Biological Geocentrism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

 

An angle I meant to include in this morning’s “Tuesday” newsletter: The modern pro-abortion view is to biology what geocentrism was to cosmology.

 

If all you had to go on was the evidence of your own eyes, of course you’d think that the earth is at the center of the universe and that the sun and stars revolve around it — you can watch the sun go across the sky every day. You can’t feel the earth’s daily rotation, and you don’t experience any sensation of movement in its annual orbit. You need some math and science to work that out.

 

The old superstition of “ensoulment” and “quickening,” which informs so much pro-abortion thinking in our time, is based in the same error: overestimating the evidence of one’s own necessarily limited perception, which is necessarily constrained by point of view. The greatest achievements in science have been, in effect, changes in our point of view, giving us the astronomical point of view, the quantum point of view, the evolutionary point of view, etc. It was natural for our ancestors to believe that something fundamental had changed in a pregnancy when they could feel the baby moving, just as it was natural for them to believe that the apparent motion of the sun, in the evidence of their own eyes, was actual motion. But we have tools that have expanded out point of view: not only the instruments of observation that show us heartbeats and other motion very, very early in the pregnancy, but also, probably more important, the genetic point of view that answers for us many questions that were matters of metaphysical speculation only a few generations ago.

 

We also know a great deal more about the natural development of human organisms than did, say, Aristotle. But our superstitions persist: For years, including into my own school years, many U.S. biology textbooks were illustrated with fraudulent drawings illustrating embryonic “recapitulation,” an old and discredited theory that the development of the embryo retraces the evolutionary development of the human species. This may have been a plausible theory in the 19th century, and the 21st century variations on it are political pretexts put forward by people who want to pretend that there is no meaningful difference between a tadpole and a human being at the earliest stages of development.

 

I don’t think the actual facts of the case are entirely inconsistent with a position in support of abortion rights. You can make a pretty straightforwardly libertarian case for the pro-abortion position. What you cannot do is pretend that what happens in an abortion is something other than the intentional termination of the life of an individual human being at an early stage of his or (more often) her natural development.

 

At the least, that puts abortion into a category of morally serious things including war, the death penalty, and euthanasia. This is not true of contraception, which prevents the formation of a new human individual rather than destroying a new human individual that already has been created. Abortion is, then, something that is morally more like capital punishment and exterminating the unhealthy than it is like using a condom or practicing abstinence.

 

You can’t magic away the facts of the case by pretending that you do not see them or by pretending that what you can and feel see supersedes the facts of the case simply because you see and feel it.

 

The world, as it turns out, does not revolve around you.