“Why Haven’t We Ended Abortion?”
by Rachel MacNair
Part 1 of 2 posts responding to Ward Ricker’s essay, “Prolife – Not”
Ward Ricker has been active in opposing abortion, but has recently written an essay expressing alienation from the pro-life movement. In Part 2, I’ll address that feeling of alienation more directly, but first I was challenged by his complaint that when he googled the question – Why Haven’t We Ended Abortion? – his own previous essay on the topic was the only one that came up. He thought the question deserved more attention.
As seen with my outpouring of reasons below, I’ve certainly thought about it. But first, I want to make the question more specific and realistic: “Why haven’t we ended abortion being legal, socially approved, and practiced widely and openly?”
First, a reminder that the CLN blog welcomes diverse views, so the reasons I offer below are my opinion and not officially that of the organization.
Some Suggestions on Why
1) Courts in those countries with a court-imposed “right” to abortion are, for the most part, engaged in bizarre reasoning from which they either refuse to budge or they budge only slightly.
2) Mainstream media too often cover negative stereotypes of abortion opponents rather than giving an honest view of the debate. Most mass media tend to avoid covering those of us that don’t fit the stereotypes. As Ward has pointed out, they also only cover the debate – they rarely cover abortion itself, nor the gory details of how it’s practiced. And mainly they don’t even do much to cover the debate.
3) In the U.S., the Republicans have talked smoothly on the topic, but many politicians don’t have behavior showing they mean it. Pro-lifers spend so much of their time working for them, only to be betrayed. Over and over. A prime example is President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court.
4) In the U.S., Democrats have become bigoted on this topic. The intolerance of pro-life views is truly astonishing. Even simple efforts to have a “big tent” philosophy of allowing people to be pro-life Democrats has met with massive resistance and in most places isn’t the current policy.
5) Because of this Republican/Democrat divide in the U.S. and similar rifts in other countries, and because of the courts, and also the media, abortion has been presented as a right-wing/left-wing divide. So people move to the wing they agree with on other topics rather than thinking about it.
6) We have the same problem with societal apathy that absolutely every social movement that has ever existed has had.
7) Abortion promoters have way more money. They make money from abortions themselves. They also have more rich people and foundations donating, plus government grants.
8) The lead-up to Roe v. Wade arose during the cauldron of the American war in Vietnam and when Cold War anxiety over having a nuclear holocaust was high. The negative vortex of violent energy fed off the horrific violence of the era.
9) The Abortion Distortion Factor – when abortion is the topic at hand, many people dispense with the moral principles they normally abide by. I explain this as cognitive-dissonance-induced belligerency.
10) Human society has a long-standing habit of using killing as a problem-solver. We’re struggling against millennia of massive slaughter.
And Yet . . .
Abortion numbers in the U.S. are falling and have been for years, and there’s an even more dramatic downturn in first-time abortions. The repeat abortions are keeping the numbers up, but they’ll fall by attrition eventually as women hit menopause, so we’ve got a more dramatic downturn coming. I’ve written about how we can use psychology to our advantage with this observation.
But this also means that our work all these years has in fact been highly effective.
It’s of course heart-wrenching that it isn’t more effective – half of a huge number is still a huge number, and just one is one too many – but we are in fact making progress, and it’s absolutely crucial that we continue.
Final Question: Why this Question?
Ward was taken aback that he seemed to be the only one posing this question, and wondered why. My quick answer is that pro-lifers are very well acquainted with the many obstacles we face and are more likely to complain about those obstacles than to ask the question in this way. These are longstanding frustrations, after all.
But being inclined to connect issues of violence, I’ll also ask:
Why haven’t we ended war? Though we’ve made progress in that people generally only think it allowable for defense and not aggression, they’re nevertheless awfully easily convinced a given war is defensive when that’s highly questionable or just plain silly. Or they’re unconvinced but apathetic.
Why haven’t we ended the death penalty? It’s a mere shadow of what it used to be in numbers of executions and numbers of places it’s used, but why is it still happening at all?
Why haven’t we ended poverty? There’s a far smaller proportion of human society mired in it than used to be, but we have the resources to end it entirely, and stop the many deaths it causes. So why haven’t we?
Why haven’t we ended racism? Again, we’ve made more progress over the decades, but far too much of racism is still rearing its ugly head.
And why haven’t we ended nuclear weapons? Unlike all these others, we’re not dealing with centuries of human practice. While nukes were prevalent when I was born, my own parents were born into a world without them. There are far fewer than there used to be, and we now have an international treaty to ban them (signed by nations that don’t possess them). Given the demise of the Cold War and the clear danger of having so many and actually “modernizing” them, why is there so much apathy?
The answer to all these questions is: all social movements to stop violence have obstacles of the kinds I mentioned above.
Also, all of them aren’t working as effectively as they could, what with being run by human beings.
Additionally, these are some of the forms of socially-approved killing that we still have left, out of a once far greater number. We pretty much ended duels, gladiator games, witch-burnings, crucifixions lining the roads for public display, and various other forms of killings that used to be quite legal. We can learn lessons from those successes.
To my mind, the practical question isn’t why the killing of various kinds hasn’t ended. The practical question is: What are we going to do, or what will we keep doing, to end them?
All hands on deck.
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy
by Richard Stith
[Originally published in The New Human (Vol. VI, No. 5, June 1977), newsletter of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition,, under the title “Abortion Proponents Are Often Exploiters of Women.” Lightly edited.]
We’re all familiar with the argument that racism is fomented by those who exploit poor whites, in order to generate a convenient and often dehumanized scapegoat and thus prevent oppressed white workers from realizing who their real enemies are. The upper-class white in effect says to the lower-class white whom he is oppressing, “Hey, don’t blame me for your miserable existence. It’s those ‘n . . . .s’ who want your job and keep wages down by flooding the market with cheap labor. Get them. Lynch them. Kill them.”
Well, similarly, those in our society who oppress women are given a convenient scapegoat in the frequently dehumanized unborn child. The male says to the female he gets pregnant and abandons, “Hey, don’t blame me for your problems. It’s that ‘fetus’ inside you. Get it. Abort it. Kill it.”
Or, again, those who stigmatize unwed mothers instead of reacting with compassion can say, “Don’t blame us for your ostracism from the community. We’ll be glad to take you back, if you cover up what you did by getting an abortion. That ‘fetus’ is your enemy. Get it. Kill it.”
