Terminating 2 at 20

Exercising her right to choose ... to kill her twins.

I ran across a disturbing opinion column from one week ago about a woman in Florida who was pregnant with twins.  "Was."  She is pregnant no longer.

No, she was not a sad victim of urban violence -- but her twins were.  She terminated them at twenty weeks of gestation.  She ended their lives half-way through her pregnancy.  Why?  For the supremely sensible reason that ... she just didn't want them, and she felt nothing for her twin children.

The website on which the column appears is littered with annoying political ads, and the column itself ends with an appeal to "the church" that may not make sense to readers or even follow from the text that precedes it.  But what the column does do well is to bring to attention how commonplace this sort of ending of innocent life is in the United States.

It also prompts questions in my mind about what sort of person possesses such a psychological and emotional disposition that she does not think twice about killing the two twin children who are so visibly alive and growing in her womb.  What really causes a person to feel and act that way?

A pair of twins at about 20 weeks gestation.

The outrage that I feel in reading about these killings stems in large part from my sympathy for the twins and from my indignation that their mother reportedly felt no sympathy, much less love, for them herself.  I feel that her actions were unjust, certainly at least in the sense that her killing the twins was disproportionate to anything the twins had done.  And I wonder why their mother thought that it was just, in the sense that it was right and acceptable, for her to kill her twins despite their having done nothing but come into being -- and that through the mother's own actions!

Having worked through James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense, I now better understand that my emotional reactions reflect my moral responses, or vice versa.  The two are intertwined and explain each other.  Frequently, when we judge an action to be immoral we also believe that a proper emotion or character trait is lacking, the absence of which led to the impropriety.  But we can take this further.

When the proper emotions or character traits are so absent that a person commits acts that horrify us, and for which the person ostensibly feels no remorse after the fact, we say that something inhuman has taken place.  What we mean is less that the act itself was inhuman but that the perpetrator is:  that action is not the sort of thing that either is characteristic of humans or ought to be.  We sense that something is really, really wrong.  Morality and humanity are inseparable.  This is why we often describe as inhuman what we judge to be immoral.

And so it strikes me as inhuman for the mother mentioned in the column, and all those like her, not to display (more) care for the humans that she was nurturing in her womb.  Because she apparently lacked that humanity out of self-interest, I understandably, and justifiably, appraise as immoral the choice to kill her twins.  The choice to kill babies may be a legal right, but it may not be morally right.

I do not have a window into this woman's heart.  I only know what is reported.  It is entirely possible, as so frequently happens in actuality but is so infrequently reported in the media, that in this instance like others the mother who aborted the lives of her unborn children suffers emotional turmoil, guilt, depression, and sincere regret.  The author of the column is one such woman who experienced these things after her own history of abortion.

My main point is just that the immorality of abortion is tied to the perceived inhumanity of the action.   When we sense that humanity is compromised by actions -- when the proper feelings, for instance, are absent and the human social relationships that should naturally obtain are thereby disturbed or nonexistent -- we believe that something has gone terribly awry.  For individuals who are outliers of indifference we have a specific term:  "the psychopath is the extreme case of the nonsocial personality, someone for whom the ordinary emotions of life have no meaning.  Psychopaths lie without compunction, injure without remorse, and cheat with little fear of detection.  Wholly self-centered and unaware of the emotional needs of others, they are, in the fullest sense of the term, unsocial" (Wilson, The Moral Sense, 107).

It would be too much -- and I wish to be clear about this -- to say that the mother who terminates the lives of her twin children is a psychopath.  I am not claiming that.  But by reminding ourselves about what is wrong with psychopaths, we may glean something of what is wrong with aborting living human fetuses:  it destroys the most basic social bond that exists, that between mother and child.  It displays a supreme indifference to the emotional, indeed very, lives of others.  It appears to "injure without remorse."  It seems lopsidedly self-centered.

Mothers who abort their children's lives may not be psychopaths.  Presumably they are affected in ways that we may never detect.  And we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  Many mothers later report the severe conflict of conscience that they experienced in deliberating about and going through with an abortion, or in reflecting on it subsequently.  Only the most callous of individuals feel nothing, and only then would we rightly apply the psychopathic label.

But we must ask about a society, no, our local communities because "society" is too impersonal -- we must ask whether the communities in which we live and move display toward abortion the sort of callousness, the sort of indifference, the sort of heartlessness, that we could properly attribute to a psychopath, to someone who injures without remorse.

Where is the humanity in our communities toward other humans who just happen to be at a different stage of aging than we are?

Maybe "psychopath" does not fit individual circumstances, but what about the state of our community character?  If a psychopath is an entity "for whom the ordinary emotions of life have no meaning" (and surely the loving, caring emotions of parent to child are at the center of ordinary life), then perhaps the label "psychopath" aptly describes us in our collective disposition to the termination of innocent lives.  Is the character of our society with respect to this matter one of a psychopath?  I wonder.  But if so, do we even care about that label?