Roe v. Me

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 11, 2021

 

There is a popular image, very useful to abortion advocates, of anti-abortion protesters screaming insults in the faces of women going into the facilities we insist on calling “clinics” as if what went on in there were health care. I have spent some time on those sidewalks and I have never seen that or anything like it, though I assume it must happen from time to time. I am not much one for screaming or chanting or things like that, but I will admit that, when it comes to the abortion debate, I am occasionally tempted to raise my voice a little bit. Not in some pseudo-therapeutic primal scream — more like, “What the hell is wrong with you people?”

 

That is uncharitable. Because, in a great many cases, we know what is wrong with — or wrong for — the women going into those human slaughterhouses: They are terrified, they are poor, they are alone, they have been discarded, they have had an overwhelming new variable thrown into their lives, which did not include very much comfort or certainty to begin with, and they believe that for a few hundred dollars they can remove this sudden source of dread and anxiety. They wouldn’t be wrong about that — not exactly — if the financial cost were the only cost. But it isn’t, which is, of course, what this argument is about.

 

We can understand why women want abortions because we make different decisions for the same reasons — their reasons are our reasons, too, even if our choices are not the same. When I was living in Manhattan in my mid to late 30s, my Manhattan friends were either starting to have children or had little ones — while my friends across town in the South Bronx, who were in the same age group but mostly not in the same tax bracket or graduates of the same schools, had children in high school or in college, and a fair number of them had grandchildren before they were 40. I do not have very many friends who chose to have children in their teens or early 20s, and I have very few friends who chose to become single mothers. In that sense, we chose the same outcomes as the young women seeking abortions, even if we chose different means.

 

So we should not pretend that abortion is a simple matter of discrete choices made by autonomous women rather than the practically inevitable result of a pattern of life in which we all participate and in which we are all — and I do not exempt myself — complicit.

 

Besides the screaming, the other stereotypical depiction of an anti-abortion protester involves him waving shocking placards that show the bloody aftermath of an abortion. These I have seen quite a lot of. And the protesters who display these images are right to do so, because to do so is to speak the truth. That’s what abortion does. You know that these images speak the truth because abortion advocates seek to prohibit them — “visual terrorism,” one critic called them. In Canada, the authorities in Calgary banned displaying any protest sign larger than an index card near a school after an anti-abortion protest outside Queen Elizabeth High School, with a city report warning that the images could be troubling to those who were “psychologically unprepared.” But all normal and healthy people are psychologically unprepared for such displays — it is the ones who are psychologically prepared for them that there is something wrong with.

 

And that really gets to the heart, if you will, of the abortion debate: Too often, we cannot or will not face the truth about abortion, because the truth is too horrifying — and because acknowledging that truth would morally oblige us to a course of political and social action that would be, to say the least, uncomfortable.

 

And so we retreat into lies — and into facile similes, which are as good as lies. We know what an abortion does, and we know what is violently put to death in an abortion. About that, there is no serious question. In response, those who seek to keep the current abortion regime in place work to analogize away the human organism: “Sure, those are human cells, but we throw away human cells all the time — every time someone gets an appendectomy or a haircut.” Garry Wills, the noted Catholic writer, made precisely this argument in the New York Times, insisting that “my clipped fingernails or trimmed hairs are human life,” as though he were ignorant of the distinction between human cells and a human organism. Or: “Think of it as a parasite.” No, because “it” isn’t a parasite, or a tumor, or a failing organ or a gangrenous limb. “What about the 13th Amendment? Forcing a woman to provide labor for the fetus against her will!” No, pregnancy is not slavery.

 

Pregnancy is pregnancy. And a human being is what it is, and it is that exactly, nothing else.

 

Abortion destroys a distinct individual human organism at an early stage of development. This isn’t a “potential” life — this is an actual, living human organism, albeit one that is very young and very small and very vulnerable. None of those characteristics — distinct, individual, human, living — is really open to debate, and none of them is a statement that requires religious justification. These are scientific questions with scientific answers. It is, in fact, the pro-abortion side of the debate that is forced to retreat into metaphysics, with neo-medieval claims about “personhood” that are in fact nothing less than the ancient superstitious doctrines of “ensoulment” in modern disguise. Confronted with the fact of a human organism, they change the subject to avoid the force of the fact. We don’t need to think of these little human bodies in analogic or metaphorical terms: We can think of them — and must think of them — as exactly what they are.

