Whatever Happened to the Human Race? E-Book

Francis A. Schaeffer

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Why Should Christians Care About the Dignity of Human Life? What determines whether a life has value? Does age, ability, or health? Scripture tells us that we are all created in the image and likeness of God, and Christians are called to defend the dignity of his creation. But as debates rage around issues from abortion to euthanasia, it can be difficult to speak up against opposing viewpoints. In Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, renowned theologian Francis A. Schaeffer and former US surgeon general C. Everett Koop, MD argue that society's view of life quickly deteriorates when we devalue God's creation through "anti-life" and "anti-God" practices. First written forty years ago, their perspectives are still relevant today as secular humanist issues, including euthanasia and infanticide, increasingly take hold in our culture. Their medical, historical, and theological insights empower readers to affirm a pro-life worldview and defend it confidently.

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“When Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was first published, it was considered alarmist. Euthanasia and infanticide were deemed unthinkable. Today, after scandals from Planned Parenthood and the ethics of Peter Singer, we’re not so shocked. The most important Christian doctrine for our times is that of the image of God. It speaks unequivocally to the dignity, the sanctity, and the nobility of the human race. Today this volume, coauthored by Francis Schaeffer and Everett Koop, is as fresh as ever and deserves a wide readership.”

William Edgar, Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“This book is alarming. It describes a society that treats human beings in ways that rival any dystopian novel. Yet despite how far we’ve declined in the intervening decades, the authors are still spot on in identifying what has caused our disdain for our fellow humans. The cause is sin’s resulting disordered values, combined with the inability to reason deeply and consistently. But rather than wallowing in pessimism and despair, the authors guide the reader to think carefully and Christianly about these issues. They show how the foundations of morality and reason cannot be ultimately grounded in humanity—that is, in human persons—but only in the Divine Person, revealing how persons are what ultimately matter. Moreover, they explain how all this is related to the gospel of Jesus Christ, even giving a helpful overview of the Christian story as laid out in both the Old and New Testaments. This book is a fantastic, substantive, and accessible combination of social commentary, philosophy, theology, and, ultimately, good news. It’s a wonderful primer on how to think about the most important things in life.”

Mitch Stokes, Senior Fellow of Philosophy, New Saint Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho

“Why do debates over abortion and euthanasia heat up in a heartbeat? Decades ahead of their time, Schaeffer and Koop cut right to the crux of our current cultural divide. At hand is a serious philosophical debate about who counts as one of us; either you believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life or you don’t. More and more Americans don’t, and Christians must respond with a biblically grounded case for human value as the only basis for fundamental rights. Schaeffer and Koop’s Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is precisely the place to begin building that case.”

Scott Klusendorf, President, Life Training Institute

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Francis A. Schaeffer

and C. Everett Koop, MD

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Copyright © 1979 by L’Abri Fellowship

This edition © 2021 by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Originally published in the USA under the title:

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, by Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, MD

Copyright © 1979 by L’Abri Fellowship

This worldwide English edition © 2021 by Crossway (a division of Good News Publishers) with permission of L’Abri Fellowship. All rights reserved.

The excerpt from “Medical Science Under Dictatorship,” by Leo Alexander is reprinted by permission from The New England Journal of Medicine.

The excerpt from “No Fault Guilt-Free History,” by Dr. Richard M. Hunt is from New York Times, February 16, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The New York Times Company. Used by permission.

The excerpt from “You Be the Judge,” National Newsline, February 1975 (Dayton, Ohio: Nurses Concerned for Life, Inc.) is used by permission of the publisher of National Newsline, Nurses Concerned for Life, Inc.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from Holy Bible New International Version, copyright © New York International Bible Society, 1978. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7699-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 83-70955

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2021-07-15 02:57:58 PM

Contents

1  The Abortion of the Human Race

2  The Slaughter of the Innocents

3  Death by Someone’s Choice

4  The Basis for Human Dignity

5  Truth and History

6  Our Personal Response and Social Action

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography of Other Books

General Index

Scripture Index

Chapter One

The Abortion of the Human Race

Cultures can be judged in many ways, but eventually every nation in every age must be judged by this test: How did it treat people? Each generation, each wave of humanity, evaluates its predecessors on this basis. The final measure of mankind’s humanity is how humanely people treat one another.

