Abortion and Nazi ideology: the triumph of the will.

The protesters spewing forth hateful slogans during the Human Life Conference in the International Plaza Hotel in Toronto in early April, 1999, were very inaccurate in their choice of insults. For example, they accused HLI supporters of being racists. A little thought would have made them realize how ludicrous this charge was. Right-to-life advocates have never been known for being selective; they claim that all unborn human beings are worthy of life, whether they are white, black, brown, or yellow. Second, if they had got inside the hotel they would have found that the participants in the conference were not engaged, as they professed to think, in planning the blowing up of abortion clinics and the abortionists with them. There were no lectures on sharpshooting, no demonstrations of the use of plastic high explosive or semtex to blow up cars or buses, not even any discussion of which abortionists might be targeted by hit squads. Nothing violent or provocative went on inside the conference hotel. There were e rudite discussions of such subjects as human cloning and public policy, the UN charter on the rights of children, oral contraceptives and breast cancer, and Edith Stein as a model of femininity.

Fascism and George Grant 

Included in the numerous insults hurled at participants in the HLI conference was one which had more application to the insulters than to the insulted: the accusation of "fascism." In a discussion of the Morgentaler abortion decision of 1988, a decision which left Canada without any abortion law at all, the late George Grant wrote that the judgment could be seen as comic and farcical if it did not concern the slaughter of the young. "The comedy," he wrote, "arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say 'yes' to the very core of fascist thought--the triumph of the will."

In the pre-modern world, he continued, "will"--as in "Yet not my will but Thine be done" (or we could add "In His will is our peace")--implied rational choosing by rational souls. In the contemporary world, it means the resolute mastery of ourselves and the world. We have to put aside the understanding of it as a power or faculty of the soul which has to do with free choices. Instead, it is the centre of our searching, the assertion of what we want. Its greatest modern exponent, Nietzsche, said that everything was "will to power." In modern terms, therefore, it has come to mean that power over ourselves and everything else which is itself the enhancement of life. Truth, beauty, and goodness have simply become subservient to it.

The film

The Triumph of the Will was the title of Leni Riefenstahl's documentary film about the National Socialist Party convention at Nuremberg, which George Grant calls "a brilliant title for a brilliant documentary." Is it not absurd, he asks, to relate the apotheosis of such an occasion to the freedom of women to have abortions as they deem desirable? Is it not particularly absurd when the convention was essentially masculine and women seen as subservient and in a stance of adulation?

In the film Hitler is seen, not as the liberator of his own will, but as the man who through his own liberation can make possible the freedom of each individual in the nation. National Socialist doctrine despised the submergence of the individual will in the collectivity, as communism preached. Instead its teaching was that each individual will would find its liberation in unity within the National Socialist Party. The Jewish community, strong in German-speaking lands, was thought of as internationalist and cosmopolitan, and therefore stood in the way of the triumph of the German will; therefore the Jews had to be eliminated. Of course, when the National Socialists realized that their members were being beaten in war, this terrible extermination had to be speeded up in the name of the will's revenge.

Feminists: Bertha Wilson 

"It is not surprising," Grant writes, "that leaders of the women's movement, seeking to overcome the injustices of a longstanding patriarchal tradition, should express themselves in the modern language of the triumph of the will. As the presentation of modernity to itself, it is in all of us at some level explicit. It is to be expected that this language should become dominant among the leaders of the women's movement, because they are so aware of what it means to live in modernity." When the Supreme Court struck down Canada's abortion law in January 1988, the only judge to say straight out that abortion was a woman's right was Madam Justice Bertha Wilson. She took her stand on the recent struggle for feminine rights:

"Women's needs and aspirations are only now being translated into protected rights. The right to reproduce or not to reproduce which is in issue in this case is one such right and is properly perceived as an integral part of modern woman's struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human being."

In her view, the 1969 legislation setting up a system of therapeutic abortion boards in hospitals had taken the decision away from the woman and given it to a committee--therefore, a clear violation of the woman's autonomy in decisions of a private nature. The legislation provided that the woman's capacity to reproduce was not to be subject to her own control, but to the control of the state:

"She is truly being treated as a means.... She is the passive recipient of a decision made by others as to whether her body is to be used to nurture a new life."

Medical matter

The reasoning behind Justice Wilson's position was examined in detail by two political scientists and a professor of law, Janine Brodie, Shelley A.M. Gavigan and Jane Jenson, in their book The Politics of Abortion, published by Oxford Press in 1992. The 1969 legislation effectively defined abortion as a medical matter. This medicalized definition increasingly came under fire from two opposing sides: "On one side, pro-choice groups decried state control over women's access to abortion, arguing instead that women should have the 'right to choose.' They founded their claim on the principle that reproductive freedom is integral to any realization of full gender equality. On the other side, pro-life groups countered with the claim that the right to life of the foetus takes legal and moral precedence over women's rights to self-determination."

Neither side would have anything to do with the familiar view accepted by the politicians that abortion should be a matter between a woman and her doctor. The authors quote, with apparent approval, a pro-life speaker's demolition of this position in the Canadian Parliament:

"Why her doctor? Surely the question to kill unborn human beings is a philosophical and moral issue.... By training, by experience, [doctors] are probably the least qualified group to decide philosophical questions.... most medical people could not tell the difference between a philosophical precept and a wet paint sign."

