that the problem is simply too many filipinos Although President Ramos has given the issue a prominence it never had under Mrs Aquino population control is by no means new to the Philippines lEver since the World Bank's Robert McNamara declared population growth the gravest threat to the world outside nuclear war both public and private American institutions began to devote themselves to curbing its growth especially in the Third World No cost was too high in this crusade Although Mr McNamara went on to say that no government really wanted this to mean coercion they simply could not afford to let population pressures grow so dangerously large ITn China this philosophy would lead to forced abortions and other outrages Mr McNamara himself visited India at the height of its forced sterilization program in 1976 to congratulate the government for its political will and determination The Philippines became a particular focus of American interest because of the presence of U S bases such as Clark Field and Subic Bay ITndeed back in the 1970s control of foreign populations was considered essential to U S security a document written in 1974but declassified only recently National Security Study Memorandum 200 concluded for example that wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States This same report identified 13 key countries among which was the Philippines The result was millions of dollars poured into Manila and the elevation of population control to a national priority Out in the field the incentives were mostly bribery such as free transistor radios for men who had vasectomies But far more pernicious was the legacy it left poisoning the Philippine debate even today Because Marcos was eager for the development money it brought he gave the international aid brigade more or less free rein even to the point of writing into the Constitution a state mandate to achieve and maintain population levels which clause was eliminated with the Aquino Constitution ITndeed a USAKD officer once boasted to me that his organization had got then President Marcos to transfer a Philippine cabinet officer Placido Mapa to the Philippine National Bank after Mr Mapa had proved a stumbling block to implementing the population programs WINTER 1994171

WILLIAM MCGURN Although population programs in the Philippines never reached the fever pitch of China or India it spawned an entire industry with its own vested interests to the point where an oft cited defense for keeping the programs intact was to keep the population workers employed For if the Marcos government was initially reluctant to make itself more unpopular by adopting population control the carrot of untold millions in development assistance much of which became tied to population control measures soon changed all that Over its last five years of Marcos rule for example the Population Commission spent more than 1.19 billion pesos 94.5 million at then conversion rates of which a good chunk came from USAID the World Bank and the U N Fund for Population Activities In a country where the per capita income even today is barely 700 a year this was a staggering amount Yet an internal study commissioned in 1987 showed that for all this money and energy the program was a flop No study was necessary to show that it didn't do much to alleviate poverty either The story of population reduction in the Philippines is of a hypothesis that people wanted to believe and so they put so much money into it so much effort and worked themselves up to the point where they now think the problem is they haven't done enough says a former executive director of the Commission on Population Sonny de los Reyes They ascribed the failure to every possible factor except the one that the product they are selling is wrong Certainly population control was considered unsavory in the Philippines Mrs Aquino's Secretary for Social Welfare Mita Pardo de Tavera once told me that it was interpreted by common people as babies for the rich but not for the poor They were not far off the mark Even proponents shun the words population control preferring to talk about creating options for women or AIDS prevention and sneaking population reduction in the context of an overall welfare package Yet these efforts and the general lack of success point to one overriding fact ordinary Filipinos resist these measures At first the hope was that the election of Mrs Aquino would reverse these policies As in so much else however Mrs Aquino was characterized by indecisiveness here In part this may be because she remembered that her husband Ninoy was the senate sponsor of the original legislation setting up the country's Population Commission But it was also likely that she was torn between religious convictions that told her population control is wrong and an uneasy suspicion 72 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW that in the real world this conflicted with what needs to be done to get the Philippines back on its feet for although the government did eliminate the population passage from the Constitution and insert another guaranteeing the life of the unborn in significant areas the Aquino administration proved as bad as the one it had toppled The government's Medium Term Philippine Development Plan 1987 92 established zero population growth as an official goal Moreover the multilateral aid agencies continued their lobbying unabated convinced that development was only another billion condoms or another billion dollar grant away lit is an unquestioning faith untouched by facts not least of which would be one of USAID's own studies the 1989 Woods Report which scored planners for their adherence to population control and noted the failure of American aid over the past two decades to help even one recipient country move into the ranks of developed nations Nor were the Aquino administration's dealings on the issue absent Marcos era intrigue Again U S money played a prominent role At a board meeting of the Population Commission on April i 7 1990 then Health Secretary Alran Bengzon surprised everyone by springing a full blown five billion peso population scheme about i85 million for which he demanded immediate approval This itself was highly irregular not only because the board had not had time to review the plan but because there were questions about whether the proper representatives were in attendance and whether those present had the authority to give approval The American hand was prominent here Mr Bengzon was a notorious opponent of the U S bases in the Philippines and so it looked like trouble for Uncle Sam when he was put on the panel negotiating their future But then a funny thing happened AID came up with 40 million in population funding for his department Here too the approval process was not completely kosher The program was rammed through a cabinet meeting on a Wednesday the signing took place that friday and Monday morning the negotiations began on the bases n the cabinet meeting discussing the AID grant Mrs Aquino remained silent Enter President Fidel Ramos who squeaked ahead of six other candidates in the presidential elections of May 1992 Along with Juan Ponce lEmile then General Ramos had rallied his troops to support Mrs Aquino's claim against Marcos just six years earlier WINTER 1994 73

WILLIAM MCGURN in what became known as the People Power revolution Unlike Mr Enrile Mr Ramos did not split with Mrs Aquino and in fact went on to become her chief of staff and put down a number of coups against her In style the West Point graduate has been likened to George Bush plodding and without strong convictions reflected in one of his nicknames Steady Eddie But if Mr Ramos is vague in other areas in population he has been quite clear In Manila this comes as no surprise His sister Senator Leticia Ramos Shahani has been the foremost politcal advocate of population control In 1988 she was defeated in an attempt to get through a resolution on population that essentially would have restored the state mandate from the old Marcos constitution With her brother in office Senator Shahani naturally has far more influence on this administration and a number of population bills calling for more money are now making their way through the Philippine Congress Because Mr Ramos is a Protestant in this overwhelmingly Catholic country he has wisely chosen not to take center stage on this issue Instead he has delegated the task to his Health Secretary 58 yearold Dr Juan Flavier It was a wise choice I For one thing Dr Flavier is a Catholic himself For another he has experience in the rural parts of the country But Dr Flavier's most important asset has nothing to do with his credentials he is simply funny Rather than make the mistake of getting into heated fights with the clergy and other opponents of his programs Dr Flavier has relied on his wit In response to the Church's insistence on abstinence Dr Flavier cites the ABC formula A is for abstention and B is for being faithful If these two fail then it is time to move on to C for condom Dr Flavier has patterned his approach on another well known Asian Health Minister Thailand's Meechai Viravaidya Mr Meechai has been photographed all over Thailand giving out brightly colored condoms and Dr Flavier has now brought the act to Manila Indeed when Dr Flavier was first appointed Mr Meechai sent him a bouquet of condoms containing this message Mr Secretary you are a bright star in the dark days of ignorance in the fight against AIDS When cornered Dr Flavier retreats to his clown act and reporters love it He is especially popular in the international press which has little regard for Philippine Catholicism and thus champions the Health Secretary as the leading force for progress in the country 74 WINTER 1994

