dehumanization: then and now
one of the reasons the pro-life movement is really strong in the united states as compared to other nations is perhaps because of our history of overcoming bigotry. abortion advocates have essentially repacked the same arguments that were developed by 18th century slavers—that not all human beings are persons deserving of rights. what slavers had argued was that a whole class of human beings were not persons deserving of rights (and hence could be enslaved) because they did not meet some arbitrary thresholds of mental capacities, to give an example. the modern-day abortion advocate argues the same thing, with the only difference being where those arbitrary thresholds are set.
given the country's history of slavery, personhood arguments meant to exclude a whole class of human beings from equal protection of the law are simply not popular in the united states, and for good reason too. the great emancipator, abolitionist, and founder of the republican party, abraham lincoln, had made decisive arguments in favor of human equality. the argument from equality is one of the most powerful arguments pro-lifers can make. one can simply consult the works of lincoln for guidance. do abortion advocates believe in human equality, the idea that all human beings have equal dignity and worth, or are they bigots?
american students learn about the country's history of slavery and the events leading up to the civil war. they read lincoln's speeches, the debates over slavery, including the supreme court of the united states' infamous 1857 dred scott v. sandford decision, in which the court ruled that blacks were not persons deserving of full and equal protections:
The question is simply this: Can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.
[...]
We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.
over 115 years later, the same institution, in its 1973 roe v. wade decision, made another bigoted ruling that excluded another class of human beings from equal protection of the law:
All this, together with our observation, supra, that, throughout the major portion of the 19th century, prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, persuades us that the word "person," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.
roe v. wade was decided by low information jurists, who had cited a lot of fake history in order to justify making up a right to an abortion. 49 years later, the supreme court corrected itself and overturned roe v. wade in its dobbs v. jackson women's health decision in 2022. justice alito, writing for the majority, correctly pointed out that by the time of the adoption of the 14th amendment, over three-quarters of the states had banned abortion, and the remaining states had banned it shortly afterwards. this objective truth directly contradicts the roe v. wade opinion. (for a brief overview of the fake history cited in the roe v. wade decision, read the articles by justin dyer, thomas jipping, and ramesh ponnuru; for a fuller account of the history of american abortion laws, read joseph dellapenna's book, which was cited in the dobbs v. jackson women's health decision; and for the history of abortion in common law generally, read john keown's book).
but as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. the dehumanizing language used by abortion advocates today is no different from the language used by bigots in the past. let's review some of them below.
personhood in general
An Indian is not a person within the meaning of the constitution.
—George F. Canfield,“ The Legal Position of the Indian”, The American Law Review. 15:28, January 1881.
. . . the former theory of the legal status of the "person" made no distinction between races. . . The National-Socialist philosophy, however, requires that German law recognize only persons of German origin or those who by law are declared equal to them and that only Aryans should enjoy all legal rights and privileges.
—Reichsgericht (the supreme court in the German Reich), in a June 27, 1936 decision. Cited in Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, Translated by E. A. Shills with Edith Lowenstein and Klaus Knorr, New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, p. 95.
Child, one thing you must realise. The Jew is not a person like us. The Jew is a Devil. And a Devil has no sense of honour. A Devil deals only in meanness and crime.
—Der Giftpilz by Ernst Hiemer.
mental capacities
My suggestion, then, is that we accord the fetus no higher moral status than we give to a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel and so on. Because no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Until a fetus has some capacity for conscious experience, an abortion terminates an existence that is – considered as it is and not in terms of its potential –more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow.
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Now we have to face the fact that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-aware being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either.
—Peter Singer, Practical Ethics.
Mental defectives do not have a right to life, and therefore might be killed for food – if we should develop a taste for human flesh – or for the purpose of scientific experimentation.
—Peter Singer, quoted in Death Act Dies in California, by Martin Mawyer in Fundamentalist Journal 7, June 1988, p. 61.
Some human beings are not people, and there may well be people who are not human beings. A man or woman whose consciousness has been permanently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which is no longer a person; defective human beings, with no appreciable mental capacity, are not and presumably never will be people; and a fetus is a human being which is not yet a person, and which therefore cannot coherently be said to have full moral rights.
—Mary Anne Warren, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion." The Monist 57, no. 1 (1973): 43–61.