Or, again, the businesses that pay women less because they get pregnant, that don’t provide paid maternity leave and even fire pregnant women, that don’t in any way (that is, by part-time jobs) try to help men and women accommodate their family responsibilities—all these businesses can say with abortion available, “Hey, don’t blame us for your economic problems. It’s that damn ‘fetus.’ We’ll treat you just like always if you’ll get rid of it. Kill it.”
And, finally, abortion lets the government tell the poor and the black (at home and abroad): “Hey don’t blame us or U.S. capitalism for your troubles. It’s your own kids. They are your real enemy. You’ll see how happy you’ll be if you just get rid of them. Kill them. We’ll even pay for it!”
In none of these cases are the oppressed (poor whites, blacks, women) forced to turn to racism or to abortion. But the dehumanization and scapegoating of blacks and of the unborn nevertheless are used as tools of systematic oppression. The mere fact that women in theory have “freedom of choice” in regard to abortion doesn’t stop them from being exploited by abortion, because the parameters of that choice are strictly limited by the interests of sexism, racism, and capitalism, and because the consciousness of this limitation is ideologically suppressed by the use of the “fetus” as a scapegoat.
Blacks in Africa have long regarded abortion “as the white man’s new(est) form of genocide,” stated Dr. Margaret White of Croyden, England at the annual meeting of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds. The United States Agency for International Development has financed a spokesman who attacks the antiquated laws of the colonial masters and at the same time is calling for more contraception and abortion. “I find this . . . a nastier form of colonialism than ours,” she stated. The U.S. Center For Disease Control and Prevention lists the abortion rate for non-whites as twice that of whites in America. (Ob-Gyn News, 3-15-77).
The [National Youth Pro-life Coalition] NYPLC Board of Directors, in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, has condemned the U.S. government’s plan to sterilize one-fourth of the world’s fertile women, and has called for an end to the plan’s covert funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation . . . . The NYPLC pointed out that such a massive program must necessarily involve heavy one-sided propaganda, if not coercion. The real motive behind federally-financed abortion and sterilization, keeping down the demands of the poor for social justice, is now out in the open and must be resisted, the NYPLC declared. . . .
Interestingly, the leftist press in the U.S. and abroad has for a number of years agreed with the pro-life movement about the often regressive nature of the government push for abortion and sterilization, even though the left has not generally been against abortion per se. For example, the cartoon below appeared on the cover of a journal called Science for the People in January, 1977. The remark by Che Guevara is a warning that abortion may be used to kill the unborn poor before they have a chance to grow up to be revolutionaries. The artist is Wen-Ti Tsen of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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For more of our posts from Richard Stith, see:
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Misogyny vs. Patriarchy
by Rachel MacNair
Before I get into why I think it’s important to understand the difference between misogyny and patriarchy, I want to explain how they fit into the Consistent Life Network’s set of issues.
We identified six issues of violence involving socially-tolerated killing of human beings, as listed on this banner:
Each of the issues is overarching. Nuclear weapons and military spending are covered under war. Destructive embryonic stem cell research is covered under abortion. Infanticide is included under euthanasia. And so on.
I’ve always regarded racism as also covering misogyny and lethal discrimination against people with disabilities. In all cases, entire groups are being targeted for dehumanizing words and actions. There just isn’t really a good word to cover all of the groups. Bigotry is the closest, but it doesn’t quite capture the point we want to make.
But why is racism the one to cover all three?
It’s more clearly related to all issues: the racism of the death penalty is a major problem, whereas women are less subjected to executions and people with mental disabilities are in some places explicitly exempted. Women and the disabled are also explicitly excluded from being subjected to the military draft, which we would regard as a benefit for them.
Still, our focus on abortion should bring misogyny to the forefront, and our focus on euthanasia brings bigotry against people with disabilities to the forefront. Yet racism clearly has lethal impact in both those areas as well.
Misogyny vs. Patriarchy
There’s a further complication: many people confuse misogyny and patriarchy, but they’re not the same. Misogyny means being against women. Patriarchy means ruling over women. An example to illustrate the difference:
During the original run of the sitcom Roseanne, Jackie was Roseanne’s sister and Dan was Roseanne’s husband. Dan didn’t particularly like Jackie; when he came home and saw Jackie there, he wasn’t happy. But Jackie was family, and therefore entitled to be there. Jackie moved in with a man named Fisher. Fisher beat her. She wasn’t willing to go to law enforcement for fear of making things worse. Jackie’s father had died, she had no brother, and the husband-surrogate was the problem. In patriarchal terms, the next in line for male “protection” was her brother-in-law. So Dan went and beat Fisher.
Here’s the difference:
Fisher beats Jackie / motivated by hatred for women = misogyny.
Dan beats Fisher / motivated by protection of women = patriarchy.
Both led to violence. Both are, shall we way, poor at problem-solving. Both treat women as unequal. Yet the motivation is so opposite that a different analysis applies.
Applying this to abortion:
Misogynists can regard women as receptacles for the next generation for whom abortion is disallowed. Conversely, they can regard themselves as entitled to consequence-free sex and therefore launch unwanted pregnancies and push for aborting them.
Patriarchs – while they can, of course, also be misogynists – can instead have a sense of beneficent rule over women that would protect women and children from abortion. Conversely, they can also rule that abortions should happen. Discussing the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of the Christian era, sociologist Rodney Stark observes:
Once married, pagan girls had a substantially lower life expectancy, much of the difference being due to the great prevalence of abortion, which involved barbaric methods in an age without soap, let alone antibiotics. Given the very significant threat to life and the agony of the procedure, one might wonder why pagan women took such risks. They didn’t do so voluntarily. It was men – husbands, lovers, and fathers – who made the decision to abort. It isn’t surprising that a world that gave husbands the right to demand that infant girls be done away with would also give men the right to order their wives, mistresses, or daughters to abort.
Discovering God, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 321
Both misogynists and patriarchs can be on either side of the abortion issue.
Patriarchy and the Pro-Life Movement
It’s impossible to be a misogynist consistent-lifer; it would be like being a racist consistent-lifer. Both are a contradiction in terms. But is it possible to believe in patriarchy of a non-misogynist type and still be a consistent-lifer?
