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ABORTION DECISION:
PAGE 3-March 22,1973
‘Amazing’ Historical and Biological Errors
BY NC NEWS SERVICE
(The following is the second part of a two-part interview with Dr.
Andre Hellegers, director of the Kennedy Institute for the Study of
Human Reproduction and Bio-Ethics. The interview was conducted by
Thomas Ascik of the Washington Star-News and is reprinted with
permission of that newspaper.)
Rights and Privacy
Q. The court maintains that the abortion question turns on
whether the existing laws violate a woman’s “rights” and
“privacy.” Is the fetus the possession of a woman the same as an
appendix?
A. In the opinion of the court it is. Not just the decision but
a great deal of things that are going around suggest that
intercourse is a given. It shall be without consequence;
philosophically, that is what we are saying. It is now assumed
that intercourse is one action that everyone can engage in
without accepting any consequences. We are now saying that
the decision whether to bear a child is not a decision to be made
prior to intercourse.
In the high schools we are trying to teach children that, good
heavens, intercourse does things. It is very strange the way
Justice Douglas puts it in his concurring opinion. He says, “The
vicissitudes of life produce pregnancies that may be unwanted.”
We are trying to teach in the high schools that pregnancies
are produced by intercourse, and here is a Supreme Court
Justice who says that pregnancies are produced by “vicissitudes
of life.” If he had said that rape produces pregnancies which are
unwanted and over which one has no control, you might be able
to agree. That is not a decision for which one must take the
consequences because it was not entered into voluntarily. The
philosophy now becomes all intercourse is involuntary. Or else
everyone is getting raped. It is really amazing.
Q. The court allows the state a “concern for the health of the
mother,” and allows the state a concern for the “potential life”
of the fetus, but only after 27 weeks. Why?
A. The court simply and flatly states that the fetus is not a
person to be protected under the Constitution. If that is right,
then there is no reason at all for the Court to worry about the
health of the fetus. Now, very interesting things will happen as a
result of this.
\s I read the decision, you should now be able to experiment
on the fetus “in utero.” The Food and Drug Administration has
always had very strict rules about what drugs may be used in
pregnancy. There has been a lot of talk about setting up primate
colonies to test the effect of drugs on the unborn fetus. As a
consequence of this decision it is now possible to test all drugs
on pregnant women who are going to have an abortion,
providing the woman agrees, of course.
Bad Biology
Q. The court says that it wished “a consensus” could have
been reached from philosophers, theologians and doctors about
the starting point of life.
A. There is a consensus on the starting point of life, without
any question. There are many ways to prove when the starting
point of life is. If we were going to make a test tube baby how
would we do it? We would start off by putting a sperm and an
egg together and if we succeeded, then we would be in business;
we would have life. The fertilized egg would develop
automatically unless untoward events occurred. The first
definition of life, then, could be the ability to reproduce oneself
and develop on one’s own, and this the fertilized egg has while
the individual egg and sperm do not.
The court makes some really amazing biological errors in its
decision. When it deals with the history of abortion, it talks
about what people thought about conception in the past
without realizing that conception was only discovered in the
19th century. The ovum wasn’t discovered until 1827. The
court says that the Pythagoreans held as a matter of dogma that
the embryo “was animate from the moment of conception.”
Well we didn’t even know about conception until 150 years ago.
The Pythagoreans were philosophers, not biologists, but the
court seems to regard their opinions as dissenting biological
opinions. Factually, of course, they arrive at the right answer
anyway, even though they knew very little about biology.
But unless you can think about an ovum as an entity, you
cannot talk medically about a start of life. Before, people
thought the seed was planted and it either caught or it didn’t,
almost as if the seed itself was life. That is why we have such
crazy terms as insemination, a pure agricultural term that
implies that the seed is planted. One ought to talk about
co-semination or something that recognizes that the woman
contributes an ovum.
The American Medical Association in the 19th century took
its stand against abortion when it became known what the
process of conception was and what the ovum was. When they
found out when life began they thought it imperative to protect
it from the beginning.
Q. It seems that the 20th Century has used the same medical
knowledge to draw the exact opposite conclusion.