[T]his inquiry into the physical, mental, and moral development of the negro race seems to point them clearly, as peculiarly fitted for a laborious class. The physical frame is capable of great and long-continued exertion. Their mental capacity renders them incapable of successful self-development, and yet adapts them for the direction of the wiser race. Their moral character renders them happy, peaceful, contented and cheerful in a status that would break the spirit and destroy the energies of the Caucasian or the native American.
—Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America
The negro seems unable to adopt even the inventions of the Europeans for saving labour, or do so very slowly and clumsily indeed, whereas many other primitive peoples, the Maoris, for instance, have shown themselves the very contrary to this, and employ all the contrivances for saving labour possible for them to obtain, and learn with avidity of more.
It would, however, be undoubtedly wrong to say that the negro possesses no capacity for mental improvement; for that would be placing him in a very low rank of the animal creation indeed; but it would certainly seem that his capacity must be left, in a great measure, to itself, to develope into anything worthy of the name of civilisation. He does not comprehend that of the European; it is, as it were, out of his sphere.
—Henry F. J. Guppy, "Notes on the Capabilities of the Negro for Civilisation." Journal of the Anthropological Society of London , 1864, Vol. 2 (1864), pp. ccix-ccxvi.
The Negro is a man with every attribute of one. He is one of many races, of very unequal qualities. He is equal, in strength and stature, to the European, but very far below him in mental endowment. He is superior in strength, but inferior in intellect to all the races of Asia that have had the same opportunities of development as himself.
—John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the Negro.” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 4 (1866): 212–39.
Any individual of the species homo sapiens who falls below the I.Q. 40-mark in a standard Stanford-Binet test, amplified if you like by other tests, is questionably a person; below the 20-mark, not a person.
—Joseph Fletcher. "Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man." The Hastings Center Report 2, no. 5 (1972): 1–4.
One doctor present had this retort: "I work in a program for retarded children. In our institution we have a little boy three years old. His IQ is practically zero. Still and all, the child is happy. He is happy all the time. He responds warmly and affectionately to every attention and shows a capacity for joy that any of us might envy. I tell you, you could not possibly look at that little boy and then say he isn't a human being."
What was the doctor saying? It seems plain enough. She was saying that euphoria is what constitutes humanhood, that we are real people or persons if we have a feeling of happiness or well-being, regardless of whether we have any capacity for thought and reason.
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Idiots, however, are another matter. They are not, never were, and never will be in any degree responsible. Idiots, that is to say, are not human. The problem they pose is not lack of sufficient mind, but of any mind at all. No matter how euphoric their behavior might be, they are outside the pale of human integrity.
—Joseph Fletcher, "Being Happy, Being Human," The Humanist 35, no. 1 (January 1975), pp. 47-58. Reprinted in Joseph Fletcher, Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1979).
On several occasions, when I met with a negro with a physiognomy that pleased me, I attempted to begin a conversation with him, in order to discover his intellectual and spiritual characteristics, after having studied his body. The result, however, universally satisfied me of his deficiencies in this respect, and served to confirm me in my opinion that the negro only cared for those things which belong to the very lowest grades of the human family. When attracted by the handsome color, the well-shaped hands, the beautiful white teeth, and the slender body of some good-looking negro, and when disposed to believe that such a form must contain a purer soul, I have been inclined to alter my opinion of the African's intellectual deficiencies. I have always, however, been obliged to abandon my ideal conception on a close examination, and come to the conclusion that the best-looking negroes are not far removed from the ordinary low sphere of their race.
—Hermann Burmeister, The black man. The comparative anatomy and psychology of the African Negro. Translated by Julius Friedlander and Robert Tomes. NEW YORK: WILLIAM C. BRYANT & CO., PRINTERS, 41 NASSAU ST., COR. LIBERTY. 1853.
physiognomy
When the embryo is one month old it is a tiny mass of tissue, with no resemblance to a human being.
—Boston Women's Health, Book Collective. Second edition 1973. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 144).
I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they are really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails and especially the livid color of their hands, I could not take my eyes off their faces in order to tell them to stay far away.
—Louis Agassiz, in a letter to his mother, written in 1846
Even in muscular Negroes the arms are less rotund, the hips narrow, the thighs laterally compressed, the calves lean. The Negro rarely stands quite upright, the knees are usually bent, and the legs frequently bandy. Hands and feet are long, narrow, and flat, and form the least attractive features in the Negro figure.