Technically, yes. You don’t need to beat the wife-beaters to protect women. If protecting women and children is your motivation, then the issue of whether society is better off if men rule women is a side-issue – perhaps a question of strategy.
But, I must say, I’ve never met a patriarchal consistent-lifer, and would be surprised if I ever did. Many of our member groups are pro-life feminists, and pro-life feminism is so enmeshed in our literature that we pretty much regard it as integral to the consistent life ethic. I’ve never known of an instance when anyone thought that bringing up pro-life feminism was off-topic. (I myself was president of Feminists for Life, 1984-1994). The point that greater equality and more genuine choices for women is one of the prominent solutions to abortion is a point we make frequently.
March for Life, 2019
What about the pro-life movement as a whole? This is a female-dominated movement, and always has been. While there might be a difference in multi-issue groups such as the Knights of Columbus, in activist right-to-life groups, any man who wants to participate has to be accustomed to working with women, taking our ideas seriously, and taking instruction from us.
Just this last time at the March for Life Expo, two men gave me literature showing a Roman centurion outfit and having clear patriarchal wording, of the men-are-supposed-to-protect kind. Nevertheless, they listened to me intently as I explained the finer points of boycott strategy. Their idea of male obligations on protection didn’t include discounting female expertise. It couldn’t. That’s just not the dynamic of how the pro-life movement works, or ever has.
This was one of the things that struck me when I joined the pro-life movement back in the 1980s. I was well-versed in peace and anti-nuclear activism at that point, and those movements weren’t nearly as good at including women as the pro-life movement was. There was much talk about how women had been expected to get coffee while the men did the decision-making, and this was no longer acceptable. Yet the effort to do otherwise in the groups I was involved in was very conscious and deliberate. I got pushed into a lot of leadership based on the need to address gender balance in leadership; fortunately, my predilections worked well with this.
When I joined mainstream pro-life groups, though, female participation in leadership was natural and never required attention to ensure.
Male politicians, of course, are another matter.
Book Review: “Resisting Throwaway Culture”
by Mary Lou Bennett
Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can United a Fractured People, by Charles C. Camosy.
Anyone living in the United States today is acutely aware of the pain and decay that permeate society as a result of contemporary moral issues. With such awareness, feelings of sadness, despair, and disbelief can become paramount. Hence, Charles C. Camosy’s book, Resisting Throwaway Culture, becomes a very important read.
Camosy not only writes with a profound understanding of what plagues society, but he also offers hope and a clear approach for setting the foundation for a better tomorrow. With knowledge and a straightforward approach that’s easy to read, Camosy explains that the American tendency has become to solve problems with violence. This, in turn, has resulted in what Pope Francis calls our “throwaway culture.”
Such a culture is enabled (if not fueled by) constant consumerism, and has resulted in humans becoming increasingly ignored, rejected, and disposed of. Camosy urges individuals to put aside political debates and reflect intently on their deepest values, while also embracing a Consistent Life Ethic (CLE). In doing so, people who have found themselves in a polarized culture war can finally begin to unite.
Camosy discusses the contemporary hook-up culture, reproductive technology, abortion, euthanasia, poverty, immigration, and mass incarceration. I was pleased to see he even goes a step further to also address the CLE’s concern that non-human beings are also being treated with cruelty and extensive violence. The CLE acknowledges that such brutal treatment of animals, like all violence, speaks to the fact that the world revolves around consumerism, diminishing the value of all life, human and otherwise, to “mere things” in order to generate a profit.
As I read Comosy’s theories and arguments, there were many eye-opening moments for me. For example, though I know of various state laws about the death penalty, I didn’t realize that more than 170 countries have abolished the death penalty, but the U.S., and a handful of other countries (including Iran and Saudi Arabia) continue to keep it.
I was also disturbed by some of Camosy’s information relating to reproductive biotechnology. He explained that, in the near future, embryos created through in vitro fertilization will have some chosen, while the “excess” will be thrown away. The embryos will then be edited to eliminate what those in power have decided are genetic diseases.
In each chapter, there’s a discussion on consumerism and autonomy, and how each, coupled with the use of language, serves to marginalize the sanctity of life, making it easy to discard the vulnerable. Indeed, each chapter is a reminder of how lost our country, the United States, has become.
At times I teared up, thinking about the countless loss of life, particularly that of the most innocent and helpless,the unborn. Other times, I became frustrated and enraged by what I learned. To discover that there’s a pervasiveness of abortion in many African American communities, and then read that abortion clinic owners often target communities with large percentages of racial minorities when deciding where to build their facilities, is truly infuriating.
Additionally, reading that abortion is promoted in some cities through billboard campaigns with slogans like, “Abortion is Necessary” is unnerving to say the least. Prior to reading Resisting Throwaway Culture, perhaps I could have said I found such information unfathomable, but now I understand that consumerism and autonomy apparently drive all aspects of existence, and some people have no shame. How utterly sad
This certainly all sounds bleak and disturbing. So, where is the hope that I spoke of earlier? According to Camosy, it can be found within the values of the Consistent Life Ethic itself. These values are: the inherent dignity of every person, nonviolence, hospitality, encounter, mercy, conservation of the ecological world, and offering priority to those in society who are the most vulnerable.
Beyond reminding us of these important values, Camosy reminds us that we must act–all of us. We cannot simply expect change, we must work to implement it, by first changing the way we live.
At the end of his book, Camosy’s appendix serves to highlight all the issues he discusses throughout. These issues are presented in a chart form, along with the various principles that serve to fuel them.
Though you may not agree with everything that Camosy has to say, you’ll certainly find that he has coherent arguments that get you thinking about the sanctity of life. He responds with compassion to the cultural fracturing that currently exists, while also providing a unifying framework, the Consistent Life Ethic, to protect the most vulnerable members of society.
Hopefully, Camosy’s book will be successful in its call to challenge each of us to create a culture of encounter capable of resisting what Pope Francis calls a “globalization of indifference.” If so, our society will undoubtedly become a better place for all to live.
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Mary Lou Bennett
For more of our posts from Mary Lou Bennett, see:
The Tragedy of Carrie Buck: A Review of Imbeciles / Mary Lou Bennett (book by Adam Cohen)
Mothers and Daughters / Mary Bennett (movie)
When Women Lead: The Pro-life Women’s Conference
by C.J. Williams
This year’s Pro-Life Women’s Conference had a theme: WHEN WOMEN LEAD. But what might just as well have been the unspoken theme was unity, and underlying all unity is consistency.
