The Real Meaning of Mother’s Day
by Rob Arner
Mother’s Day is the singular day when the culture turns its attention to honor the mothers among us – our own, or those whom we admire. It’s nearly impossible to get a table at a nice restaurant to take your mother out without reservations far in advance. Hallmark and other greeting card companies make a killing by selling us $5 cards with sweet poems and flowery pictures on them.
And we all go along, because we all agree our moms are special and that motherhood is a vital role in society with responsibilities that extend well beyond the nine months of pregnancy (and interminable hours of labor!) Mothers are special, and setting aside a day to honor them just makes sense.
Minister Ghazanfar speaks on Mother’s Day in Afghanistan
But what is the origin of the modern observance of Mother’s Day? Where did it come from? The answer may surprise you, because it comes from a woman of remarkable determination and conviction whose experience of human cruelty caused her to initiate the Mother’s Day movement as a prophetic form of social protest against the savagery of war.
It all goes back to the woman who is most famous for writing the song that became the de facto war anthem of the Union Army during the Civil War: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Julia Ward Howe, New England socialite and social reformer, was a thoughtful woman of deep moral convictions whose campaigns on behalf of the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and economic justice are well known. Her passion and devotion to her causes is undeniable. But less well-known is her dramatic change of heart with respect to “righteous” warfare.
In the run-up to the Civil War, Howe was one of the most ardent and vocal abolitionists. In 1861, the first year of the war, the song “John Brown’s Body” (about the radical abolitionist who had raided Harper’s Ferry, MD in 1860) was quickly becoming a popular marching song for Union troops. But their commanders, while loving the catchy and inspiring tune, were less enthusiastic about the effect on morale of their troops singing about how “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave.”
Howe heard the soldiers singing this song as they marched by her home one day in November 1861, and her companion, a Christian pastor, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, suggested to her that she write new lyrics for the song to make it more uplifting and compelling as a battle anthem. After a flash of late-night inspiration, Howe composed the text of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in order to inject her fervent abolitionist cause with a militant Christian spirituality about the righteous vengeance of God upon the wicked. Perhaps most compelling, certain stanzas of the Battle Hymn of the Republic are written to foster a sense of the soldiers’ cooperation with God in this holy cause. For instance:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
This tune is thus reminiscent of a holy war paradigm, or a crusade, completely identifying the singers with God’s righteous cause. So sure was Howe that the Union cause was holy, justified, and righteous that her theology injects this passion and fervency directly into the hearts of those soldiers who would sing the inspirational tune.
But this was not the end of Howe’s writing career.
In the aftermath of the devastating American Civil War, in which well over 600,000 lives were lost, as well as the carnage of the Franco-Prussian War soon thereafter, Howe was horrified at the human toll these conflicts exacted. In the 1870’s, Howe began a one-woman peace crusade, having repudiated the militancy of her optimistic self-righteous “Battle Hymn” years. She saw the effect of actual human combat and came to see war as just as devastating, if not more so, than the other human social evils she had previously dedicated herself to fighting.
Particularly devastating to Howe were the cries of the grieving mothers she met. These women, who had lost their sons in the senseless carnage of the Civil War, were her inspiration. In 1872, Howe set about campaigning for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” as a way of raising awareness of the fact that every nameless soldier and civilian who had lost his or her life in the horrors of the war had left behind a weeping mother.
The day was, however, mainly intended as a call to unite women against war. It was due to her efforts that in 1873, women in 18 cities in America held a Mother’s Day for Peace gathering. See the original Mother’s Day Proclamation.
Howe rigorously championed the cause of declaring Mother’s Day as an official holiday. She held meetings every year at Boston on Mother’s Peace Day and took care to see that the day was well-observed. The celebrations died out when she turned her efforts to working for peace and women’s rights in other ways. Howe failed in her attempt to gain the formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace. Her remarkable contribution in the establishment of Mother’s Day, however, remains in that her Mother’s Day dedicated to peace was the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day celebrations. To acknowledge Howe’s achievements, a stamp was issued in her honor in 1988.
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More of our blog posts from Rob Arner:
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Rejoicing in the Gospel of Life?
Tony Masalonis
compiled by Tony Masalonis from a discussion by (in alphabetical order) Tony Masalonis, Bill Samuel, Julia Smucker, Lisa Stiller, Richard Stith
Consistent Life Network blog posts express the opinion of the authors only. Although several of our Board members contributed to it, this post does not represent an official statement by Consistent Life as an organization.
On April 9, 2018, the Vatican released Pope Francis’ “apostolic exhortation” Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad). We aren’t a Catholic organization, but many CLN members are Catholic, and 1.2 billion other people are, so we pay attention when the Catholic Church speaks on our issues.
Gaudete is broad, containing meditations on popular Gospel passages and examples of how to live “holiness” in everyday life. But one part touches directly on what we as consistent-lifers hold dear: Francis refers to the “harmful ideological error” made by those who criticize other people’s work for justice, saying these critics are wrong to act as though:
the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend. Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred…. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection. ….
We often hear it said that, with respect to relativism and the flaws of our present world, the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue. Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the “grave” bioethical questions. That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable, but not a Christian, for whom the only proper attitude is to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children.
These words have raised Catholic and non-Catholic eyebrows. In particular, much has been written about the apparent equating of abortion and immigration. Some commentators, including abortion defenders, praise Francis for coming out of what they consider the dark ages, while others sharply criticize him for failing to clearly restate Catholic teaching that abortion and euthanasia are intrinsic evils while other issues are matters of “prudential judgment.”
Even within CLN leadership, we have different takes on Gaudete’s treatment of life issues. In this post we cover some different perspectives within our group, acknowledging that as consistent-lifers, we firmly agree about protecting life and we (perhaps cautiously) celebrate the Catholic Church’s increasing support for the Consistent Life Ethic (CLE).
You Can’t Have Well-being without Being
Some of us acknowledge the validity of “traditional” pro-lifers’ concerns about Gaudete. For most of the endangered people the Pope mentions, their death isn’t the main concern. Rather, we’re concerned primarily about their misery. So Francis isn’t focusing on universal and consistent opposition to all lethal violence.
It’s wrong to ignore the plight of migrants. But it’s also wrong to put economic well-being on a par with life itself.
