Gerhard & Useless Eaters

Gerhard Kretschmar died on July 25, 1939. He was born blind with one leg and one arm and with other severe disabilities. His parents petitioned the government to have this monster, as his father referred to him, euthanized and their request was granted illegally. Gerhard was five months old.

With this single death Adolf Hitler inaugurated Aktion T4, the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust, that caused the involuntary euthanasia of nearly 300,000 people with mental or physical disabilities in Germany, Austria, and occupied Poland. The methods used to exterminate the Jews in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected first against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual handicaps.

Doctors were authorized to survey institutionalized residents to determine their state of health and capacity for work. Those found to be incurably sick, who were described as living a life not worthy of life, who were classified as useless eaters, were granted a mercy death caused by starvation, poisoning, lethal injection, or gassing.

The mass murder of a class of people cannot occur unless the class has been dehumanized to help assuage the psychological trauma that floods the mind when witnessing the death of the innocent. In Germany, the process of debasing the Jews started benignly enough in 1933 with the passage of laws that on the surface looked nonthreatening. Jews were barred from government service or taking the bar examination. They could no longer slaughter animals to meet Kosher diet regulations. Their enrollment in public schools was limited. They were banned from editorial posts, couldn’t perform on stage or screen, couldn’t be tax consultants, veterinarians, or midwives. They couldn’t buy lottery tickets or keep carrier pigeons or teach in public schools.

Gradually the laws became more onerous. Jews lost their citizenship rights. They could no longer marry non-Jewish Germans. They were expelled from all public schools. They had to surrender any precious metals or stones they owned. Their passports were invalidated. They were prohibited from changing their names or altering the names of their businesses so their Jewish heritage could not be camouflaged. Finally, Jewish businesses were closed altogether or confiscated and given to others who held no right to the property.

All of these measures were legal having been legislated by the largely ceremonial Reichstag or ordered directly by Hitler. The Enabling Act of 1933 allowed for the passage of laws that could even contravene constitutional provisions, essentially giving the state absolute power to dictate right and wrong. As Hitler ascended to power no entity existed in Germany that could challenge the total assault on human life and liberty that would come to characterize the Third Reich.

Simply because something is legal doesn’t make it either right or moral in an absolute sense. There is a higher law that supersedes laws adopted by civil societies that governs whether those statutes are right or wrong, good or bad. This law was well understood by the drafters of our Declaration of Independence and was known as The Law of Nature and Nature’s God. Webster’s 1828 Dictionary of the English Language defines the Law of Nature as a rule of conduct arising out of the natural relations of human beings established by the Creator and existing prior to any positive precept. This Law of Nature exists above and before all other civil laws and acts as an independent check on the unlawful usurpation by civil government of any right or privilege.

In the Declaration our Founders affirmed there were self-evident truths from the Law of Nature – truths that didn’t need any proof to produce a clear conviction upon the mind - regarding inalienable rights – rights that cannot be infringed or transferred by or to another. With this understanding they wrote We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The right to life is nearly an unconditional right granted by the Law of Nature and Nature’s God that cannot be trespassed by any person or institution on earth. It cannot be diminished to allow for euthanizing the useless eaters in society who cannot contribute to its welfare. Neither can it be redefined to allow for the genocide of any class of people whether they be Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, or enslaved Africans. This natural right to life is fixed and universal across all civilizations for all time, including the United States of America and its Supreme Court. No worldly power exists that has the authority to amend this right in any regard.

Today we’re at a crossroads respecting the right to life as the Supreme Court is poised to overturn its fifty-year old ruling in Roe v. Wade guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion. The leaked first-draft majority opinion authored by Justice Alito in a forthcoming decision suggests the Court finds that Roe should be overturned because it is bad law on two counts. First, the right to abortion is not an enumerated right found anywhere in the federal Constitution, and second, the legal heritage respecting abortion discovered both in common law and in the statutes of the American colonies and states doesn’t support the notion that it was considered a right at all.

