Guest view: Abortion is a problem of objective morals, truth and virtue
I was pleased that my Oct. 10 opinion piece was used by Lou Matz’s University of the Pacific philosophy class to generate discussion on the morality of abortion, a topic introduced in his Moral Problems course.
Abortion, strenuously debated since 1973 when first laid on the American public, has been clouded, distorted, and misrepresented until the biological facts of the procedure have been rendered almost as bewildering as the moral opinions. Therefore, I was interested in how the class’ reasoning would find moral support for abortion when it seemed far more likely they’d find immoral excuses.
As expected, no moral reasoning for abortion was found, but plenty of justification. The letters advanced a number of familiar themes (rape, mother’s health, women’s rights, etc.) but none addressed the morality of abortion and only one recognized the humanity of the fetus. Each of the essays assumed the good of abortion and then built defenses around preconceived notions. In other words, they took the Machiavellian approach to ethics and concluded that a good end may be achieved through evil means.
The morality of abortion — seemingly a contradiction in terms—begs the question: What is morality?
Morality is the quality in human acts by which they are called right or wrong, good or evil. What is abortion? Abortion is the physical act of terminating human life after implantation in the womb, where it is viable — or living normally — until disturbed. Solving the problem requires reasoning, which is the intellectual process where information is used to guide one toward the proper moral and ethical end.
We need at least one crucial piece of information to sort this all out: the personhood of embryonic life. This is because anyone accepting the humanity of the embryo must also acknowledge its fundamental rights. Many of the student letter writers did not recognize or admit that a person occupies the space in the womb. One wrote, “It is commonly believed that anything biologically human has a right to life but being a part of a certain species doesn’t imply [that] right.
The question of personhood, central to the reality of unborn human life, is a concept foreign to some of these students since they compared unborn humans with animals. Their confusion arises because of a failure to discriminate between nature and person.
Briefly, the biological nature of the fetus is human, because it’s the offspring of human beings. So, nature answers the question: What is it?
Person answers the question: Who is it? It’s the rational individual who performs actions with and through their nature. Only humans are persons; you wouldn’t say of a cat or a chimpanzee: Who is it?
You would say: What is it? It is clear then, that an unborn child—like every one of us—has both nature and personhood with no possibility of separating the two.
Nearly all of the students’ essays were defined by moral positivism, a theory that declares there is no natural law, thus no natural rights, because all human rights are derived from the state (rather than Divine Law). Therefore, if the state says the elderly, disabled or pre-born may be eliminated, then that becomes the new morality. All totalitarian regimes rest on this ideology. Pacific students enrolled at the McGeorge School of Law will grasp immediately that America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights are not grounded in positivism.
This positivism, a hallmark of Marxist theory, is creeping through American institutions and public life generally: a student wrote, “Abortions are essential to freeing women of lifelong misery.” Chinese women suffering under that country's one-child/forced abortion policy since 1985 would argue against that opinion.
It seems a moral problems course should provide a variety of tactics to rediscover virtue and objective moral truth, rather than simply be a breeding ground for excuses in the avoidance of guilt.
John B. Hymes is a retired Stockton fire battalion chief and past Civil Service commissioner.
This article originally appeared on The Record: Guest view: Abortion is a problem of objective morals, truth and virtue
