By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
Maps are political documents, a fact that
generally receives very little notice until some cartographer wants to label
Israel “Occupied Territory” or to color in Taiwan in a shade different from
that of the so-called People’s Republic of China. Pointy-headed little men in
Delhi and Islamabad thump their chests over maps of Kashmir. Often, political disputes show up in the pages of National Review — but, sometimes,
they are fought out in the pages of National Geographic.
Armies don’t fight wars over the map,
though — they fight wars over the territory.
Because we live in a time of high-tech
barbarism, we (too) often take an essentially primitive and magical view of how
the world works. One common and ancient superstition is the belief in
“sympathetic magic,” the notion that people, objects, and events in the real
world can be influenced by manipulating symbols associated with them, such as
their names (including “secret” or “true” names) or titles and effigies of them
(voodoo dolls and the like). Change the map, change the territory? That is
superstitious thinking.
In politics, there’s a generous dollop of
public relations mixed up with the magic, but we do behave as though we believe
that by calling something the “Inflation Reduction Act” we make it an
inflation-reduction program, even when, as is the case with the recent
Democratic bill by that name, it includes no inflation-reduction measures and a
few provisions that are in fact likely to make inflation worse. Trans activists
believe that if men dress themselves as women, adopt women’s names, insist on
being addressed as though they were women, etc., then they become women — as
though “trans woman” were something other than a figure of speech. In a similar
but bloodier way, those who advocate a more unregulated approach to abortion
manifestly believe that changing how we talk about abortion
changes the facts of the case — as though rhetoric and oratory somehow
magically trumped biological facts.
And here comes the New York
Times with a top-of-the-front-page (“p.i., above the fold,” as we
print dinosaurs used to say) piece on abortion law headlined: “Is a Fetus a
Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy Says Yes.” The underline reads: “Fetal personhood, which confers legal rights
from conception, is an effort to push beyond abortion bans and classify the
procedure as murder. In Georgia, it also means a $3,000 tax credit.”
The nation’s headline-writers have a way
of mistaking the map for the territory.
Fetal-personhood laws are part of a
“strategy” to end abortion in much the same way that the 13th Amendment was
part of a “strategy” to end slavery: In both cases, the “strategy” was to bring
the law into harmony with the facts of the case as understood by the activists
making the effort to do so. If you have been on the anti-homicide side of the
abortion debate for very long, then you surely heard those on the homicidal
side of the debate — at least before the Dobbs decision — say
something like, “The law says a woman has a right to an abortion, and that’s
that.” Or, “There is no law establishing that a fetus has rights that supersede
a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.” (I have it on the authority of the
Associated Press that we can once again write “pregnant woman,” which the
famously facts-forward news agency now begrudgingly concedes is “acceptable
phrasing.”) And, in many cases, that was entirely correct, inviting the answer:
“Yes, we know what the law says, or, at least, what the Supreme Court pretends
the law says. We mean to change the law.” Much of the conversation
around Dobbs simply presented the fact of a legal right to
abortion (exnihilated via judicial imperialism) as somehow the end of the
conversation, as though there were not questions and issues prior to the law.
The half-literate civics of New
York Times headline-writers notwithstanding, the American proposition
— which is a theological proposition, as much as that fact
embarrasses some secularly minded citizens — has never held that the state, its
courts, or constitutions confer rights. The American
proposition holds instead that “all men are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights,” and that it is the proper business of the law
neither to grant nor to revoke such rights — the granting and the revoking of
that which is unalienable being both beyond the law’s legitimate scope — but to
record, formalize, and provide practical support for such rights, which
preexist the law and the state. Our right not to be killed (even by a policeman or an aristocrat) owes to the fact that we are human beings, not to the edict of nine
quasi-magical personages wearing ceremonial black robes in Washington.
Of course it matters what the law says,
just as it matters how we talk about such issues as abortion. But what matter
much more urgently and profoundly are the prior fundamental facts of the case:
What happens in an abortion is the intentional killing of an individual human
organism at an early stage of development. Either living human individuals have
moral significance or they do not. If they have moral significance, then the law must take proper note of
that significance — but the law does not create that
significance.
If you will forgive my repeating this:
There is some irony in the fact that the purportedly secular and scientific
thinking of the pro-abortion caucus is keeping alive an old strain of medieval
superstition: the doctrine of “quickening” or “ensoulment.” Because the
European Christian intellectuals of the Middle Ages were in such great part
under the influence of the ancient Greeks, they took the onset of detectable
fetal motion, which they called “quickening,” as indicating the presence of a
soul, the soul being, in such a view, the animating and dynamic force that
gives motion to matter. Many traditions within Islamic law have taken an
essentially identical view. (Our worldly and sophisticated progressive friends,
who denounce pro-lifers as “Taliban Christians,” should familiarize themselves
with the facts of Islamic beliefs about abortion, and, in particular, to the actual
treatment of abortion under Taliban rule, which at times has included an
inclination to permit the procedure
as a means of mitigating family poverty that could have come out of Planned Parenthood literature.) The
notion that at birth, or perhaps at some other point late in gestation, a
magically transformative event occurs and transforms that meaningless clump of
cells into a human being deserving of protection as a “person” under the law is
only the ensoulment superstition in modern dress. Many abortion opponents are
religious; so are many abortion advocates. But the pro-life position requires no
deity and no theology. The same cannot be said of the ensoulment doctrine,
which all but demands a hand reaching down from the beyond to deliver the
divine spark of life. Biology can tell you what is being killed even if it
cannot tell you whether you should kill the organism in
question. The modern version of ensoulment/personhood sets that on its head,
beginning with the desire to permit the killing and then backfilling in a
pretext that effectively asserts that what is to be killed is not human and
cannot be human because we want to permit its killing.
