Letter to the Times

Walter Percy1.
Translation: Antonio Pardo.

22 January 1988
Mr. Director
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street New York
N.Y. 10036

Dear Sir:

The fifteenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade2 seems to me a better occasion than any other to draw attention to an aspect of topic abortion that generally goes unnoticed.

The battle lines between pro-lifers and abortionists are so clear and the arguments are so well known and have been so often repeated that I do not think it risky to present the controversy as follows. While it can be argued that, according to Judeo-Christian values, human life is sacred and cannot be destroyed, and while it is true that modern medicine sample increasingly clear evidence that there is no qualitative difference between an unborn and a newborn, this argument is persuasive only to those who accept those values or that evidence. Where they are lacking, only those familiar arguments about "women's rights over their own bodies", which include "the products of conception", can be understood.

The controversy currently seems to be stuck between the "religious" and "secular" positions, although it is apparently the latter that prevails in polls and in the media.

Rather than go into yet another argument that, whether true or false, seems to me futile, I would prefer to draw attention to some social and historical consequences that may be less well known. My call for attention is directed at respectable and well-known institutions such as The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Women's high school , and others who, while distinguished for their defence of human rights, do not accept as a premise the sacred value of human life.

In a word, if one accepts a principle that permits the destruction of human life for whatever social reasons may seem most admirable, there are consequences, perhaps unforeseen.

One does not have to go far back in history to find an example of such consequences. Take democratic Germany in the 1920s. Perhaps the most influential book published in German in the first quarter of this century was entitled Justification of the Destruction of Worthless Lives. Its co-authors were the distinguished jurist Karl Binding and the eminent psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. Neither Binding nor Hoche had heard of Hitler or the Nazis. And Hitler most likely had never read it either. He did not need to read it.

The ideas expressed in that book and the measures suggested for health policy were not the product of Nazi ideology but, rather, the fruit of the finest minds of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic: doctors, sociologists, jurists and others who, with the best secular intentions, tried to improve the social and genetic heritage of the German people by eliminating the morons and the undesirables. It is completely unnecessary to say what use the Nazis made of such ideas.

I hope my words will not be understood as a parallel between the respectable American institutions I have just mentioned and the corresponding pro-Nazi institutions.

What I want to point out is that, when the line is crossed, when the principle of the possibility of destroying innocent human lives, for whatever reasons, for the most admirable socio-economic, medical or social reasons, gains legal, medical, social acceptance, one does not have to be a prophet to predict what will happen next or, if not next, then sooner or later. This is a full-fledged warning. Depending on the will of the majority and the opinion polls currently in favour of allowing women to eliminate unwanted unborn children, it is not difficult to imagine an electorate or a court which, in ten or fifteen years' time, will be in favour of eliminating useless old people, subnormal children, blacks with anti-social behaviour, clandestine immigrants, gypsies, Jews? Why not, if that is what the majority, the opinion polls and the politics of our time want?

Yours sincerely,

Walter Percy