In this draft opinion the Court asserts the debate over abortion should no longer be fueled by either the Roe or Casey opinions, but rather it should be jettisoned from the federal level to the state legislatures where the people’s representatives can decide the nature and scope of the right. The Court is choosing to dislodge the constitutional fault these two opinions imposed so that states can determine both the morality and legality of elective abortion. Transferring the abortion dispute to the states via Roe’s demise doesn’t mean abortion will be outlawed. On the contrary, abortion on demand will still be legal in many states that maintain the right either by statute or by constitutional provision.

I agree with Alito that Roe is bad law, but I don’t agree that state legislatures or even a citizen referendum have the authority to decide this issue. The right to abortion does not exist in the moral universe in which we exist. Elective abortion is a violation of the Law of Nature’s inalienable right to life and therefore cannot be legal or moral in any nation on earth.

Yet the debate in America over abortion is not about the Law of Nature’s supremacy of moral authority but rather about the extent to which human liberty can infringe on the right to life, which is called the freedom to choose. The Court via Roe determined women have a fundamental right of privacy over their bodies that nullifies any right to life the Law of Nature grants to a human embryo living inside of them. Without regard to any other authority other than human self-will, the Court ignored the inalienability of the right to life and said, in effect, whatever right to life the fetus has can be transferred to the mother. This transference was declared to be legal across the nation but it could never be morally right. The Court’s decision was a blatant, egregious, and purposeful denial of the undeniable truth that human life – regardless of its degree of potentiality – is protected against every encroachment not permitted by the Law of Nature. No one has the right to terminate innocent human life.

Pro-choice supporters argue that a woman’s access to abortion is a reproductive right over which the government has no jurisdiction. They liken it to the right of privacy that extends to a couple’s bedroom. No government can lawfully regulate a couple’s manner of birth control, or direct the decision to have or forego children, or control the outcome of any pregnancy. These decisions are so intimate that any intrusion by government into these affairs should be considered unconscionable, and even immoral. I agree the state has no legitimate interest in interfering with such matters, but once the woman is pregnant the issue is no longer about a reproductive right or even her own body, but about living tissue that will inescapably develop into a human being. At this point the human embryo has acquired the right to life the Law of Nature grants and deserves the protection such a right requires.

A modern, enlightened society might take enormous pains to rationalize that five-month old Gerhard’s diminished life falls so short of what it means to be alive that he can no longer be considered worthy of belonging to the human race. He is indisputably human and is endowed with personality albeit trapped in a physical body that constrains him from reaching full functionality. Nevertheless, his parents either don’t want to nurture such a deformity or don’t want him to suffer the indignity of being a spectacle later in life, and so they decide he must forfeit his inalienable right to life for their good and his. He loses his life because society somehow determines he’s not human enough to be human. The same incomprehensible irrationality was applied to the Jews and other marginalized classes of people in Nazi Germany.

Conversely, it is comparatively easy for an intellectually progressive society to evade the hard questions about Gerhard’s fate when he is a minuscule mass of nascent cells inside the womb and bears no resemblance to anything human. At this stage it’s conveniently conclusive to abortion advocates that Gerhard is not human enough to be human and therefore the inalienable right to life afforded by the Law of Nature does not apply. From here forward the entirety of the debate over abortion will have nothing to do with Gerhard or his potential for life or the rule of the Law of Nature and Nature’s God, but rather it will focus on the utter sovereignty of the mother’s will and body to the exclusion of everything else, including the substantial scientific evidence that can inform precisely what happens to Gerhard’s embryo within hours and days of his conception.[i]

Abortion is further justified from the innumerable problems that allegedly arise for the mother and the child due to pregnancies that are unwanted or unplanned.[ii] These complications spring from the woman’s marital status, the number of children already in the household, her socio-economic attainment, her level of education, the breadth of any support network, her income and career, her psychological temperament, her affinity for motherhood, and whatever aspirations she holds about the future that will now be interrupted or abandoned because of a baby. Compounding these very real concerns for the mother are those expressed for the child itself. These fears involve the child’s future – the safety of the home environment and the surrounding neighborhood, the provision of food and shelter, the promise of a good education, the hope of a well-paying job, and the start of a family where the cycle of all of this happiness and fortuity can be repeated.