IHE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW lI've been condom ed without trial he likes to say to reporters Give him his due Dr Flavier is most effective and comes across as far less stuffy and pedantic than many of his opponents For all his fun however Dr Flavier has not been entirely honest about his program For as usual the m o has been to introduce population control as part of a greater health care effort In this case the ostensible push is against a prospective AIDS epidemic With tens of thousands of Filipinas working as prostitutes and others bringing in the disease from abroad the fear is that AIDS could explode as it has in nearby Thailand Now the Philippines certainly has its own sex industry and certainly enough reason to worry about it But the question is whether they are being honest about the degree of the threat Right now the Philippines has about 500 documented cases of AIDS but Dr Flavier estimates that there may be as many as 100 times that amount The point is that this is an estimate and a highly questionable one at that Each time a new case is recorded the good doctor ups his figures Thus while only a few months back wire service stories were using the figure of 37,000 AIDS carriers today the number is up to 50,000 And these are the people who talk about having science on their side The portrayal of the Church has likewise been dishonest While the Philippine Catholic Church certainly has strong conservative elements it is by no means the hidebound institution portrayed so often in the press Mr Ramos after all owes his life and his job to Jaime Cardinal Sin whose 1986 call for his flock to take to the streets to protect the rebellious soldiers made the People's Power revolution In recent months the Cardinal has been highly critical of the Ramos administration's population push and although Dr Flavier has not been mentioned by name it is fairly clear to whom the Cardinal is referring Indeed the Catholic Bishops Conference in June issued a pastoral letter on the subject calling the government's program an abrasive act of insensitivity and expressing their opposition to what it called the actions of the government and its instrumentalities which work towards the destruction of the Filipino family As in the American debate over federal funding the Philippine debate has been deliberately muddied over the issue of subsidy not in their wildest imagination do Church leaders believe they will make contraception illegal Three years ago Cardinal Sin told me that was not his intention WINTER 1994 75

WILLIAM MCGURN What does rile the Church is both the public monies dedicated to and especially the state imprimatur given to the population control ideology In mid July Ramos told a gathering of bishops that he would implement the population plan as part of his economic recovery If we are ever to provide adequately for our people if we are ever to catch up to our neighbors in Southeast Asia we must at this particular time harness our forces and cut where we should that is in the area of population growth he said Since then he has repeated that his target is for a fertility rate of 2.0 below replacement level But the Church has kept up the attack and President Ramos not wishing an all out confrontation has instructed Dr Flavier to keep a lower profile Unfortunately the debate thus far has been largely at cross purposes Proponents of population control assume that measures are necessary if the government is to develop while opponents especially in the Church attack it as immoral Few take on the planners where they are weakest on the economic issues themselves The result is that the two sides tend to argue past each other tacitly ceding the economic and development argument to the pro control side This is a travesty for the Philippines because not only will population control do nothing to solve their economic problems it is part of a mindset that contributes to them In the 1960s and early 1970s accepted wisdom had it that development was impossible without first curbing population But this is a view that sees government as the primary provider and people as mouths rather than minds That is true in a socialist state where each additional person becomes an additional burden for the state it's no secret that the countries said to have the most grievous population pressures today are also socialist states i e India and China But in a capitalist society each additional person is a net producer by definition producing more than he and his family consume What ended the population problem in most of East Asia was not the governments sometimes strong efforts to reduce the rate but something far more potent affluence The Philippines does indeed have problems related to population but they have nothing to do with the growth rate Rather they have mostly to do with the government's heavy involvement in the economy the protectionism enjoyed by the top segment of society from foreign competition and the perverse incentives this breeds As Senator Francisco Tatad points out what most regard as a population problem is actually 76 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW a problem of urbanization For while the Philippines is still one of the least densely populated nations in the world Manila is one of the most crowded cities Because the country has not developed people flock to the city for opportunity giving Manila a density rate several times that of Hong Kong's The traditional protectionism extended to Philippine big businesspart of a Filipino First policy that has brought the Philippines from the top of Asia to the bottom in a generation also plays a role For without foreign investment there will be no jobs and consumers will pay higher prices for goods and services The government including Mr Ramos likes to point out that the birth rate is much higher than the increases in gross national product What they miss is that foreign investment could turn this around almost overnight as it did in the rest of East Asia Indeed such has been the success of its neighbors that all of them Hong Kong South Korea Taiwan and Singapore have shifted gear and are now desperately trying to encourage their people to have more not fewer children Unlike President Aquino whose tenure left people pining for Marcos President Ramos appears to understand that his country needs to take stock of itself if it is ever to enjoy the economic growth that makes the rest of East Asia the most dynamic region in the world Accordingly he has made a number of positive moves from liberalizing foreign exchange rates to taking on the phone monopoly In this context however the emphasis on a population control program is a throwback to the past It is especially debilitating for nations like the Philippines because it shifts the focus to a losing zero sum game at a time when national energies would best be spent unshackling the many chains that keep People Power from demonstrating its economic potential a potential that every foreign businessman no matter how badly he has been mauled by the country's market believes the Philippines has Population reduction deflects responsibility from the government by allowing them to say the problem is too many people not us says Sonny de los Reyes But if you have zero productivity it doesn't matter whether you divide that zero by two four or eight Instead of trying to figure out how many people we should be dividing the pie by we should be asking why the pie is so small Fortunately for Filipinos the 1992 closure of the last U S base on the islands has forced their government to make some of the WINTER 1994 77