Most of these external characteristics remind us irresistibly of the ape: the short neck, the long lean limbs, the projecting pendulous belly—all this affords a glimmer of the ape beneath the human envelope.
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Having thus, in our investigation regarding the differences between Negro and White, shown that there are certain constant and easily detected distinctive characters; and having further seen that the differences are in the Negro mostly reducible to an animal or simious resemblance, there arise now two important questions to be discussed.
The first question refers to the permanence of the differences. Is it possible that these may become obliterated by any influences in nature, that is to say, without an intermixture of races, so that the Negro may by elevating influences become metamorphosed into a White, or the White by depressing causes be transformed into a Negro?
The second question refers to animal resemblance. Are we able to point out the gradations which bridge over the gulf which still exists between the Negro and the ape, and follow them step by step from the anthropoid ape to the Negro, and from the Negro to the white man?
—Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth, 1864.
The most degraded of human races, that of the negroes, whose form approaches most closely to that of the beast, and whose intelligence has nowhere risen to the point of reaching a regular form of government or the least appearance of sustained knowledge, has nowhere preserved either annals or traditions.
—Georges Cuvier, quoted in Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts by Martin J. S. Rudwick, p. 246
disabilities
Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.
—Peter Singer, in his book Practical Ethics.
Is there human life which has so utterly forfeited its claim to worth that its continuation has forever lost all value both for the bearer of that life and for society? Initially, this question is in every case to be answered with certainty: Yes .... There was a time, now considered barbaric, in which eliminating those who were born unfit for life, or who later became so, was taken for granted. Then came the phase, continuing into the present, in which, finally, preserving every existence, no matter how worthless, stood as the highest moral value.
There are living people to whom death would be a release, and whose death would simultaneously free society and the state from carrying a burden which serves no conceivable purpose, except that of providing an example of the greatest unselfishness.
—Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life: Its Extent and Form (1920), trans. Walter E. Wright and Patrick G. Derr, in Issues in Law and Medicine VIII, 2 (1992).
binding and hoche's work was the foundation of the nazi's aktion t4 euthanasia program in which they killed hundreds of thousands of disabled children, men, and women.
parasitism
mass of differentiated tissue acting as a parasite within the mother’s body.
—Boston Women's Health, Book Collective. Second edition 1973. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 144).
If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person's body.
—Murray Rothbard, "For a New Liberty."
On the level of "biology alone," the dependency is one way—the fetus is a parasite.
—Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Women's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984, p. 346
The Jew was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples.
—Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf" (1925).
The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in and on which he lives, and place this parasite on a rock, and he will die.
—Konstantin Pobedonostsev, quoted in Dubnow, Simon (1915). History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the earliest time until the present day. Bergenfield, NJ. p. 414.
The normal state of the negro is barbarism of the most abject kind. Left to himself, all history shows, that he cannot rise above his normal state. Aided by the white man, and only through the medium of slavery, he becomes partially civilized and Christianized. He is the parasite man, and cannot flourish except in a state of dependence upon, and in subjection to, the white man.
miscellaneous
"An aborted baby is just garbage and that's where it ends up. Why not make use of it for society?"
—Dr. Martti Kekomäki, quoted in Naomi Wade, "Aborted Babies Kept Alive for Bizarre Experiments," National Examiner, Aug. 19, 1980, pp. 20-21.
a waste product: thousands of fetuses are discarded every day.
—Lewis Lapham in “Forum: Ethics in Embryo”, Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1987, p. 38.
I remember [Christian Wirth] standing there next to the pits full of black and blue corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity, it could not have. It was a mass, a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What should we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo. I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass.
—Nazi Commander Franz Stangl, from the book "Into That Darkness" by Gitta Sereny.
a collection of a lot more dehumanizing quotes can be found in william brennan's book "dehumanizing the vulnerable." do you have more dehumanizing quotes to share?
pro-lifers should get comfortable calling out bigotry when they see it. finally, let me conclude with an inspiring quote from the great emancipator himself:
I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man? If the Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute book in which we find it and tear it out. Who is so bold as to do it? If it is not true, let us tear it out. [cries of ``no, no''] Let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]
Posted Sep 28, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC