Vasu Murti's blog

Respected pro-life columnist Nat Hentoff is a self-described "liberal Jewish atheist." Not your stereotypical pro-lifer! The pro-life movement desperately needs religious diversity, and someone like Hentoff gives it credibility in secular circles. 

George McKenna III

Twelve years ago, in an article appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, George McKenna wrote: "Within the liberal left, from which the Democrats draw their intellectual sustenance, there is increasing dissatisfaction with the absolutist dogma of 'abortion rights.' Nat Hentoff, a columnist in the left-liberal Village Voice, wonders why those who dwell on 'rights' refuse to consider the possibility that unborn human beings may also have rights." 

Another liberal Jewish atheist, Peter Singer, concedes this point. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, is not liked even by pro-life liberals, because he advocates not just abortion, but infanticide and euthanasia as well. Bill Samuel, a lifelong vegetarian and president of Consistent Life, once compared Peter Singer to Hitler. (There is a sad irony here, as Peter Singer lost three of his four grandparents in the Nazis' concentration camps.)

Pro-life feminist Mary Krane Derr called Peter Singer's Should the Baby Live? "intellectualized racism", because he advocates euthanizing handicapped infants. I'll always respect Peter Singer as the author of Animal Liberation (i.e., for stating in secular philosophical and to some extent political language what we ethical vegetarians have always known to be true), but disagree vehemently with him on the issues of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. 

Anyway, in his article, "Taking Life: the Embryo and the Fetus", Singer quotes a report of a British government committee inquiring into laws about homosexuality and prostitution, which concludes: "There must remain a realm of private morality and immorality that is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business." ("Not the Law's Business?"—the Wolfenden Committee— issued the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Command Paper 247, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957, p. 24) 

John Stuart Mill

Singer goes on to quote John Stuart Mill (in his essay "On Liberty") as having said: "...the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others..." Singer writes that "Mill's view is often and properly quoted in support of the repeal of laws that create 'victimless crimes'—like the laws prohibiting homosexual relations between consenting adults, the use of marijuana and other drugs, prostitution, gambling and so on. Abortion is often included in this list... 

"The fallacy involved in numbering abortion among the victimless crimes should be obvious," concedes Singer. "The dispute about abortion is, largely, a dispute about whether or not abortion does have a 'victim.' " So even Peter Singer, who can hardly be called a right-to-lifer, concedes that the abortion debate centers on whether or not abortion is "victimless."  Nat Hentoff's observation is correct! 

Hentoff quotes Jesse Jackson, who was once pro-life:

Jesse Jackson

”This passionate reverend used to warn: ‘Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being. That's how the whites dehumanized us... The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do and not feel they'd done anything wrong.’" 

I was brought over to the pro-life side not by a preacher, but by completely secular arguments. During 1986-88, I had access to USENET, a nationwide computer network linking universities, corporations, think tanks, military bases, etc. During this time, I paid close attention to the abortion debate. There was a student at Rutgers, John Morrow who argued passionately against abortion (and took a lot of heat for it, too! As my friend Ron Scheinberg, who, like Hentoff and Singer, is also a Jewish atheist, once said about PETA, "They're not out to win a popularity contest." It takes courage to stand up for the defenseless). 

Although he was a Christian, John's arguments were completely secular. This condition was agreed upon beforehand by everyone on USENET, and John said he had no problem with it. I was impressed with what he had to say, because up until this time, I was under the impression that abortion was a "religious" issue, and we shouldn't impose our religious beliefs upon other people.

Barney Frank

John said he favored all "blocking" methods of contraception (Maria Krasinski would tell me in the late '90s that the correct term is "barrier" methods), said he disagreed with the Republicans for failing to provide enough social support for children once they're born (Barney Frank once commented that for Republicans, "Life begins at conception and ends at birth."), said healthcare in the U.S. should be "federalized", i.e., "socialized, like it is in the U. K.", compared discrimination against the unborn to homophobia and xenophobia, and said it was his opposition to capital punishment that led him to oppose abortion. This is hardly the agenda of the Christian right. He'd have made a good Democrat. I'd love to meet him in person, one day. 