WILLIAM MCGURN hard decisions that were easy to put off so long as the money tap remained open Even on population control there is a silver lining For although the direction and language of the Ramos administration's population plans recall the heydey of such efforts in the 1970s the money simply is not there Mr Ramos doesn't have it Bill Clinton doesn't have it And even organizations like the World Bank are finding their sails trimmed by an American Congress increasingly unwilling to fund them and a recession plagued Japan equally strapped for cash The best hope for the Philippines lies in Mr Ramos efforts to pry open his economy Were he to liberalize its economy along the lines of say Hong Kong it would undoubtedly set off a boom that would make people forget all about the country's birth rates and put an end to the situation whereby a university educated Filipina can make more as a housemaid in Hong Kong than as a bank executive in Manila For at its heart the chicken in every pot and condomin every pocket approach to development is a confusion about economics not population It sees only half the equation people consuming valuable resources and gives no thought to the nature of resources themselves and their relation to the people that ultimately create and give them value It assumes wealth is fixed and channels its effort into redistribution when releasing those energies for productive purposes would leave everyone richer And thus it makes war on babies when it should be going after bureaucracy It comes as no surprise that such an ethos would be embraced by a Marcos But how sad that it should find a home in an administration dedicated to People Power 78 WINTER 1994

ON ABORTION

On Abortion James Q Wilson Abortion is a moral question Most people regardless of how they feel the question should be answered or who should do the answering will agree with this There may be some extreme pro choice activists who maintain that the decision of whether to carry a fetus to term is purely a matter of taste but K doubt there are many such persons or that if confronted with the choice themselves they would make it in the same spirit in which they decide where to spend their vacation Were abortion not a moral issue then infanticide would not be one either because the difference between a 265 day old fetus and a newborn infant is a matter of but a few hours We recoil in horror at the thought of deliberately killing a newborn infant though we may recognize a few circumstances in which that might become a tragic necessity We must therefore recoil in equal horror at the thought of killing an infant that does not differ from the newborn in any respect other than that it receives oxygen and food via an umbilical cord instead of through its nose and mouth I know of only one philosopher who defends both abortion and infanticide K find his arguments not only unconvincing but monstrous K suspect that almost everyone would react in a similar fashion 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 This issue is sometimes framed to require one to define a person or to decide when life begins K hope to show that it is so difficult to supply a persuasive answer to these questions as to raise the possibility that they are the wrong questions lEach implies that there is a moment at which life has not begun or a person does not exist and then immediately following it a moment at which life has begun or a person has come into being Kn other aspects of our daily affairs we do not accord moral respect on the basis of such precise off on no yes distinctions Rather we grant greater and greater degrees of moral respect to lJames Q Wilson is currently a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and a well known author most recently of The Moral Sense published by Free Press New York This article first appeared in the monthly Commentary January 1994 and is reprinted here with the author's permission all rights reserved WINTER 1994 79

JAMES Q WILSON people to the extent that they conform in their conduct and manner to widely shared standards of what it means to be human A deranged homicidal maniac who is stalking the streets killing innocent victims is alive and a person but we have few qualms about the police shooting him down on sight 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 an elderly woman who was once a loving wife and mother but who now acts bizarrely under the influence of advanced and irreversible Alzheimer's disease barely seems to be a person yet we experience great moral anguish in deciding whether to withdraw his life support or confine her to institutional care The moral qualms we have about abortion arise I think chiefly from the instinctive appeal of the infant a feeling of compassion and attachment that is as natural as any sentiment that ever enters the human breast Whatever we mean by life or the value we attach to it few if any of us are likely to deny that our judgment is at root a moral one or to say that it is irrelevant to the position we take on abortion That is not in general how the courts see the matter Though passionate debates and angry confrontations over the morality of abortion are commonplace the legal rules governing abortion scarcely refer to these moral issues In Roe v Wade the decision that legalized abortion the Supreme Court acknowledged that the state had an important and legitimate interest in potential life but did not define that interest as a moral one On the contrary it went to great lengths to disavow any interpretation of those words that might seem even vaguely moral The Court majority ruled that during the first trimester a woman had an unqualified right to terminate her pregnancy at will during the second trimester the state could regulate abortions only to protect the mother's health and during the third trimester when the fetus was viable the state in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life might choose to forbid abortions unless the woman's health or life were at risk Now if the Court were concerned about protecting life on moral grounds one might suppose that it would not only allow a ban on third trimester abortions but would insist upon it But no In fact by defining health to mean a woman's well being the Court virtually assured that any state law that tried to ban even third trimester abortions would be open to challenge The reason seems clear if the Court's position were to be even 80 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW arguably defensible on constitutional grounds it had to maintain that the fetus was not a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment That amendment instructs the states that they may not deprive any person of life liberty or property As Justice Harry Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v Wade readily acknowledged at the time if a fetus were a person then its right to life would be guaranteed Hence to uphold a right to abortion the Court would have had to show that at some stage during its development a fetus was not a person When it became a person which surely had to occur some time before birth an abortion would be an unconstitutional deprivation of life in short murder Since the Court could not establish when a fetus changed from a nonperson to a person it could not allow the fetus ever to be defined as a person for then abortions would always be murder Determined to create a right to abortion based on the assumption that the mother was a person with a right to privacy and the fetus was a nonperson with no rights at all the Court when it came to defining what a state might do during the third trimester allowed the government to regulate and even proscribe abortion but it did not insist that it do either This rights based view of abortion held sway for two decades and until somewhat modified by the Court in Casey 1992 was reiterated and extended by a series of decisions which not only implicitly denied that abortion was a moral question but struck down almost any state attempt to confront a pregnant woman with either practical or moral arguments about the possible consequences of abortion lin X983 the Court overturned an effort by the city of Akron to impose a mandatory 24 hour waiting period between an application for an abortion and its performance lin X986 it overruled a Pennsylvania attempt to require that a woman asking for an abortion be informed about the availability of prenatal care child support programs and adoption agencies An interesting feature of the Akron ordinance was that it supplied the woman with materials on the physical features of the fetus so that she would know what she was confronting lin all these cases the unifying theme of the Court majority was that abortion was a right that a woman alone was entitled to exercise the state not only could not make that decision for her it could not even try to influence how she made it The result of this doctrinal position was as Mary Ann Glendon WINTER 1994 81