The assertion is made that an unwanted pregnancy carried to term will bring near catastrophic consequences to both mother and child. Both will suffer, perhaps for their lifetimes, because the mother will live a life of regret and the child will live a life without love. An incompatible mixture of maternal contempt with a child’s longing for acceptance apparently could produce enough volatility in the upbringing of the child so as to suggest if such conditions were to be replicated across the country social upheaval would be the result. All of this domestic discord and collective disorder can be avoided with a simple medical procedure that restores the mother’s life to pre-pregnancy settings and averts further tragedy by preventing the birth of a child that could never be loved, happy, or fulfilled.

The natural right to life rooted within the Law of Nature is indifferent to the possible negative ramifications facing a woman with an unwanted pregnancy. Its single aim is to convey the objective reality that beginning at conception personhood comes with an inherent claim of legal power to exclusively possess and enjoy life. This exclusive entitlement to life cannot be infringed even while the emergent personhood dwells in the body of another.

It doesn’t matter to Gerhard’s embryonic legal power that he’s unwanted or unplanned, or that his eventual birth will trigger a cascade of difficulties for his mother, or that he faces a life of blindness accompanied with other disabilities, or even that his mother does not believe he is a human person. None of this has any relation to the intrinsic title to the right to exist that attaches to Gerhard at the very inception of his undetectable life. Regardless of how adamantly the mother believes her body is her supreme domain untouchable by anything in heaven or on earth, the Law of Nature speaks otherwise to human reason. Gerhard’s body is not her body, and his right to life exists far above any desire she may have to be rid of him.

We come now to the delicate matter of impregnation by rape or incest. Whenever pro-abortion devotees sense a waning of public acceptance of elective termination of a pregnancy, to bolster support they predictably pivot to the rare instances when women, especially young girls, are involuntarily impregnated by a violent act. Such acts are unspeakably horrific. I know survivors of this sexual trauma and their stories are filled with the pain of guilt and shame. Rape and incest are reprehensibly evil acts and their impacts seldom, if ever, diminish. Yet, the evil act does not create an evil effect. The baby conceived from such an act is innocent, and terminating the pregnancy is an evil in itself, a transgression of the natural right to life found in the Law of Nature. As the saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. The immorality of abortion will not expunge the malevolence of rape or incest.

The decision facing these victims whether to carry or terminate the fetus is incomprehensibly difficult and undeniably life-changing. From a purely emotional perspective, the predisposition would be to extend mercy to the victims and allow for the cancellation of an injustice of which they had no part. From a strictly legal standpoint, the Law of Nature is unsympathetic toward the cruelty the victims endured that resulted in impregnation because the suffering the evil caused is not justification to abrogate the inviolability of the right to life. This is the dispassionate truth of the easy wrong facing the hard right. It would be easier to forfeit the babies’ life in these rare circumstances than to inflexibly adhere to the right to life and carry the baby to term and face the lifelong consequences of such an appalling act. Yet, the preservation of life is exactly what the Law of Nature requires. It is as unforgiving as it is demanding.

Finally, the most problematic part of the abortion issue is the dilemma that surfaces when the mother’s right to life is endangered by the fetus’ right to live. Here the Law of Nature recognizes two identical rights that are in conflict. Within the philosophy of natural law there exists a principle called the Doctrine of Double Effect, which in this example states that when an act has an immoral outcome (the death of the fetus) the act is permissible when its action is an unintended secondary result from a moral objective (saving the mother’s life). The otherwise unyielding Law of Nature gives way to surrendering one life to safeguard another.

