If Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death were, as Andrew Sullivan and his ilk insinuate, a shrill “Christianist” screed, it would by now have been reviewed in every major newspaper and journal, held up to scorn as proof of the hateful bigotry of the Right. The Left’s silence is here more informative than its criticism could ever be.
The book does have faults. It begins weakly, and I was about ready to put it down after the wince-making account of a supposed “dream” in which Hillary Clinton delivers a middle-of-the-road speech about abortion. After that, however, the author finds his footing and rarely goes astray. His argument is brisk, penetrating and well, though not obtrusively, documented.
Mr. Ponnuru’s sure-footedness is remarkable, as he is engaging in a polemic on three fronts: first, seeking to move weak or inconsistent pro-lifers – those, for instance, who oppose abortion but not embryonic stem-cell research – toward affirmation of the rights of all human beings at all stages of development; second, counseling pro-life enthusiasts on the virtues of an “incrementalist” strategy that doesn’t attempt to push beyond what public opinion will tolerate; finally, taking sharp issue with the “party of death” (a moniker adapted from the frank avowal by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin, one of the party’s leaders, that abortion and euthanasia are “choices for death”).
For all of its excellences, though, the book has a slight but persistent flaw: It takes it for granted that belief in equal human dignity is a “natural” position, one that the party of death has lately eroded. The inference is that those who urge choices for death have powerful arguments, indeed, that reason is at least superficially on their side. Some pro-lifers certainly think so, which leads them easily to despair.
In truth, the situation is nearly the opposite and ought to give those of us who agree with Mr. Ponnuru’s substantive position grounds for nervous hope. The pro-life side is the one that has historically gained ground through rational argument, while its opponents have sought to keep the debate on the level of emotion and sentimentality.
There is little evidence in history that men feel a natural respect for the lives of anyone but their close relatives. What deterred our first ancestors from murder was not a sense of justice but fear that the victim’s kin, or his ghost, would avenge him.
That understanding was the foundation of the law of homicide in the classical world. To kill a kinless man in Athens was to risk nothing. The state would pay attention and mete out punishment only if a private citizen was interested enough to prosecute the crime.
Within the kin group, too, there was no concept of equal dignity. Infanticide was an uncontroversial practice in Greece and Rome. If abortion was rare, that was only because it was unsafe, not because doctors swore in the Hippocratic Oath not to perform it.
This state of affairs was not defensible through any form of moral reasoning, but it was accepted custom, like slavery, wife beating and male promiscuity. Men felt uneasy at the margins. Infants were abandoned by road sides, where they might be rescued, rather than killed outright. Roman believers in potestas patria felt that the Carthaginians went too far in thinking that children were a sacrifice desired by the gods. Still, the overall picture was one that carried “choice” to an extreme.
Then, little by little, a “party of life” broke through the inertia of custom. In the First Century, getting rid of unwanted babies was an act that anyone might do openly and without shame. In the Twenty-First, it is cloaked in euphemism. Ponnuru pointedly observes that “pro-choice” speakers at both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 2000 proclaimed their support for “a woman’s right to choose” without ever adding an object to the verb. Whenever President Clinton used the word “abortion”, he coupled it with an assertion that the practice ought to be “rare”. A pro-choice TV commercial portrays old white males restraining a young biracial woman’s ability to choose, but the particular choice shown on the screen is the selection of a soft drink, not of a child. Defenders of partial-birth abortion sedulously avoid describing the facts of what they prefer to call “dilation and extraction”.
Pro-abortionists, an optimist might note, are, by and large, far less self-confident than the ante bellum advocates of slavery. Slave owners were willing to make the argument that property in humans was a positive good. Very rarely do abortion’s defenders call it that. If they tried that tack, does anyone doubt that public opinion would turn massively against them?
Similar obfuscation and outright falsehood imbue the arguments for euthanasia and destructive research on embryos. The Party of Death offers numerous examples. The stem cell controversy, in particular, abounds in them. The horror of creating a human being for no purpose other than to kill her in experimentation is softened by calling the child by a “blastocyte”, exaggerating outrageously the imminence of miracle cures, and ignoring the fact that medical researchers currently are much richer in promising lines of endeavor than in resources to pursue them.
This rhetorical landscape reflects the tremendous advances made by the party of life over the past two thousand years. Christianity played a major role in convincing men that the lives of unrelated people with no utilitarian value to oneself are precious, but reason was vital, too. It was the Scholastics and their rebellious offspring, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who demonstrated that assigning a high value to human life in and of itself was not an arbitrary whim of the Christian deity but a universal dictate of moral reason. We cannot rationally defend our own right to life unless we defend everybody else’s.
With the decay of Christianity and Reason, unreasoning nature has begun to reassert itself. Why should a man who believes in no God and reserves the right to fashion his own moral truths recognize the rights of an unborn child – or of anyone else who doesn’t appeal to his fancy?
Happily, only the vanguard of the post-Christian, post-rational pseudo-philosophy follows its logic to its conclusion. At each stage apostasy to the party of life grows. Many accept experimentation on embryos, fewer abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, fewer still abortion nearer to birth except for what are perceived as strong reasons. Polls indicate that most Americans probably oppose allowing abortion during the last few months of pregnancy except in cases of rape, incest, severe deformity or danger to the mother’s life. A solid majority would outlaw the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion. Very few countenance killing children after they have been delivered.
Unhappily, the vanguard that logically spins out the implications of unreasonable premises is heavily overrepresented among lawyers, judges, journalists and other workers with words and thus has a disproportionate influence over government policy. Legislatures before 1973 occasionally liberalized the circumstances under which abortion was legal. If the question were returned to the political arena, many would impose few or no restrictions. That is the measure of the ground that the party of life lost during the Twentieth Century. The loss is more than one would like, but scarcely irrecoverable.
One of the marks of civilization is that, while it necessarily develops along side heinous practices and for a long while tolerates them, it does not regress after they have been abolished. In the long run, the pro-life cause will rise or fall with that of civilization as a whole. It isn’t really conceivable that a creative, self-sustaining culture, capable of resisting mankind’s tendency to drift toward barbarism, will ignore the moral claims of the weak, whether they are unborn, disabled or enfeebled by age, any more than it will reinstitute slavery. The party of death is doomed, unless it can pull civilized society down on our heads.