As the Consistent Life Network (CLN) set up to table in the enormous Pontchartrain Conference Center in New Orleans, we were surrounded by a sea of fellow advocates for life. Women poured in from as far away as California, as near as New Orleans itself, speaking more than one language and sporting more than one exterior style. Eight hundred plus registered this year, and we were excited to notice our fellow tablers focused on restoring resources and building a culture of peace consistently.
From Feminists Choosing Life of NY, whose executive director Michele Sterlace-Accorsi (who keynoted the event with verve and personal passion) to Sisters of Life, who spoke eloquently of developing our own interior silence and peace, the women spoke and heard consistency.
END WAR and STOP CALLING FEMINISM VIOLENCE FCLNY’s buttons stated boldly.
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL Rehumanize Intenational’s new stickers flashed in appropriate Spanish.
“[We are here] valuing life no matter what,” Sterlace-Accorsi rounded up her keynote, “We can cure diseases. . . but the only cure for despair, loneliness . . . and fear . . . is love.”
Within all this, Rachel MacNair and I mini-trained multiple conference goers on the peaceful but radically impactful Grassroots Defunding Planned Parenthood Campaign. Rerouting non-pregnancy healthcare needs away from PP and to the local federally qualified health clinics both aids men and women in local communities find the testing and treatment they need, and takes customers and funds away from clinics that kill, ultimately starving out PP centers across the nation.
“This is wonderful,” said one woman from Massachusetts, “I was at the huge public hearing on the abortion bill last week, but this is something I can do every day.”
Panels ran that unified and consistent gamut as well, pinpointing women’s power to lead in their communities. “Prolife? For the people at the border!” cried Fr. Craft, leading Sunday mass for the Catholics in attendance, “Are you leading with love?”
Cynthia J. Wood also addressed the #MeToo movement in her breakout, “Sexual Harrassment- A ProLife Issue Too.” A physicians’ panel, “Comprehensive Care” addressed healthcare needs and holistic nonviolent avenues for doctors also keyed in the consistent note.
A final highlight, the conference wrapped on Carrie Murray Nellis’s look at caring for and supporting birth mothers in the adoption process – and their lives going on.
“Nonviolence,” said Diane Lara from Texas, “I mean, caring about life and replacing violence. That’s why I sidewalk advocate. It’s also why I started a small organization here that works on, like, do no harm. Local agriculture and care for our environment and community. Vegan living – avoid harming animals. And never, never kill a preborn person.”
That’s unity. That’s consistency. And we were beyond pleased to participate this year – our table covered by two trailblazing women – in a conference lead by the feminine genius of unity and consistent compass
Note: This was the fourth annual conference; the 2020 conference will be June 26-28 in Indianapolis.
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For more of our posts on adventures at events, see:
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine 100th Anniversary Celebration
The Mirror-Image Counterpart of the Selfish Society
by Richard Stith
This 1978 article was originally entitled “What it Means to be Pro-Life: Toward a Political Theory for Our Movement.” It appeared in The New Human, Vol. VII No. 2, March–April 1978, a publication of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition.
It’s been lightly edited.
Does being “pro-life” mean something more than being against abortion? Every pro-lifer would, of course, answer “yes.” But exactly what else it means is not quite clear. Does it mean one is against all killing, and thus that one must also work against euthanasia, capital punishment, and war? Does it mean that one is searching for “positive alternatives” to killing, especially in the case of the unborn? Or does it mean that one is an all-around “pro-people” good guy, working to help everyone in every way?
Probably, it means all of these things to some extent. But I think it also means something more exact. I think that there’s a quite specific role that the pro-life movement has undertaken to perform. . . .
I want to argue that the specific role of our movement is to be an exact mirror-image counterpart of the “selfish society.” That is, our job is to be a kind of counterbalance to the selfish tendencies in human nature and in politics—so that we ought not to try to do all the good things, but rather only those things which we think selfishness is least likely to take care of.
In order to make my point clear, let me first outline a model of a selfish society and of the rights which it recognizes. The role of the pro-life movement will then be simply to further those rights which self-interest leaves unprotected. I’m not saying that modern society is entirely selfish, but only that it is to a large extent selfish. Therefore, we can expect it won’t ignore matters affecting self-interest. However, it may ignore matters of human dignity which it thinks not relevant to self-interest, and so it’s in these matters that the pro-life movement is most needed.
A Model of the Selfish Society
Even a totally egotistical and selfish person will grant some rights to other human beings. For example, he or she will agree in general that people shouldn’t kill each other. Why would the person agree? Simply because the person doesn’t want to be killed, and realizes that other selfish people won’t promise not to kill him or her unless he or she also promises not to kill them. Similarly, the selfish person will grant other people rights to property, because he or she wants them to respect his or her property. So even in a society made up of wholly selfish egoists, certain rights will be recognized (or at least public lip-service will be paid to them).
But will a rational selfish person extend these rights to all people? No. For if his or her motives are wholly selfish, he or she has no reason to grant any rights to someone who’s too weak to do him or her harm. Such a person will be interested in “making a deal” only with those who have something to offer to that person. For example, if someone else is too young or too weak to kill him or her, why should he or she agree not to kill that person? The selfish person has no reason at all to make such an agreement. A selfish person will recognize the rights only of those who are strong enough to hurt him or her.
We should add two additional points:
First, strength may be measured by group rather than by individual. So, for example, a selfish person will acknowledge the rights of even a very weak person, if the latter is a member of a group (say, racial, ethnic, family) which is strong enough to retaliate effectively. Or conversely, a selfish person will not grant rights even to a very strong individual, if the former belongs to a group which is strong enough to suppress the latter. So, for example, an individual slave may be very clever and strong and yet have no rights, if the combined group of selfish slave-owners is strong enough to crush any rebellion. [Editor’s note: the same applies to condemned prisoners.]
Second, even selfish people have their likes and dislikes, and they may like some other people. The can’t love these people (because love, as self-giving, is necessarily unselfish), but they might like having certain others around, because they’re pleasant or useful. Thus even selfish people, for example, may want to protect their own children, because they find them cute, or helpful, or a status symbol, or because of some other self-interested reason. Thus, even though young children are too weak to be a danger to their parents, their parents may protect them insofar as they’re “wanted” (have no handicaps which make them not pleasant or useful). Similarly, their parents may insist other adults not kill them, and in return they may agree not to kill the wanted children of other adults.