 

There isn’t any refuge for the pro-abortion argument in literary license, either. The so-called heartbeat bills in Texas and elsewhere take what amounts to a poetical view of human life. In truth, we all know that it isn’t a heartbeat that makes us human. Lumbricus terrestris, the common earthworm, has a heart (five of them, in fact, as you may have learned in junior-high biology), and most of us know someone with a pacemaker, relying on artificial means to maintain a heartbeat. The heartbeat isn’t an advertisement of humanness — it is an advertisement of an individual life. If you ever have been present for an ultrasound in which the heart of an unborn baby only a few weeks old can be not only heard but seen beating, you know that this has a powerful effect on people. The heartbeat makes that life undeniable — which is why so much energy currently is being used by abortion advocates attempting to redefine that heartbeat as anything but a heartbeat. “Fetal heartbeat,” the nice folks over at NPR inform us, is “not a clinical term.”

 

It’s just . . . “fetal cardiac activity.”

 

Never mind what you can see there on the ultrasound screen in front of you. It’s only “electrical activity.” Indeed it is — precisely the same electrical activity that actuates the heart in every human being. But not a “fetal heartbeat,” they insist. “This is a term that is not widely used in medicine.” Why? Because the sound you hear when you listen to an adult heartbeat through a stethoscope comes from valves opening and closing, whereas in the six-week-old unborn child those valves haven’t developed yet. But, properly understood, the fact that we already have that detectable — visible! — heartbeat before the heart has even finished developing is better evidence for the pro-life side than for the pro-abortion side: The fullness of the human unfolding is implicit from the beginning.

 

Having lost that argument, abortion advocates play the hard-headed pragmatist. Nobody calls himself a eugenicist today, but we still have abortion advocates warning the nation that the crime rate will go up if we don’t snuff these lives out in the womb. “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” Ron Weddington, co-counsel in Roe v. Wade, advised Bill Clinton. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.” Those whispers should worry us more than that sidewalk screaming does. But the whispers have long persisted. Even the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a terrifyingly instrumentalist view of the abortion question, insisting that to reduce abortion would be in effect “to promote birth only among poor people,” whereas the Roe regime, as she accurately observed, grew out of a program to prevent “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Not every­one is as eloquent as Justice Ginsburg, but surely you’ve heard some variation on this: “Are you going to pay to take care of those unwanted babies?”

 

A good question, to which the answer is — unquestionably — yes.

 

There are millions of American families looking to adopt — in fact, in a typical year, there are dozens of families looking to adopt for every baby that becomes available for adoption in the United States, which is one of the reasons so many Americans look abroad to adopt. Even if we assumed that every one of the 619,591 abortions the CDC reported in 2018 would otherwise have made a child available for adoption, the number of families looking to adopt would still outnumber the available children by a ratio of more than two to one. Not that “Exter­minate ’em if we can’t place ’em!” is anything other than pure barbarism — but the truth is, we would not have trouble placing them. The main obstacles to adoption in the United States today are bureaucratic and political, not a lack of families willing to adopt. Americans scour the earth for children, going to places most of their fellow citizens never have heard of — and we already know where Baltimore is.

 

People sometimes ask me to write about abortion because I was born to a teenaged girl just before the Roe decision was handed down — I was 23 days old when Sarah Weddington, with whom I later shared a college campus, reargued the case before the Supreme Court in October 1972. I have never met my biological parents, so I can’t say whether they considered abortion in my case or whether they might have considered it had it been legal in Texas at the time. What I do know is that I was among the very last Amer­icans in my situation to have enjoyed the formal legal protection of the state at the moment when I most needed it. And surely that matters. Protecting the lives of the people is what the state is there to do.

 

We owe something to charity and liberality, but our first duty in this matter is to the truth. And the truth is that we are killing more than 600,000 human children a year, that we are doing this almost exclusively because they are inconvenient, and that we will not have a humane society until we stop. I do not know whether Roe v. Wade will survive its coming en­counter with the Supreme Court. I do know that the thinking behind it cannot survive an encounter with the truth, and the truth is the truth whether you scream it or whisper it.