While none of us in the CLE movement think abortion is the only issue, it’s reasonable for some folks to consider it the key issue. It’s currently the largest example of mass killing in the world, and it involves families attacking their own members.
It’s like people in the U.S. South in the 1950s saying that overcoming segregation was overwhelmingly the most important issue. They’d be wrong to forget other issues, but their courage and stamina should be praised, rather than belittling them as merely concerned about race.
Although Francis clearly asserts the importance of defending the rights of unborn babies, a few sentences later he appears to mock the seriousness of “bioethical issues” by putting scare quotes around the word “grave.” This punctuation choice seems in tension with consistent-life concerns about direct killing.
Many inconsistent pro-lifers are pro-war and pro-death penalty, and closed-minded about migrants. They can and should be criticized for that. But they’re perfectly consistent about opposing the deliberate and culturally-approved killing of the innocent and helpless, shown by their strong, counter-cultural opposition to killing unborn (and newborn) infants and old/sick people – often at great cost to themselves.
“All Lives are Equally Sacred”
Some of us think the Pope is understandably frustrated at people waving the pro-life banner while showing little concern for social justice issues that impact human well-being. He’s also careful to note for the social justice crowd that the lives of the unborn are critically important.
The distinction made above between causing death and causing misery is much weaker than one might suppose. Many suffering from conditions like poverty, trafficking, and forced migration die because of them. Human dignity is a theme in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) going back to Rerum Novarum (1891, generally considered the founding document of modern CST), and CST holds that the right to life includes not only the right not to be directly killed, but also the right to a dignified life. Sanctity of life and quality of life cannot be neatly separated.
Whether or not one reads Gaudete as suggesting abortion opponents are indifferent to lives of the born, it’s evident that many people see abortion as the one issue. Many are Catholics.
Feticide isn’t the only case where a family destroys its own members: it’s the same with euthanasia. And abortion, as horrifying as it is, isn’t the only form of mass killing. War, genocide, and terrorism are excruciatingly common. Euthanasia and executions are rampant in some countries. All the forms of violence we oppose kill in great numbers. Most chilling, the potential death toll of world-wide war is over seven billion – the entire human race.
Consistent-Lifers United in Diversity
Does Gaudete reaffirm the CLE? Negate it? Both? Neither? Parts of the document seem at first to be a ringing affirmation – and then we notice two omissions: the death penalty and war (“peace” is mentioned many times, but in a general sense.) Instead of these forms of direct killing, the Pope includes those who aren’t targets of intentionally lethal violence. We must be equally concerned to protect their lives – but their lives aren’t quite as directly menaced.
It would have also been nice to see more about connections between life issues. Many anti-abortion people are so “single issue,” they don’t see connections between issues, especially poverty. If we address poverty, we begin to address abortion. The 1950s “single-issue” anti-segregationists, unlike many traditional pro-lifers, understood links between issues; they got that poverty was wrapped up in segregation, and that desegregation was a way out of poverty. Talking about abortion and poverty from this perspective might make the document more palatable, even convincing, to some traditional pro-lifers.
However, these deficiencies don’t make Gaudete a bad document. Every statement needn’t address every issue or every angle. Francis and other Popes have addressed other lethal violence well elsewhere. We ourselves don’t talk about every single life issue in everything we say. Popes too are free to focus on a few threatened populations at a time without losing their CLE credentials!
From an article on Gaudete et Exsultate in America Magazine
Towards Harmony
As consistent-lifers, we strive to speak to single-issue abortion opponents just like we should speak to single-issue death penalty opponents or single-issue pacifists: “Hey, folks, it’s really important what you’re doing, and we see why you focus on that. But here are important additional steps some feel called to take in the same direction. We hope you’ll join us, but if you’ve got your hands full already, at least let us know you’re with us.” We should not in any way put these people down, publicly or even in our own minds.
We have different opinions about how successfully Pope Francis has adopted this CLE attitude. In context, his critique of inconsistency shows he’s not denying the gravity of bioethical concerns – certainly not that of abortion, as he says explicitly. Rather, he’s saying they don’t override all other concerns about human life and dignity. It’s true, though, that those quotes around “grave” could potentially be misleading.
But we definitely all agree that building up our fellow workers for life and peace in a “cooperative spirit of peace, reconciliation, and respect in protecting the unprotected,” as our mission statement reads, is the way to go. And although some of us think Pope Francis missed a chance to holistically proclaim a consistent ethic of life in this new document, perhaps by more unequivocally declaring abortion’s gravity and by addressing war and executions, we continue to applaud his excellent overall track record of standing up for all life.
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For more of our blog posts from different religions, see:
Atheism: The Vital Need for Diversity
Christianity: The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
Hinduism: Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals
Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times
See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Finding Common Ground on and Learning from World War II
by John Whitehead
Writing on this blog, Consistent Life Vice President Rachel MacNair recently examined several moral issues related to the Second World War and how we interpret and remember that war today (see The Darkest Hour—“Glorifying” War?). An observation in that piece that struck me was that when a nonviolence advocate discusses war with someone who supports it, a war supporter who “understands things as complicated might be easier to talk into alternative methods of solving problems.” I agree that appreciation of an issue’s complexity can make someone more open to alternate views, even if complete agreement isn’t possible. I offer my own thoughts on how World War II’s moral complexity offers the possibility of finding some common ground between opponents and supporters of the war.
Those who say the Allied war effort in World War II was justified and those who say it was not, even if they can’t agree on this question, can agree on other moral aspects of the war. This area of agreement isn’t merely of historical interest, but is important to remember as both groups consider how to respond to contemporary conflicts.
The crucial point both sides can agree on is this: while stopping the Axis was a just cause (and setting aside whether an alternative to war was possible), the Allied war effort killed huge numbers of civilians. Moreover, to some degree, the Allied war effort didn’t even fulfill its intended goal of saving lives from the Axis. If I were to draw a general principle from this point, it would be
War, even waged in the most just of causes, typically involves killing those whom even the war-makers should recognize as innocents.
The three main Allied nations—Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—all killed many civilians in their war effort against the Axis. Richard B. Frank, in his work Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire estimates that the United States’ bombing of Japan, including the infamous nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killed over 400,000 Japanese civilians. Also, Britain, and to a lesser extent the United States, bombed German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden—Frank estimates between 300,000 and 593,000 German civilians died in the Allied bombing.