JAMES Q WILSON of the Harvard Law School has shown to make abortion policy in the United States more radical than that in any other industrial nation with the possible exception of the People's Republic of China In virtually every European nation the right to abortion is either sharply limited or if generally permitted in the early months of pregnancy surrounded with constraining regulations in the later months And in most of these nations a woman alone cannot decide the matter In England and Switzerland for example two doctors must certify the existence of legal grounds for an abortion In Greece and Germany a woman must seek a second opinion from a doctor other than the one who is to perform the abortion When the abortion is to occur late in the pregnancy many nations oblige the woman to present her case to a committee or board for approval In Israel an abortion is permitted in the first trimester but only when approved by a doctor and then only when the woman is under seventeen or over forty years of age the child was conceived out of wedlock there is a risk of a genetic defect or it is necessary to protect the mother's health Even Sweden allows more regulation than does the United States there abortion on demand is available but only until the 18th week of pregnancy while here it is available for at least 24 weeks The difference between the American and European approaches to the issue arises from how the decision was made and the philosophical framework in which it was cast Here the courts decided the matter abroad the legislatures decided it Here the issue was defined in terms of individual rights there it was often defined in terms of moral responsibility Here the legal rules were at odds with public opinion there they more closely approximated it Americans have made it clear in repeated opinion polls that they oppose both abortion on demand and a prohibition on all abortions A majority will support abortions under carefully defined circumstances such as a pregnancy that endangers the mother's life or is the result of rape particularly and possibly only during the first trimester There has been little change in these views since Roe was decided They seem to reflect an underlying belief that the fetus is entitled to some degree of moral respect especially after it has developed for a few weeks a degree of respect that does not preclude taking into account important competing considerations such as the health of the mother In short Americans are philosphically at odds with the justices who have fashioned their abortion law 821WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW That gap was reduced somewhat by the Casey decision in 1992 Then a bare majority of the justices reaffirmed Roe but changed its meaning and application Speaking through Justice Sandra Day O'Connor the Court reasserted that a woman has a constitutional liberty to some freedom to terminate her pregnancy But the state is now allowed to place restrictions on this right even when the fetus is not yet viable provided those restrictions do not impose an undue burden on its exercise for the first time the Court seemed to uphold such restrictions as a 24 hour waiting period a requirement that teenagers obtain the consent of their parents or in special circumstances a judge and the mandatory provision of written materials about alternatives to abortion l Though the practical effect of the acceptance of these restrictions is uncertain it is clear that for the first time the official opinion of the Court acknowledges the possibility that the fetus is entitled to some degree of state protection But protection on what grounds There are two possibilitiesthat the fetus is a person who like the mother has rights or that the fetus is a form of human life that is intrinsically entitled to protection Kn a recent book Ronald Dworkin of Yale and Oxford has made this distinction and assessed its implications 2 Dworkin argues that if we think a fetus is a person with constitutional rights then American opinions about abortion are inconsistent Kn particular the exceptions for rape and incest make no sense if it is wrong to kill a person and the fetus is a person then it is as wrong to kill a fetus that is the product of rape or incest as it would be to kill a newborn infant who was conceived in that manner Kf a fetus is a person with rights then it has those rights whether it is in its first trimester or third and whether it is healthy or deformed lif however Dworkin goes on our views about abortion are shaped not by the logic of rights but by the value we attach to human life then American opinions become more coherent As a fetus grows it becomes more lifelike and the more lifelike it is the greater claim it has to our moral respect Kf it is horribly deformed owing say to a chromosomal abnormality or a prenatal injury II say seemed to hold because these restrictions were accepted by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor David Souter and Anthony Kennedy but apparently rejected by Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens whose partial concurrence with their three colleagues was necessary to produce the five to four verdict reaffirming Roe What state restrictions will in practice pass constitutional muster remains to be seen 2Life's Dominion An Argument About Abortion Euthanasia and Individual Freedom Knopf 288 pp 23.00 WINTER 1994 83

JAMES Q WILSON then it is less human and exercises somewhat less claim on our moral respect Dworkin argues I think correctly that when the great majority of people think about abortion they think in terms of the value and meaning of life of the nature of humanity and not in terms of individual entities asserting rights against one another Since Dworkin is a celebrated philosopher who has been strongly identified with rights talk his first book was called Taking Rights Seriously this modification of his views itself deserves to be taken seriously Most academic political and moral philosophy is about rights by contrast most conversations among ordinary people about political and moral issues are not about rights but about decency duty and self control As I have argued in The Moral Sense the disjunction between how philosophers define philosophy and how people think philosophically constitutes a major strain in contemporary culture It is thus a noteworthy event for one of our leading academic philosophers to suggest that abortion under some circumstances may be wrong because it insults the intrinsic value of human life But of course this leaves two large questions to be answered When does the fetus acquire a life that has intrinsic value And what role shall the government play in protecting that value I do not find Dworkin's answer to either question very persuasive Like most supporters of a woman's right to abort he finds no clear line that determines unambiguously when life begins As I have already indicated I agree with this judgment Life emerges or more accurately the claims that developing life exert upon us emerge gradually but powerfully Everyone recognizes the force of this emergence because everyone or I suppose nearly everyone recognizes that aborting a fetus near the end of its term is morally a far more serious matter than aborting one shortly after it has become implanted in the womb Similarly a mother will usually grieve more deeply over the death of her three year old child than over the death of her newborn infant and more deeply over the latter's death than over the miscarriage of an embryo Dworkin explains these near univeral reactions by the concept of investment The death of an infant is worse than that of a fetus because a greater investment has been made in the former than in the latter The investment is of two sorts biological and social I think this is too narrow a view of the matter It may be true as Dworkin suggests that the death of an adolescent girl is worse than the death of an infant because the adolescent's death frustrates 84 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW the investments she and others have already made in her life But IT doubt that this is the whole story The greater grief a mother experiences at the death of an infant than at the death of a ten week old fetus does not arise IT think from the mother's feeling that her carrying the fetus to term was more costly or constituted a greater waste of resources than carrying the fetus for only ten weeks IT obviously cannot speak for mothers but IT would imagine from what they say that their feelings on the occasion of the death of an actual or potential child do not reflect lost investment but lost humanity the newborn infant is distinctly human a person whom the mother loves and of whom she expects a full and mutually rewarding life while the fetus is somewhat less fully human Moreover the mother sees the infant but not ordinarily the fetus There are bonds in both cases but the bonds are far greater and the loss far more poignant when the infant has been held in her arms Dworkin rejects this line of reasoning Unaccountably he writes that the greater gravity of a late term abortion than of an earlyterm one cannot be explained on the ground that fetuses more closely resemble infants as pregnancy continues To him increasing resemblance alone has no moral significance He gives no reason for reaching that conclusion one that strikes me as wholly at odds with everything that could plausibly be surmised about a mother's feelings Suppose a woman has had on different occasions both an early miscarriage and a late term one suppose that she looked upon the two fetuses can anyone doubt that the greater grief she would feel in the second case would to an important degree be caused by the close resemblance between the late term fetus and a live infant Nor can the investment theory explain why a young mother might be willing to sacrifice herself for her young child if for example both are in a burning building and only one can be rescued or how onlookers would react to her refusal to make that sacrifice There is greater investment in the mother than in the child but IT conjecture that many mothers would tell the rescuers to take her infant first even if that materially increased her chances of dying and IT further conjecture that if she did the opposite insist that she be taken first and the infant second most onlookers would feel she had acted wrongly even cruelly The onlookers criticisms would not be moderated by her later explaining to them that nature and society had made a greater investment in her WINTER 1994 85