The great dramatic moments of history have left us with monuments and memories of compassion, love, and unselfishness, which punctuate the all-too-pervasive malevolence that dominates so much human interaction. That there is any respite from evil is due to some courageous people who, on the basis of personal philosophies, have led campaigns against the ill-treatment and misuse of individuals. Each era faces its own unique blend of problems. Our own time is no exception. Those who regard individuals as expendable raw material—to be molded, exploited, and then discarded—do battle on many fronts with those who see each person as unique and special, worthwhile, and irreplaceable.

The reason we are writing this book is that we feel strongly that we stand today on the edge of a great abyss. At this crucial moment choices are being made and thrust on us that will for many years to come affect the way people are treated. We want to try to help tip the scales on the side of those who believe that individuals are unique and special and have great dignity.

Yad Vashem is the monument in Jerusalem to the six million Jews and others who were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.1 It is one of the many memorials that are scattered over the world in tribute to those who have perished in upheavals of rampant evil—evil that swirls in on people when they no longer have a basis for regarding one another as wonderful creatures worthy of special care. Yad Vashem is a fitting place to begin, for it reminds us of what, unhappily, is possible in human behavior. Those who were murdered were people just like all of us. More important to realize is that those who murdered them were also people just like all of us. We seem to be in danger of forgetting our seemingly unlimited capacities for evil, once boundaries to certain behavior are removed.

There are choices to be made in every age. And who we are depends on the choices we make. What will our choices be? What boundaries will we uphold to make it possible for people to say with certainty that moral atrocities are truly evil? Which side will we be on?

The Thinkable and the Unthinkable

There is a “thinkable” and an “unthinkable” in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these “certainties” are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice. On a humanistic base, people drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes the thinkable as the years move on. By “humanistic base” we mean the fundamental idea that men and women can begin from themselves and derive the standards by which to judge all matters. There are for such people no fixed standards of behavior, no standards that cannot be eroded or replaced by what seems necessary, expedient, or even fashionable.

Perhaps the most striking and unusual feature of our moment of history is the speed with which eras change. Looking back in history, we notice that cultures such as the Indus River civilization (the Harappa culture) lasted about a thousand years. Today the passing of eras is so greatly sped up that the 1960s stand in sharp contrast to the 1970s. The young people of the 1970s do not understand their older brothers and sisters of the 1960s. What was unthinkable in the 1960s is unthinkable no longer.

The ease and speed of communication has been a factor in this. A protest in South Africa, for example, can be echoed by sympathizers in New York in just a few hours. Social conventions appear and disappear with unprecedented rapidity.

The thinkables of the 1980s and 1990s will certainly include things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet—since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking—when these become thinkable and acceptable in the 1980s and 1990s, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the 1970s. They will slide into each new thinkable without a jolt.

What we regard as thinkable and unthinkable about how we treat human life has changed drastically in the West. For centuries Western culture has regarded human life and the quality of the life of the individual as special. It has been common to speak of “the sanctity of human life.”

For instance, the Hippocratic Oath, which goes back more than two thousand years, has traditionally been taken by the graduates of American medical schools at the time of their commencement.2 The Declaration of Geneva (adopted in September 1948 by the General Assembly of the World Medical Organization and modeled closely on the Hippocratic Oath) became used as the graduation oath by more and more medical schools. It includes: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception.” This concept of the preservation of human life has been the basis of the medical profession and society in general. It is significant that when the University of Pittsburgh changed from the Hippocratic Oath to the Declaration of Geneva in 1971, the students deleted “from the time of conception” from the clause, beginning: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life.” The University of Toronto School of Medicine has also removed the phrase “from the time of conception” from the form of the oath it now uses.3

Of course, the Hippocratic Oath takes us back to the time of the Greeks. But the fully developed concept of the sanctity of human life that we have known did not come from Greek thought and culture but from the Judeo-Christian worldview, which dominated the West for centuries. This view did not come from nowhere. Biblical doctrine was preached not as a truth but as the truth. This teaching formed not only the religious base of society but the cultural, legal, and governmental bases as well. As a total worldview it answered the major questions people have always asked. It dealt not only with the questions Who is God? What is He like? It also gave answers to the questions of Who are we as people? How ought we to live together? What meaning does human life have? In this way, Judeo-Christianity formed a general cultural consensus. That is, it provided the basic moral and social values by which things were judged.