The Nagasaki memorial at ground zero of the atomic bomb in 1945
The Soviet army, while advancing through Eastern Europe into Germany, killed ethnic German civilians through both bombing and more face-to-face methods such as shooting them. Sexual assault of civilian women was also widespread, as was expelling Germans from their homes.
These Soviet actions were the first stage in a prolonged post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. Over 400,000 ethnic Germans may have died as a result of Allied mistreatment. During the war, Stalin also took the opportunity to settle scores with various ethnic groups within the Soviet Union he suspected of disloyalty, having them killed or deported.
To be sure, the number of civilians killed by Allied policy was smaller than the millions of civilians who died because of Axis policies—and the millions more who may have died had the Axis won—but this is no justification for ignoring or justifying Allied atrocities.
Moreover, even setting aside the means by which the Allies achieved victory, the victory’s ultimate consequences are ambiguous. While post-war Europe, for all its problems, was a more just, less violent place than Nazi-dominated Europe would have been, post-war Asia was a different story. Imperial Japan’s rule in Asia was comparable to Nazi rule in its cruelty and violence, but did Allied victory replace Japanese rule with something better?
Many Asian nations liberated from Japan met one or more of the following fates in the following decades: 1) European colonial rule that provoked wars for independence (as in French Indochina); 2) rule by home-grown dictators and strongmen sometimes as brutal as the Japanese (Mao Zedong in China being the most prominent example); or 3) becoming ground zero for the proxy wars the now-divided Allied powers fought among themselves (as with wars in Korea and Vietnam).
Jizo statues in a Tokyo cemetery, after a Mizuko kuyō (水子供養) or fetus memorial service
Even the most noticeable “success story” of post-war Asia, the democratic and prosperous Japan rebuilt by the United States, has a much darker side that should concern pro-lifers: to cope with the needs of a large population amid a war-devastated economy, Japan took steps to control its population by legalizing abortion, through the euphemistically named “Eugenic Protection Law” of 1948 (which occupying American authorities didn’t block). Within seven years, abortions peaked in Japan at 1.1 million.
If I consider how many people, especially civilians, died to achieve Allied victory and how unjust the post-war order in Asia was, I am not left with a strong impression of war’s ability to defeat injustice. I am left with a sense of war’s terrible costs and moral compromises and how even victory leads to confused, uncertain outcomes.
If a war with as just as cause as the Second World War can be so problematic, how much more so are the wars, past and present, fought for ambiguous causes? The overall impression is one of war’s inadequacy as a tool of achieving justice. This is a lesson that everyone, both those who oppose the Allied war effort and those who believe the war effort was ultimately necessary, would do well to learn.
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For more of our commentaries on the world wars, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Self-Defeating Violence: The Case of the First World War
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
Tribalism: A Major Obstacle for Building Bridges
by Rachel MacNair
Rachel MacNair
Two media personalities, one right-wing, the other left-wing, have recently been in the public eye for their comments on abortion. Writer Kevin Williamson has been in the news because he was hired by The Atlantic and then, before starting, was dismissed because of abortion-related comments. Also, John Oliver in his comedy show, Last Week Tonight, did a segment on crisis pregnancy centers. Coming from differing views on abortion, both men’s behavior illustrates what David Brooks has called tribalism. In psychology we refer to this as ingroup/outgroup dynamics.
Right-Wing: Hanging Mothers?
Kevin Williamson, a long-time columnist for the National Review, recently lost an opportunity to be a regular columnist for The Atlantic because of his views on women who have abortions. In a Tweet, now deleted, Williamson apparently said that both doctors involved in abortion and women who had abortions should be hanged. He said something similar in a podcast.
Williamson was placed for adoption, so he’s one of the millions of people who could have been aborted and weren’t. Abortion survivors of this kind might well have emotional reactions as they identify with the baby they once were – that’s one of the many horrific outcomes of mass feticide. But it contradicts the general view of pro-life activists, and thereby misrepresents the movement to outsiders who don’t know this. The title of the podcast episode, after all, is “Everyone Hates Kevin – Again.”
I wrote a blog post about why it is that we pro-lifers in general don’t favor punishing women for getting abortions, with added consistent life insight (Who the Law Targets).
This recent news brought to my mind my personal experience when I met Kevin Williamson, which illustrates the point of how “tribalism” works as an obstacle.
Immediately after the 2016 election, I went on two seminar cruises, each one of an opposing “side” – one with liberal The Nation magazine and the other with conservative National Review. A story I haven’t before told about the National Review cruise concerns the session they had on abortion. Here, only pro-life views were presented. Unlike every other session, the introducer did mention a caveat that they knew not everyone in the audience agreed with the pro-life perspective. Indeed, my assigned roommate was pro-abortion and argued the issue with me.
They had originally had a panel of three that included Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life. But she was offered work on the Trump transition team that was meeting right then, so they needed a substitute.
Well before the session, I saw Ramesh Ponnuru, who’s a writer and senior editor on their staff. He was delighted to see me again; he remembered having invited me to speak many years before at Princeton University when he was a student there and I was president of Feminists for Life of America. I offered to take Charmaine’s place on the panel for the session. Ponnuru said that seemed like an excellent idea to him, and he would ask other staff about it.
They didn’t take me up on the offer. With an all-male panel, they used Kevin Williamson instead.
Top left: Kevin Williamson. Top right: Ramesh Ponnuru. Bottom: Charmaine Yoest
As I sat in the audience, I was antsy, knowing the answers I would have given had I been up there. Answers I knew were more effective with the audiences I speak to. Given that not everyone in the audience was pro-life, and that many who were pro-life weren’t well-versed on the topic and needed those better arguments for their own discussions with friends, a good presentation was really needed.
Here we have a case where a woman with expertise, who could have been replaced with another woman with expertise, was instead replaced by a man who is not as well versed in the usual pro-life arguments. While I may be in the pro-life “ingroup,” which is why I hoped my offer would be accepted, I’m not in the conservative “ingroup.”
Left-Wing: Let ‘em Lie!
