THE RATIONAL CASE FOR LIFE

A review article on Germain Grisez's Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (Corpus Books 1970)

Editor's note. With 1998 being the 25th anniversary of the dreadful Roe v. Wade decision, in each issue NRL News is presenting either a revealing portrait of the abortion mentality written by a pro-abortionist, or a thoughtful critique of the abortion mind set composed by a pro-life champion.

Reviewed by Richard M. Doerflinger

As the House of Representatives was considering a ban on federal funding for the abortion drug RU 486 a few weeks ago, a pro-abortion congresswoman rose to offer an unusual argument against the ban. She said that as a Catholic she would side with St. Augustine, who held that a fetus in the first few weeks of pregnancy is not a person and will not be raised on Judgment Day.

When colleagues asked me what the truth of the matter was, I had only to reach for my bookshelf and take down Germain Grisez's 1970 classic work, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments. Sure enough, I found a concise and well-documented analysis of St. Augustine's thinking on abortion that showed the congresswoman to be dead wrong. My only problem: I've used this thick paperback so many times before in similar situations that it's disintegrated into three sections, and juggling them together can be a challenge.

On almost any factual or historical matter concerning abortion, Grisez's work has the answer - - presented concisely, dispassionately, and with a citation to primary sources. Books published since 1970 may be more up-to-date, but few can approach Grisez for comprehensiveness or analytical rigor. If any book in the pro-life movement deserves to be called prophetic, it must be this one.

When Professor Grisez's book on abortion was first published, it had an additional historic importance that we may find it difficult to appreciate today. In 1970 the pro-abortion movement was showing enormous strength. The American Law Institute had issued its proposal for"abortion reform" allowing abortion in various "hard cases," and a few states had already gone farther to legalize abortion virtually on demand. The legal and academic establishments were so committed to legalization that pro- abortion sentiments were laying claim to a monopoly among the educated elite.

In that same year, a philosopher of Catholic background named Daniel Callahan published a well-argued and well-documented book, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality. Some thought Callahan had established a "pro-choice" stance as the enlightened American viewpoint of the future.

In the midst of this came a book from Grisez, then a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, that met and surpassed Professor Callahan on his own terms. Grisez's work was both more comprehensive and more profound than Callahan's. He reviewed the evidence on the beginning of human life at conception; he traced the evolution of moral thinking on abortion in Christian and other religions and the development of a secular assault on traditional moral absolutes; he showed the links between the abortion movement and the rise of eugenics; he recounted modern legal and political developments; and he critiqued in depth the medical and sociological claims in favor of abortion "reform."

As one might expect from a philosophy professor, Grisez went beyond a mere recounting of data. He launched his own clear and rigorous critique of the major moral arguments for abortion. In doing so he took pains to show that the abortion debate must be waged on a number of different levels.

Grisez anticipated that once the biological facts about prenatal human life became impossible to ignore, abortion apologists would simply shift to arguing that some human lives do not deserve the name of "personhood" - - and he showed how to respond to the fallacies in both biology and philosophy that lay behind such arguments. He positioned the abortion issue not as a question about "when life begins," but as a moral debate in which the principle of equal protection for all must be defended against a new form of prejudice. He even analyzed the difficult role of the pro-life legislator who must decide which political " compromises" will serve life - - and which may betray it.

In 1970 Grisez rightly predicted that "moderate" legalization proposals would deny the unborn child's personhood but simultaneously fail to address the reasons for most illegal abortions - - and thus lead to broader proposals to legalize abortion on demand. Also rightly, he predicted that a wide-open "free choice" policy on abortion would ironically set the stage for publicly funded abortion as an instrument of social "welfare." And he rebutted some "myths" spread by abortion supporters that have lingered in the public debate long after they were shown to be hollow.

For example: Remember the uproar in 1979, when Dr. Bernard Nathanson announced that he and other abortion advocates had fabricated an annual 5,000 to 10,000 deaths from illegal abortions in the U.S.? Well, Grisez had exposed the lie in 1970 - - using quotes from abortion advocates themselves that dated back to 1960.

In his introduction, Professor Grisez expressed the hope that this would be "a source of materials for all who wish to study the issues seriously, in order to write, speak, testify, vote, judge, and decide about this subject with somewhat more care than otherwise would have been possible." While admitting that he was not an attorney, he said he had attempted to compose "a brief in defense of the unborn." In this he succeeded admirably, for his facts and arguments were recycled by others in countless articles, briefs, and presentations to state and federal lawmakers both before and after Roe v. Wade. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Germain Grisez's book put the intellectually respectable case for the pro-life position on the map.

Later Professor Grisez was to move on to broader concerns. His essay on the ethics of suicide and euthanasia was a highlight of the 1977 anthology Death, Dying, and Euthanasia edited by Dennis Horan and others. Along with Joseph Boyle he supplied a book-length analysis of the euthanasia debate, Life and Death with Liberty and Justice, in 1979. In books like Beyond the New Morality he took on moral relativism and "situation ethics" generally.

Beginning in 1983, Professor Grisez also began a multi-volume work titled The Way of the Lord Jesus to set forth a thoroughly modern and profoundly faithful system of Catholic moral theology. Here he could place the Church teaching on abortion in the context of a belief in the sanctity of human life, and a moral norm against any direct attack on innocent human life. The influence of Professor Grisez's thought within the Catholic Church is dramatized by the fact that many scholars see his hand in Pope John Paul II's celebrated encyclical on The Gospel of Life.

But that ungainly paperback book of 1970 still holds a special place in the minds and hearts of many pro-life advocates. Few books on abortion since then have matched its historical detail, its incisive social analysis, or its clear moral argumentation.

To see all three matched in one book is an event I do not expect to see again in my lifetime.