My son survived the Holocaust
Once upon a time, I was agnostic on the issue of abortion. Being a very logical and cautious thinker, I thought, that the premise of the proabortionist (that the fetus is a clump of cells, not human) and the premise of the antiabortionist (that the baby should be treated like a human being even if his humanity is still in question, just to err on the side of morality) had no common ground that could be used for discussion. If there was no logical common ground, I thought the issue was beyond the power of the reason to settle rationally.
Then I had a kid. Thanks to modern sonic photography, I saw my son Orville in my wife’s womb. He was still within the first trimester. He was playing with his toes.
It was as if I had been struck by a lightning bolt. Dear God, how I felt cheated. I had been, all this time, giving the generous benefit of the doubt to a pack of bloody child-murderers.
Imagine a man who had never met a Negro listening to a Southern Planter and an Abolitionist arguing about whether the Darkie had rights, or was just property. Then the man meets, let us say, Frederick Douglass or Thomas Sowell, a black man smarter than he is. Wouldn’t that man feel his innocence had been abused by the Planter? You told me there was a reasonable doubt as to whether this man here is human. Sir, he is more human than you. He does not advocate enslaving his fellows.
So is my anger toward the red-handed child-murderers. Sir, children are innocent, and no unborn little babe has ever urged his fellow man to murder. You, on the other hand, are on the same moral level as the Aztec.
My son, at that time, was unprotected. No law would avenge him, if my wife had decided to kill him. Doctors, by the way, had wrongly diagnosed him, and told us he would be born with an incomplete spine and severe brain disorder, and urged us to kill him. Fortunately, my wife is a Christian Scientist, and I am a Stoic. She holds that God will not allow disease to afflict the faithful, and I hold that one must do one’s duty to one’s children no matter the cost to oneself, without hesitation and without complaint.
I did not kill my son. I was angered that a doctor, whose duty is to preserve life, dared to argue with me that I should commit infanticide, merely for my own convenience.
My son is alive, born without flaw, and doing just fine, thank you. He is a survivor of the Abortion Holocaust.
All the arguments about whether babies are human or not is merely nonsense. Babies do not have upright posture, talk, use the opposible thumb or use fire, or have any of the characteristics that seperate us from animals. They are more helpless than kittens. A baby in the womb, before he grows a brain, is an organism sexually reproduced from two parent organisms, and therefore must be of the same species as the parent, even if he lacks the defining characteristics of the species. He might look like a tadpole, or an inkblot, but he will be male or female. He is not going to grow up into a tree or a fox: he must be of the human species.
Whether human or not has no bearing on the issue of whether the mother’s duty to protect her child has been triggered.
If his parents are not monsters, even at the earliest ages, they love him and will protect him. He has a name, or else the parents are still arguing about his name.
When does the duty begin to care for our young? Anyone who says it begins only when the child draws breath, cannot complain about a pregnant mother smoking crack, or maiming the child in the womb. But if maiming the child in the womb is wrong, then killing him is wrong, for killing is nothing more than maiming him to the point where life stops.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