I like watching John Oliver. I normally watch every segment of his I can on the web (I don’t have cable). But I must admit I didn’t watch the segment on crisis pregnancy centers, broadcast April 8, 2018. I had read a news story on it, and I knew I’d never be able to enjoy watching Oliver again if I saw that segment. The premise of it was that Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) are allowed to lie, and do lie. If they say something, such as that there’s a link between abortion and women later developing breast cancer, then to Oliver’s mind, the fact that they said it must mean it’s a lie. Some “pro-choice” organizations, after all, have said that the abortion/breast cancer link is not so, and therefore, to Oliver, it’s not so.
John Oliver
John Oliver normally goes after the people who are dishonorably making money or are otherwise callous or violent to vulnerable people. This is why I like watching him. The idea that he has flipped that ethic upside down in this CPC segment has clearly not occurred to him. This is another example of ingroup/outgroup tribalism at work.
I keep up with several late-night comedians; it helps me deal with political stresses, as long as they stay away from the topic of abortion. But I do observe that they make frequent use of cuss words. John Oliver especially has a constant stream of such words in his monologues, at least one per paragraph, even when there’s no connection with what he’s saying. Indeed, there are times when the simple use of such a word brings a round of laughter.
Being someone who’s been known to privately use cuss words myself – especially at my misbehaving computer – I don’t really have an ethical objection. And of course the Consistent Life Network wouldn’t even think of having a position on merely vulgar (not violent or bigoted) language.
But it does strike me that his frequent use of such words further shows this problem: he’s not trying to persuade anybody that doesn’t already agree with him. Even if only a small portion of people he’s talking to find such words offensive, if he’s trying to persuade these people, why use such words? Their very use implies he has contempt for them. Trump voters, especially evangelicals, have noticed this sense of contempt aimed at them, and have responded accordingly.
I think one reason the words are used so much is that the cuss words help define the ingroup. Just using them, even out of any context, is seen as funny for that very reason – giggling in the camaraderie of being us rather than them.
This goes with the prejudicial remarks Oliver made about good people trying to help pregnant women, people who aren’t merely talking but putting in the hard work that’s called for by their principles. From the perspective of Oliver and much of his audience, such people are them, not us.
The Dove Needs Two Wings to Fly
This all goes to illustrate two points we in the consistent-life-ethic movement have been making for years:
- The us/them view (or ingroup/outgroup dynamic) has to be taken into account when figuring out strategy, because it’s always been one of our major obstacles – the very concept of bridge-building is meant to counter it.
and
- As I explain above for both the right and left, the groups who regard themselves as being on different “sides” are hurting their own causes by insisting on sticking only with their own ingroups. Persuasion of other groups suffers.
Fortunately, that problem can be lessened over time. After all, Ramesh Ponnuru expressed that he would have been happy to have me present to the National Review audience. And some of those late-night comedians do occasionally treat unborn children as humans (see, for example, Conan O’Brien “Fetus at Large,” Part 1 and Part 2; Seth Meyers as we mentioned on his current show and on Saturday Night Live, videos unfortunately no longer up).
So, while we’ve known all along that this us/them mentality is a major problem, we’ve also seen over and over again that it’s an obstacle that can be surmounted.
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled
by Sarah Terzo
This is Part 2 of 2. Part 1 was How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
Sarah Terzo
Now that abortion has become entrenched in our culture, people are pushing for legalizing suicide. Currently in the United States, usually if someone wants to commit suicide, the police can be called. Suicidal persons will be interviewed. If mental health workers fear they’re in danger of suicide, suicidal persons will be hospitalized. They won’t be released from custody until they can convince mental health professionals they won’t commit suicide. However, in other countries, a suicidal person who is also disabled or chronically ill might be treated very differently.
Countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands allow euthanasia or assisted suicide for people who experience incurable, unbearable suffering, including mental suffering. Such laws enable the suicides of people with physical and mental disabilities. People have been killed or assisted in killing themselves because of conditions such as combined deafness and blindness; autism; and alcoholism. A study documented 37 cases in the Netherlands where people with mental health problems were enabled to commit suicide after refusing treatment that could have helped them. People with disabilities or other severe health problems are being assisted in dying rather than living.
The United States hasn’t yet reached this point, although seven states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide for people diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Such laws devalue the lives of one particular class of ill person, but don’t yet go as far as certain European laws.
I might not currently qualify for assisted suicide because my illness—rheumatoid arthritis—is not terminal (though it can lead to premature death). However, people with my condition and other disabilities have been victims of illegal assisted suicides in the United States.
Jack Kevorkian
Jack Kevorkian, known as Dr. Death, helped as many as 130 people kill themselves. Some were terminally ill, but others had chronic but nonfatal conditions. One woman had my diagnosis – rheumatoid arthritis. Despite killing 130 people by assisted suicide over the course of his career, Kevorkian served only 8 years in jail. Would a person who killed 130 able-bodied people get off so lightly?
Another disturbing sign is how the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), a suicide prevention group, now accepts the legitimacy of assisted suicide for the terminally ill. It takes a disturbingly vague stance on more permissive assisted suicide laws. AAS released a paper last fall declaring that “legal physician assisted deaths should not be considered to be cases of suicide.” Therefore they wouldn’t work to prevent it.
The paper does a poor job of explaining why only some suicides should be prevented. It gives 14 reasons assisted suicide differs from the types of suicide they work to prevent. Some of these seem to be arguments for making legalized suicide more readily available: “Suicide in the conventional sense often involves physical self-violence . . . [physician-assisted suicide] is intended to provide the physically easiest, least violent, least disfiguring, most peaceful form of death an already dying person could face”; “The legal status and consequences of the two acts are different”; physician-assisted suicides “do not incur the sometimes substantial forensic and other costs that suicides do . . . They do not invite dilemmas of publicity.”
Arguing that assisted suicide is less violent and involves less red tape resembles the argument that abortion should be legal because of the risks posed by illegal abortions. The point about forensic costs is especially striking – it doesn’t concern the well-being of the suicide victim, but the convenience to society.
AAS also argues assisted suicide is a rational choice for people with terminal illnesses. This argument devalues the lives of the people for whom suicide is considered rational. They aren’t given the same type of suicide prevention services others receive. Moreover, even the comparative narrowness of this argument, which limits allowable suicide to people with terminal illnesses, is qualified or diluted elsewhere.
Although AAS focuses on US law, it acknowledges the more permissive European assisted suicide/euthanasia laws and doesn’t clarify whether it agrees with them. It’s not clear whether the AAS supports assisted suicide for non-terminal patients. The paper doesn’t say whether such laws go too far.