In my article "Abortion and the Left" (which appeared in the September 2000 issue of Stanislaus Connections, a peace and justice paper out of Modesto, CA), and also in my 2006 book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion, I write: 

"A rational, secular case thus exists for the rights of the human unborn. Individual human life is a continuum from fertilization until death. Zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, adolescent, adult, etc. are all different stages of development. To destroy that life at any stage of development is to destroy that individual. The real question in the abortion debate is not the seemingly absurd scenario of giving full human rights to human zygotes, but rather on the thorny question of how to protect those rights without violating a new mother's privacy and civil liberties. And the right to privacy is not absolute. If parents are abusing an already born child, for example, government 'intrusion' is warranted—children have rights. 

"Recognizing the rights of another class of beings limits our freedoms and our choices and requires a change in our lifestyle—the abolition of (human) slavery is a good example of this. A 1964 New Jersey court ruling required a pregnant woman to undergo blood transfusions—even if her religion forbade it—for the sake of her unborn child. One could argue, therefore—apart from religion—that recognizing the rights of the human unborn, like the rights of blacks, women, lesbians and gays, children, animals, and the environment, is a sign of social progress." 

In his 2005 book Guerilla Apologetics for Life Issues, which I reviewed in 2006, Paul Nowak also says, "You should try as much as possible to keep religion out of the discussion." This is significant. Only in the secular arena can we promote our ideals without imposing our religious views on others. (And persons using the secular arena to defend the unborn must not turn to un provable religious beliefs to deny rights to animals.) Nowak asks readers to try and get pro-choicers to determine when they think human rights should begin, implying that since life begins at fertilization, all other criteria (viability, birth, etc.) are arbitrary.

Again, the real question in the abortion debate is not the seemingly absurd scenario of giving full human rights to human zygotes, but rather the thorny question of how to protect those rights without violating a new mother's privacy and civil liberties. 

Ira Glasser

In his 1992 book, Visions of Liberty, former Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser writes: 

"The use of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping emerged during the Prohibition era. Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger whom the government wished to search. It placed taps in the basement of his office building and on wires in the streets near his home. No physical entry into his office or home took place. Olmstead was convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from the wiretaps. 

"In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Olmstead argued that the taps were a search conducted without a warrant and without probable cause, and that the evidence seized against him should have been excluded because it was illegally gathered. He also argued that his Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself was violated. 

"By a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected his arguments and upheld the government's power to wiretap without limit and without any Fourth Amendment restrictions, on the grounds that no actual physical intrusion had taken place. 

"Olmstead's Fifth Amendment claim was also dismissed on the grounds that he had not been compelled to talk on the telephone, but had done so voluntarily. Thus the Court upheld the government's power to do by trickery and surreptitious means what it was not permitted to do honestly and openly. It wasn't until 1967, in a similar case involving gambling, that the Court overruled the Olmstead decision by an 8-1 margin and recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic surveillance. 

"Interestingly, these cases arose in the context of crimes like bootlegging and gambling. During the past twenty years, the majority of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping by both state and federal officials has been in cases involving drug dealing and gambling. 

"Serious crimes of violence, such as homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and burglary, are rarely the target of electronic eavesdropping, which is not normally a useful tool in such cases. 

"From the beginning, when wiretapping was virtually invented to enforce laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol, to the late 1960s, when gambling was a major target, to the present, when the use and sale of drugs other than alcohol are the main target, these intrusive devices have been used mostly to enforce laws aimed at punishing and proscribing personal conduct that society deems immoral. 

"Because such conduct essentially involves private activities among consenting adults who are all likely to want to keep those activities secret, they are harder to investigate and prosecute than crimes like robbery or burglary, in which an unwilling victim will probably aid any investigation...the invasion of privacy inherent in wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping remains with us as part of the legacy of our attempts to criminalize personal conduct. 