So our conclusion must be that pure self-interest will do a good job of recognizing the rights of the strong or the wanted (individually or by group). But selfish persons won’t care at all about those individuals or groups who’re both weak and unwanted.
Caring without Selfishness
Just as selfish persons are concerned about others the more they are strong or wanted, so pro-lifers ought to care about others the more they are weak and unwanted. Now, there’s no other class of human beings weaker than the unborn, and so whenever these children are also unwanted, they are totally ignored by our selfish society. It’s for this reason, I think, that pro-lifers have rightly concentrated so much on protecting the unwanted unborn child. That child is the underest of underdogs, so to speak, and so is both the most defenseless and the most oppressed (no other person today being totally killable on demand).
Pro-lifers, in other words, don’t think the unborn are more valuable than other persons are. Unlike the pro-abortion people, who give no rights to the unborn, we believe that all persons’ lives are equally worthy of reverence and protection. However, self-interest will and does take care of the rights of the strong or wanted, and so the help of the pro-life movement is less needed.
Now, with this model as a guide, I think the special vocation of our movement can be truly discerned. We’re called upon to help those who would otherwise be without help—not those who already have plenty of help.
For example, I don’t think the pro-life movement should be involved in trying to stop recombinant DNA research, even though this research, in my opinion, is a clear danger to the survival of the human race—because of the simple fact that the rights of the strong are here as menaced as are those of the weak. The strong don’t want to be wiped out, and so we can assume they’ll do a good job of limiting such research for the sake of their own self-interest—without the help of the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers shouldn’t fight against all dangers to life. They should mainly oppose the killing of the weak and unwanted.
But we must go beyond protecting the right to life of the victims of selfishness and aim at protecting all their human rights. So, for example, pro-lifers should protect not only the right of Down Syndrome kids to survive, but also their right not to be purposely or accidentally neglected—insofar as selfish adults don’t give a dam.
Obviously, this is all a matter of degree rather than of absolutes. There’s a kind of social spectrum along which we all fit. At one end are those of us who are both very strong and very wanted. These are not the concern of the pro-life movement. At the other extreme are those both very weak and very unwanted. These are our chief concern. But we ought to be more concerned to fight for others as they near the point where they have no significant defenses against more powerful individuals and groups.
Popularity?
One last crucial point: If such is our vocation we can’t ever expect to be popular. For we shall always be found on the side of the unwanted—the “niggers” or “fetuses” of every age. Even if, for example, we succeed in getting selfish persons to “like” unborn kids (say, by showing pictures of them cutely sucking their thumbs) or in getting them to see their own self-interest at stake (because, say, of a declining population or of a growing disrespect for all human life) we won’t become “socially acceptable.” For to the extent that the unborn become wanted, they become no longer our chief concern; and we must struggle in defense of those individuals and groups who have now become the most oppressed victims of a selfish society. As soon as our work is approved, it’s finished, and we are called to struggle elsewhere.
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More of our posts from Richard Stith:
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
by Rob Arner
As anyone who has embraced the consistent life ethic (CLE) will tell you, the sense of isolation, of not fitting in can be paralyzing. This is all the more true when it comes to the traditional American political spectrum, with its the left-right/conservative-progressive dichotomy. CLE political positions, linked as they are by the underlying conviction that all human beings possess inherent dignity and worth, are at odds with the standard narratives of left and right and lead to a sense of alienation from both.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, knew this sense of isolation better than most.
Day and the Poor
As a radical left-wing journalist in her young adulthood, Day developed a social conscience that led her to side consistently with the workers, the poor, and other marginalized people:
[W]hat I read made me particularly class-conscious. I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over West through slum districts, and watch the slatternly women and the unkempt children and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were. I wanted to do something toward making a “new earth wherein justice dwelleth.”
Union Square to Rome, 37
Or as she would put it in a diary entry from 1945, Day “became converted to the poor, to a love for and desire to be always with the poor and suffering— the workers of the world.” This progressive social conscience led her for a time in her youth to identify with a variety of anarchist, socialist, and communist organizations who shared her social vision for a more just society.
Day and Abortion
But as an adult convert to Catholicism, she came to marry this progressivism with a deeply-rooted traditionalist Christian faith that reinforced in her the conviction that every human life is priceless and irreplaceable. Her conversion experience prompted her to reflect on some of the earlier tragedies and mistakes of her life, especially the painful experience of having an abortion in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain her relationship with the baby’s philandering father. In 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade was decided, Day reflected on the pain abortion had caused for many women, as well as for herself:
Suddenly the thought came into my mind of abortion and even then though our entire [Protestant] pop has been taught that it was not “taking life”—“Life only began at 4 ½ months.” Legal restrictions alone made women guilt ridden. Does the changing of laws— the Supreme Court decision—do away with this instinctive feeling of guilt? My own longing for a child.
Diary entry dated April 13, 1973
Most deeply disturbing for Day was the way that many of her collaborators in the 1960s anti-war movement didn’t share her reverence for human life, lamenting how “those in this peace crowd do not hesitate to have abortions” (November 12, 1962 letter to Thomas Merton). She elaborated in another letter: “Here we are as pacifists seemingly on the side of life, and so many in the peace movement denying life” (March 3, 1967 letter to Jim Forest).
Rejecting Left and Right
Thus, Day and the Catholic Worker don’t fit neatly into the usual left/right dichotomy. Like socialist radicals, she made the cause of the poor and workers central to her vision of a just world. But like conservative traditionalists, she was deeply grieved by the prevalence of abortion in society. As this icon of Day communicates,
she combined traditionally “conservative” methods and emphases, such as charity, the works of mercy, and an emphasis on personal responsibility to address social needs, with traditionally “liberal/progressive” methods of social change, such as protest and nonviolent civil disobedience.
As a Catholic Worker from Philadelphia once explained to me, the Catholic Worker isn’t a “liberal” or “conservative” organization, but rather a radical one. While conservatives are generally happy with “the system” with only minor tweaks, and “liberals” would focus on making structural changes within the system in order to make it work, a radical organization such as the Catholic Worker is convinced that the system doesn’t work and is so fundamentally flawed and corrupted by sin that it can’t.