By the mid-70s, pro-choice groups were challenging the prevailing medical definition of abortion, using a language of rights; a new figure appeared, the woman who simply wanted to ask for an abortion from her doctor. In a debate in Parliament in 1988, government MP Barbara McDougall, Minister Responsible for the Status of Women, declared that, while she was personally opposed to abortion, "Every woman has her own conscience [and] the government cannot and should not tell women what they can think and do." She pointed out that frequently the body makes its own choice: "The miscarriage of an unborn child is a natural abortion. It is the body saying 'no.' Why, if the woman is a whole being, cannot her mind, her intellect, her spirit make that same decision?"

The 'pro-choice' rhetoric asserts women s right to bodily integrity and reproductive control. Anything less, the feminists argue, expropriates the female body and disenfranchises the female subject. They charge that pro-life's rhetorical challenge is to make the foetus complete and autonomous by rendering the woman's body invisible and irrelevant to foetal personhood: "The pregnant woman, according to this discursive construction, represents shelter, nourishment, and time. She is a mechanical incubator who, so long as she is functional, is irrelevant to the outcome of the pregnancy."

Just how many Supreme Court judges were convinced by these arguments in 1988 is difficult to say. We do know that Justice Antonio Lamer, later in 1990 to become Chief Justice, simply voted according to the prevailing opinion polls. He told us that on February 6, 1998, in an address to the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. Rather than basing his judgement on the strength of his personal conviction or on the weight of the law, he had allowed the force of public opinion to determine his concurring vote (see "Chief Justice shocks Canada," Catholic Insight, Sept. 1998, pp. 14-15).

The above feminist caricature of the pro-life position--rendering the woman invisible--is an interesting illustration of how far abstraction and ideology can take intelligent women away from reality. No one on the right-to-life side thinks of a pregnant woman as a mechanical incubator; no one regards her as invisible and irrelevant. Aid to Women in Toronto, run by workers who are supported by pro-life, does what its name implies--gives assistance to women, especially those who are having babies and need help. Birthright, founded in Toronto by Louise Summerhill, is now an international organization with many local chapters, all of them governed by the mandate to be of assistance to both mothers and their babies.

The person who did take an extraordinarily one-sided view of the abortion debate was Dr. Marion Powell, who was commissioned by the Ontario Government to report on access to abortion in the province. She was a well-known feminist, an ardent advocate of abortion, and the driving force behind the Bay Street Birth Control Centre in Toronto, which referred women for abortion. As Gwen Landolt of REAL Women pointed out later, her report had not been completed by the time the Morgentaler hearing took place; when it did appear, however, the Supreme Court judges seized on it and began quoting it as if it were gospel truth. Undoubtedly it was this document which Mr. Justice McIntyre was thinking of when he commented in his dissenting opinion that he preferred to deal with evidence on which he could conduct cross examination. In its approximately thirty pages, Marion Powell's report made the unborn child appear invisible; she did not refer to it at all.

Judge McIntyre

In his dissenting opinion, Mr. Justice McIntyre concluded that there has never been a general right to abortion in Canada and that there has always been clear recognition of a public interest in the protection of the unborn. That interest goes all the way back to the Romans, who would not torture or execute a pregnant woman guilty of a capital offence--since the law had a right to take one life, not two.

Exactly the same principle was carried on in English common law. It is reflected in Shakespeare's Henry VI Part II, in the novels of Defoe, in John Gay's Beggar's Opera, in the Salem witch trials of 1694; time and again, the same view prevails--that a woman who is pregnant cannot suffer the extreme penalty of the law, because her child is an innocent person who deserves to live.

No such precedents can be found for the view that abortion is a woman's right. Thinking of the campaign for acknowledgement of such a right, McIntyre said, "It is not for the courts to manufacture a constitutional right out of whole cloth."

Grant on the individual will

Bertha Wilson's position was unprecedented--and depended, perhaps without her knowing it, on the overemphasis on the will to which George Grant was to call attention. "After the Supreme Court decision," he wrote, "the victorious advocates of abortion on demand paraded with signs, on some of which was the slogan Abort God. They were right to do so," he commented; what they meant was "abort the idea of God because it has held human beings back from liberation." What is given to us in the word "God," he pointed out, is that goodness and purpose are the source and completion of all that is. Only in terms of such an affirmation can we dimly understand why human lives partake in a meaning which we should not hinder but enhance. Those who see life simply as a product of necessity and chance are inevitably more open to feticide, because they do not see the destiny of meaning to which human beings are called. The advocates for abortion give us a taste of what politics will be like when influential groups in society th ink that meaning is to be found in getting what they want at all costs. Even in its highest ranks the legal system simply flounders in the face of those who find meaning in the triumph of the will. "When society puts power into the hands of the courts," Grant concludes, "they had better be educated"--and of course he finds that they are not.

The conclusion is clear. To the woman who claims that abortion is her unquestioned, unmitigated right, the response must be, "Why?" Public policy in a democratic country must not be based on a Nazi doctrine--the triumph of the will.