Dr. Hellegers Is Fetal Expert
With International Education
WASHINGTON (NC) - Dr. Andre Hellegers, director of the
Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and
Bio-Ethics, is a 46-year-old expert on fetal physiology and
population who obtained an international education in
medicine.
A native of Holland, he studied at Edinburgh University,
Scotland; the University of Paris, Johns Hopkins University and
Yale University.
He is a former assistant professor of obstetrics and
gynecology at Johns Hopkins and currently is a professor at
Georgetown University here.
A contributor to a variety of medical journals and former
president of two medical societies, the doctor was a member of
President Johnson’s population committee and Pope Paul Vi’s
birth.control committee. As deputy secretary of the papal body,
Dr. Hellegers dissented from the pope’s birth control encyclical
and its dictums against artificial birth control methods.
However, Dr. Hellegers is a staunch opponent of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s abortion ruling granting a woman an almost
unlimited access to the operation during the first six months of
her pregnancy. He favors abortion only when the mother’s life is
endangered by the continuation of the pregnancy.
He was named director of the Kennedy Institute of
Georgetown Hospital when it was created in 1971 with funds
from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.
A. That’s right. Now that it is absolutely clear how the
process works one begins to falsify history and blame the 19th
century for having written laws which it wrote, not based on
Victorianism, but based on the new knowledge about the
process of conception. Unless you are aware of the fact that
biologists did not discover the ovum until the 19th century you
will completely misread the history of the subject.
The original idea was that the souls was attached at some
time to the body but nobody knew when the process of
body-building started. When that became known, doctors and
the AMA began to count the start of life from conception.
It has been commonly assumed that once human T - not cat or
rat - life - not death - has started then the concept of soul or
human dignity has started. That is where the falsity of the
Supreme Court decision lies. If the court had said that we know
when life starts but the issue is when we shall protect it or when
we shall attach value to it, then it would have had rational
ground for its decision. In the whole debate I have resented the
falsification of embryology for the purpose of avoiding the
fundamental question - when shall we attach value to human
Do you think the court could have reached the same decision
if it had put the question on the proper grounds?
A. Ah, that would have been the difficult one. The court
would have been forced to say something which the California
Journal of Medicine has already said very clearly. It says that we
know when life starts, let’s not kid ourselves. We ought to admit
that we are handling certain social problems with the medical
technology of killing life that has already started. The court
didn’t have the courage of its convictions. So it wound up with
the principle that you may kill the fetus even though it is
already alive, but the court didn’t quite dare to come out and
say it.
Q. What are some further implications of the court’s
decision?
A. I am not sure that the court’s decision will cause any
further harm other than the killing of fetuses. I am not a
dominotheory man. Some people predict that euthanasia,
infanticide and other practices will follow hard and soon on the
abortion decision. I do think that the abortion decision and
other bio-ethical problems are common symptoms of an
underlying question. The question is whether you are going to
have a utilitarian view of man or whether you are going to have
some other view. The court’s decision is a utilitarian view. This
fundamental question will come up very clearly, very shortly
when the issue of how we use the live fetus for experimentation
comes up. In England it has already been decided; you may use
the live fetus for experimentation.
There are two great issues before us now. First, does one
adopt the World Health Organization’s definition of health, and
does it become a doctor’s duty to ensure “a sense of well-being”
which is, in a way, happiness. The second issue is whether we
shall look at the body in a utilitarian sense or whether we shall
attach some greater value to it.
14 WEEK OLD FETUS -- Benedictine Father Paul
Marx holds a bottle containing a 14 week old aborted
fetus which he acquired in his travels, lecturing in
defense of life. His travels have taken him to 35-40
states and nearly as many foreign countries. He said
that he “never dreamt that we (in the United States,
after the recent Supreme Court decision) would have
the least protection for the unborn in all the world.”
(NC Photo Copyright 1973 by Vern Bartos)
Lenten Series Special-- Justice in the World
THREE WORLDS
BY JAMES R. JENNINGS
Associate Director
USCC Division of Justice and Peace
When President Nixon visited Peking
and Moscow, he exploded some old
notions about friends and enemies.