Judeo-Christian teaching was never perfectly applied, but it did lay a foundation for a high view of human life in concept and practice. Knowing biblical values, people viewed human life as unique—to be protected and loved—because each individual is created in the image of God. This stands in great contrast, for example, to Roman culture. The Roman world practiced both abortion and infanticide, while Christian societies have considered abortion and infanticide to be murder.

Until recently in our own century, with some notable and sorry exceptions, human beings have generally been regarded as special, unique, and nonexpendable. But in one short generation we have moved from a generally high view of life to a very low one.

Why has our society changed? The answer is clear: the consensus of our society no longer rests on a Judeo-Christian base, but rather on a humanistic one. Humanism makes man “the measure of all things.” It puts man rather than God at the center of all things.

Today the view that man is a product of chance in an impersonal universe dominates both sides of the Iron Curtain. This has resulted in a secularized society and in a liberal theology in much of the church; that is, the Bible is set aside and humanism in some form (man starting from himself) is put in the Bible’s place. Much of the church no longer holds that the Bible is God’s Word in all it teaches. It simply blends with the current thought-forms rather than being the “salt” that judges and preserves the life of its culture. Unhappily, this portion of the church simply changes its standards as the secular, humanist standards sweep on from one loss of humanness to the next. What we are watching is the natural result of humanism in its secular and theological forms, and the human race is being increasingly devalued.

In our time, humanism has replaced Christianity as the consensus of the West. This has had many results, not the least of which is to change people’s views of themselves and their attitudes toward other human beings. Here is how the change came about. Having rejected God, humanistic scientists, philosophers, and professors began to teach that only what can be mathematically measured is real and that all reality is like a machine. Man is only one part of the larger cosmic machine. Man is more complicated than the machines people make, but is still a machine, nevertheless.

As an example, in 1968 Dr. Edmund R. Leach, Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, wrote in the London Times:

Today when the molecular biologists are rapidly unravelling the genetic chemistry of all living things—while the radio astronomers are deciphering the programme of an evolving cosmos—all the marvels of creation are seen to be mechanisms rather than mysteries. Since even the human brain is nothing more than an immensely complicated computer, it is no longer necessary to invoke metaphysics to explain how it works. In the resulting mechanistic universe all that remains of the divine will is the moral consciousness of man himself.4

How unsatisfactory this evaluation is can be seen in the fact that a decade later every point Edmund Leach made is still in question.

Nonetheless, even though the years pass and men like Leach do not prove their points, the idea of a purely mechanistic universe with people as only complicated machines infiltrates the thinking of many. By constant repetition, the idea that man is nothing more than a machine has captured the popular mind. This idea keeps being presented year after year in the schools and in the media, however unfounded and unproven the hypothesis. Gradually, after being generally unquestioned, it is blindly accepted—just as, after many years of teaching that the earth was flat, the notion was believed because of its sheer pervasiveness. Flawed and erroneous teachings about mankind, however, have far more serious effects. After all, they are talking about us.

For a while, Western culture—from sheer inertia—continued to live by the old Christian ethics while increasingly embracing the mechanistic, time-plus-chance view of people. People came more and more to hold that the universe is intrinsically and originally impersonal—as a stone is impersonal. Thus, by chance, life began on the earth and then, through long, long periods of time, by chance, life became more complex, until man with his special brain came into existence. By “chance” is meant that there was no reason for these things to occur; they just happened that way. No matter how loftily it is phrased, this view drastically reduces our view of self-worth as well as our estimation of the worth of others, for we are viewing ourselves as mere accidents of the universe.

Sociological Law and Personal Cruelty

Recently a generation has arisen that has taken these theories out of the lab and classroom and into the streets. Its members have carried the reduction of the value of human beings into everyday life. Suddenly we find ourselves in a more consistent but uglier world—more consistent because people are taking their low view of man to its natural conclusion, and uglier because humanity is drastically dehumanized.