In reality, human development unfolds
along a mostly seamless arc, not as a series of discrete graduations. The life
of the human organism starts in a reasonably well-understood and biologically
observable way and then progresses until it reaches its biological conclusion.
There is not usually much debate about when a body is dead. The fact that there
are occasional ambiguities and “corner cases” does not somehow leave us unable
to see what is in front of our faces.
They had less sophisticated tools of
biological analysis in the 19th century, but few of those who held
property in slaves or who justified such bondage denied that slaves were human
beings — what they argued was that slaves were a less worthy form of human being
and as such did not deserve to be recognized as persons under the law.
(Contrary to what many people seem to think, in the infamous “three-fifths
compromise,” it was the slavers who wanted slaves counted as full people and
the abolitionists who did not want them counted at all — the planters had no
intention of permitting slaves to vote, but they wanted them counted for
congressional-apportionment purposes.) As with the case of abortion advocates
who would deny the fact of the human character of the unborn, those who
justified slavery had explicit and implicit theologies they could muster in the
defense of their case, a whole metaphysical battery they could fire at their
abolitionist opponents. They could also point to a long-standing legal order
supporting their claims. The abolitionists did not have the law on their side,
but they had the facts on their side, and the law eventually was made to
account for the facts — for reality.
The question of “fetal personhood” cannot
be sorted out as though it were exclusively, or even primarily, a legal
question. What is in the womb — what is killed in an abortion — is what it is,
and the law does not have the power to change that. The law can only recognize
reality.
I suppose we could solve the mystery
through process of elimination. What’s inside the uterus of a pregnant woman?
Is it a rutabaga? No. Is it a half-caf venti latte? No. Is it the Declaration
of Independence? No. At some point, we will reach the answer.
But we already know the answer.
Norah Vincent, R.I.P
George Plimpton, one of the founders of
the Paris Review, is remembered for his patrician manners and
refined accent (think William
F. Buckley Jr., only a little less so), as well as a few small movie roles, but one of his great contributions to writing was his advancement of
“participatory journalism.” He pulled off some great stunts, such as managing
to get himself a spot playing professional football with the Baltimore Colts
(he was 44 years old, and they were the defending Super Bowl champions) and
trying to join the PGA tour alongside Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. He did
standup at Caesar’s Palace and toured with a circus, boxed light-heavyweight
champion Archie Moore and came close to getting himself murdered by Leonard
Bernstein while performing with the New York Philharmonic. He did these things
to write about them, for the amusement and education of his readers.
The late Norah Vincent, a sometime
contributor to National Review, was a kind of dark George Plimpton, famous
for long-form stunt journalism. She went through a period of passing for a man
and wrote her first book, Self-Made Man, about the experience. Distressed
by the difficulty of following up that celebrated work, she checked herself
into a mental hospital and wrote a book about that: Voluntary Madness:
My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin. Like the great Nat Hentoff, she
wrote for the Village Voice until her refusal to submit to
left-wing orthodoxy made it impossible for her to continue there. (Hentoff
ended up at Cato, and Vincent wrote for National Review — what would
independent-minded liberals do without the vast right-wing conspiracy?) As the New
York Times put it:
Norah
Vincent is a little nonplused at the rage she provokes. After all, she is
hardly the only young columnist with a shopping cart of views that could stock
any good Republican larder. Like her take on abortion (“Ours is a country in
which you are ill-advised to be a fetus”). Or on multicultural college
curricula (“those nebulous, oh-so-advanced ‘ways of knowing’ are likely to keep
you driving a cab or flipping burgers for the rest of your life”). Or AIDS (gay
advocates “don’t like to admit” that “gay men must bear the responsibility for
the spread of AIDS.”)
The rage,
however, is not just about what she writes. It is about who she is and what she
now writes for. Since last year, Ms. Vincent has been a freelance columnist
for The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative weeklies and
the voice of the political left. Make that the many political lefts.
She is
also a lesbian, which fuels the fury of The Voice’s readers and its
staff.
You know how that dumb story goes: If you
are gay — or black, or an immigrant, or a woman, etc. — you are not permitted
to have your own views. You have your views assigned to you, issued with your
ovaries or melanin.
Vincent was a terrific writer and a lively
intellectual presence. But her celebrity proved less than durable, and she ran
out of stunts to pull. Except the last one: Last month, she had herself put to
death in some ghastly suicide room in Switzerland at the age of 53.
‘We Got Rolled’
Yes, yes, you
did — and not for the first time. As an engineer friend of mine likes to say, “Stupid should hurt.”
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