At one point the paper comments that US law denies assisted suicide to people with depression or other mental health issues and allows that in such cases “traditional suicide prevention services and treatment for depression may well play a role.” Elsewhere, however, in distinguishing assisted suicide from more conventional suicide, the paper notes that while certain European laws allow suicide for “unbearable suffering in intractable mental illness” they at least require “heightened scrutiny.” Setting aside the questionable nature of the “scrutiny” in countries such as the Netherlands, this alleged distinction implies that the AAS thinks assisted suicide for mentally ill people is acceptable—or at least is ambivalent about it. This attitude undermines the whole goal of suicide prevention for which the AAS allegedly exists.
All these conditions—laws allowing euthanasia and assisted suicide, especially the permissive laws in places such as Belgium and the Netherlands, the lax treatment of Kevorkian, and the acceptance of assisted suicide by a supposed suicide prevention organization—show how the lives of disabled and nondisabled people are not valued equally.
From the website of Not Dead Yet (www.notdeadyet.org)
Disabled people are vulnerable to being coerced into suicide. Many disabled people fear being a burden to others (of the 1,275 people who have died through assisted suicide in Oregon, over 40% cited “Burden on family, friends/caregivers” as being a concern). They know their disabilities can make life harder for the people who love them. They know their medical care is costly.
This fear affects me in my own life. As someone with bipolar disorder, I’ve been fighting suicidal feelings since I was 16. The knowledge that from some people’s perspective my suicide should be aided, not prevented, because of my disability makes it harder.
The threat of assisted suicide, and the gradual expansion of its use, is just one side of the danger facing the disabled. Disabled people also face the danger of falling into ever-deeper poverty. Supporting oneself isn’t easy for a disabled person: in fact, one study estimates that about 10 years after the onset of a chronic, severe disability, a disabled person’s average earnings decrease by 76%. In the United States, disabled people who’ve never been able to work, can—if they can qualify—get a stipend from the government of between $700-1,000 a month through Social Security. This is nowhere near enough to live on in any part of the United States. If the disabled don’t have family or friends that can take care of them, they have to rely on social programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and rental assistance just to survive. If you count SNAP recipients between the ages of 18 and 59 who have a disability—including those who don’t receive disability benefits—they add up to about 28% of all recipients. For men and women too disabled to work, there are no other options. In the United States, people with disabilities are at least twice as likely to live in poverty as able-bodied people.
Because of high health care costs, even disabled people who work often cannot make enough money to afford treatment for their medical conditions. Without a full-time job, health insurance is hard to come by, so many disabled people rely on Medicaid. One medication I take, only one out of 15, costs $40,000 dollars a year. Very few severely disabled people could earn enough money to pay for a medication like that. I therefore have to rely on the government through Medicaid.
Dependence on all these different forms of government assistance—disability benefits, SNAP, rental assistance, Medicaid—makes the disabled vulnerable to the cuts in these programs that some politicians pursue. If politicians succeed in cutting food stamps, rental assistance, and other social programs, these cuts would disproportionately hurt the disabled. Many disabled people would be thrown even deeper into poverty; some may lose access to housing.
Another harm to disabled people is the stigma attached to receiving government benefits. Even though the structure of our society makes it impossible for most disabled people to survive without government programs, disabled people (as well the able-bodied poor) are made to feel deeply ashamed of their dependence. All too often, people are judged by wealth or productivity, rather than their basic humanity. Disabled people sometimes internalize this stigma. It’s a common cultural narrative that a person must be productive enough to survive without outside support. One way to help the disabled is to counter this narrative when and where it occurs.
Ableism is on both sides of the political spectrum, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat. Ableism can take the form of support for abortion, euthanasia/assisted suicide, or denying support to the disabled. Defenders of life should oppose ableism no matter who is promoting it or what form it takes.
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For more of our blog posts from Sarah Terzo, see:
Abortion Doctor Says: We are the Executioners
Healing for the Perpetrators: The Psychological Damage from Different Types of Killing
How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
For other posts on euthanasia, see:
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill by Jacqueline H. Abernathy
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean? by Rachel MacNair
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life by Richard Stith
See the list of all our blog posts put in categories
Eugenics in Roe v. Wade
by John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from the book The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics, pp. 151-153.
The 1973 Supreme Court decisions that ended all legal protection of unborn children were based on eugenics. Despite that, comments about the decisions usually focus on privacy and women’s rights, not on eugenics. So we should look carefully at the ways in which eugenics shows up in the decisions.
(1) The appearance of eugenics in the abortion decisions that is easiest to see is the reference in a footnote to Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case that opened the floodgates for sterilizing people who were considered to be unfit. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that the Constitution protects a “right to privacy” and that the decision to have an abortion is an exercise of this right. But, the Court stated, the right to privacy is not absolute; it can be limited in some cases, such as vaccination and sterilization. So the abortion decision was not about women’s rights; it cited a case permitting forced sterilization.
(2) The abortion decisions were written by Justice Harry Blackmun. His approach to abortion follows the lead of Glanville Williams. Glanville Williams, who taught law at Cambridge University, was a member of the Eugenics Society. In 1954, the Eugenics Society voted to support the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), which set out to remove legal restrictions against abortion. Williams became president of the ALRA from 1962, and was successful within a few years; the British law was changed in 1967.
Harry Blackmun
The longest part of the decision written by Justice Harry Blackmun was his history of abortion laws. This is not a bizarre approach, but it is not the obvious approach either. If it was his intention to discuss abortion at length before examining the case that had come to the Supreme Court, he could have written about the development of the child, or about the methods of abortion, or about various birth control methods. He decided to dwell at length on the history of abortion laws. This is noteworthy, because this is the approach taken by Glanville Williams, in his book The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, which Blackmun cited.
A startling aspect of Roe v. Wade is its insistence that laws against abortion are recent. But this view is taken from Glanville Williams. Williams wrote: “It is not generally realized that this rule is not older than the beginning of the last century.” Blackmun wrote: “It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of states today are of relatively recent vintage.”
