Abortion = Murder of the Innocent

The following poignant comments are from REASON IN THE BALANCE, The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education written by Berkley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, page 133-139. Sidebar comments are ours.

NATURAL LAW When President George Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas to a vacancy on the United States supreme Court in 1991, liberals opposed to confirming the nomination at first directed critical scrutiny to statements Thomas had made in favor of employing "natural law" in constitutional interpretation. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden [see sidebar], chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which had to pass on the nomination, emphasized tat he too believed in the existence of natural law. Indeed, he had successfully opposed a previous Republican nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Robert Bork, in part because Bork denied that the Constitution protects certain natural rights that are not mentioned in the document itself. At that time Biden had insisted, "My rights are not derived from any government...My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of our fellow citizens by our Creator and they represent the essence of human dignity."		Joseph Biden, U.S. Senator from Delaware, is a CATHOLIC. American adherents to Catholicism represent one of the largest groups of individuals who hold a naturalistic worldview. Since Catholicism claims to be theistic Christianity, it is odd indeed that these diametrically opposed ideas can co-inhabit the same mind.

Good and Bad Natural Law Biden feared, however, that Thomas might believe in the wrong kind of natural law. He explained the difference between good and bad natural law in a newspaper article that expanded on a theme first advanced in The New York Times by Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, a very influential liberal legal scholar. According to Biden's article, good natural law is subservient to the Constitution--that is, to positive, human-produced law--and its use is therefore restricted "to the task of giving meaning to the Constitution's great, but sometimes ambiguous, phrases." Second, good natural law does not dictate a moral code to be imposed on individuals; instead, it protects the right of individuals to make moral decisions free from dictation of either legislators or judges. Finally, good natural law is not a static set of "timeless truths" but rather an evolving body of ideals that changes to permit government to adjust to new social challenges and new economic circumstances. Bad natural law, by negative implication, would be an unchanging moral code that restricts either the freedom of individuals to do as they think best or the freedom of government to do whatever the public interest requires.		While Senator Biden claims Catholicism as his religion, he entirely rejects the theistic worldview and philosophic framework of Christianity. This contradiction, between the ' official teachings' of the Catholic faith and its adherents, is the tragic and bizarre legacy of Catholicism throughout the world.
As a legal scholar, I hoped Thomas would accept Biden's challenge and articulate a vision of natural law with real content, but this was not to be. Bork had debated his legal theories with senators candidly, with disastrous results, and political strategists had concluded from that experience that the way to get confirmed is to say as little as possible. Thomas took their advice and stuck to a simple set of unilluminating answers when the senators tried to probe his judicial philosophy.		Unlike Judge Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas was confirmed, but is passionately hated by Democrats and liberal activists alike. Their hatred in rooted in a radical secularism and inherent hatred toward God and religion.
The resulting stalemate illustrated the ambivalence with which our contemporary legal culture regards the proposition that there exists some objective standard of right and wrong against which human legal standards can be measured. Anyone who says that there is such a standard seems to be denying that we are morally autonomous beings who have every right to set our own standards and depart from the traditions of our ancestors. If one attributes the enduring moral commandments to God, one invites the accusation that one means to force one's religious morality on persons with different views. On the other hand, anyone who denies that there is a higher law seems to embrace nihilism and therefore to leave the powerless unprotected from the whims of the powerful. Either alternative [appears] unacceptable. The safest course for a judicial nominee in Thomas's position was to be impenetrably vague or platitudinous on the subject.		Put biblically, a total rejection of the judicial framework outlined in Romans 13:1-7. Our cultural shift to postmodernism is replacing the foundations of Western civilization with moral and philosophical relativism, which is to say--no common foundation or anarchy.