Personalism
For Dorothy Day, the philosophy that best expressed these seemingly divergent convictions in a coherent and intellectually satisfying manner was “personalism,” a philosophy imported from French Catholicism by her mentor and Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. At its root, personalism stresses three things:
(1) The invaluable worth and dignity of the individual person;
(2) The fundamentally social nature of the person (that is, persons are always “persons-in-community”); and
(3) the moral imperative of personal responsibility, which stressed persons, rather than institutions or ideologies or rulers, as primary moral agents and the essential subjects of history.
Personalism means that persons, rather than ideas, agendas, or any other abstraction, are what ultimately matter. All other issues are subordinated to the needs of the person standing before you. Personalism for Day was also an authentic third way between the twin dangers of liberal capitalist individualism and person-negating communist collectivism. Both, she felt, in different ways, devalue the person or make the person’s importance subordinate to some greater cause or conflict.
This synthesis of the individual and the social was so novel in American society that it aroused great suspicion from both the right and the left. Robert Ellsberg observes that personalism was so outside the American experience that “readers from both the left and the right often found it difficult to locate the movement along the conventional political spectrum… To many seasoned observers, the very idiosyncrasy of these positions suggested a smokescreen, designed to obscure the true intentions of its proponents.” Indeed the FBI maintained a surveillance file on Day for her entire career as a Catholic Worker, and her resolute pacifism lost the Catholic Worker newspaper over a third of its subscriber base during World War II.
Day came to understand that adopting a personalist outlook on life meant losing a lot of friends who didn’t share her same core values. As she wrote in a 1943 letter to a fellow Catholic Worker, “Personalism isolates you in this mad world!” But it also offered her a radically open view toward others, which, for her as a Christian, meant seeing Jesus equally in all people.
Reflecting on an upcoming trip to Cuba, which was fresh off Fidel Castro’s communist revolutionary takeover, she wrote: “I go to see Christ in my brother the Cuban, and that means Christ in the revolution[ary], [and] Christ in the counter-revolutionary. But to both sides, being violently partisan, such an attitude will be considered reasonable by neither” (Diary entry, September 2, 1962). Nevertheless, she clung to the belief that personalism offered the best – indeed the only – just and humane way to create “a new social order wherein justice dwelleth, which is neither capitalist nor communist nor totalitarian in any way” (February 7, 1969 letter to Karl Meyer).
Personalism and the CLE
Because of her personalism, Day was an early adopter of what came to be the consistent life ethic. The infinite value of the person, Day believed, meant that something eternal and irreplaceable was lost when a person is killed through neglect or belligerence, and she took a solid stand for her entire life against all killing of human persons. As Daniel Berrigan put it in the foreword to Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, “What held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars— into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.”
Day herself would connect the issues in a way that is now so familiar to those of us who embrace the CLE. “We are aghast at the continuing and spreading warfare in the world— the waste of human life, and at home too with abortion used to save the resulting consequences of our acts from suffering, from the cross we impose upon them” (1971 letter to Daniel and Philip Berrigan).
Dorothy Day’s long career as a Catholic Worker stands as a testament to the possibilities that can open up when we reject the boxes forced upon us by the prevailing society. The CLE is a personalist outlook, one which embraces the inestimable value of each and every human life and stands in ready defense against any threat that would destroy it or force it to exist in poverty and degradation. It combines the best of the progressive social vision of justice and equity for all people with what is good from the conservative esteem for and defense of every life, “from womb to tomb.” Only such visions that can bridge the divides and make common cause toward a better world can ever come close to achieving Day’s goal of creating “a new society from within the shell of the old.”
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For similar posts, see:
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)
Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
Abby Johnson Remembers Dan Berrigan
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero
For more of our posts from Rob Arner, see:
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
The Real Meaning of Mother’s Day
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
by Rachel MacNair
The recent live-action version of the movie Aladdin didn’t deal much with specific consistent life issues. The only one brought up was war, and that was only because the villain wanted it, though never got beyond planning. Yet the fleshing out of the characters, compared to the 1992 cartoon version, led to a theme about power. The movie uses the theory of power that nonviolence has always been based on. And of course nonviolence has always connected all of our issues.
Hungry for Magical Power
We can start with how startled the genie was to discover that his new “master” wasn’t a greedy power-hungry person, as the genie was accustomed to. His first words to Aladdin were, “Oh Great One who summons me,” a line that would be more expected by the kind of people who try to find the genie’s lamp. As part of the more realistic plot lines that go into live-action movies, as opposed to cartoons, people who seek out the lamp would be those kinds of characters.
It seems funny to refer to a story with a genie doing magic as “more realistic.” But it’s common in live action films based on previous animation that the implications of the story are better thought out.
Instead, the genie finds in Aladdin a young man who actually asks the genie what he, the genie, would wish for – a whole new idea. And what the genie wanted was his freedom. Naturally. And for the first time, he found a man who wasn’t quite so power-hungry, who said that for his third wish he would give the genie his freedom.
Yet the genie had seen what power of the magical kind does to people. He clearly had bitter experience. He was cynical enough to expect this would happen with Aladdin as well. When it came time for that third wish, the genie turned out to be correct: Aladdin had gotten a taste of power, and couldn’t let it go. In the original cartoon, the issue was that Aladdin was lying to everybody. In this version, the idea that power had gone to his head was more to the point.
Aladdin’s first wish was to be a prince. This wasn’t for the sake of being a prince, but for the sake of impressing a specific woman, Princess Jasmine. He’d fallen in love with her, but she was legally obligated to marry only a prince. Therefore, he needed to be a prince.
In the original cartoon version, Aladdin got “dolled up” and then, by golly, he was a prince. The live-action version paid a little more attention to what that means: where was his country? Ababwa was made up, of course, so the question of whether he was actually a prince, simply because he had such impressive riches, was asked.
This becomes all the more important when the villain, Jafar, steals the lamp he originally sent Aladdin to get, and uses it in the very way that the genie feared. And while in the cartoon version the genie was clearly unhappy about having to fulfill Jafar’s demands, in this version, there was more: you could see in the genie’s face how very much it pains him to have to do this yet again.