The Hippocratic Oath is a stumbling block for historians who want to argue that only Christians oppose abortion. Williams and Blackmun deal with the Hippocratic Oath in different ways. Williams, incredibly, simply skips over it; he quotes Hippocrates on some other matter, but does not mention the Oath. Blackmun addresses it, but finds a way to set it aside. He explains that it represented a minority view among the Greeks, but was later taken up by Christians.
(3) Most importantly, the whole idea of humanity accumulating over time, from zero person at conception through various levels of value in each trimester up to 100% person at birth, is eugenics. The idea of evolution through stages from insignificance to humanity is pure eugenics, based on Darwin’s theories. The whole trimester scheme in Roe v. Wade, with different rules at three stages in pregnancy, is blatantly arbitrary, and that has always struck pro-lifers as a fatal flaw in the decision. But eugenicists are not bothered by arbitrary decisions, since their view is that rights are invented by society, by a social contract based on consensus, not given by God.
Eugenics devalues humans by rating people on a sliding scale. There are different sliding scales, but they all dehumanize vulnerable people and justify various crimes against humanity. The eugenics in Roe v. Wade is not a sliding scale based on racism; it does not assert that whites > yellows > reds & browns > blacks. And it is not a sliding scale based on IQ testing, placing the highly intelligent over the normal, the normal over morons, and morons over imbeciles. It is like the sliding scale in evolution, from protozoa to vegetable life to animal life to mammals to primates to savages to civilized mankind.
Roe v. Wade reflects a belief in the idea that each individual passes through developmental stages that imitate evolution: egg and sperm become a zygote, which becomes a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus, then an infant, then a child, then an adult, then an old person, then a corpse. Of course each person goes through different stages in life; the critical question is whether the person’s worth also rises and falls. The 1973 decisions on abortion reflect the idea that size and weight and complexity— and value and rights—all accumulate gradually.
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For more excerpts from this book, see:
The Jukes and Kallikaks “Studies”
For more of our blog posts on racism, see:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills
The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion (Graciela Olivarez)
More than Double the Trouble: Another Way of Connecting (intersectionality)
How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
Sarah Terzo at the March for Life
by Sarah Terzo
Part 1 of 2; Part 2 is How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled.
To be truly pro-life is to value all human beings. People are valuable not because of what we can do but because of what we are: human beings. For pro-lifers, people are not judged by how attractive they are, how wealthy they are, or how useful they are to others. People have inherent worth. This is the core of the pro-life message.
We live in a culture that does not value the preborn. It also does not value the disabled. In fact, a desire to eliminate disabled people was a driving force behind abortion even before Roe v. Wade.
Before the 1960s, the majority of Americans opposed legalizing abortion. This was clear in opinion polls. But the movement for abortion legalization got an enormous boost from two events: the Sherri Finkbine case in 1962 and the German measles outbreak of 1964.
Sherri Finkbine was the host of the popular children’s show Romper Room. She was pregnant and suffering from morning sickness and insomnia. To treat her ailments, her husband brought a drug back from overseas – the drug thalidomide, which had not been approved in America, and gave it to her. Months into her pregnancy, Finkbine found out about the terrible birth defects that were caused by this drug, such as missing and misshapen limbs, and other health problems.
At the time, abortion was legal only to save the life of the mother. In practice, however, hospitals sometimes approved abortions for other reasons. Sherri Finkbine applied for an abortion at a local hospital, and her abortion was approved and scheduled.
To warn other women about thalidomide, Finkbine gave an interview to a newspaper about her situation. When the story ran, the hospital, fearing bad publicity, canceled the abortion.
What happened next was a media frenzy. Newspapers publicized how Finkbine, this beloved figure, was being forced to carry a horribly deformed child. She was portrayed as the innocent victim of cruel anti-abortion laws. Abortion-legalization activists used the story to drum up support for abortion. After Roe v. Wade was decided, lawyer Sarah Weddington, one of the pro-abortion attorneys who argued Roe, would say to Finkbine: “It’s a privilege to meet you. If it hadn’t been for you, my job ten years later would have been much more difficult.” (quoted in Patricia Myers. “Shades of Gray.” Phoenix, October 1989, pp. 40–45)
Finkbine ended up getting her abortion in Sweden. According to Cynthia Gorney, who wrote a book about the history of abortion in America: “when Sherri Finkbine was asked afterward what the Swedish doctors had said about her abortion, she said they had told her that deformities were present and that ‘baby’ was not the best description for what she had been carrying. It was better to think of it, Mrs. Finkbine reported the doctors having explained, as a growth.” (Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars, p. 51)
The disabled baby was considered less than human by the doctors who aborted him or her (no sources I found bothered to document the child’s sex.)
Shortly after the Finkbine case, an epidemic of German measles in 1964-1965 led to the birth of disabled children throughout the United States. German measles, otherwise known as rubella, was a relatively mild disease in adults. However, pregnant women who contracted it often had babies with disabilities. Babies born to mothers infected with rubella developed heart defects, deafness, and intellectual disabilities.
The connection between rubella and birth defects was discovered in the 1940s by Australian ophthalmologist Norman Gregg, who openly promoted abortion for pregnant women infected with the virus. Leslie J. Reagan, author of Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America, states: “German measles was crucial for bringing out the public discussion of abortion and propelling the early abortion rights movement…. [It was] the opening that made it possible for women, and men too, to talk about the validity of this procedure and the necessity of making it legal.”
Pro-abortion activists capitalized on the fears of pregnant mothers who wanted healthy, normal children. These activists framed abortion as a medical issue, necessary to ensure that babies were not born disabled. In this way, abortion supporters used ableism to make abortion more palatable to the public, promoting the claim that it was better for a baby never to be born than allow him or her to be born with a disability.
Abortion supporters are still using ableism to promote abortion. An Episcopal priest recently said that abortion should be legalized in Latin America because of the Zika virus. Since the Zika virus can cause birth defects, she argues, abortion must be legal. If it isn’t, women will be forced to “suffer the consequences of a disabled child with special needs” (Kira Schlesinger Pro-Choice and Christian: Reconciling Faith, Politics, and Justice, p. 8).
Today women are expected to have tests to determine if their children will be disabled and are often encouraged to abort if they are. In some cases, it’s said to be in the best interests of the disabled child. One article I read recently was about a woman whose child had kidney problems and may have needed a kidney transplant after birth. Rather than let her baby be born, and giving him medical treatment, the woman decided to do what she said was the most “humane” thing for him. She had him dismembered in a D&E abortion.