To illustrate what it means to practice this low view of man, let us consider some present realities that only a few years ago would have been unthinkable—even on the base provided by a memory of the Christian consensus, let alone within the Christian consensus itself. The Christian consensus gave a basis and a framework for our society to have freedoms without those freedoms leading to chaos. There was an emphasis on the value of the individual person—whose moral choices proceed from judgments about man and society on the basis of the existence of the infinite-personal God and His teaching in the Bible.

The Bible teaches that man is made in the image of God and therefore is unique. Remove that teaching, as humanism has done on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and there is no adequate basis for treating people well. Let us now look at some of those related unthinkable realities. The loss of the Christian consensus has led to a long list of inhuman actions and attitudes which may seem unrelated but actually are not. They are the direct result of the loss of the Christian consensus.

First, the whole concept of law has changed. When a Christian consensus existed, it gave a base for law. Instead of this, we now live under arbitrary, or sociological, law. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes took a big step in the change toward sociological law. Holmes said, “Truth is the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” In other words, law is only what most of the people think at that moment of history, and there is no higher law. It follows, of course, that the law can be changed at any moment to reflect what the majority currently thinks.

More accurately, the law becomes what a few people in some branch of the government think will promote the present sociological and economic good. In reality the will and moral judgments of the majority are now influenced by or even overruled by the opinions of a small group of men and women. This means that vast changes can be made in the whole concept of what should and what should not be done. Values can be altered overnight and at almost unbelievable speed.

Consider the influence of the United States Supreme Court. Ralph Winter, reviewing The Memoirs of Earl Warren, said in the Wall Street Journal of July 27, 1977, that a large body of academic criticism has argued that the Warren Court was essentially antidemocratic because it paid little heed to traditional legal criteria and procedures and rewrote law according to the personal values of its members. Winter summed up Supreme Court Justice Douglas’s concept as, “If the Supreme Court does it, it’s all right.” The late Alexander M. Bickel of Yale said that the Supreme Court was undertaking “to bespeak the people’s general will when the vote comes out wrong.” And Bickel caustically summed up the matter by saying, “In effect, we must now amend the Constitution to make it mean what the Supreme Court says it means.”5

The shift to sociological law can affect everything in life, including who should live and who should die.

Those taking the lead in the changes involving who should live and who should die increasingly rely on litigation (the courts) rather than legislation and the election process. They do this because they can often accomplish through the courts changes they could not achieve by the will of the majority, using the more representative institutions of government.

The Christian consensus held that neither the majority nor an elite is absolute. God gives the standards of value, and His absolutes are binding on both the ordinary person and those in all places of authority.

Second, because the Christian consensus has been put aside, we are faced today with a flood of personal cruelty. As we have noted, the Christian consensus gave great freedoms without leading to chaos—because society in general functioned within the values given in the Bible, especially the unique value of human life. Now that humanism has taken over, the former freedoms run riot, and individuals, acting on what they are taught, increasingly practice their cruelties without restraint. And why shouldn’t they? If the modern humanistic view of man is correct and man is only a product of chance in a universe that has no ultimate values, why should an individual refrain from being cruel to another person, if that person seems to be standing in his or her way?

Abusing Genetic Knowledge

Beyond the individual’s cruelty to other individuals, why should society not make over humanity into something different if it can do so—even if it results in the loss of those factors which make human life worth living? New genetic knowledge could be used in a helpful way and undoubtedly will bring forth many things which are beneficial, but—once the uniqueness of people as created by God is removed and mankind is viewed as only one of the gene patterns which came forth on the earth by chance—there is no reason not to treat people as things to be experimented on and to make over the whole of humanity according to the decisions of a relatively few individuals. If people are not unique, as made in the image of God, the barrier is gone. Once this barrier is gone there is no reason not to experiment genetically with humanity to make it into what someone thinks to be an improvement socially and economically. The cost here is overwhelming. Should the genetic changes once be made in the individual, these changes will be passed down to his or her children, and they cannot ever be reversed.

Modern humanism has an inherent need to manipulate and tinker with the natural processes, including human nature, because humanism:

1. Rejects the doctrine of creation.

2. Therefore rejects the idea that there is anything stable or “given” about human nature.

3. Sees human nature as part of a long, unfolding process of development in which everything is changing.

4. Casts around for some solution to the problem of despair that this determinist-evolutionist vision induces.

5. Can only find a solution in the activity of the human will, which—in opposition to its own system—it hopes can transcend the inexorable flow of nature and act upon nature.