JAMES Q WILSON I want to assert that it is precisely the degree of resemblance between a fetus and an infant that is of moral significance We should focus on this point if we believe as both Dworkin and I do that because society has an interest in making certain that the intrinsic value of human life is respected it also has an interest in maintaining a moral environment in which decisions about life and death are taken seriously and treated as matters of moral gravity Before turning to the policy implications of that view let me take up on general terms what Dworkin thinks the government is entitled to do Here he makes what if I understand him correctly is an astonishing claim To him the moral issue concerning abortion has to do with the intrinsic value of human life I and I think most people agree To him human life can only have intrinsic value if we think it is in some sense sacred On this many people will agree some will disagree But if fetal life enjoys some degree of moral respect because it is sacred then he says the government of the United States cannot regulate abortions at least in the early months of pregnancy without violating the First Amendment prohibition on the enactment of laws respecting the establishment of religion Since our disagreements about the value of life are at bottom spiritual the legislature cannot without violating the separation of church and state impose one concept of the spiritual on people who have a different concept Lest I be accused of misrepresenting Dworkin let me quote him A state may not curtail liberty in order to protect an intrinsic value when the effect on one group of citizens would be special and grave when the community is seriously divided about what respect for the value requires and when people's opinions about the nature of that value reflect essentially religious convictions that are fundamental to moral personality I conclude that the right to procreative autonomy from which a right of choice about abortion flows is well grounded in the First Amendment But abortion is not the only case that invokes our concern for protecting the intrinsic perhaps sacred value of human life We also oppose infanticide and homicide for these reasons Why do we allow the legislature to pass laws prohibiting them Given the criteria Dworkin sets forth in the statement cited above it can only be that the community is not seriously divided about these matters But suppose it were Suppose this were 1944 not 1994 and lynchings were commonplace in certain parts of the country People were then deeply divided over what respect if any was 86 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW due to the life of a black man Some people genuinely believed that only vigilante justice could maintain a society based on the to them necessary principle of white supremacy Should people who disagreed with this view who felt that the life of a black man was entitled to as much respect as the life of a white one have been forbidden fwm enacting their views into law because to do so would have violated the separation of church and state Or suppose that a legislature is trying to decide whether to enact the death penalty The legislators will be deeply divided over the issue Some will think that all human life even that of convicted murderers is sacred others will argue that the life of a victim deserves great respect and the life of the murderer none at all Lest there be any doubt as to the religious basis of some of these views both sides will quote from the Bible Can the legislature vote for the death penalty or even vote against it without violating the First Amendment f the views of former Justice William Brennan opposing capital punishment had prevailed would he have been placing the Eighth Amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment at war with the first Amendment Suppose finally that American armed forces were to conquer a nation in which many people practiced infanticide There may not be many such places now but at one time there were Suppose further that the conquest was defensible on moral and legal grounds U the President were to order his commanding general to make infanticide illegal in the occupied land and to stamp out its practice by whatever means seemed appropriate would he be acting contrary to the spirit of the first Amendment to the Constitutio n There is perhaps one legal doctrine that may appear to be analogous to Dworkin's position on abortion The courts have refused to allow the government to conscript as soldiers men who are on religious grounds conscientiously opposed to war lin doing this the courts have given the widest possible meaning to the phrase religious grounds so that it is not necessary that the objector actually believe in God But this is not really analogous at all The courts have not held that war and conscription are impermissible because the community is deeply divided over the rightness of war and that this division reflects spiritual attitudes toward life Nor have the courts struck down on these grounds any declaration of war li believe that the reason Dworkin is unwilling to allow legislation WINTER 1994 87