In a D&E abortion, the abortionist uses forceps to extract the child piece by piece, literally tearing him apart. The abortionist pulls off the baby’s arms and legs, tears apart the rest of the body, then finally crushes the baby’s skull to remove it. It is a violent, gruesome procedure. Yet the author described the abortion of her son as an act of kindness.
Often, though, if we read the actual words of those who abort disabled children, the well-being of the child really isn’t the main concern. In some cases, a disabled child is just too expensive and inconvenient. Rayna Rapp, in Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America quotes some parents whose unborn children were being tested for Down Syndrome. They were waiting for their test results to come back. All of them intended to abort if the test was positive.
One woman said, “I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t be that kind of mother who accepts everything, loves her kid no matter what. What about me? Maybe it’s selfish, I don’t know. But I just didn’t want all those problems in my life.” (p. 138)
Another said: “It’s devastating, it’s a waste, all the love that goes into kids like that.” (p. 134)
A third said: “I think it’s kind of like triage, or like euthanasia. There aren’t enough resources in the world. We’d have to move, to focus our whole family on getting a handicapped kid a better deal… Why spend $50,000 to save one child?” (p. 146)
The mention of euthanasia is all too appropriate. The same ableism that often drives support for abortion also drives support for euthanasia and other measures that hurt the disabled.
Part 2 will address euthanasia.
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For more of our blog posts on people with disabilities, see:
For more from Sarah Terzo:
Abortion Doctors: We are the Executioners
Healing for the Perpetrators: The Psychological Damage from Different Types of Killing
See all of our blog posts put in categories
Post-World War II Eugenics
by John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from the book The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics, pp. 114-116.
The dominant figure in American eugenics after World War II was a complex individual, Frederick Osborn (1889-1981). He is credited with reforming eugenics, removing the taint of racism and putting the field back on a firm scientific footing. But during his “reform,” from 1947 until 1956, he was president of the Pioneer Fund, a secretive white supremacist group. So he did not oppose racism; he opposed open racism. His reform of eugenics, then, would disguise, not remove, the taint of racism.
Osborn was a Major General. But he never made much of his military rank after World War II, perhaps because he was a little uncomfortable holding such a high rank without ever seeing combat. He was in charge of boosting troop morale during World War II, and got his exalted rank by politics. He spent most of his life boosting eugenics.
In 1956, Osborn traveled across the Atlantic to give the annual Galton Lecture at a meeting of the Eugenics Society. The speech was later published in the Eugenics Review (volume 48, number 1, April 1956). His words were well received then, and remain fascinating today.
In the address, entitled “Galton and Mid-Century Eugenics,” Osborn stated his devotion to the cause. Galton had envisaged a movement to raise the average of human intelligence and character that would “sweep the world and make man at least the master of his own destiny on earth.” But it had not happened, and the movement was reduced to “a few small handsful of men in various countries . . . not influencing public opinion.” In fact, Osborn noted, “The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters.” Despite these problems, Osborn affirmed that “I still believe in Galton’s dream.”
Then Osborn posed the key question: “What have we done wrong?” He was concerned because “we have all but killed the eugenic movement.”
It is hard to imagine such moral blindness. Speaking just a decade after World War II, when tens of millions of people died fighting the savagery of a master race ideology, is Osborn concerned about the deaths of the Jews? Is he sorry about what happened so that the Nazis killed the feebleminded? Is he ashamed of the role that eugenics played in Germany and Japan, churning out death for civilians? No, he is troubled because they had almost killed the eugenics movement.
So what went wrong, according to Osborn? He said that they had “failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused . . . they won’t accept the idea that they are in general second rate.”
As you try to understand why people may have been slow to accept that they were second-rate, keep in mind that Osborn considered the upper five or ten percent of the population to have the intelligence and character that the entire human race should have.
Osborn’s response to the challenge was a proposal he called “voluntary unconscious selection.” The idea was to alter laws, customs and social expectations, so that individuals would decide for themselves that they did or did not want to have children. The way to persuade people to exercise this voluntary unconscious selection was to appeal to the idea of “wanted” children. Osborn said, “Let’s base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care.” In this way, the eugenics movement “will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it.”
Osborn’s speech shows that the eugenics movement was hurt, but not dead. They still held to Galton’s dream, they were trying to find new ways to achieve it, and they were still making plans.
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For the other excerpts from this book, see:
The Jukes and Kallikaks “Studies”
For more of our blog posts on racism, see:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills
The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion (Graciela Olivarez)
More than Double the Trouble: Another Way of Connecting (intersectionality)
Valentine Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass
by Carol Crossed
These were remarks delivered by Carol Crossed at a February 18, 2018 event at the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum, a CLN member group.
This week is not only the birthday of Susan B. Anthony, but also the 200th birthday of her good friend Frederick Douglass.
Because of illiteracy, the birth dates of most slaves were not known by their families. And certainly not known by their masters. After all, as one slaver said, “Do we keep a record of when our cows birthed calves?” So Douglass knew 1818 was his birth year, but he did not know his date of birth. He chose February 14, since his mother called him “her little valentine.”
Anthony’s friendship with Douglass was portrayed on stage this fall in Rochester, NY. The performance was titled The Agitators. Colleen Janz [our executive director] and five of us on the Birthplace Museum Board of Directors attended the performance. We hung on every word.
Anthony broke with custom and tradition when she asked Douglass to give the eulogy at her father Daniel’s funeral in 1862. This was unheard of in the mid-19th century.
However, recent expansive research has given rise to questions about racism within the suffrage movement. The research is well founded to a limited extent. The Birthplace has a piece of ephemera depicting racial overtones.
Despite her friendship with Frederick, Susan was not exempt from contemporary accusations of racial bias. This primarily was because Susan opposed the 15th amendment, giving black men the right to vote. Her opposition was because voting rights did not expand to another class of human beings: She wanted rights [in the language of her day] for both the Negro and women, and would not go halfway.
Today this rift between feminists is seen in the pro-choice / pro-life divide. Pro-choice feminists want rights for women at all costs. Pro-life feminists see themselves as favoring universal rights, and refuse to deny the rights of what they consider another class of human beings. They do not want to go halfway.
Susan was the leader in this war of all or nothing: voting rights for all or voting rights for none. It was a racial split in the suffrage movement that lasted 22 years.
According to Elaine Weis, who has written about the anti-suffrage movement, this rift tried at the souls of Anthony and Douglass even after their deaths. In the final years of the passage of the 19th Amendment, their friendship was criticized by many who opposed suffrage and was used to attack Anthony in her grave. As a matter of fact, even before ratification, the first to call the 19th Amendment the Susan B. Anthony Amendment were not pro-suffragists, but the anti-suffragists, who wanted to taint the suffrage cause. They hoped that race connection, that friendship, would deter supporters of suffrage, particularly those representing the Southern states.
The connection even deterred many in the north, even in the city where Anthony and Douglass led their activist life, Rochester, NY. Yes, the state of New York voted for suffrage, but in the city of Rochester, suffrage was defeated. It brings to mind the old adage that a prophet is honored everywhere except her own home town.
Carol Crossed is President of the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Board of Directors, and a Co-Founder of the Consistent Life Network.
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See all our blog posts put in categories.
The Darkest Hour – “Glorifying” War?
by Rachel MacNair
All posts represent only the opinion of their authors. We pride ourselves on presenting a diversity of views, and opinions about movies are something people will have wide differences on. This is my own opinion – and only my current opinion at that, easily changed.
I recently wrote in Peace & Life Connections about how the best picture nominations for the 2018 Oscars related to our issues and mentioned that The Darkest Hour was in the “glorifying-war” category. This brought a couple of objections, on the grounds that, as Richard Doerflinger put it, the movie
portrayed the horrors of war and the horrible decisions they demand of national leaders pretty clearly. The war in question (hardly a glorious one!) was launched by Nazi Germany against the world, and the film dramatizes a key moment when Hitler was about to take over almost all of Western Europe — and Great Britain had to decide whether to “negotiate” a deal with Hitler, which would have meant effective Nazi control of the country as the fate of France would show, or continue to resist invasion. In the middle of this dilemma is an immediate dilemma, whether effectively to sacrifice the lives of 4000 soldiers in order to save another 300,000 trying to escape from France before they are surrounded and massacred by the German army. I don’t think anyone can watch the film and get the impression that this was glorious — it may be the best that Churchill could do in an impossible situation, but it evinces shock from other sympathetic characters and rightly so.
He later pointed out that in previous decades, a lot of the war movies, especially ones dealing with fighting the Nazis, could clearly be put in the category of glorifying war. They sanitize the violence, oversimplify, and make the victory look easier then reality would ever allow. I agree with him that anyone seeing The Darkest Hour would see it was far more mature.
I went to see it because I take an interest in good historical dramas, especially those close enough to what really happened to give some sense of what the experience was like. I especially like dramas that show what people were thinking and why. This movie certainly succeeded in doing that. And I think Gary Oldham deserved his Best-Actor Oscar win for portraying Winston Churchill. Playing actual historical characters is the most accomplished of acting skills, and he nailed it.
I’m going to offer three reasons why I (currently) think that the movie belongs in the “glorifying-war” category.
1. Portraying violence as complicated is a common way of justifying it.
Consider the case of abortion, as we often do when we connect issues of violence.
Parallel to the people who portray war positively and gloriously, as a way of turning boys into men and defeating the “bad guys,” there are people whose attitude towards abortion is “on demand, and without apology.” The very portrayal of it as a woman’s right badly oversimplifies the impossible situations pregnant women are sometimes put into.
But there are other abortion defenders who object to being called “pro-abortion” on the idea that nobody favors abortion; they only favor choice. These folks emphasize how hard it is to make the decision. Many understand how ghastly the reality of abortion is.
As with war, the group that understands things as complicated might be easier to talk into alternative methods of solving problems. So a case can be made that they’re not as bad.
But does handwringing about the violence make them any less abortion defenders? Not only do opponents of violence feel the same way about the candidate or group even if they acknowledge the complexities involved, but much more importantly, the victims are just as dead.
2. Showing how hard violence is means it requires more bravery and sacrifice.
Violence as an easy problem solver is different from violence as a difficult problem solver. When it’s easy and the “good guys” come out unscathed, then most contemporary viewers may well see that as playing at war, rather than really understanding what war is like. Portraying people in impossible situations makes the people who use violence more heroic (hence, glorious). Certainly, Churchill’s speeches in the movie were portrayed as noble speeches.
3. The very selection of the topic portrays how “necessary” war is.
The main reason I saw The Darkest Hour as glorifying war is that it showed the origin of a view that was common during the Cold War: that the depicted events demonstrated that “appeasement” doesn’t work and that therefore arms build-ups are necessary.
It’s true, of course, that appeasement doesn’t work — but pacifists at the time were arguing that this isn’t even what Chamberlain did. Chamberlain’s previous negotiation with Hitler bought time to build up arms, and building more arms is what Britain did. By the time Chamberlain made that deal, the situation had already gotten bleak.
The crucial thing about World War II is that there were so many opportunities to nip it in the bud long before it got to the point depicted in the movie.
Just portraying that time, when the available options were few and harsh, is taking the situation as a given. Therefore the protagonists are seen as brave. This interpretation doesn’t take into account all the previous actions that helped build up to the dire hour, actions and failures to act that were decried by pacifists at the time.
American political cartoon 1921
Most people watching this movie have no idea that this situation grew out of previous conditions that should have been better handled. Some people know about the problems of the Treaty of Versailles and other instances of excessive punitiveness towards Germany. Some people know about the times when the world could have stood up for the Jews early on and did not, thus emboldening Hitler. But those people did not learn about these things from watching this movie, and everyone else is left in the dark.
We have a movie with an entire focus on the events commonly cited to assert why arms buildup, including nuclear weapons, is needed. This is one side of the argument, a very conventional interpretation during the Cold War. The movie doesn’t let the viewer know that there even exists another side to the argument. We know that standing up against people like Hitler is necessary, but there’s no clue here that there’s any method to do so other than war.
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For more of our posts commenting on movies or television dramas, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights I (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Hollywood Movie Insights II (Never Look Away, The Report, and Dark Waters)
For more comments on war policy, see:
Self-Defeating Violence: The Case of the First World War
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
Using Empathy during a New Cold War