6. Therefore encourages manipulation of nature, including tinkering with people, as the only way of escaping from nature’s bondage. But this manipulation cannot have any certain criteria to guide it because, with God abolished, the only remaining criterion is nature (which is precisely what humanist man wants to escape from) and nature is both noncruel and cruel.

This explains why humanism is fascinated with the manipulation of human nature.

It is not only Christians who are opposed to the forms of genetic engineering which tinker with the structure of humanity. Others such as Theodore Roszak and Jeremy Rifkin of the People’s Business Commission rightly see this genetic engineering as incompatible with democracy. Christians and other such people can raise their voices together against this threat. That does not, however, change the realization that the democracy such people are trying to save is a product of Reformation Christianity, and without Reformation Christianity the base for that democracy and its freedom is gone.

In sociological law, with the Christian consensus gone, the courts or some other part of government arbitrarily make the law. In the concept of genetic engineering, with the uniqueness of people as made in the image of God thrown away, mankind itself is in danger of being made over arbitrarily into the image of what some people think mankind ought to be. This will overwhelmingly be the case if such concepts as what has been called “sociobiology” are widely accepted.

According to these concepts, people do what they do because of the makeup of the genes, and the genes (in some mysterious way) know what is best for keeping the gene pool of the species flourishing. Regardless of what you think your reasons are for unselfishness, say the sociobiologists, in reality you are only doing what your genes know is best to keep your gene configuration alive and flourishing into the future. This happens because evolution has produced organisms that automatically follow a mathematical logic; they calculate the genetic costs or benefits of helping those who bear many of the same genes and act to preserve their own image. Thus, the reason why parents help their children live is that the genes of the parents make them act to preserve the future existence of like genetic forms.6

No one tells us how the genes got started doing this. The how is not known. And even if the how were demonstrated, the why would still be in total darkness. Yet with neither the how nor the why known, everything human is abandoned. Maternal love, friendships, law, and morals are all explained away. Those who hold the sociobiological view believe that conflict both in the family and with outsiders is the essence of life. This serves as a chilling reminder of Hitler’s Germany, which was built on the social conclusions logically drawn from the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest.

Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson, who wrote Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, says: “We may find that there is an overestimation of the nature of our deepest yearnings.” He calls for “ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologized.”7

The humanistic philosophers tried to make ethics independent of biblical teaching; the present tragic result is the loss of humanness on every level. Now, Wilson argues, ethics and behavior patterns should be made independent of these humanistic philosophers and put into the realm of the purely mechanical, where ethics reflect only genes fighting for survival. This makes ethics equal no ethics.

Time said of sociobiology, “Indeed, few academic theories have spread so fast with so little hard proof.” Why has it spread so fast with no hard proof? That is easy to explain: we have been prepared for it by all the humanistic materialism of past years. A constant barrage of authoritative, though unproven, statements comes from every side, and gradually people accept themselves and others as only machinelike things. If man is only a product of chance in an impersonal universe, and that is all there is, this teaching is a logical extension of that fact.8

To summarize: On the one hand, the idea that mankind is only a collection of the genes which make up the DNA patterns has naturally led to the concept of remaking all of humanity with the use of genetic engineering. On the other hand, it has led to the crime and cruelty that now disturb the very people whose teaching produces the crime and cruelty in the first place. Many of these people do not face the conclusion of their own teaching. With nothing higher than human opinion upon which to base judgments and with ethics equaling no ethics, the justification for seeing crime and cruelty as disturbing is destroyed. The very word crime and even the word cruelty lose meaning. There is no final reason on which to forbid anything—“If nothing is forbidden, then anything is possible.”

If man is not made in the image of God, then nothing stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our society today: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the increase of child abuse and violence of all kinds, pornography (and its particular kinds of violence as evidenced in sadomasochism), the routine torture of political prisoners in many parts of the world, the crime explosion, and the random violence which surrounds us.