JAMES Q WILSON restricting abortion except perhaps in the last trimester is that contrary to the implications of his moral argument he is at heart a person who sees this issue entirely in terms of rights A woman's right to procreative autonomy is trumps He suggests that this right ought to be exercised with due regard for its moral seriousness but then rejects virtually every legislative enactment that would have the effect of stressing its moral seriousness or heightening a woman's moral awareness Though he allows in principle for some unspecified pre abortion restrictions before the fetus becomes viable in practice he is against almost every law that has been passed with the intention of influencing just influencing mind you not dictatinghow a woman should make her decision Dworkin opposes a requirement that the spouse be notified or that a waiting period occur before the abortion takes place He supports a required waiting period before buying a gun but not one before having an abortion Even a 24 hour waiting period might in his view make it more costly for some women to have an abortion and thus might deter them from doing so therefore such a brief period must be unconstitutional I wish to take more seriously than Dworkin the moral approach to abortion and see where it might lead us To some people it requires one to ban all abortions because life begins at the moment of conception This position has the apparent virtue of drawing a bright clear line But I am not convinced that such a bright line can in fact be drawn because I am not convinced that there is such a thing as the moment of conception Long before conception each female egg and each male sperm is alive and each contains within it encoded in DNA human life Though the production of a human being cannot begin until the egg and the sperm are united in the zygote the elements some would say the blueprints of human life already exist Conception does not summon forth life where none existed before it permits life to begin developing toward its infant form If the penetration of the egg by the sperm is the crucial moment then one must oppose not only abortion but many kinds of contraception since some of these such as the IUD and some birth control pills prevent the already fertilized egg from becoming implanted on the wall of the uterus That is the position of the Catholic Church and it has the merit of complete consistency It is consistency purchased at a high price however for it requires one to believe that contraception is immoral I do not think most 88 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW people anywhere believe that or can be made to believe it Nor do believe it A sperm and an egg whether separate or just joined do not arouse the moral sentiments that we associate with human life t is just as well that people feel this way because not every zygote becomes an embryo Many fail to implant on the uterine wall of those that do implant perhaps no more than half survive for two weeks According to one expert Arthur Hertig only about one third of all zygotes survive Nature flushes away a large fraction of fertilized eggs If we think that it is the moment of conception at which sacred life begins then we should be searching for ways to induce more frequent implantations and expressing our anger at how an unfeeling nature is defying our moral beliefs But if the line is not drawn at conception or implantation then where Surely it must be drawn well before birth since the fetus is viable many weeks before a normal delivery Yet doubt that a sharp line can be drawn at all Embryonic and fetal development does not proceed by crossing lines it is a continuous process governed by no fixed blueprint but by the iteration of many succeeding cell divisions the outcome of which it is impossible to foretell But life in general is filled with circumstances in which the alternatives are not clearly defined cannot define twilight but that does not mean that cannot tell the difference between night and day Our inability to draw a line should no more disable us from making moral judgments about a fetus then it prevents us from making such judgments about children or adults We cannot specify in advance for aU cases when a promise is so binding that it must be obeyed whatever the circumstances and when circumstances permit one to ignore it We have an obligation to act fairly by which I mean treating equals equally but we cannot draw clear lines that specify over all or even most cases what constitutes an equality of condition that requires equality of treatment Though we cannot make the specifications we nonetheless feel and usually feel quite strongly that keeping promises and acting fairly are moral obligations Though no line can be drawn we can identify think the rough state in embryonic development when if we are made unmistakably aware of it our moral sentiments begin to be most powerfully engaged People treat as human that which appears to be human people treat as quasi human that which appears quasi human Imagine a room on the walls of which are arrayed in chronological order exact color photographs of the human embryo suitably enlarged from WINTER 1994 89

JAMES Q WILSON first fertilization through early cell divisions and implantation through the emergence of various human or human like features and on to the complete fetus the day before normal delivery There would be 266 photographs in all one for each day of embryonic or fetal development Suppose we then ask a variety of people but perhaps especially women to examine these photographs and to tell us in which one or in which small cluster of them they first see what appears to be a baby Having examined such pictures most people I speculate would select those that represent life at around seven to nine weeks after conception 3 In the first and second weeks of pregnancy all that is visible and just barely visible is a fertilized egg or zygote By the fourth week some organs begin to appear and function but in no recognizably human form In the fifth week a creature is visible but one that is not materially different from a mouse or pig By the seventh week distinctly human arms and legs are evident and not only the eyes but the eyelids are visible In the eighth though the fetus is but an inch and a half long the fingers are distinct and the genital organs though still unsexed have appeared At the end of the eighth week doctors stop calling what they see an embryo and begin calling it a fetus By the tenth week at the very latest the fetal face has a clearly human appearance It would be even better to view motion pictures rather than stills A pregnant woman will feel fetal movement after eighteen or nineteen weeks of pregnancy a feeling I am told that is an inexpressible source of wonder and joy but in fact the fetus has already been moving flexing jerking and hiccuping too gently for the woman to sense it since the ninth or tenth week Now my speculation may turn out to be incorrect At the very least the viewers responses to these pictures will cover a range with a few saying it's a baby as early as the fifth week and a few withholding that judgment until perhaps the tenth week I would be astonished if any withheld that judgment for as long as the end of the first trimester roughly the twelfth week Suppose now that a woman considering an abortion were brought into this room and shown these pictures She would be told something of this sort You are X weeks pregnant as near as we can tell The embryo now looks about like this pointing In another week 3Readers not familiar with the magnificent color photographs of embryos and fetuses made by Lennart Nilsson should examine his A Child is Born Dell 1990 90 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN lIFE REVIEW it will look like this pointing You should know this before you make a final decision Some will complain that this exercise would put a woman under moral pressure Yes it would that is exactly why li think it should be done The problem with deciding on an abortion without a visual encounter with the fetus or embryo is that one is relieved to a degree of any sense of the extent to which another life may be at stake J do not propose this exercise because K am convinced that no woman seeing the pictures would agree to an abortion There are many considerations that will enter into her decision and some will on balance lead her to abort Nor do li assume that most women now make this decision lightly or unthinkingly K propose this procedure because it is likely to induce every woman to make a fully informed moral decision She will of course already be generally aware that abortion is a grave step and vaguely aware that another life may be at stake But these sentiments will of necessity be somewhat vague or unfocused She will be keenly aware of whatever is at stake in her personal circumstances her married or unmarried status her career plans her economic or social position that may incline her to abort She will not be as keenly aware li suspect of what is at stake in the development of the fetus We all find it easier to prefer an outcome we value and can visualize to one that we value but cannot visualize Being required to see literally see both sides of the issue makes the moral issue clearer and heightens the sense that the choice is inescapably a moral one All of us are in asymmetrical moral positions of this sort at one time or another We worry more about a stray cat when it is at our doorstep than when it is out of sight We may have a policy about giving to a beggar but no policy quite prepares us for a personal confrontation with one A pilot will find it easier to drop a bomb on a building in which women and children are hiding than to place a bomb in that building having first seen the women and children in it A soldier may find it less troubling to shoot an enemy he cannot see than one with whom he has suddenly come face to face A business executive finds it simpler to downsize his firm than to fire a veteran employee who is standing before him For our moral sentiments to provide a useful guide to our actions it is often necessary WINTER 1994 91