American culture has concocted several other validations for a constitutionally protected right to elective abortion. Women become empowered by having their bodies under their own control. The fetus is incapable of feeling pain during an abortion. Access to medically directed abortions reduces harm to the mother who would be at risk of injury from illegal, unsafe abortions. Abortions do not cause long-term physical or emotional problems. Profoundly deformed fetuses can escape a life of hardship and pain. Women without access to abortion services are more likely to become unemployed, live in poverty, receive social welfare, and become victims of domestic abuse. Abortion reduces crime by denying women the chance of bringing into this world children more likely to engage in criminal activity. Abortion is an effective way to control global population.

None of these rationales supporting abortion provides any defense against the ultimatum from the Law of Nature that it is the highest moral authority in the promulgation of the ethics concerning life. Within that controlling power there exists no capability to allow situational leniency that would annul either the claim or the operation of the most sacrosanct entitlement in world history. Elective abortion is a lawless act regardless of what human reason may decide or what a human court may declare.

Whenever the right to life is altered the value of life is diminished. We need look no further than to the genocide or enslavement of classes of people across history to substantiate this accusation. In these cases, social malignancy resolved that a life unworthy of life was not deserving of protection or preservation by any standard of morality or dignity. In Gerhard’s case, his parents conceded his deformed body testified that he simply was not of this world. If allowed to live, he would have expanded his parents’ perception of what it means to be part of the human race. In the same way, a tiny mass of fetal tissue, if allowed to live, can amplify for Americans what it means to be human.

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[i] Cited here is a collection of the most popular pro-choice slogans that appear on placards in public rallies. None of these slogans asserts the right to abortion is found in the fact the fetus is not a human being. Rather, the right originates in the mother’s absolute autonomy over her body and anything inside of it. The pregnant woman is entirely independent of any law either by civil authority or by reason or revelation that would restrict the exercise of the freedom of her will. – Abortion is healthcare. Abortion is freedom. Jesus isn’t a dick so keep him out of my vagina. Abortion is a civil right. I’m a woman not a womb. Keep your rosaries off my ovaries. Every mother a willing mother. Every child a wanted child. Against abortion – have a vasectomy. I demand a separation of vagina and state. May the fetus you save grow to be a gay abortion provider. Nacho uterus. Public cervix announcement: fuck you. Someday I hope to have as many rights as a gun. My body my choice. Mind your own uterus. My uterus is private property. If you cut off my reproductive choice, can I cut off yours. Abortion providers save women’s lives. Respect my existence or expect my resistance. Republicans care about fetuses until they become women. My freedom begins with my body. Abortion is a personal decision not a legal debate. My uterus is greater than your God. If it’s not your body it’s not your decision. If you’re against abortion, don’t have one. If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator. My uterus my rules. Bans off our bodies. Don’t tread on me – my choice. [ii] “If the government forces a woman to complete unwanted pregnancies, it’s like forced labor in a jail to that woman.” Des Moines Register letter to the editor, May 2022. “Regarding the future of Roe v. Wade, no one is looking past the fact that it’s an unborn child and they want to protect its right to live. Have they considered an unwanted child’s future? That child could be abused and not have a bright future. The child might be found in a dumpster somewhere. Anti-abortion advocates have to think of this. No one wants to see a child killed whether in the womb or other ways, but common sense should prevail.” Des Moines Register letter to the editor, May 2022. “I am a pro-choice Christian. I am pro-choice even as I acknowledge out country’s moral ambivalence about abortion. The issue of abortion sometimes involves issues of rape, incest, or fetal abnormalities. The issue of abortion always involves the life, health and well-being of the mother. The issue of abortion is often complicated by abuse, family dysfunction and poverty. The question of abortion necessarily involves the availability of contraception, systems of support, health care and adoption. For me, as a Christian the central question is, ‘Who is the best decision-maker for this morally ambiguous situation with a million different complexities and contingencies?’… The complex, morally ambiguous decision of continuing or ending a pregnancy is one that is best made by pregnant women in consultation with their chosen support system.” Des Moines Register letter to the editor from a local pastor, May 2022.