Ceremonially, the West and the East
were joined, if only briefly. With a long
track record as an anti-communist, the
President opened the way for fresh
insights and understandings about the
world the West and the East cohabitate.
America’s president is the
acknowledged leader of the First World
(the “West” or the “Free World”),
which encompasses Western Europe,
Great Britain, Canada, the United States
and Japan. In these nations, major
breakthroughs in political systems and
technology have occurred over the last
several centuries.
Political developments in the First
World have been marked by the
advancement of civil rights. England’s
revolution over three hundred years ago
replaced autocratic government with a
parliamentary system of landed gentry
and urban middle class. The American
and French revolutions continued the
process of eroding autocracy, preparing
the way for the more broadly based
electoral system which has become
dominant in Western Europe, North
America and, more recently, Japan.
“THE PRICE WE PAID was a fratricidal Civil War that settled the
political questions of the right of states to secede, and left to later
generations the question of granting equal civil and economic rights to
black Americans.” Union Army chaplain Father William Corby raises his
hand in general absolution to troops about to fight in the bloody battle of
Gettysburg. (NC Photo)
Accompanying this
revolution-evolution in political systems
were phenomenal technological
advances in the West. This combination
resulted in increased social mobility
and, for some, an increased enjoyment
of individual rights, such as the
freedoms of speech, press and worship.
One of the notable characteristics of
the First World nations is their
free-market system (so-called free
enterprise). The economies operate in
such a way that private entrepreneurs
are free to exploit resources and to
develop any products or services that
their ingenuity and foresight can devise,
for sale in the public market.
In principle, if the products or
services are “good,” they will sell at a
price the market will bear. If the
product or service is faulty, of little
utility or too expensive, it will not. The
business prospers or fails accordingly.
As a dominant characteristic, the system
is consumer- and profit-oriented.
Russia entered the process of
p o 1 i t i cal -technological modernization
relatively late. The country was an
agrarian society of illiterate peasants
exploited by an elitist ruling class.
Following the revolution of 1917, the
Soviets instituted a fundamentally
different system from either medieval
monarchy or modern free enterprise.
In principle, nothing was left to the
whims of the free-swinging marketplace.
Production of industrial goods,
agricultural products, and consumer
items, as well as housing, clothing, and
even the arts, came under the control of
the central government. Private
investments were eliminated and
individual farms were consolidated into
giant farm communes.
The principal characteristic of the
Soviet economic system is central
planning under government control.
With the nations of the Eastern
European bloc, the Soviet Union’s
major achievement is that, within about
50 years, it has become the world’s
second largest industrial power - the
Second World.
The differences between the two
Worlds are obvious; similarities are not
so apparent. It is difficult to place the
methods and achievements of the two
Worlds in perspective because of the
differences in the time frames. The First
World evolved into its position of world
dominance over a period of three or
four centuries; the Russian experiment
was a crash program forced onto a
society in about two generations. That
the social cost of both experiments in
modernization was severe has been
amply documented.
In the First World, the cost of human
lives and dignity has been enormous.
The sweat shop was common during the
Industrial Revolution. Western
Europeans established control of the
port cities in Africa, India and around
the rim of the Pacific, creating their
exploitative colonial systems. In the
United States, our colossal land grab of
the Indian territories and the virtual
elimination of tribal Indians manifests
the price the exploited paid for
America’s development.
U.S. economic development gained a
tremendous boost by the low-cost labor
resulting from the American system of
slavery. The price we paid was a
fratricidal civil war that settled the
political question of the right of states
to secede, and left to later generations
the question of granting equal civil and
economic rights to black Americans.
The social costs of development in
the First World-slavery, colonialism,
genocide of native populations-compare
with those of the Soviet Union-purges,
forced labor rationing and restriction of
personal freedoms.
The other side of this equation is the
social cost of continued
underdevelopment. It is precisely this
choice, between the costs of
development and those of
underdevelopment, that the less
developed nations face. These
nations-the Third World-are presented
with the First World and the Second
World models for development.
Presently, the Third World seems
skeptical of both.