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Abortion
and The “Not Quite Human” Excuse
By Douglas W. Johnson
A quick glance at the
morning newspaper or the pages of history books will make one thing
as clear as it can be: that humans will often hurt each other,
injure one another, be unspeakably cruel to others and kill them. We
do these things whenever that other person is inconvenient to
us, either by threatening our contented state of being—as when they
might spill the beans about our wrong-doings or are collecting a
debt, or when we want something and their existence stands in the
way of our getting it.
Since most of us have
at least some conscience left, as dormant as it may have become, we
feel uncomfortable going around abusing and killing our fellow human
beings. Therefore, we feel it necessary to find some excuse
which will allow us to do exactly these things and still be at ease
with ourselves. One of the most commonly used and effective of these
excuses is the “not quite human” ploy. In it, we find some reason to
believe that the victims of our actions have something about them
that lowers them beneath the accepted standards for being “real”
humans. Of course we see ourselves as really human in the true sense
of the term.
Some of the most
obvious examples of this behavior come from Hitler and his Nazis. In
what we call the Holocaust they did terrible things to the Jews. But
they were able to convince themselves that they were not doing them
to fully human beings. The Jews were “vermin.” In one of their
movies about the dispersal of the Jews around the world, the
pictures were of rats boarding ships. We dwell on the horrors of the
Holocaust, and well we should, but we should also never forget what
the Nazis did to the Slavic people. They took their land, stole
their resources and killed millions of them. After all, they were
only “Untermenschen,” that is, literally sub-human. Its easy to kill
or enslave people who are like that, even if the real reason for
making war on them was to gain land and slaves for their own people,
while the Slavs stood in the way of that.
Our American hands are
not so clean either. We were able to kidnap, enslave and degrade
Africans and their descendents because in our arrogance we could
look down on them as something below us real humans. Our treatment
of the Native Americans was cut from the same cloth. After all, they
were “savages.”
We modern Americans
like to think of ourselves as enlightened, descent people, and in
many respects we are. We would never consider ourselves capable of
producing our own Holocaust, but that is exactly what we are doing
in legalizing and promoting wholesale abortions. Tens of millions of
the most innocent and vulnerable among us have been killed because
they are inconvenient to us. They threaten our life style: “I
was about to make a career move, and a baby would prevent that.” Or,
“We really needed a new house or car more than another child.” Or,
“I didn’t want it known that my teen-age daughter was pregnant.” It
is interesting that when poles are taken of Americans on this issue,
the great majority will answer that they approve of abortion to save
the life of the mother, but they disapprove of such convenience
abortions. Yet the statistics show that present practice is just
the opposite: with modern medicine, abortions are almost never
needed to save the mother’s life, but the vast majority of them are
simply because the baby will be inconvenient. It will somehow get in
the way.
In order to get rid of
them because they are in the way, we do what humans have often
done, we say that they are not quite human. The advances in modern
science have established that the full DNA of a person is present
from the moment of conception. It will determine not only our
coloring and to a great extent how tall we are and our general
appearance, but even, it seems, our tendency to such things as
alcoholism and paranoia. From the very beginning a full human is
there. Not a possible human or a potential human, but a human at an
early stage of development. (And all of us are, ourselves, still
“works in progress.”) Yet the abortion industry and its supporters
will never let us use words such as “human,” or “unborn baby,” or
“person” to describe this developing human. “Zygote,” “fetus” and
the like are OK, since we do not need to admit that we are killing a
living human being.
One way of being
inconvenienced is when someone threatens our happy life style, and,
as we have seen, it is an important reason for the abortion
epidemic, with its accompanying refusal to label the unborn as
anything more than less than human.
But now the battle for
the unborn is being fought on new grounds as well as on the old. The
same modern science that has established the full biological
humanity of the conceived being, has now decided that it is not only
OK, but a moral imperative to use, or even create this human life to
experiment on and kill for the possible well-being of others. Dr.
Mengele would be proud! Here we meet the other side of
inconvenience. We want something for ourselves—healing—and somebody
or something—in this case the life of the unborn—stands in the way
of our getting it. When is the unjust killing of an innocent human
ever morally acceptable if it enhances the well-being of others?
“Never!” we say. But this is exactly the argument being used by
those who want this experimentation to go on. How can this be
justified? Only by believing that we are doing these terrible things
to something that is not really human, somewhat less than a full
human being.
It is hard for any of
us to say what we would do in the situation of a Christopher Reeve
or a Nancy Reagan. But one would hope that we would not approve of
the killing of a number of other human beings, call them what you
will, on the possibility that we or our loved-one might be cured.
One could also hope
that not only Christians, who believe that all human life is
precious in the eyes of God, but even Humanists who value this same
human life will can unite to stop the Holocaust of the unborn, but
cannot speak out to defend themselves. |
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