Modern Academics Undermine Their Own Rights, Scholar Tells Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund

By Geraldine Hawkins
May 21, 2003

Most prestigious institutions are experiencing a serious erosion of confidence that human beings can have any knowledge of right or wrong, Professor Hadley Arkes of Amherst College told the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund gathered at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel last week.

'My colleagues have taken as their signature tune, 'God is dead,'" Arkes said. "They are no longer in a position to give a moral defense of their rights, or our own."

In addition, Arkes pointed to the lack of moral courage among elected officials.

"What we were trying to accomplish in the move that became the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, was to plant premises in the law that will unravel the whole case for abortion rights." The Born Alive Infants Protection Act, signed into law by President Bush August 5, 2002, guarantees that every infant born alive enjoys full legal rights under federal law, regardless of his or her stage of development or whether the live birth occurred during an abortion.

The arguments would have been more widely discussed "if we had political men and women who were willing to make use of that move and actually draw the other side into an argument. The part we never anticipated and which has been the deepest surprise in this experience, is that our political men have not shown the slightest inclination to wage the argument and make use of this lever we've put in their hands."

Arkes said that the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) understood that this principle would unravel their whole argument.

"NARAL actually came out in opposition on the day the hearings opened on our bill, in July 2000, to preserve the life of the child who survived the abortion. They came out in opposition because they understood the principle that lay at the heart of the thing, more than our own friends seemed to understand."

Arkes has written a book called The Genteel Treasons of the Political Class, which deals with the self-destructive tendencies of wealthy liberal academics.

"My concern was with the way in which the political class had talked itself out of the premises, and the doctrines of natural rights, so woven into the understanding of the American Founders and Lincoln, and so fundamental to the character of the regime they established and preserved. They have talked themselves out of the premises behind natural rights.

"You know you're in trouble when your own people have talked themselves into the premises of the other side. They have contempt for the underlying premise on which their own freedom rests," Arkes said.

"Justice Holmes, in one of his many infamous lines, declared that the purpose of the modern project in law was to purge all words of moral significance from the law altogether - and leave in their place legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law; to leave a system of law, confined to things merely legal, the law posited by people in power. That world of law coincided with the world of social science, similarly purged of words of moral significance - and with that sense of things, the word 'tyrant' was removed from our vocabularies and replaced in the 1930s with the term 'dictator,' a term suitably neutral. And then dictator, turning into a pejorative, was transmuted again in the '60s and '70s, so that the press would refer to Brezhnev and his fellow thugs as Soviet 'leaders.'

"Now what has become striking for me of late is the way in which that sense of things has been adopted by the spokesmen for conservative jurisprudence in the U.S. Senate. Social science stopped speaking of right and wrong, and began speaking of norms and deviants. And when that state of mind is carried over to judicial nominations, the opposition says that our nominees are extremists, out of the groove, by which they mean that they have reservations about Roe v. Wade and all of the jurisprudence associated with that decision, whether in assisted suicide or gay rights.

"And when it comes to the defense, the spokesmen on our side insist that our nominee is indeed 'mainstream' and 'respectable' - that he went to a good law school, that people who don't share his politics nevertheless give him high marks for his professionalism, or his willingness to detach himself from his moral judgments.

"You cannot say that infanticide has ceased to be a big deal unless you say that homicide has ceased to be a big deal. What we are putting in place is an anti-jural jurisprudence.

"What they see is a fetus marked for termination, not a child protected by law. Even a child marked for abortion is entitled to protection by law, and that law cannot pivot on whether or not anyone wants her.

"The child has an intrinsic dignity that cannot be contingent on whether she serves the interests of anyone else.

"Thirty-five so-called moderate Republicans threatened to adjourn the House rather than go to the floor with our findings. We wanted the ARGUMENT."

Arkes said that it was important for the arguments to be read into the Congressional Record and debated in the halls of Congress and in the newspapers.

"Take the case of live-birth abortion - when the child is born and they put it aside to die. What should the penalty be? Withdrawing federal funds from hospitals that do this?"

Arkes said that eligibility for federal funding rests on shaky foundation.

Hadley Arkes is Edward Nye Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College, although during the past academic year he has been on sabbatical at Princeton. He is the author of The Philosopher in the City, First Things, and Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, to name a few. He frequently contributes to national journals including The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and First Things, which took its name from his book of that title.

Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, in her introduction of Arkes, said that the overflow crowds at Boston College and Harvard Law School to hear pro-life speakers on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade are "just a local manifestation of what polls are letting us know is taking place all over."

Glendon quoted The New York Times to the effect that 61% of young people aged 18 to 29 are pro-life. Glendon said that the explanation the Times gave for this was that these young people had never experienced a society in which a woman did not have a "right" to an abortion.

"My grandparents knew a world where abortion was not a woman's 'right,'" Glendon said, "and this is one of those cases where grandparents and grandchildren get together - in this case to agree that a private license to kill is not doing anybody any good."

Glendon said pro-life speakers are being welcomed to Harvard and Boston College "because a small band of courageous law students were willing to take on the dominant culture."

Glendon said that when she asks these students how they came by their convictions, often they answer, "'I'm from Princeton, and I had a professor named Robert George,' or 'I went to Amherst, and I had a professor named Hadley Arkes.'"

Arkes returned the compliment by referring to Glendon, a Roman Catholic, as "The Pope's Bombshell."

The Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund was established immediately after Roe vs. Wade, with the objective of defending pro-life legislation in the Courts and providing legal expertise and funding appropriate to pro-life legislation. Their attorneys have, among other victories, successfully defended the Massachusetts Parental Consent Law before the U.S. Supreme Court, and succeeded in having RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Organization) charges dropped with respect to peaceful protesters at abortion clinics.