Nuremberg Gambit
By Timothy J.A. O’Donnell
Violence against innocent human life is a moral evil. The gunning down of Dr. Tiller is lamentable in the extreme even without withdrawing his background of destroying viable preborn children. A vigilante nevertheless cannot deliver justice.
Yet the persistent question echoes in the hearts of many: What is justice then for the tens of millions of children killed by abortion and the women and men deeply wounded by abortion now living post-abortive lives? The comparison between the Nuremberg Trials and the radical abortion advocates might prove interesting.
The claim that the major protagonists of the modern ethical morass of abortion offer a rhetoric, which serves to conceal behind their masks of civility, and moral togetherness, what are in fact their preference for a Common Plan of killing is not unheard of. An acute observer of the program of abortion sees that abortion - presented in its essential institutionalized structure, catalogue of distortion, and pageant of supporters – is killing en masse.
And it follows, that the scheme of abortion on-demand is arguably a crime against humanity. In that context, the Pro-Life movement ought to mull over its aims beyond purely ending abortion by also considering the next step: What if prosecuting pro-abortion instigators, organizers, and policymakers - not through violence, but through the courts, became possible?
The blueprint for success might be found in the appropriation of two key principles used in the post World War II Nuremberg Trials: the primacy of conscience and crimes against humanity. The moral arguments found in these trails of renown signal one of the epitomes of justice in Western history in part, because it was secured on the moral high ground of conscience.
Is now the time to initiate another goal for the Pro-Life movement? After all, pro-lifers already struggle mightily against the seemingly implacable Roe v. Wade decision and the glut of new bio-ethical issues. Clamorous division across the country and significant moral confusion among the faithful does not bode well for yet another task. Even so, the long view Pro-life community needs begins in dialogue, sharing ideas and perspectives, in a vigorous contest to shape our shared destiny.
A set of questions have to be asked and answered: Are the moral truths, arguments, and principles employed throughout the Nuremberg Trials germane to the abortion debate? If so, is there a narrative that necessarily emerges of prosecuting the principal advocates, foremost architects, and fundamental institutions responsible for executing a plan resulting in the destruction of over 50 million human beings?
At the Nuremberg Trials following World War II you may recall the Allies sought to bring to justice the leading Nazi conspirators; Justice Robert Jackson, an American jurist if impeccable credentials, introduced the world to the legal concept of crimes against humanity to prosecute the Nazis for their wholesale killing and warfare. His strategy was straightforward:
The strength of the case against these defendants under the conspiracy Count, which it is the duty of the United States to argue, is in its simplicity. It involves but three ultimate inquiries: First, have the acts defined by the Charter as crimes been committed; second, were they committed pursuant to a Common Plan or Conspiracy; third, are these defendants among those who are criminally responsible?
(Summation for the Prosecution by Justice Robert Jackson
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Jacksonclose.htm)
First, have crimes been committed? The certain logic is as follows:
Intentionally killing an innocent human being is morally wrong.
Elective abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being.
Hence, elective abortion is a serious moral wrong.
In fact, most intellectually honest abortion advocates have conceded the entire argument of whether or not the preborn children in the womb are human beings. The scientific evidence is too overwhelming and the rational arguments too compelling for any reasonable person to successfully argue against them.
Second, is there now or has there been a Common Plan to commit these crimes on a vast, unprecedented scale? It is, I take it, to be the case. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, convert to Catholicism and author of Hand of God describing his leadership in the movement to legalize abortion in the U.S. and his subsequent rejection of the pro-abortion movement, declares that he formed NARAL in the late 1960s to “promote the pro-abortion mentality across the land. One of our strategies in order to mislead the American public was to deny what we knew to be true, that an abortion kills an existing human being. This was the greatest mistake in my life and the greatest mistake in American history” (Emphasis added).
The central plan or plot has been and continues to be the destruction of innocent, defenseless human beings. The plot is simple – categorize the preborn children as dispensable, inconvenient, disruptive to one’s lifestyle, or relegate them as non-persons because of their size, dependency, and stage of development. The attack ensues in the silent intimacy of the womb utilizing a variety of deadly, methodical, persistent medical procedures to bring about the death of their intended victim, the child in the womb. Thus, the woman is restored to her radical autonomy liberated from the problem of a baby (and so the story goes). The institution receives payment, sanitizes the instruments, disposes of the “biological waste”, and campaigns for more customers.
For the moment, let me remark that reading the disturbing account of the abortion movement from Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) through the contemporary debates, what becomes eminently plausible and plainly visible is the machinery of the Culture of Death: abortion, euthanasia, destructive embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, etc. The progressive march toward the legalization of abortion, its proliferation throughout the nation and export to developing nations, the business activity it birthed (est. at over $1 billion per year), and the political power and adulation abortion factions garnish have fortified the liberal ideology.