"The other major use of electronic eavesdropping has been to punish political dissent. For decades, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps and other electronic devices to spy on political figures and citizens not yet suspected of having committed a crime. He built vast dossiers on their political activities and personal lives. Special units of local police called 'Red Squads' did the same." 

The central issues in the abortion debate are thus the "personhood" or moral status of the unborn, and the extent of individual and marital privacy. 

Stephen Douglas has been quoted as having said in debate with Abraham Lincoln that human slavery should be resolved through the democratic process. Let the people decide: if they "want slavery, they shall have it; if they prohibit slavery, it shall be prohibited." 

Whether or not democracy is the ideal form of government is not the issue here, but since we live in a democracy, what is wrong with Douglas' statement? It was through the democratic process that we gave women the right to vote, gave 18 year olds the right to vote, and even attempted the Equal Rights Amendment. Isn't this how we should extend human rights to the unborn? Isn't this how we should give rights to animals? 

Dred Scott

Pro-lifers compare Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In both cases, rights were denied to an entire class of humans based upon an arbitrary criteria, such as developmental status or the color of the skin. The conclusion Paul Nowak draws from this in Guerilla Apologetics for Life Issues is that the Supreme Court is not infallible. Roe v. Wade was decided in part by denying rights to the unborn, but also by assuming a right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut assumed a right to marital privacy regarding the use of contraception) which is not clearly spelled out in the Constitution. 

Can we overturn Roe without overturning Griswold? Is the solution to the abortion crisis to pack the Court with conservatives who might also oppose things like church-state separation (Nat Hentoff, an atheist, must know that in the Newdow case regarding the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Scalia had to excuse himself from the case, because he doesn't believe in complete church-state separation) and deny us contraception (Griswold again!) and a right to privacy (Olmstead AND Griswold!)...or is the solution to enact a Constitutional Amendment to extend human rights to the unborn? 

In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld a sodomy law. A few years ago, they reversed themselves, which outraged the religious right, but pleased lesbians and gays, the parents and friends of lesbians and gays, and political liberals. I cannot understand how pro-life liberals and pro-life Democrats, most of whom respect the private nonviolent behavior of consenting adults, most of whom support church-state separation, and most of whom support contraception and better sex education as the most effective way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, would want to align themselves with pro-life conservatives and pro-life Republicans in order to pack the courts with conservatives in the hopes of eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. 

It's my conviction that we do have a fundamental right to privacy, and I cannot advocate putting the women of America unwillingly under electronic surveillance, probing their past without their consent, denying them contraception, or even going through their personal effects (although the Fourth Amendment does protect us against unwarranted search and seizure). There must be a better way. 

Robert P. Casey

In a September 15, 1992 article appearing in the Village Voice entitled, "The Excommunication of Robert Casey," Hentoff observed that the Democratic Party had abandoned free speech by not allowing Casey to speak at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. According to Casey, "The Democratic National Committee has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Abortion Rights Action League." 

Casey said he would strongly support Lynn Yeakel who was then running against Republican Senator Arlen Specter. Yeakel favors abortion but, Casey said, "we agree on all the other issues." Despite being humiliated by members of his own party, Casey said he would not leave the Democratic Party. The anti-abortion Republicans, he insisted, "drop the children at birth and do nothing for them after that." 

Unlike Republicans, pro-life liberals advocate real social support for pregnant women and mothers. In Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices, editor Gail Grenier Sweet calls for: 

Easy access to contraception, sufficient maternity and paternity leaves, job protection, job-sharing and flex-time, aid to women who wish to stay home to raise young children, tax breaks and subsidies for women caring for elderly relatives at home, community based shelters for pregnant single women to learn parenting skills and finish their education, upgraded pension plans to alleviate the poverty faced by many elderly women, humane care of the handicapped and elderly in nursing homes, hospices for the terminally ill, medical care for infants born with handicaps, shelters for battered women, childcare programs, etc. 