The Nonviolent Rebellion
Jafar wished to be sultan. And the genie took the royal clothes off the Sultan and put them on Jafar, put Jafar on the Sultan’s throne, and stood by ready for enforcement. So the guards concluded that their loyalties must now shift, because the magic had happened.
But here is where the nonviolence theory of power comes in: Princess Jasmine made a direct appeal to the guards. Where was their loyalty really? Was it not up to the people to determine a ruler, and not up to someone who managed to find a genie and make a wish?
The guards realized this was so. Who was wearing the clothes didn’t matter. Who was sitting on the throne didn’t matter. They had loyalty to the same man they had pledged loyalty to before.
Neither Aladdin nor Jafar were able to become a prince or a sultan by magic. Magic isn’t how power works.
Power works because people cooperate with those in power – primarily, because they understand the power to be legitimate. Tyrants can strike fear in people, but that’s a very difficult way to maintain people’s cooperation. Only an understanding of legitimacy keeps power without tremendous and unsustainable inputs of violence over time.
In this case, the withdrawal of power happened right away. But then, the illegitimacy of the power grab was quite blatant; in real life, clearly stolen elections are common triggers for nonviolent uprisings. In front of Jafar, Jasmine pointed this problem out to the guards. They could see it immediately, and responded accordingly.
Jasmine
The figure of Jasmine herself has become quite a bit more powerful in the recent version. The new song for this movie, Speechless, is a passionate song in which she declares that she will not be speechless. (See a clip or full lyrics)
But her power doesn’t come from a desire to lord it over others. It comes from a compassionate desire to help others. Her power, using compassion, would be seen as more legitimate, and therefore easier to sustain in a willing population.
Her father, the Sultan, sees this. Earlier when she had proposed that as his only child she should be the next sultan, and that she had the needed skills, he had responded that a woman wouldn’t be sultan. While not illegal, it was against tradition. Yet after she demonstrated how courageous and effective she was, in the face of a magical onslaught, he saw that she would in fact make a very good sultan. He told her she would be the next one.
The Third Wish
As for Aladdin, he realized the danger of leaving a genie with magical powers that the genie himself would rather not use. He also realized that he’d been slipping into a power-grabbing mindset, and Jafar had just given him a model of how horrific that road could be. So he did keep his promise and he used his third wish to free the genie.
This was the same plot point in both the cartoon and live-action movies. Yet in the recent version, the genie was stunned because he wasn’t expecting it. He thought Aladdin had become like the other “masters” he had had, since Aladdin had pretty much said so earlier. At least, the genie would have thought, what Aladdin wanted was relatively benign. And Aladdin’s desires were a huge relief after dealing with Jafar (a problem solved through a trick from Aladdin that took advantage of Jafar’s blind power hunger).
Aladdin sacrificed using his third wish for himself and instead used it to free the genie. This showed his compassion. He went back out on the street in his street clothes; a sacrifice for a friend is what he intended to do.
And of course it was that compassion that was a major appeal to Princess Jasmine.
That and his knowledge of what things were like on the street would be a tremendous help in her work as sultan. She was the one qualifid to do the work, and he recognized that (another major appeal for her), but he had a contribution to make as someone not in the upper class.
Conclusion: Hollywood
The feminist sensibilities in Disney movies are improving considerably over what they used to be. While Snow White in the 1930s sang “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” the cartoon Jasmine didn’t want to be pushed into marriage with a pompous man. With this latest movie, she developed into a Jasmine who wanted and deserved a leadership role.
Yet it’s still common in Hollywood that women gain equality by becoming as violent as men. Rather than catching on that violence is bad for the men committing it, along with everyone else, the penchant in many movies to use fantasy violence as a fantasy problem-solver is still strong, and shoving women into that same mold isn’t really feminist progress.
It was refreshing to see a strong woman leader who wasn’t merely nonviolent in the sense of not being violent, but who assertively used nonviolence principles to solve the violent problem in front of her.
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For more of our posts on movie and TV reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
Life-Affirming Doctors
Part 1: Let Everybody be Able to Find a Safe Doctor
The author prefers to remain anonymous because, as she indicates, she doesn’t want her medical condition known to her family.
My primary care physician retired, so I have to find a new one. This is an opportunity for me to pick a new one who will be safer with regard to my wish to stay alive until my body dies naturally. My state is going to impose “assisted suicide” within two years, everybody concedes, so it’s not too soon to line up a doctor who will not recommend I submit to it and who does not write fatal prescriptions for anybody.
Non-religious people like me will be especially vulnerable. Everybody faces the prospect of health care people and social workers telling us: “For people in your condition, our business is to help you die. If you are so irrational you want to commit the personal irresponsibility of living until your body dies naturally, speak to your priest.” Well, I don’t have a priest.
On the other hand, when I told a state secular right-to-life organization about my challenge described in the first paragraph, the only direction they knew to point me in was to the Catholic Medical Association. But I’m not a Catholic. I might contact that organization out of desperation (after first seeing whether the so-called reactionary branch of my own nominal religion has its own medical association), but I don’t want my “advisors” to see me as conversion material. In addition, some people are turned off by certain religious affiliations, some by all religious affiliations.
Furthermore, what opportunity is there for people who aren’t in a specific religious denomination to find out about a service run by that denomination? Has the idea of an overall directory of safe doctors never occurred to many people in pro-life offices because their own religion already provides an equivalent service? Do any of them provide such a service? By considering religious medical associations sufficient, one is cutting out many people; one is reducing the chance that more people who want to continue living after being declared death-eligible will do so. One is also reducing the chance that people who want to carry a pre-born child with a terminal illness to term or sustain the life of a severely disabled family member will actually do so.
Moreover, unfortunately, religiously-oriented pro-life people I’ve had experience with sometimes inadvertently include in their statements things that alienate me.
I have a cancer that was removed by operation but is considered likely to recur in someone my age. However, its rate of growth is not set. I hope that if it grows again, it will do so extremely slowly and take pauses of dormancy. Right now I can function normally, though I must see doctors more frequently than I had to before my diagnosis.
I have told neither my blood relatives nor most of my friends about my disease, and a major reason is that all indications point to them having the mainstream attitude that “suffering” is a capital crime and “once you start suffering, we plan to start hoping that you’ll quickly die.” Imagine one’s loved ones wishing one dead!