In communist countries, where materialism and humanistic thinking have been dominant for over several generations, a low view of people has been standard for years. This is apparent not only in the early legislation about abortion but also in the thousands of political prisoners who have been systematically oppressed, tortured, and killed as part of the very fabric of communism. Now, however, as humanism dominates the West, we have a low view of mankind in the West as well. Let us consider some more of the direct and indirect results that this low view of people has brought into our society in the noncommunist world.

Child Abuse

Dr. C. Henry Kempe, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, first used the term battered-child syndrome. The term child abuse covers at least three separate entities: physical assault, physical neglect, and emotional abuse and neglect. In the first of these the child is a victim of an act of aggression.9 These case histories are typical of thousands:

Case 1: Police found a nine-year-old girl in a closet measuring twenty-three by fifty-two inches, where she had been locked for half of her life. She weighed only twenty pounds and stood less than three feet tall. Smeared with filth and scarred from parental beatings, this child had become irrevocably mentally damaged.

Case 2: An eleven-year-old boy was brought to a San Francisco hospital suffering from severe malnutrition. He weighed forty-four pounds, had a body temperature of eighty-four degrees, and was in a coma. The suspicious marks on his wrists and ankles were related to his mother’s and her boyfriend’s immobilization of the boy for hours on end by means of handcuffs, chains, and locks.

The second variety of child abuse, physical neglect, is probably many times more frequent than either the medical profession or the police can document. The third form, emotional abuse, is not only difficult to define but more difficult to detect and prove—after which comes the very difficult task of rehabilitative therapy.

So far it is children who have suffered the most from dehumanization. Nothing could illustrate better the dehumanization and exploitation of children than child pornography. Why doesn’t public outcry demand that films depicting child pornography be withdrawn? Because the producers know that they will not be box-office failures. Dehumanization of both adults and children is taking quantum leaps. The unthinkable rapidly becomes not only thinkable but even welcome as entertainment—and being accepted as entertainment, it becomes powerful propaganda for ongoing personal and social practice, further dehumanizing young and old alike.

To begin to grasp the enormity of the problem, consider that in 1972 there were sixty thousand child-abuse incidents which were brought to official attention in the United States. Just four years later, in 1976, the number that received official attention passed the half-million mark. Reported cases of child abuse probably represent only about half of what really occurs.

Child abuse is the fifth most frequent cause of death among children. In U.S. News and World Report (May 3, 1976) it was reported that Dr. Irwin Hedlener, investigating child abuse at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, said: “If child abuse were polio, the whole country would be up in arms looking for a solution.”10

An especially alarming form of dehumanization is the apparent increase of incest. Dr. Harry Giarretto, director of the pioneering Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center in San Jose, California, says that incest is an epidemic in America.11 Dr. Amanat, who heads up the Sexual Abuse Committee in Saint Louis, believes that forty thousand of the one million victims of sexual abuse a year are victims of incest. Some say that incest is the most frequently unrecorded crime in this country and much more common than general child abuse or child neglect.12

We believe that the increased use of children in sex films has contributed to the sexual abuse of children. When absolute sexual standards are replaced by relativistic ones, and this is coupled with the generally low view of people that modern humanists have been teaching, society is not left with many barriers against the sexual abuse of children. After you remove the psychological and moral barriers imposed by a high and sacred view of human life, child abuse of all kinds becomes very easy, given the stresses of child rearing, especially child rearing in the anti-family climate of today.13 The Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion and the arbitrariness of that decision regarding who is or is not a “person” have broken down barriers. There has been a drastic rise of crimes against children since abortion-on-demand became legal in the United States. We are convinced that this increase is caused in part by the liberalization of abortion laws and the resultant drastic lowering of the value placed on human life in general and on children’s lives in particular.14

The forces of humanism have scoffed at Christian morality and ethics as well as at the Christian view of man. These theories of so-called liberation from the biblical absolutes are bearing their fruit. But humanists, far from reexamining the basis of their position now that the situation is souring, stubbornly propose (on the same old base) remedial action to the problems that humanist philosophy itself has created. This action is even more dehumanizing in its results, as we shall see later in this book.