Similarly, in the December 1993 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future, a "consistent-ethic" periodical on the religious left, in an article entitled "How Will we Revere Life?", editor Rose Evans writes: 

"This editor has long been aware of the relative success of the Dutch support system for pregnant women, compared to that of the U.S. The Dutch abortion rate is a minute fraction of the American. I believe the rate for young women in their teens is about one-twentieth of the U.S. rate. And this is done not so much by restrictive laws (although there are some restrictions) as by real social support for pregnant women and mothers. 

"The situation for pregnant women in the U.S. who don't have assured income, family support and medical insurance is abysmal and getting worse. Choice is a joke. Women don't have money for decent food, decent housing, or decent medical care, nor adequate support after the child is born." 

"Want to Stop Abortions?" asks the June 1995 newsletter for the Colorado Peace Mission in Boulder, CO. "Make them unnecessary. Provide everyone with: A choice of whether to have sex...and with whom; Comprehensive sex education; Non-coercive family planning; Safe, affordable birth control; Open, honest talk about sex; Loving parents..." 

Until we pro-life Democrats have enough numbers within our party to change the Democratic Party platform to one advocating a Constitutional Amendment extending human rights to the unborn (as is the case with the Republican Party), I think we should be advocating the following: real social support for pregnant women and mothers, along with reasonable restrictions, such as a 24 hour waiting period, parental consent/notification, informed consent laws, a ban on partial-birth abortions, etc.

Doing this would dramatically bring down the abortion rate, which would please pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike within our Party, and it would be consistent with Bill Clinton's "safe, legal and rare" position. If "safe, legal and rare" becomes the mantra of the Democratic Party with regards to abortion, I would consider it real progress from the '70s, when pro-choice bumper stickers read: "Abortion is every woman's choice." 

Hentoff goes on to say: 

”I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass.  There, I met Derek Humphrey, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the ‘death with dignity’ movement. 

”He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia, into the American press. 

"’But then,’ Mr. Humphrey told me, ‘a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me.’  ‘What was that wonderful thing?’ I asked. 

"’Roe v. Wade,’ he answered. 

”The devaluing of human life...did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word ‘baby’ does not appear in Roe v. Wade, let alone the word ‘killing.’ And so, the termination of ‘lives not worth living’ goes on.” 

The word “privacy” does not occur in the Constitution, either. So perhaps we should first enact a Constitutional Amendment establishing a right to privacy, and then follow it up with a Constitutional Amendment extending human rights to the unborn. Rescuing unborn children from abortion is admirable, but the people who do this voluntarily risk arrest and jail, and are read their Miranda rights before being placed under arrest and surveillance.

This is the case with those who rescue animals, too. We can work simultaneously towards extending rights to animals, as we are now doing with the unborn.

John Stuart Mill wrote: "The reasons for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves—the animals."

Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), successfully prosecuted a woman for child abuse in 1873, at a time when children had no legal protection, under the then currently existing animal protection statutes. This case started the child-saving crusade around the world. 

Count Leo Tolstoy

While it is known that the feminist movement originally opposed abortion as "child murder" (Susan B. Anthony's words) and as a form of violence that women are forced to turn to in a patriarchal society, a society that shows virtually no concern or respect for new mothers, it is generally not known that many of the early American feminists—including Lucy Stone, Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—were connected with the 19th century animal welfare movement. Together, they would meet with anti-slavery editor Horace Greeley to toast "Women's Rights and Vegetarianism." 

Many of the early American feminists thus saw animal rights as the logical next step in social progress after women's rights and civil rights. Count Leo Tolstoy similarly described ethical vegetarianism as social progress: 

"And there are ideas of the future, of which some are already approaching realization and are obliging people to change their way of life and to struggle against the former ways: such ideas in our world as those of freeing the laborers, of giving equality to women, of ceasing to use flesh-food, and so on."