To a Student at Shanghai American School on "Abortion as Genocide."

This letter is a continuation of our correspondence. The student is writing as part of an AP Language class. It began with an essay of hers in response to one of mine and one of Cathleen Kaveny, professor of law and theology at Notre Dame.


Dear Emily,

I appreciate the tone of your discussion. You might be interested to know that one of my sons, who was 18 at the time, spent last spring semester at the City University of Hong Kong and also traveled some on the mainland of China while he was there.

The original context of the [my] essay that appeared in the Opposing Viewpoints Series was a university student newspaper where I was answering specific criticisms, which limited the scope of the points I made.

A fundamental issue surrounding abortion is personhood. One similarity between abortion and more recognized atrocities such as genocide is the denial of personhood status to human beings. I think that you will find it almost universally accepted in the scientific/medical world that an individual human life begins at fertilization. The controversy centers on the philosophical/political question of when a human being becomes a person. “Pro-life” people say that a human being at whatever stage of development is a person, while “pro-choice” people make a variety of claims but generally say that a human being does not become a full person with a legal right to life until “viabilty” or birth.

Citing possible positive outcomes does not solve the ethical issues of personhood because one could also find such outcomes for the Holocaust, as an example. The creation of the State of Israel as a sanctuary for Jewish survivors was one positive result, and as morally absurd as it sounds, the Holocaust reduced the overall instance of crime among the Jewish populations, which had a net effect on crime.

(In any case, the positive outcomes you referenced, and the research are certainly contested. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime . )

I would like to address the other specifics that you mentioned, but time is limited, so I offer a referral to two books that represent the best pro-life apologetics I know, both by Francis J. Beckwith, a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University. The books are: Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights and Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice.

Both books, and editorial summaries and reviews, can be found at http://www.amazon.com/ . One item Beckwith raises is a difference between artifactual and biological development. An artifact, like a clock or a rocket, is put together piece by piece and is not functional as such until it is complete. A living being, however, begins all at once and in time its self-directed development shows us what it has been all along.

A final comment: I don’t think any word is adequate now to describe all that abortion is. “Foeticide” has as weakness the common use of the word “fetus” to dehumanize pre-natal human life. Fetus does not specifically apply to human beings, but to any mammalian species. Maybe we will just have to wait for someone like Raphel Lemkin, someone with a passionate intellectual interest in the law and in words combined with an overwhelming personal interest in the terribleness of the Holocaust, since most of his relatives were murdered. And perhaps we will have to wait for more of a consensus against abortion, since it’s not the words themselves that have power, but the weight we give to them.

The Chinook Assembly is Available Now

Go to http://www.chaoticterrain.com/ to order.

GAP and I go to the Chicago Public Library

Sort of . . .
On Saturday I was poking around the internet and found my name listed on a table of contents in several places. A table of contents, alone. That was strange. Looking further I found the reason for the listing. Greenhaven Press and several related imprints publish educational resources for schools on a wide variety of science and social issues. Unknown to me, they used an article of mine in their book, Abortion, in their Opposing Issues Series. The book was published in February, 2010. Apparently the publisher reprinted an September 2007 editorial I wrote for the Sidelines, the student newspaper of Middle Tennessee State University. My article in the book was titled, “Abortion is a Form of Genocide.” The opposing side was taken by a law professor at Notre Dame. Except for mine, the essays were written by what I might call minor luminaries, like conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, or Michael New, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.
While the book may be found in five branches of the Chicago Public Library, and in libraries and schools around the country, unfortunately, it does not have photos of aborted children. And it does not contain my best and most elegant arguments, which are based on etymology of gens in Latin and genos in Greek. (i.e. Fetus means offspring, progeny means offspring. Abortion is progeny-cide.) Nor does it explain that our use of photographs of aborted babies serves the same educational purpose as using pictures from the Holocaust. The book is available at www.gale.cengage.com/greenhaven/, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. $39.70, hardbound. $27.50, paper. I will ask the publisher for a complimentary copy!