Third, consider the certain beliefs shared by all the contributors to their project: the act of abortion is a reproductive right for the mother, and she alone is the final arbiter of the disposition of the life of her child in the womb. Therefore, the State must protect and secure the mother’s reproductive rights by enabling her to procure an abortion, murdering her own child when that child is most defenseless incapable of exerting their fundamental right to life.
The entitlement to kill, enshrined in the law with Roe vs. Wade, supersedes the right to live, grow, and exist of another human person, the child. Up to the present in everyday America, four thousand defenseless, innocent children a day are being killed programmatically through the abortion industry apparatus and political machine of liberal ideology.
When Jackson summarized his case, he established the reason the upper echelon of the Nazi Regime were guilty of the crimes carried out in bloody fashion by the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads and other sinister collaborators:
In conspiracy, we do not punish one man for another man's crime. We seek to punish each for his own crime of joining a common criminal plan in which others also participated. The measure of the criminality of the plan and therefore of the guilt of each participant is, of course, the sum total of crimes committed by all in executing the plan. But the gist of the offense is participation in the formulation or execution of the plan. These are rules which every society has found necessary in order to reach men, like these defendants, who never get blood on their own hands but who lay plans that result in the shedding of blood.(Summation for the Prosecution by Justice Robert Jackson
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Jacksonclose.htm)
Any account of human action, which recognizes the role of morality, compels the accounting of choices and consequences such that those persons responsible for the devices of the lethal Nazi mechanisms, instruments, and policies of destruction are as culpable as those in the camps committing genocide. The pro-abortion advocates leading, operating, condoning, and executing the Common Plan of abortion is no less guilty by virtue of their actions. That explicit charge against the ACLU, NARAL, NOW, Planned Parenthood, and the influential members of our state and federal government to the extent they have lived out the Culture of Death might one day face a thoroughgoing legal examination and tribunal for their misdeeds.
The Freedom of Choice Act presents a clear and present danger to the Catholic healthcare system – a system providing care to millions of poor, uninsured, and under-insured Americans – because it could force hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the nation to either permit abortions within their facilities or forgo government funding. The “choice” for Catholics and others who believe that abortion is a moral evil is to either participate in evil to protect their livelihoods or face fines, loss of accreditation, and job loss.
President Obama offered a nod at protecting the conscience of healthcare workers without providing any detail at the notorious Notre Dame commencement.
For Catholics and society as a whole, one’s conscience is of utmost importance, its formation and dictates are anything but optional. Vatican II gives a traditional account of the role of conscience:
In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by love of God and neighbor. (Gaudiem et Spes, 16)
And the prosecutorial team and judges at Nuremberg were acutely aware of the primacy of conscience because their entire case depended on it; the Nazis were not arrested and prosecuted because they had violated German law, but rather they violated a more fundamental law: the moral law written in their conscience and on their hearts. There is no escaping the truths of conscience - deliberately killing innocent human beings is always wrong, prevalent ideologies are irrelevant, and conscience cannot be repudiated or negated by feelings or structures of power.
Nearing the conclusion of his summation, Jackson appealed to the sense of right and wrong of the justices as he points out:
Nor did any one answer the question of Humanity as to why these oceans of blood and this burning of a continent. Reason, with its partner Conscience, had been lost long ago in the jungle of Nazi greed and arrogance, and so Madness ruled, Hate marched, the sky reddened with the flames of destruction and the world wept -- and still weeps.... Crimes against humanity touch on the sacred truth that all men ought to do good and avoid evil.
President Obama’s public statements on abortion, destructive embryonic stem cell research, FOCA, and the denial of medical care to infants who slip past the knife in an abortion displays a tilt-a-whirl ethical system devoid of objective moral principles above his capricious preferences for political munificence.
The logical incompatibility of President Obama’s absolutist position and his policies to spread abortion is not difficult to identify in this statement at Notre Dame commencement: “So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions.” Why? President Obama fails to state the range, scope, and principles of his remarks other than loosely proposing dialogue with pleasantries and moral baby-talk. Stages of human activity and enquiry demand a far more serious and coherent response from the pro-abortion agitators.
Failing to protect the current conscience protections places the President squarely in the dock. Elevating mere human laws, i.e. legalized abortion, above the Natural Law and Eternal Law is precisely the defense the Nazis argued in their defense -I was just following orders with no reference to the truth of conscience.
This week, President Obama traveled to Europe and the Middle East. On the 65th anniversary of D-Day, he took an account of the exceptional role American blood and treasure sacrificed to end World War II liberating millions from tyranny and terror? As a former law professor, will he acquaint himself with that shining moment in the history when the rule of law and justice quelled the cries of angry vengeance for the innocents murdered?
We ask you, Mr. President, will the protections safeguarding the primacy of conscience remain intact -, how do you respond? Are you going to further imperil the sanctity of human life by trampling underfoot the consciences of healthcare professionals by pressuring them to participate or be complicit with evil?
The bulwark of our nation’s liberty and moral compass awaits your reply.
