The writer demonizes his fellow citizens without making any effort to address the merits of their positions.
The writer demonizes his fellow citizens without making any effort to address the merits of their positions.
D avid Von Drehle, deputy opinion editor and columnist at the Washington Post, has published an essay eviscerating what he derides as the “perverse zealotry” of his fellow citizens who happen to have pro-life convictions. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of his piece:
Beware victorious political movements. Winning brings out the zealots, and zealots devour their friends. Consider the Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, which, at the peak of its power, was known to kill people for wearing glasses on the theory that glasses signified the elite intellectual class. As though anyone other than an elite intellectual could digest the turgid tomes of the communist canon.
It is thus with the antiabortion movement in the United States. Aflame with their success in overturning Roe v. Wade, the zealots of the movement have turned their energies against the suite of medical procedures known generally as IVF. In various state legislatures as well as the Southern Baptist Convention, the perverse result is that the supposed champions of families and babies are targeting the very families that want babies the most.
After his outrageous comparison of pro-life Americans to the Khmer Rouge — the sadistic communist regime that presided over the Cambodian genocide, during which it killed nearly 25 percent of Cambodia’s population in less than four years — Von Drehle proceeds to recount his family’s own unsuccessful attempts to conceive children through in vitro fertilization.
The experiences he describes — the pain his wife suffered, the immense sadness they both shared, and their refusal to give up hope in the possibility of welcoming a child into the world — are deeply moving and obviously inform his advocacy of abortion and IVF. Still, the tragic circumstances he and his wife shared as they have attempted to conceive are no excuse to attack many millions of pro-life Americans in such a slanderous and vicious way.
Needless to say, it is horrific and repulsive for Von Drehle to equate the “zealotry” of committed pro-lifers — whose reverence for the sanctity of human life is grounded in long-held and well-considered moral, philosophical, and religious convictions — to one of the most destructive, genocidal regimes history has ever seen. Even worse, if that is possible, Von Drehle demonizes his fellow citizens without making any effort to address the moral and scientific arguments underpinning their pro-life position.
Von Drehle does not discuss whether he believes human embryos and fetuses are human persons — that is, whether they have personhood and therefore possess the same intrinsic dignity and rights that you and I have. He does not make, as pro-abortion bioethicists such as Peter Singer do, a moral and philosophical argument for denying personhood status to human embryos and fetuses. To defend his comparison of pro-lifers to deranged genociders, Von Drehle does not even offer something like Ruth Marcus’s incoherent claim that to become a human being is a “gradual process” that “unfolds from that union [fertilization, when the sperm unites with the egg to create an embryo with unique genetic material] to a point where humanity cannot be denied.”
It does seem that Von Drehle acknowledges that human embryos and human fetuses are at least human beings. After all, in his essay, he refers to them as “unborn babies.” But as he rashly goes about vilifying pro-lifers, he does not appear to understand the substance of the pro-life position or how his own apparent admission that human embryos and fetuses are more than a discardable clump of cells fits into the debate:
I don’t think any people alive care more about the miracle of conception, the viability of a fetus and the gift of life than IVF patients. No one suffers more acutely or weeps more bitterly over unborn babies; they are, after all, holes at the centers of our lives. How can a person of faith fail to see the creative power of God in the intelligence that makes such reproductive technology possible? What crabbed theology sees God at work in sperm and eggs and reproductive organs, yet finds only sin in the brains of scientists and doctors? Lord save us from the zealots.
The supposed “creative power of God in the intelligence that makes such reproductive technology possible” has nothing to do with responding to pro-life moral and philosophical arguments. The pro-life position that Von Drehle says he opposes is the view that human embryos and fetuses (as a matter of scientific fact) are human beings and that they possess human personhood, with the very same dignity, rights, and worth that you and I have. Therefore, any violation of their dignity and rights (e.g., their intentional destruction) is always morally unacceptable.
Far from illogical and unreasonable zealotry, the pro-life position is well reasoned, logically consistent, and intellectually defensible. But rather than contest their view on its merits (as serious critics such as Singer do), Von Drehle chooses instead to engage in highly offensive and inaccurate polemics against his fellow citizens. That choice — dogmatism over rational argument and respectful disagreement — is intellectually deplorable and unworthy of publication anywhere, much less by a media outlet that considers itself to be one of the country’s newspapers of record.
The lesson here is clear: Before releasing incendiary polemics against those you believe to be your enemies, seek first to understand their views and the substance of your disagreement with them. Otherwise, it is you who risks becoming an unreasonable and dogmatizing zealot.