Slouching Towards Gomorrah (28 page)

A better response than “three strikes” would be to impose a stiff first sentence and make the offender serve all of it. Imprisonment serves several functions, and one is incapacitating the criminal. A violent man in prison will not shoot you, rape you, or crack your skull. There is no reason to be sentimental about a person who commits even one violent or serious crime. Violence is not inflicted through negligence or inadvertence. If the man who was sentenced to ten years served ten years, at least seventy-two people would be spared death, rape, or other serious injury.

The last-ditch argument, as Dilulio calls it, of the anti-incarceration lobby is that prisons cost too much to permit imprisonment of violent offenders for all or most of their terms. But, as he points out, “barely a half cent of every government dollar (federal, state, and local) goes to keeping convicted criminals behind bars…. [and we spend] 12 times more on public welfare programs.” It “costs society about twice as much to let a criminal roam the streets as it does to keep him behind bars.” And that cost does not include the fear and suffering of victims and their friends or the fear of those who do not become victims but are concerned that they may.

We clearly have need of drastic reform of our criminal justice system, which must begin with a public discussion about restraining violent criminals, adult and juvenile. As the Council on Crime report says:

The co-chairs of the Council that issued the report containing that excellent passage are Griffin B. Bell, former federal judge and U.S. Attorney General, and William J. Bennett, former Secretary of Education and “drug czar.” The “elite circles” they speak of with
anger and frustration are the people I have been calling modern liberals. These are the people Stanley Rothman and his colleagues studied and found that an attitude of non-punitiveness toward criminals correlates with alienation from the American system. The policies and attitudes promulgated by these “elite circles” are the reason that the probability of a violent criminal, even a repeater, going to prison and serving most of his time is now only about one-fifth of what it was in the early 1960s.

These modern liberal elites are the same people who block any significant welfare reform despite the obvious connection between welfare and the explosion of illegitimacy and crime rates. Charles Murray contends that “illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time—more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.“
²⁴
The control of the “elite circles” over the making and implementation of policy is the reason we face a highly problematic future. What is a possible cure for crime and illegitimacy at unprecedented and probably still rising levels? One possible answer is that there may be no cure, or none that we can employ against the will of modern liberals. We may go on much as we have, at least until the welfare state collapses and society is engulfed in a hurricane of violence.
²⁵

When physical safety becomes a major problem even for the middle classes, we must of necessity become a heavily policed, authoritarian society, a society in which the middle classes live in gated and walled communities and make their places of work hardened targets. After the Oklahoma City bombing, there were serious proposals in Washington to use the Army to provide security. The mayor of Washington, D.C., proposed using the National Guard to supplement the police in that drug-ridden and murder-racked city. Whites tend to dismiss the violence of the inner cities as a black problem. As the killing and the drugs spread to white neighborhoods and suburbs, as they are doing, the response will be far more repressive. Both the fear of crime and the escalating harshness of the response to it will sharply reduce Americans’ freedom of movement and peace of mind. Ours will become a most unpleasant society in which to live. Murray poses our alternatives: “Either we reverse the current trends in illegitimacy—especially
white illegitimacy—or America must, willy-nilly, become an unrecognizably authoritarian, socially segregated, centralized state.“
²⁶

If we would avoid that, we must beat modern liberalism in elections and place the machinery of the state in the hands of people willing to reform welfare and punish crime.

10

A
BORTION,
A
SSISTED
S
UICIDE, AND
E
UTHANASIA

J
udging from the evidence, Americans do not view human life as sacrosanct. We engage in a variety of activities, from driving automobiles to constructing buildings, that we know will cause deaths. But the deliberate taking of the life of an individual has never been regarded as a matter of moral indifference. We debate the death penalty, for example, endlessly. It seems an anomaly, therefore, that we have so easily accepted practices that are the deliberate taking of identifiable individual lives. We have turned abortion into a constitutional right; one state has made assisted suicide a statutory right, and two federal circuit courts, not to be outdone, have made it a constitutional right; campaigns to legalize euthanasia are underway. It is entirely predictable that many of the elderly, ill, and infirm will be killed, and often without their consent. This is where radical individualism has taken us.

When a society revises its attitude towards life and death, we can see the direction of its moral movement. For that reason, it is necessary to examine the morality of such practices as abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia and to try to determine where they are likely to lead.