Abortion

Of all the subjects relating to the erosion of the sanctity of human life, abortion is the keystone. It is the first and crucial issue that has been overwhelming in changing attitudes toward the value of life in general. The Supreme Court of the United States on January 22, 1973, in deciding Roev.Wade and Doev.Bolton declared that a new personal right or liberty existed in the Constitution—the right of a woman to procure an abortion at any time. The right of privacy was given a completely new interpretation.15

The Supreme Court went far beyond its own judicial function and invalidated the regulation of abortion in every state in the union. Professor John T. Noonan Jr., professor of law at the University of California (Berkeley) said:

Some of the legislation affected was old, going back to the mid-19th century, some was recent, reflecting the wisdom of the American Law Institute or containing explicit statements of intent to protect the fetus. Some of the legislation had been confirmed by recent popular referenda, as in Michigan and North Dakota; some of the legislation was in the process of repeal, as in New York. Old or new, compromise or complete protection from conception, passed by 19th-century males or confirmed by popular vote of both sexes, maintained by apathy or reaffirmed in vigorous democratic battle, none of the existing legislation on abortion conformed to the Court’s criteria. By this basic fact alone, Roev.Wade and Doev.Bolton may stand as the most radical decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court.16

The decision of the Court went far beyond the expectation of the wildest dreams of the proabortion elite in the United States. Noonan summarized the situation this way: “By virtue of its opinions, human life has less protection in the United States today than at any time since the inception of the country. By virtue of its opinions, human life has less protection in the United States than in any country of the Western world.”17

Archibald Cox of Watergate-prosecution fame said in his book The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government:

The decisions plainly . . . sweep away established law supported by the moral themes dominant in American life for more than a century in favor of what the Court takes to be the wiser view of a question under active public debate. . . . My criticism of [the decision] is that the Court failed to establish the legitimacy of decision . . . to lift the ruling above the level of political judgment.18

In 1977 what eventually became known as the Hyde Amendment, designed to ban the use of taxpayers’ money to pay for abortion-on-demand, was repeatedly blocked by congressional technicalities. The debate on the Hyde Amendment was begun in June 1976, lasted until October, and then was passed in both houses, only to be halted by a single Brooklyn federal judge named John F. Dooling who decided that the Hyde Amendment was unconstitutional. In effect, the Supreme Court, by refusing to reverse Dooling, “gave a district court judge the power to frustrate the clearly expressed congressional will in a matter of appropriating tax funds [which] turns the doctrine of separation of powers on its head.”19

The Court had the opportunity to pull back from its position in a series of decisions in the summer of 1976, but instead confirmed its position and declared that a physician need not provide the same care for a living product of an abortion that would be required for a living baby delivered in a situation when the intent was to have a baby.20

The schizophrenic nature of our society became further evident as it became common practice for pediatricians to provide the maximum of resuscitative and supportive care in newborn intensive-care nurseries where premature infants were under their care—while obstetricians in the same medical centers were routinely destroying enormous numbers of unborn babies who were normal and frequently of larger size. Minors who could not legally purchase liquor and cigarettes could have an abortion on-demand and without parental consent or knowledge.21

In our day, quite rightly, there has been great protest because society in the past viewed the black slave as a nonperson. Now, by an arbitrary absolute brought into the humanist flow, the law in similar fashion declares millions of unborn babies of every color of skin to be nonpersons. Abortion-on-demand is the law of the land, and with the erosion of society’s belief in the sanctity of human life there has followed the killing of more than a million unborn babies a year.

We should say here that those who favor abortion argue that child abuse will decrease if abortion is practiced. It is supposed to be kinder to the unborn child to abort it than to allow it to be born and possibly suffer mistreatment. Those who fought for liberalized abortion policies have had their way, and since 1970 it is conservatively estimated in the United States that there are probably over ten million fewer children who would now be between the ages of one and seven. Since these ten million were “unwanted” and supposedly would have been prime targets for child abuse, it would seem reasonable to look for a sharp drop in child abuse in this same period. But in fact, since the legalization of abortion-on-demand, child abuse has grown remarkably, and it is not due to just more efficient reporting.

