First, Do No Harm

Amid the hullabaloo following the Supreme Court’s five-to-four decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, America’s elite newspapers responded predictably.

The Chicago Sun-Times sanctimoniously excoriated the Court for having “endorsed a wrongheaded law” and “lent credence to the unsettling notion that Congress” can interfere with personal medical decisions. Yet, in the same breath, the Windy City daily conceded the “admittedly unsettling aspect of partial-birth abortions” and confessed that “any kind of abortion procedure can be grim.”

The venerable New York Times lamented the decision’s “fundamental dishonesty” and its “real cost to the court’s credibility, its integrity and the rule of law.” Amid all of their hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing over the perceived disregard for “precedent,” the Times, however, never bothered to defend the procedure whose prohibition they bewail.

Joining the apocalyptic chorus, the Washington Post decried the “paternalistic pretense” underlying the “elevation of the importance” by the Court “in protecting the fetus throughout pregnancy.” Despite depicting partial-birth abortion as an “admittedly gruesome procedure,” the Post editorialists concluded that the “ominous” implications outweighed any practical consideration of the practice in question.

Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles Times executed the most precious of unintended ironies, labeling the decision an “unconscionable U-turn” while offering a detailed and dispassionate description of the abortifacient procedure, by which “a doctor partially extracts a fetus from the uterus into the birth canal, where he then collapses the skull by suctioning its contents.”

Even the amateurs jockeyed for their swing at the Supreme Court piñata.

Limning a dystopian future America as “a repressive land of back-alley abortions,” The Harvard Crimson offered a stirring denunciation of the Gonzales decision. “At best,” The Crimson warned, “this reversal of precedent is worrisome, poaching abortion rights today; at worst, it is simply wrong—the first step toward completely denying a woman’s right to choose tomorrow.” The coup de grâce was saved, however, for the final paragraph: the Court’s “ill-considered decision will have the worst possible repercussions for American women.” Throughout The Crimson’s 400-odd-word jeremiad, not even one clause deigned to mount a practical defense of the procedure the editorial ostensibly intended to defend.

For all their blustery bravura, these editorialists remain blindfolded by ideological fervor. The uninspiring rhetoric and trite phraseologies only testify to the difficulty of shaping party platitudes and talking points into coherent prose.

Regardless of personal opinions on the issue of abortion, readers should recognize such ranting, uttered by mainstream editorial pages in nearly perfect paraphrase of one other, for what it is: hysteria.

Reasonable people who see the world as it exists—and not those whose vision is narrowed by ideological blinders—do not attempt to fit every political event into a predetermined theoretical framework. When considering issues—such as partial-birth abortion—only ideologues are content to dispense with the facts, for, as Rousseau famously summarized, they do not affect the question.

And it is in their blithe ignorance of the facts that these print-media ideologues err most egregiously.

While a moral consensus against all forms of abortion has yet to emerge—or, at least, yet to marshal the same political and financial resources as the militant pro-abortion lobby—a clear majority opposes the partial-birth variety. Not ideology, but natural human sentiment, has opened the eyes of enough Americans, and enough congressional legislators and Supreme Court justices, finally to ban the procedure. The fact stands, as some pro-abortion papers even indicated: Partial-birth abortion is cruel, barbaric, and inhumane.

The “rights” invoked in defense of a practice which many demur from even mentioning cannot—and, if we live in a just society, must not—trump humane sensibilities and common sense. No sane person would defend barbarism for the sake of maintaining ideological purity.

Just like fanatical libertarians, who worship the invisible hand as their eternal deus ex machina, and foreign-policy messianists, who strive to export political systems without regard for local customs, the ideological pro-abortionists maintain only a tenuous grasp of reality.

Blind ideology, regardless of its source, is anathema to a healthy and just politics. The danger indeed, as these knee-jerk editorials revealed, lies in unwittingly following an ideology to its logical conclusion. Once you have made that leap, like Burke, “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista,” you will see “nothing but the gallows.”

Marooned without recourse to prudence and common sense, ideologues dwell in an airy-fairy netherworld where logic, reason, and humanity do not apply.

And nothing could be further from reality.



Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.