Abortion and Ideology

Abortion and Ideology | Raymond Dennehy, University of San Francisco | Ignatius Insight

A survey of the justifications advanced by scientists, philosophers, and other members of the elite class, such as judges, to justify the legalization of induced abortion reveals that they have abandoned rational inquiry in favor of ideology. For although their arguments have the trappings of the objectivity of scientific method and other marks of rational inquiry, it is clear that they subvert reason and manipulate evidence to actualize an ideal that they perceive to be above all rational criticism. This enslavement to ideology is but a reenactment of what happened in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to the detriment of science and philosophy, not to mention the degradation of human life.

Sophistical Arguments for Abortion

Two months after the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Roe v. Wade, when the public debate on abortion was white hot, a political cartoon appeared in the editorial section of what is now called The San Jose Mercury News, depicting two departed souls standing on a cloud and sporting the obligatory wings. All about them tiny fetuses, also sporting wings, were standing. One of the souls says to the other: "Fetus, Fetus. I never knew so many kids named 'Fetus' in all my life." [1] A couple of days later, the paper printed a letter to the editor from a representative of a local feminist group complaining about the cartoon's "insensitivity to women who have had abortions." A plausible interpretation of the cartoonist's motive is that, rather than intending to bruise anyone's feelings, his aim was to caricature what was then the recent entry of "fetus" into everyday language as a replacement for the term, "unborn baby." Thereby hangs a tale.

The success of the proabortion movement depended on diverting the public's attention from the fact that induced abortion is the direct killing of an innocent human being. Replacing "unborn baby" with "fetus" was a good start, for the latter term is sufficiently abstract to deflect public consideration from the homicidal consequences. But changing the public's thinking about abortion would require more than making "fetus" the preferred term in everyday discourse. It would also be necessary to spread a fog of confusion over the positions of science on the status of the fetus. Bernard Nathanson writes that, before his conversion from proabortion advocate to champion of human life, he and his colleagues worked hard to convince people that it is impossible to determine when human life begins by insisting that it is a moral, theological, or philosophical question, not a scientific one. [2]

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Comments

[Petey]

Thank you for posting this. And thank you Dr. Dennehy for writing it.