Abortion and Natural Law The specific issue behind all this philosophical fencing was, of course, abortion. Biden and other liberals feared (with good reason) that Thomas believed in a natural law-based right to life for unborn children, derived from a tradition reflecting a merger of Judeo-Christian teaching with classical Greek philosophy. According to this natural-law view, the sixth commandment's prohibition of murder, like the New Testament's "golden rule," gives divine sanction to a moral principle that is independently accessible to human reason. Pagans and agnostics as well as religious Jews and Christians know, or should know, that the killing of another human being is wrongful in the absence of justifying circumstances like self-defense.		While the natural-law view is reasonable, we live in the Age of Irrationality. Darwinism and liberal 'God-is-dead' theology (the foundation of NATURALISM) has destroyed the biblical concept of personhood, both in and outside the womb. Rather than human life having value, it's inherent worth is reduced to absolute zero.
That the fetus developing in the womb already is a fellow human creature--and not just a bundle of tissues that might become human at some point in the future--is established by a particular conception of what a human being is. A human being is created in the image of God and endowed from the earliest moment of development with that divine image. In more scientific terms, we might say that the important thing about the developing fetus is not the physical state it has reached but the genetic information, present from the start and unique to each individual, which directs not only embryonic development but eventually such processes as puberty and even aging. To nurture and respect such a wondrous thing is obligatory not only because of the unborn child's right to life but also because of the reverence due to its Creator.		The "image of God" or "divine image" includes the unique attributes of human personhood: intellect, emotions, and volition.
From these propositions it does not necessarily follow that abortion is unjustifiable in all circumstances, but it certainly does follow that abortion is something about which a legislature may make laws, just as it makes laws about other forms of homicide. If Judge Thomas held views anything like those just delineated, advocates of a virtually absolute right to abortion had every reason to want to keep him off the Supreme Court. At the time of his confirmation, it appeared that the new justice might soon be in a position to cast the crucial fifth vote to overturn the controversial decision in Roe v. Wade, thus abolishing the [so-called] right to abortion and returning the whole issue to the usual lawmaking process. (Footnote: Months after his confirmation, Thomas did vote as expected, but other conservative justices joined with liberals to reaffirm the Roe v. Wade decision, and so the right to abortion survived. See Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 112 S. Ct. 2791 (1992).]		The "circumstance" to which Professor Johnson refers is the 'self-defense' argument. That the mother will in all likelihood forfeit her own life due to medical complications of the pregnancy.
Abortion was also the most immediate issue behind Senator Biden's modernist formulation of natural law. Biden attributed the natural right of humans to "our Creator," but the Creator he had in mind was a modernist entity whose commands evolve along with circumstances and never stand in the way of what the most enlightened human beings think is appropriate. With respect to abortion, this means that humans are entitled to autonomy in moral choices and hence to protection from moral coercion.		Senator Biden is a modernist (soon to be postmodernist) who employs religious rhetoric for political gain. Biden represents the religious humanism of a majority of Catholics, who have long since rejected the theistic views of their Church and Christianity.

What Is the Fetus? The limits of this position are not completely clear, since no one [today] asserts a general right to kill other human beings, even if they are very young children. Behind the right to abortion must stand some doctrine about what the fetus is, and why it is not the same sort of entity as a newborn infant. this doctrine may also be described as a proposition of natural law, in the sense that it purports to be a fact about the nature of the fetus that legislators--and even Supreme Court justices--are not free to disregard.
If the fetus up until birth (or at least until viability) were not an independent human being at all but a mere bodily part of the mother, then a virtually unlimited right to abortion would follow straightforwardly. The problem with justifying abortion on this basis is that outside the abortion context the law often does treat the fetus as a human being with a right to life. In some states, this protection goes so far that killing of an unborn child by anyone but its mother or her abortionist is murder. A 1994 California Supreme Court decision, for example, held that a robber who shot a pregnant woman, causing a miscarriage, was guilty of murder even if the fetus was not viable (capable of survival outside the womb) at the time of death.
The California court, like other courts that have upheld fetal homicide statutes, did not consider this result to be contrary to Roe v. Wade's doctrine that an abortionist acting with the consent of the mother has a constitutional right to kill the same fetus. Legal authorities agree that the constitutional right to abort is based on a balancing of the state's interest in protecting unborn life on the one hand and the expectant mother's constitutional right to privacy in procreative choice on the other hand. At least before viability, and as a practical matter before birth, the mother's right to privacy always outweighs the state's interest. When the mother's privacy right is not involved, however, the state may serve its interest in protecting unborn life by punishing a person who kills a fetus for murder.
The conceptual shift that underlies this modernist approach to abortion is the substitution of a mere "interest"--the state's interest in protecting unborn life--for what traditionalists would call a human being's right to life. The state's interest in preserving fetal life is difficult to describe coherently. In an age of international conferences adopting urgent population-control measures, the state's interest seems to be in encouraging abortions as a backstop when other birth-control measures fail, rather than in preventing them. And whatever its moral obligations, the state has no apparent "interest" in protecting the lives of physically or mentally defective unborn children who may require expensive treatment and care if they are born.
The courts say that on the one hand, the state's interest in protecting unborn life is so weak that the mere desire of a woman to have an abortion overrules it, regardless of her reasons. On the other hand, they also say that the same interest is powerful enough to justify sentencing a killer of a fetus to life in prison, or possibly even to death. Few modernists are troubled by this logical anomaly, because the present situation makes perfect sense politically. Powerful social groups support both a right to abortion and a heavy-handed crackdown on violent crime. Attempting to satisfy both groups has led the law to treat the fetus as if it were a mere bodily part in one situation and as if it were a human being with a right to life in another.

Again, these comments were taken from REASON IN THE BALANCE, The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education by professor Phillip E. Johnson. I our opinion, a most powerful book!

Abortion

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