JAMES Q WILSON for us to experience and not simply imagine those sentiments and the conditions that evoke them Some abortion clinics defer to or play on this asymmetry in the woman's feelings A woman goes to a clinic for a pregnancy test a day or so later she telephones to get the result The clinician begins by asking Will pregnancy be good news or bad news If the woman says Bad news the clinician will immediately ask Do you want to terminate The stage of fetal development is never mentioned The word abortion is never used She is simply scheduled for a procedure The alternative that I am suggesting is in effect followed when a doctor has reason to think that a woman is carrying a seriously deformed fetus In a famous case in 1962 Sherri Finkbine of Arizona followed this procedure when knowing she had taken thalidomide she saw pictures or at least heard vivid descriptions of the horribly deformed babies that had been born in Europe to women who had also used the drug unable to obtain an abortion in Arizona she got one in Sweden The fetus was badly deformed My procedure does not prejudge the outcome it only clarifies the moral choice I suppose some women I imagine very few would abort what appeared to them to be a normal human baby But at the very least they would not do it in feigned innocence or real ignorance The theologian Paul Ramsey once described what the current situation now entails In this instance the darkness of the womb makes unnecessary resort to a mortician's art to cover the grim reality As long as we do not see the deaths inflicted or witness the dying the direct killing of nascent life has only to be compared with the greater or lesser convenience of other solutions in an antiseptic society Shine the photographer's light into the dark womb and things change not perhaps as much as Ramsey would have liked he was a stern and uncompromising foe of abortion but to some material degree Even after viewing the photographs a woman might elect an abortion long after the fetus had become distinctly baby like Her life might be in serious danger or delayed fetal abnormalities might appear But I believe or at any rate I very much hope that only such grave circumstances would lead to abortions much beyond the eighth week And that includes abortions when the mother has been the victim of rape or incest In a purely rights only perspective on abortion a pregnancy resulting from rape violates a woman's right not to 921WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN liFE REVIEW become pregnant against her will That violation would justify an abortion even at a late stage in the pregnancy But a moral perspective would suggest that if there is to be an abortion it ought to be before the fetus appears human which is to say precious innocent vulnerable appealing if the woman waits beyond that point then a moral perspective would suggest that the baby however conceived should be carried to term and if the woman wishes put up for adoption Some readers will note that my position on abortion is rather similar to that of certain philosophers such as Aristotle and medieval theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas who suggested that a fetus does not become a person until it is ensouled or vivified Aristotle suggested that movement or quickening occurs in the male fetus after about 40 days and in the female one at about 80 days although he immediately added that this was only a rough estimate Apart from the questionable distinction between the two sexes it is my conjecture that Aristotle who was the greatest biologist of premodem times based his judgment on an inspection of actual fetuses According to modern embryological research Aristotle was roughly correct to find that the fetus acquired human features and began to move at to take the midpoint between 40 and 80 days 60 days about 8 or 9 weeks Aristotle's view on this matter influenced Aquinas though the two thinkers came to very different conclusions Aquinas argued that the human rational soul was not present immediately after conception Drawing presumably on Aristotle's concept of quickening Aquinas suggested that only a human form with human organs could contain a human soul Before a fetus was a person it was an animal A newly conceived embryo was alive but to Aquinas and those who followed him it did not become a rational divinely created being until it had been formed by the soul much as soft wax is formed by a seal Thinkers holding this view might regard the abortion of an unsouled fetus as a sin but only the abortion of a souled one as murder This was the theory of mediate animation which gained the approval of many Church authorities As early as the 4th or 5th century long before the time of Aquinas St Jerome had written that seeds are gradually formed in the uterus and it is not reputed homicide until the scattered elements received their appearance and members Jerome like St Augustine did not claim to know for certain when the fetus received a soul only God could know that WINTER 1994 93

JAMES Q WILSON But aborting an ensouled fetus was regarded as far more grave a matter than aborting an unsouled one By the 12th century both the theologian Gratian and Pope Innocent III were prepared to say that it was not homicide to kill a fetus until after it had been ensouled This view received the support of Gregory IX in his decretals but at the same time he made clear that aborting any fetus however young was a sin for which penance was required Some Catholic theologians even suggested that killing an unformed fetus in order to save the life of the mother might not even be a sin much less a homicide By the 19th century however Church doctrine on this matter had begun to harden The reasons it has been suggested were twofold First modern biological science was casting doubt on Aristotle's theory of embryological stages in the newer view the embryo was biologically alive from fertilization on Second abortion was apparently becoming more commonplace rare events might be met with equivocal theology but routine events required clear rules One by one the exceptions permitting abortion were eliminated and the penalty of excommunication was extended to women who procured an abortion By the end of the 19th century abortion was being condemned and one Vatican ruling even suggested that an ectopic or tubal pregnancy which physicians knew constituted a serious threat to the life of the mother could not be surgically ended In 1930 Pius XI issued an encyclical that denied there were any grounds for allowing abortion at any stage in fetal development The Bible does not mention abortion but to Pius it seemed clear that killing a fetus violated the commandment against killing every life was sacred and since embryos were alive every embryo was sacred When uncertain knowledge and rare events permitted complex judgments the Church uttered them but when events greater knowledge common events forced its hand the Church drew a clear line and stuck to it 4 4Jewish teachings about abortion are at least as complex as Catholic thinking Though some people speak confidently of the Jewish position my amateur reading of the summary accounts reveals considerable differences among the authorities It seems clear that abortion to protect the life of the mother is permitted Abortions for other than therapeutic purposes are treated as morally grave matters but there is no codified position as to what constitutes grave One modern rabbinical authority describes elective abortions as akin to homicide while another would permit them if there were a good reason Among such reasons is the anguish of the mother at the prospect of a deformed child See the Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971 Volume I pp 98 101 and David M Feldman Marital Relations Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law Schocken 1974 chaps 14 15 94 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW But was drawing such a line reallly necessary John 1 Noonan Jr a profound historian of Church doctrine from whose writings li have drawn much of the account that appears above thinks it was The central question is How do you determine the humanity of a being 1 0 Noonan there is only one possible answer if you are conceived by human parents you are human He recognizes that for several centuries some important Catholic theologians and even some popes gave a different answer but on reflection all these other answers had fatal weaknesses Viability is not a guide to an embryo's humanity since viability can be determined by the skill and resources of modern science in principle any fetus might be made viable Nor is the capacity for having sensory experience a determinant of humanity because the fetus long before birth has such experiences and some adults owing to neurological damage might stop having experiences without ceasing to be human I agree with these views Noonan also rejects the test I have proposed but for reasons I do not find convincing He acknowledges that the grief of a woman over the miscarriage of a fetus is not as great as the grief she would feel over the loss of a child but he opposes any test based on such feelings because feeling is a notoriously unsure guide to the humanity of others He grants that a mother is more attached to an infant she can see than to a fetus she cannot but says that sight is even more untrustworthy than feeling in determining humanity He reaches these conclusions by way of this analogy since people are known to discriminate against others on the basis of color race religion and language then feelings and sight are unreliable guides to what is human and thus deserving of respect But this is not I think a proper analogy There is no doubt that our feelings about others are sometimes hateful or that seeing the other person does not always draw us to him But these consequences of the natural human tendency to prefer our own kind do not apply except in the rarest of cases to our own offspring Quite the contrary that we are led by nature to prefer our own kind and especially our own children is the surest reason for believing that we will cherish them and cherish them the most when we can see and touch them Many couples give birth to infants who are not like them in color configuration or expression The Mendelian laws of inheritance ensure that many blond parents will have a black haired child and many WINTER 1994 95

