It is Not True that there are No Good Causes - Ending Abortion is One
by Paul Johnson - reprinted from The Spectator, August 17 1996
Abortion is the most difficult and important issue facing advanced societies today It is the most difficult because the arguments on both sides are immensely strong and at the heart of them is an unresolved emotional and moral dilemma: should we listen to the pleas of a desperate distraught women or the unarticulated cries for mercy of an unborn living creature? It is important for two reasons. First, there is the sheer scale of the killing, from which we try to avert our gaze, and the communal heartlessness it represents. The modern abortion culture is a frontal assault on the sacredness of human life. It is no accident that the first country to adopt it was Stalin’s Soviet Union, where 30 million adults were also done to death in horrific circumstances. Doctors in the West, operating under the laws legislating abortion, have now killed more living creatures than Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung put together. One west Midlands abortionist using a particularly brutal suction method is said to have polished off more human creatures than did Eichmann.
The last tale maybe folklore. No one knows. In Britain abortion is the least explored major activity today. Investigation reporters’ are not allowed to touch it. Television which gets its cameras into every other intimate secret refuses to take them into the abortion clinics and the refuse bins and incinerators where bodies of once living creatures are disposed of. Walls of euphemism surround the subject. Just as dispatching a Jew to a Nazi death-camp was officially termed ‘sending east’ so today the house rules of some publishing houses do not allow authors to refer to an ‘unborn child’ - the term ‘foetus’ must be used. So we are ignorant of modern abortion and meant to be ignorant and perhaps want to be ignorant. But in our hearts we know just as ordinary Germans knew in the early 1940’s that something horrible is going on amongst us on a colossal scale.
The second reason why abortion is the most important issue facing us is that it is a test case for all the moral problems which will arise in the 21st century as the new scientific revolution enables us for the first time, to manipulate life. If we do not put the unborn child into a protective envelope which is morally sound and legally workable then it seems to me unlikely that we will solve any of the far more complex dilemmas which advancing medical technology will shortly thrust upon us. The life principle is too fundamental to be left to the medical profession. What doctors in Nazi Germany and psychiatrists in Soviet Russia were prepared to do as a matter of routine makes us realize the doctors as a profession cannot necessarily be trusted to do right. When the story about the aborted twin broke last week I was shaken by the comments of some of the doctors who seemed astonished at the fuss and did not appear to grasp that a moral issue had arisen. The whole subject of medical ethics and especially the philosophical principles which underline them is marginalized at universities. It is either not studied at all or tends to fall into the hands of lawyers and sociologists who are as confused as the doctors about the deeper moral issues.
Yet abortion is essentially a moral issue, just as slavery was. Both revolve around the value we attach to human life. Entire civilizations lived with slavery for centuries but ultimately its inescapable immorality had to be recognised and the political consequences accepted whatever the cost. It is no accident that abortion is now the biggest single issue in American politics and will remain so until it is dealt with. For the United States which is at bottom a highly moral and idealistic society went through the same experience with slavery in the 19th century. A powerful case for slavery could be and was made and enforced by the huge special interests which had grown up around it. Time and again the subject bubbled up angrily and broke the political surface and then subsided again as yet another compromise was thrown over it. It seemed in everyone’s interest to avoid a showdown. But the issue was morally too important for that. It would not go away and in the end it involved the United States in a war which killed a million people and destroyed a society and way of life forever.
The price America had to pay was enormous but America decided it had to be paid. Today it is hard to find any American even in the south who would not agree that slavery had to be ended even at the cost of civil war.
The Americans will eventually prohibit abortion just as they once prohibited slavery and for the same reasons. Slavery was tolerable only when it was shrouded in ignorance euphemism and deception. The more you knew about its realities the more its ugly facts were uncovered the higher the gorge rose. The decisive moment in America came when Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the horrible essence of slavery home to millions of readers in an emotional form they found irresistible. They had to read her novel and they did. After that everyone knew. They could no longer plead ignorance and sooner or later they were bound to act. The case against abortions has yet to find its Harriet Beecher Stowe. But it will. Then the people will force politicians to move whatever the lobbies say. I hope for the sake of our national honour that Britain acts before the United States as we did with slavery. It is notable here that every time the truth about the nature of abortion breaks the surface as it did in the case involving the killing of a twin, more and more people including doctors themselves ask questions about the morality of the whole evil business.
The first thing we need to do is to break the habit (I do not say conspiracy) of silence in the media. We need to learn in print and experience on our television screens exactly what goes on in the abortion industry and what its ‘products’ look like in life as well as in death. We also need doctors nurses and other people involved to confess frankly what they feel about their work and how they reconcile what they do with their consciences. None of this will happen unless individual men and women in the media show persistence and determination. Perhaps Channel 5 due to come on air in the new year will enter where its seniors fear to tread. Perhaps the Daily Mail the most pro-family national newspaper will take the plunge and campaign for the end of legal abortion at will. What is sure is that 40 years after the first night of Look Back in Anger it is quite untrue to say that there are no good causes left.