Sunday, April 22, 2007

Is "Abortion Doctor" Pejorative? Cont'd   [Jonah Goldberg]

Princeton's Robert George passes this along:

Dear Jonah:

 

The irony is that the label "abortion doctor" was actually introduced by supporters of legal abortion and its public funding as a way of softening the image of physicians who engage in the rather grisly practice of deliberate feticide.  They were traditionally known as abortionists, and that remains the accurate label.  The truth is that persons performing what we ordinarily think of when we use the term "abortions" are not acting as doctors (i.e., healers) at all.  Whether or not they hold a medical degree and license to practice medicine, the object of their action is not healing but killing.  The (attempted) abortion is a success or a failure depending precisely on whether they transform a living human fetus into a corpse.  Anything short of fetal death---including live birth---is a failed abortion. 

 

Pregnancy as such is not a disease; and abortion as such is not a therapeutic treatment.  Of course, sometimes pregnancy induces dangerous maternal health problems, and physcians (including physicians who are pro-life) sometimes take actions unavoidably causing fetal death in order to save women's lives or prevent serious irreparable damage to their health.  A classic case is the removal of a cancerous, but gravid, uterus.  These were traditionally described as "indirect abortions," to distinguish them from abortions in the straightforward sense, i.e., procedures whose precise objective is killing the fetus. (The issue can be, though it need not be, discussed in terms of the "doctrine of double effect.")

 

In a case of this sort, a surgeon who performed such a procedure would be pleased—not disappointed—if somehow the baby miraculously proved able to survive after being removed from its mother's body.  When we use the term "abortionist" (or "abortion doctor"), we refer to someone who accomplishes what he sets out to accomplish precisely in causing the fetus's death.  His job is turning a living human being in utero into a dead one, then extracting the body or its severed parts to prevent infection.  If the baby somehow miraculously survives, he would not be pleased — he would not even be paid.  And he would probably be sued. 

 

Sincerely,

Robby

And Ed Whelan has further thoughts over at Bench Memos on the subject.

04/22 12:10 PMShare