Dividing the Baby
October, 2002
Doug Kmiec, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and advisor to presidents, once hosted a local talk show on various controversial issues, one of which was abortion, and I was one of the guests on that show. As you probably guessed, I defended the pro-life side of the argument. The local representative from Planned Parenthood defended the pro-abortion side, and ... At this point you're probably wondering why I've said "and ... " I said it because, there was a third participant in the debate, a Professor Solomon, also from Notre Dame, who defended Notre Dame's position.
Actually, Professor Solomon spent the evening trying to define a position somewhere between my position, which was that innocent human life, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death was inviolable and deserved the protection of the law, and the position of Planned Parenthood, which was that it was not, and that human beings could be sacrificed to suit the convenience of the mother. After a particularly unsuccessful attempt at trying to carve out a position between the two I just mentioned, Professor Kmiec turned to the camera and announced "Professor Solomon wants to divide the baby."
Kmiec's line elicited guffaws from the audience. It also pointed out the fact that on certain fundamental issues, no compromise is possible. In the parlance of contemporary America, we refer to those who recognize that some issues are simply either/or issues and not amenable to compromise as being "I00 percent." It's an Americanism. It's also not particularly accurate because it gives a number as the sign of an inviolable principle, and numbers can always be broken down into smaller numbers, but there it is. That is the language we have inherited and we put it to use to get our point across.
Politicians are by nature people who have a hard time understanding this principle. Someone once said that politics was the art of the possible. Someone else said that it was the art of compromise. What this implies in a world like ours is that since everything seems to be in the process of being absorbed by the political process, therefore, everything is open to some form of compromise. Colin Powell's wife and William Bennett's wife, thinking along these lines, created a "pro-life" organization whose purpose seems to be to agree that they will disagree, or, perhaps, to agree that they will not take the issue seriously, or to agree that getting along is more important than more fundamental principles.
As I said, politicians have a weakness in this regard. They want to be popular, since being popular is another word for getting elected to office. They know that standing up for principle makes one unpopular, and so they look for ways to divide the baby, not realizing that a baby, like certain principles, cannot be divided.
George Bush seems to have this weakness when it comes to babies, especially the babies whose lives have been sacrificed to create lines of stem cells that can be grown and re-grown so that certain people and corporations can make a lot of money by killing people much smaller than themselves. President Bush had a choice to make. It was a complicated choice to make in some ways. In other ways, it was very simple. In three out of the four instances of the particulars involved in that decision, he came down on the right side. In baseball that would have given him a batting average of .750, which is extremely impressive-- for baseball.
Unfortunately, decisions about life are not like baseball. In the most basic decisions, a little mistake at the beginning, the ancients knew, creates a very big mistake later on. This is precisely the lesson that America has had to learn the hard way on the issues surrounding sex and human life. A little mistake at the beginning - whether contraception, or divorce or abortion - has done nothing but bequeath greater problems later on, problems like what to do with the cells that have been gotten from murdering little people early on. While it is possible to fight this evil on a piecemeal basis - in fact, it is impossible to fight it otherwise - it is not possible to do evil and at the same time claim to be doing good. The very nature of the issue is so fundamental that it militates against percentage type solutions. Dividing the baby is the same thing as killing the baby. Solomon understood that. So did the baby's mother. That Professor Solomon did not is part of the challenge that faces us now. We need to explain to him and to our "pro-life" politicians that compromise on fundamental principles results in more dead babies. A baby is not something you can divide, nor is it possible to divide the principle that defends that baby's life, not even if some ghoulish Dr. Frankenstein can come up with medicines that can save other people's lives.
President Bush obviously didn't understand that principle, nor did he understand that three out of four isn't enough when it comes to things this basic. It's up to us to reeducate him and his fellow travelers on precisely this issue.
Dr. E. Michael Jones, Ph. D. is a member of the Board of Advisors for the 100% Pro-Life PAC (PO Box 1601, Havertown, PA 19083) www.prolifepac.com. Dr. Jones is a popular lecturer, an author whose books include "John Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution" and an editor and publisher of Culture Wars, an independent Catholic magazine about faith, culture and morals in our time. He and his wife, Ruth, live in South Bend, IN and are homeschooling their children.