I certainly haven’t knowingly told clergy people of my native denomination. It has embraced death-hastening and abortion so thoroughly that I might no longer have the right to call myself a member of it. Imagine one’s clergy person telling an ill or handicapped person that it is a sin to stay alive!
Needed is a set up where everybody can find a safe doctor, clandestinely if necessary. Even if the number of safe doctors diminishes, people should be able to find the ones that remain.
Needed is a national database of life-respecting medical practitioners. Even if most of its input comes from religious organizations, it should not be identified with any one denomination, and should accept input from religiously “unaffiliated” doctors as well. It should not replace the religious directories; it should be in addition to them. It should be available in every pro-life organization’s, doctor’s, and volunteer’s office. But also, its existence should be disseminated to the general public.
Part 2: Let Everybody have a Conscience
by Richard Stith, commenting on the court decision in Ontario, Canada, to compel doctors to participate in euthanasia.
Patients’ rights as well as doctors’ rights are at stake. Patients have a right to what they consider to be a good doctor, one whose conscience does not permit him or her to participate in what the patient considers to be a heinous crime. The Ontario decision deeply undermines the doctor-patient relationship of trust.
Furthermore, not only is conscience needed in order to resist the oppression of evil societal orders, like those of the Nazis, but it also functions to undergird the legitimacy of law in daily life in a just society. Without conscience to provide deep legitimacy, all law becomes just a set of technical requirements to be ignored whenever you won’t get caught.
Why would the Ontario Court not recognize that it’s encouraging sociopathic behavior by its decision? This for me is the most interesting political and philosophical question.
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For another of our blog posts on defending one’s self against euthanasia, see:
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill: The Connection between Lethal Injection and Assisted Suicide
Jacqueline H. Abernathy
by Jacqueline H. Abernathy, Ph.D., MSSW
In a recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, comedian and host John Oliver offered a scathing (albeit profane) rebuke of lethal injection as a means of execution in U.S. states with capital punishment. He detailed the issues with the drugs employed and how ineffective they are at killing: essentially torturing the condemned with a prolonged death intended to make the process appear more palatable for everyone else. With each point he made, he always came back to his premise: the lethal means are irrelevant because capital punishment is simply wrong.
I agree completely.
But then he said something quite disturbing: He claimed that assisted suicide is somehow different because terminally ill people are easier to kill.
I’ll give you a moment to try to reconcile that with his larger point. That moment is over, because it doesn’t matter how much time you have. One simply cannot reconcile the two.
Lethal injection supplies the same class of drugs as assisted suicide does. It uses the same means toward the same end: premature and imposed death. How then is killing an ill person any different from killing anyone else?
Since he brought it up, let’s clear up the confusion about how assisted suicide works. He detailed how lethal injections are inhumane, but what distinguishes assisted suicide from traditional euthanasia is that traditional euthanasia is a lethal injection whereas assisted suicide is self-administered oral ingestion of these same drugs. Hence the drugs used in assisted suicide — which have included pentobarbital, the same one that has been used in lethal injection — are an okay option when self-administered by someone who’s dying; just not for those sentenced to death. Because it’s faster or more effective at killing, says Oliver. Only there is one big problem: it’s not.
Oliver mentioned assisted suicide only to demonstrate that it supposedly offers a more humane alternative to lethal injection, which he decried as barbaric and cruel. The show presented harrowing details about how the condemned may remain conscious during their executions since the drug responsible for inducing a coma can often fail. He explained how limited availability of certain lethal drugs can inspire the use of creative alternatives with horrific consequences. Finally, he lamented how long and torturous the process was, lasting not just a few minutes as intended but in one case, nearly two hours.
What Oliver apparently does not know is that every one of his points also apply to assisted suicide.
I can concede the logic that ill people are more fragile than healthy ones, but it doesn’t take a medical degree to know that intravenous delivery of any drug is more effective than oral intake.
Reports indicate that some people who choose assisted suicide vomit their bitter lethal dose before it can be absorbed, which is why anti-nausea drugs often accompany the barbiturate overdose. People do sometimes regain consciousness just like during an execution. Just as drug makers don’t want to be involved in executions, many of them have also inflated their prices to discourage use in assisted suicide. This practice leads many people to choose cheaper drugs with consequences akin to those experienced when the state looks for more readily-available drugs for lethal injections. In both cases, death takes far longer. And while I cringe that executions have taken up to 2 hours, assisted suicide can take up to 4 days.
Oliver mentioned assisted suicide only to make his point, while failing to recognize assisted suicide’s own inhumanity. He also mentioned alternatives to lethal injection like opioid overdose and the problems associated with that. His goal was not to defend any means of killing in executions, as he always circled back to his premise: there is no right way to do a wrong thing. So how then is assisted suicide not also a very wrong thing?
Oliver’s obliviousness is typical of the mental gymnastics required for justifying other forms of legal violence: that the violence he supports is not comparable to what he condemns. So let’s make it comparable. Would he withdraw his opposition to lethal injection if the death row inmates were as ill as those who choose assisted suicide?
The answer is clearly no. It doesn’t become okay to kill a person simply because they’re sick and therefore easier to kill. This suggests a double standard between ill people and inmates, when we actually have mechanisms to treat terminally ill inmates with dignity. This is called compassionate release, and exists at the federal level and in most U.S. states.
There’s hope that the horror stories Oliver highlighted will result in judges ruling that lethal injection is unconstitutional on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual punishment. But explain this: how is what deemed to be inhumane for convicted murderers somehow acceptable for the ill and dying? It clearly isn’t. Oliver was right when he said humane society doesn’t purposefully kill. Yet medical fragility is an exception? If anything, a humane society treats those more vulnerable with greater care rather than using their illness to justify their violent and unnatural end.
Oliver said it best when he concluded: “there is no perfect way for the government to kill people.” What he fails to mention is that there’s also no perfect way for people to kill themselves. I hope John Oliver will rethink his defense of violence toward the terminally ill and extend to them the same concern he has for human beings sentenced to die by execution. Assisted suicide is just as macabre as lethal injection, but less effective at killing. Just as in capital punishment, the means are irrelevant. Killing humans is wrong even if the human is terminally ill. Even if that human is yourself.
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For more of our blog posts against euthanasia, see:
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled by Sarah Terzo
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life by Richard Stith
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean? by Rachel MacNair