I’ve been into the great Catholic authors of the 20th century. I’ve done Merton, O’Connor and now I’m reading Walker Percy novels now. Really strong writer and I’m enjoying him but he’s pretty heavy lifting. But here’s something he wrote that’s pretty easy to understand but right on. He was brave for writing it then and I think it’s even more relevant today.
June 8, 1981By Walker Percy
A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybodyovington, La. — I feel like saying something about this abortion issue. My credentials as an expert on the subject: none. I am an M.D. and a novelist. I will speak only as a novelist. If I give an opinion as an M.D., it wouldn’t interest anybody since, for one thing, any number of doctors have given opinions and who cares about another.
The only obvious credential of a novelist has to do with his trade. He trafficks in words and meanings. So the chronic misuse of words, especially the fobbing off of rhetoric for information, gets on his nerves. Another possible credential of a novelist peculiar to these times is that he is perhaps more sensitive to the atrocities of the age than most. People get desensitized. Who wants to go about his business being reminded of the six million dead in the holocaust, the 15 million in the Ukraine? Atrocities become banal. But a 20th century novelist should be a nag, an advertiser, a collector, a proclaimer of banal atrocities.
True legalized abortion–a million and a half fetuses flushed down the Disposall every year in this country–is yet another banal atrocity in a century where atrocities have become commonplace. This statement will probably offend one side in this already superheated debate, so I hasten in the interests of fairness and truth to offend the other side. What else can you do when some of your allies give you as big a pain as your opponents? I notice this about many so-called pro-lifers. They seem pro-life only on this one perfervid and politicized issue. The Reagan Administration, for example, professes to be anti-abortion but has just recently decided in the interests of business that it is proper for infant-formula manufacturers to continue their hard sell in the third world despite thousands of deaths from bottle feeding. And Senator Jesse Helms and the Moral Majority, who profess a reverence for unborn life, don’t seen to care much about born life: poor women who don’t get abortions, have their babies, and can’t feed them.
Nothing new here of course. What I am writing this for is to call attention to a particularly egregious example of doublespeak that the abortionists–“pro-choicers,” that is–seem to have hit on in the current rhetorical war.
Now I don’t know whether the human-life bill is good legislation or not. But as a novelist I can recognize meretricious use of language, disingenuousness, and a con job when I hear it.
The current con, perpetrated by some jurists, some editorial writers, and some doctors is that since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life, it is therefore a private religious or philosophical decision and therefore the state and the courts can do nothing about it. This is a con. I will not presume to speculate who is conning whom and for what purpose. But I do submit that religion, philosophy, and private opinion have nothing to do with this issue. I further submit that it is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high school student and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.
Such vexed subjects as the soul, God, and the nature of man are not at issue. What we are talking about and what nobody I know would deny is the clear continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of fertilization of a single cell.
There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.
Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, “But it’s still alive!”
To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.
The con continues. All the way to the White House right now. Obama infamously said that deciding when life begins was above his pay grade as if it were impossible to know. As if it were a theological question. But it’s all just part of the con.
April 21, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Great find!
April 21, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Extremely interesting.
April 21, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I love lyrical, smart writing! What a gem you found!! Thanks for sharing this.
April 21, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Great post Matthew.
I am a physician, though classified as an “alternative” healthcare provider. (What is the alternative to health, anyway?) But even nearly 20 years ago, we studied embryology.
Could it be that we chiropractors were better trained in this subject matter, too? But then there are those who learned the subject material, and those who did not. And I suppose that the same takes place in the hallowed halls of academia medica. How a student could read the scientific text and/or pay attention in class and not get the big picture is beyond me, above my paygrade, but I digress.
Science proves what the church has always maintained, that life begins at the moment that the sperm and the ovum meet and exchange chromosomal material. PERIOD. Any alteration in the normal, natural course of events for this new creature will end in death.
April 21, 2009 at 3:06 pm
To be fair, Obama did not say he didn’t know when life begins. He said that the question of when a baby “gets human rights” is above is pay grade. In a way, it’s worse.
April 21, 2009 at 3:32 pm
And even if you do believe that life probably doesn’t begin at conception, if there is some uncertainty, shouldn’t the laws of a just society err on the side of protecting from death an innocent human life?
If you were driving down a residential street on a blustery day and a big moving box blew out in front of you, you might have a moment to think before reacting. You might decide, oh why not, I’ll get a “rush” by running over the empty box. Right then you notice a bunch of little kids rolling around in big moving boxes in the yard adjacent to the road. You believe that the box is empty, but wouldn’t all that is good and true and right demand that you swerve to avoid that box in the road?
A law that does not “swerve to avoid the box” is an unjust law.
Kate
April 21, 2009 at 5:05 pm
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April 21, 2009 at 5:09 pm
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April 21, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I like the reasoning and imagery behind the swerve to avoid the box. It is common sensical yet politicians do not follow the reasonable man standard when it comes to this issue. I have not read any justification. Also, when it comes to the burden of proof required to punish a criminal, the courst employ the standard of guilt beyond resonable doubt. When it comes to executing the unborn, no such standard exists – not even the preponderance of evidence. Should some burden of proof be required before someone is denied of the most basic human right?
April 21, 2009 at 6:44 pm
If it was true in 1981 (which I doubt) that pro-life advocates have no concern for impoverished families, it is certainly a myth today. In fact the two issues are not actually related. That non sequitur rather leaves me unimpressed with this author.
Secondly, the comparison to Galileo lacks grounding in historical facts, favoring instead the anti-Catholic rhetoric that has been perpetuated about that case.
This convinces me that this Percy fellow is not someone with whose writing I would want to waste my time. One whose profession it is to write words should do the work of informing himself first, no matter how linguistically talented.
April 22, 2009 at 2:20 pm
This convinces me that this Percy fellow is not someone with whose writing I would want to waste my time.WP’s novels are most decidedly not a waste of time. Try, “Love in the Ruins”.
In fact, I’m suprised and disappointed that he tossed out the “pro-lifers don’t care about the born” platitude. It’s like an uncharacteristic sop to the progressivist sop of nuance. That nasty thing invoked to make people think that good is not really good or that evil is merely the victim of the good. So big fail on WP on that point. Still a worthwhile author however.