This is because nationwide abortion-on-demand has what might be called an “educational impact.” The West German Federal Constitutional Court (West Germany’s Supreme Court) in its February 1975 decision banning abortion-on-demand during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy stated this: “We cannot ignore the educational impact of abortion on the respect for life.” The German court reasoned that if abortion were made legal for any and every reason during the first trimester, it would prove difficult to persuade people that second-and third-trimester fetuses deserve protection simply because they are a few weeks older. The court apparently feared that what would happen to older fetuses could also happen to children after birth.22 As Harold O. J. Brown observes, parents, perhaps unconsciously, could reason, “I didn’t have to have him. I could have killed him before he was born. So if I want to knock him around now that he is born, isn’t that my right?”23

Is it not logical, after all, that if one can legally kill a child a few months before birth, one should not feel too bad about roughing him up a little bit (without killing him) after he is born? Parents who are apprehended for child abuse must feel that the system is somewhat unfair in that they can be arrested for beating their child, whereas people who kill their infant before birth (at an “earlier age”) go scot-free—in fact, have society’s approval.

There is further evidence that our society is schizophrenic on these matters. Consider our concern to provide special facilities for the handicapped in public places: restrooms that can be used by someone in a wheelchair, ramps instead of steps going into public buildings, lifts on public conveyances to get a handicapped individual onto a bus or train. Yet, while having proven that we do have compassion for the handicapped as well as the resources to care for them, at the same time we have a growing tendency to destroy the newborn baby who might have been one of those handicapped individuals.

A much more serious example of this schizophrenic mentality is that we will transport a newborn baby, who is premature and has a congenital defect incompatible with life, to a hospital a considerable distance away—so that a sophisticated team of doctors and nurses can correct that defect and plan for the rehabilitation of the youngster. Meanwhile, in a number of other hospitals within gunshot distance of that center, other medical personnel are destroying perfectly normal infants in the womb.

The Growth of Human Life

Our reasons against abortion are logical as well as moral. It is impossible for anyone to say when a developing fetus becomes viable, that is, has the ability to exist on its own. Smaller and smaller premature infants are being saved each year! There was a day when a 1000-gram preemie had no chance; now 50 percent of preemies under 1000 grams are being saved. Theoretically, there once was a point beyond which technology could not be expected to go in salvaging premature infants—but with further technological advances, who knows what the limits may be! The eventual possibilities are staggering.

The logical approach is to go back to the sperm and the egg. A sperm has twenty-three chromosomes; even though it is alive and can fertilize an egg, it can never make another sperm. An egg also has twenty-three chromosomes, and it can never make another egg. Thus, we have sperm that cannot reproduce and eggs that cannot reproduce unless they get together. Once the union of a sperm and an egg occurs and the twenty-three chromosomes of each are brought together into one cell that has forty-six chromosomes, that one cell has all the DNA (the whole genetic code) that will, if not interrupted, make a human being.24

Our question to a proabortion doctor who would not kill a newborn baby is this: “Would you then kill this infant a minute before he was born, or a minute before that, or a minute before that, or a minute before that?” At what point in time can one consider life to be worthless and the next minute precious and worth saving?

Having already mentioned the union of sperm and egg to give forty-six chromosomes, let us briefly review the development of a baby. At twenty-one days, the first irregular beats occur in the developing heart, long before the mother is sure she is pregnant. Forty-five days after conception, electroencephalographic waves can be picked up from the baby’s developing brain.

By the ninth and tenth weeks, the thyroid and the adrenal glands are functioning. The baby can squint, swallow, and move his tongue. The sex hormones are already present. By twelve or thirteen weeks, he has fingernails; he sucks his thumb and will recoil from pain. His fingerprints, on the hands which have already formed, will never change throughout his lifetime except for size. Legally, it is understood that an individual’s fingerprints distinguish him as a separate identity and are the most difficult characteristic to falsify.

In the fourth month the growing baby is eight to ten inches long. The fifth month is a time of lengthening and strengthening. Skin, hair, and nails grow. Sweat glands come into being; oil glands excrete. This is the month in which the mother feels the infant’s movements.

In the sixth month the developing baby responds to light and sound. He can sleep and awaken. He gets hiccups and can hear the beat of his mother’s heart. Survival outside the womb is now possible. In the seventh month the nervous system becomes much more complex. The infant is about sixteen inches long and weighs about three pounds. The eighth and ninth months see a fattening of the baby.