The necessity for reflection about abortion does not depend on, but is certainly made dramatic by, the fact that there are approximately a million and a half abortions annually in the United States. To put it another way, since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in
Roe
v.
Wade
, there have been perhaps over 30 million abortions in the United States. Three out of ten conceptions today end in the destruction of the fetus. These facts, standing alone, do not decide the issue of morality, but they do mean that the issue is hugely significant.

The issue is also heated, polarizing, and often debated on both sides in angry, moralistic terms. I will refrain from such rhetoric because for most of my life I held a position on the subject very different from the one I now take. For years I adopted, without bothering to think, the attitude common among secular, affluent, university-educated people who took the propriety of abortion for granted, even when it was illegal. The practice’s illegality, like that of drinking alcohol during Prohibition, was thought to reflect merely unenlightened prejudice or religious conviction, the two being regarded as much the same. From time to time, someone would say that it was a difficult moral problem, but there was rarely any doubt how the problem should be resolved. I remember a woman at Yale saying, without any disagreement from those around her, that “The fetus isn’t nothing, but I am for the mother’s right to abort it.” I probably nodded. Most of us had a vague and unexamined notion that while the fetus wasn’t nothing, it was also not fully human. The slightest reflection would have suggested that non-human or semi-human blobs of tissue do not magically turn into human beings.

I objected to
Roe
v.
Wade
the moment it was decided, not because of any doubts about abortion, but because the decision was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives.
Roe
and the decisions reaffirming it are equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to
Dred Scott
v.
Sandford.
Just as
Dred Scott
forced a southern pro-slavery position
on the nation,
Roe
is nothing more than the Supreme Courts imposition on us of the morality of our cultural elites.

Qualms about abortion began to arise when I first read about fetal pain. There is no doubt that, after its nervous system has developed to a degree, the fetus being dismembered or poisoned in the womb feels excruciating pain. For that reason, many people would confine abortion to the early stages of pregnancy but have no objection to it then. There are, on the other hand, people who oppose abortion at any stage and those who regard it as a right at any stage up to the moment of birth. I will discuss here the question of abortion at any stage from conception to birth.

In thinking about abortion, it is necessary to address two questions. Is abortion always the killing of a human being? If it is, is that killing done simply for convenience? I think there can be no doubt that the answer to the first question is yes; and the answer to the second is almost always. For many people, these answers will be dispositive, but for others, they will not. It will be necessary, therefore, to discuss some of the justifications given by pro-abortion thinkers who accept those answers but do not regard them as decisive.

In discussing abortion I will not address instances where most people, however they might ultimately decide the issue, would feel genuine moral anguish; cases, for example, where it is known that the child will be born with severe deformities. My purpose is not to solve all moral issues but simply to address the major ones. Abortions in cases of deformity, etc., are a very small fraction of the total and, because they introduce special factors, do not cast light on the direction of our culture as do abortions of healthy pre-borns performed for convenience.

The question of whether abortion is the termination of a human life is a relatively simple one. It has been described as a question requiring no more than a knowledge of high school biology. There may be doubt that high school biology courses are clear on the subject these days, but consider what we know. The male sperm and the female egg each contains twenty-three chromosomes. Upon fertilization, a single cell results containing forty-six chromosomes, which is what all humans have, including, of course, the mother and the father. But the new organism’s forty-six chromosomes are in a different combination from those of
either parent; the new organism is unique. It is not an organ of the mother’s body but a different individual. This cell produces specifically human proteins and enzymes from the beginning. Its chromosomes will heavily influence its destiny until the day of its death, whether that death is at the age of ninety or one month after conception.

The cell will multiply and develop, in accordance with its individual chromosomes, and, when it enters the world, will be recognizably a human baby. From single-cell fertilized egg to baby to teenager to adult to old age to death is a single process of one individual, not a series of different individuals replacing each other. It is impossible to draw a line anywhere after the moment of fertilization and say that before this point the creature is not human but after this point it is. It has all the attributes of a human from the beginning, and those attributes were in the forty-six chromosomes with which it began. Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate and biophysicist, is quoted as having estimated that “the amount of information contained in the chromosomes of a single fertilized human egg is equivalent to about a thousand printed volumes of books, each as large as a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
”
¹
Such a creature is not a blob of tissue or, as the
Roe
opinion so infelicitously put it, a “potential life.” As someone has said, it is a life with potential.