JAMES Q WILSON dark skinned parents will have a fair skinned one It may be that some parents become especially fond of babies who are just like them but I am aware of no evidence that parents are inadequately attached to infants who differ physically from them Indeed I am forcefully struck by how many parents will lavish care and affection even on babies born with terrible deformities or incurable illnesses Far from being an unreliable guide to affection and moral respect sight and touch and the feelings they generate are the surest possible guarantees of love and care when it comes to infancy In sum saying that a human being with full and absolute claims on our moral respect exists from the moment of conception is not consistent with either modern science or natural sentiments the Catholic Church itself long recognized that a difference exists between a formed and an unformed fetus whether the forming of a fetus has natural or supernatural causes does not alter the greater feeling a parent has for a fetus the more fully formed it is and the struggle to sustain a clear simple line as the sole basis for a judgment about the morality of abortion does not accord with either the sentiments or the practices of most decent people Therefore one should try to clarify the moral issue in ways that draw on the natural respect people have for innocent life by making them and especially pregnant women more fully aware of the presence of that life and of the claims it makes on us I have yet to discuss how if at all the law should take account of this position If my experiment were carried out and there developed a consensus as to when an embryo became a baby should the law recognize this and ban abortions after that period I believe that it should provided there were exceptions for grave and special cases such as a severe deformity and even then only after the woman had obtained the advice and consent of disinterested and expert parties But before voting for such a law I would prefer to wait and see what would happen if my procedure were followed For it to be followed the Supreme Court would have to change its position The necessary changes are prefigured in the language of the Casey decision It rejected the trimester framework of Roe it reaffirmed the state's legitimate interest in the protection of potential life and it explicitly held that even though a woman alone must choose whether to abort before the fetus is viable the state is not prohibited from taking steps to ensure that this choice is thoughtful and informed Even in the earliest stages of pregnancy I would 96 WINTER 1994

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW have said especially in the early stages the state may enact rules and regulations designed to encourage her to know that there are philosophic and social arguments I would have said moral arguments of great weight that can be brought to bear in favor of continuing the pregnancy to full term but having said that the Court then went on to rule out any regulations that would create an undue burden or present a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion 1 suspect that my procedure would fail the undue burden test though 1 can find no philosophical argument in Casey as to why it should II would much prefer the Court to give greater latitude to state and federal legislatures to define a policy in this area one that takes as its first principle the protection of human life This is what the french statute passed in 1975 does it states that the law guarantees the respect of every human being from the commencement of life There shall be no derogation from this principle except in cases of necessity and under the conditions laid down by this law The law goes on to specify the circumstances under which the principle can be violated describing them as matters of necessity As it turns out necessity means that a woman who during the first ten weeks of pregnancy finds herself in distress is entitled to terminate her pregnancy after she has received government mandated counseling But the final decision is hers Mary Ann Glendon has endorsed the general principles of such an approach pointing out rightly that it elevates moral considerations over purely personal preferences or individual rights and that even though an elective abortion remains available during the first ten weeks the way in which we name things and imagine them may be decisive for the way we feel and act with respect to them Her Harvard colleague laurence Tribe dismisses such a view to him a policy that is a mere formality is a meaningless hypocrisy whereas one that has any effect disempowers and disrepects women To him even a moderate regulation of abortion trivializes women This is too much even for Ronald Dworkin who chides Tribe for being a prisoner of his rights only mentality Several people including President Clinton have said that abortions ought to be safe legal and rare So long as the issue is dominated by pro choice activists like Tribe who see the matter largely if not entirely in terms of women's rights abortions will be safe legal and commonplace WINTER 1994 97

JAMES Q WILSON No restrictions at all will be possible because by constraining a woman's choice they will disempower or trivialize her I do not think that there is any possibility of a consensus among pro and anti abortion activists and as long as the matter is defined in terms of rights the pro abortion activists will win For hardly any politician is willing to vote against rights By contrast the American people are less preoccupied with rights and more respectful of life Even though they are ultimately willing to let a woman make the final decision they want to ensure that it is a morally constrained and fully informed decision I wish that this nation could start afresh formulating de novo a legislative policy on abortion based on the fundamental premise that abortion is a moral question but not one that invariably admits of only one answer in all circumstances Most other nations have done just what this country seems incapable of doing This is the priceand I think it a very heavy price indeed we have paid for turning so important a matter over to Justice Blackmun and his colleagues What kind of people are we that we cannot say legislatively that human life is precious that an infant's life is perhaps the most precious of all and that we want to ensure that women are placed in a moral environment in which decisions about life and death are taken seriously and treated as matters of moral gravity Many women perhaps most already treat this matter as a morally grave issue but many do not it is for them a form of birth controland even those who do may not always clearly see and thus fully sense what is at stake Let them see it When are you going to settle down and start a single parent family THE SPECTATOR 23 October 1993 98 WINTER 1994

APPENDICES

101 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.

Use your keyboard's arrow keys or the arrow buttons on either side of the pages to browse this issue in depth. Click on any page to zoom in, and click again or press "ESC" on your keyboard to zoom out. Not what you're looking for? Return home or search for an article using the box below: