"What Would
Reagan Do?"
By Francis J. Beckwith
In 1984 President Reagan published a small book,
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation that included postscripts
by his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, and the British writer
Malcolm Muggeridge. It was the first book published by a sitting
president. Reagan’s contribution to the volume had been
published in the spring of 1983 in the Human Life Review, but
he saw fit to republish it so that his argument could reach a
wider audience.
On June 5, 2004, President Reagan died of pneumonia
after a ten-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. His death
brought an avalanche of media coverage, including commentary by
the late president’s friends and foes, and apparently neutral
observers in the press. Despite all of that, his position on abortion
was rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. I did, however,
hear several mentions of Nancy Reagan’s support of embryonic-stem-cell
research — an endorsement based on that research’s
purported promise of finding a cure for Alzheimer’s.
In fact, Ron Reagan, the son of Mrs. Reagan and
her late husband, will be offering a prime-time address at the
Democratic Convention tonight in which he will defend such research.
We can certainly understand why Mrs. Reagan takes
the position she does. For a decade she suffered as she saw her
beloved husband’s mental facilities deteriorate, until he
could no longer recognize her, his children, or their closest
and dearest friends. If the president had died of a heart attack
or even cancer, it would have been painful for his family, but
it wouldn’t have approached the anguish of witnessing the
protracted escaping of talent, memory, and wit from a man who
had those things in abundance. No one can blame Mrs. Reagan for
employing her public reputation and reservoir of good will to
promote the scientific research she believes will spare other
families from the misfortune that she and hers have suffered.
But as I listened to the commentators extolling
Mrs. Reagan’s cause, I asked myself the question: What would
Ronald Reagan do? So I pulled out my copy of Abortion and the
Conscience of the Nation, to apply the implications of President
Reagan’s argument to the sort of research his widow now
advocates.
Ronald Reagan’s work on abortion is animated
by his understanding of human equality. He found it in the ideas
of the Declaration of Independence, and in reality in President
Lincoln’s project of “a new birth of freedom.”
For President Reagan, what mattered in the abortion debate —
what is doing the moral work, so to speak — is whether the
unborn is a member of the greater human family, not whether it
exhibits the characteristics we find in that family’s healthy
adult members. “[W]e live in a time,” he wrote, “when
some do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose
what individuals have value. Some have said that only those individuals
with ‘consciousness of self’ are human beings….
Obviously, some influential people want to deny that every human
life has intrinsic, sacred worth. They insist that a member of
the human race must have certain qualities before they accord
him or her status as a ‘human being.’”
Reagan saw in this debate what Lincoln saw in
the issue of slavery: Are the slaves truly human beings in possession
of the same nature as their owners? If so, then they are not meant
to be property, but are bearers of rights, entitled to the same
protections under the law as all beings who possess that nature.
For Reagan, in turn, the question was: Does the unborn fetus possess
the same nature she will possess as she grows and develops into
an infant, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle-ager,
a senior citizen?
President Reagan saw the deep connection between
our human nature and the rights that spring from it, which a just
government is obligated recognize. The unborn — from zygote
to blastocyst to embryo to fetus — is the same being, the
same substance, that develops into an adult. The actualization
of a human being’s potentials — that is, her “human”
appearance and the exercise of her rational and moral powers as
an adult — is merely the public presentation of functions
latent in every human substance, from the moment it is brought
into being. A human may lose and regain those functions throughout
her life, but the substance remains unchanged.
As Reagan understood, if one’s value is
conditioned on certain accidental properties, then the human equality
affirmed by the Declaration and advanced by Lincoln — the
philosophical foundation of our constitutional regime —
is a fiction. In that case there is no principled basis for rejecting
the notion that human rights ought to be distributed to individuals
on the basis of native intellectual abilities or other value-giving
properties, such as rationality or self-awareness. One can only
reject this notion by affirming that human beings are intrinsically
valuable because they possess a particular nature from the moment
they come into existence. That is to say, what a human being is,
and not what he does, makes her a subject of rights. But this
would mean that, like slavery, the nation ought to discard the
right to abortion, for it is as inconsistent with our fundamental
principles as was slavery.
Stem cells are found in all animals, including
human beings. In adults, stem cells serve the function of repairing
damaged tissue. In the early embryo — before its cells differentiate
into the cells of particular organs — stem cells are are
called totipotent cells, because they “retain the special
ability to develop into nearly any cell type,” according
to a 1999 report of Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory
Commission (NBAC). The embryo’s germ cells — cells
that “originate from the primordial reproductive cells of
the developing fetus” — have similar properties. Whatever
the potential of human stem-cell research, the real issue that
animates opponents and raises deep ethical questions is how these
cells are obtained and from what entity they are derived.
The NBAC report focused on four potential sources
of human stem cells-all raising severe ethical issues: from “human
fetal tissue following elective abortion,” from human embryos
created by IVF that are either no longer needed by couples seeking
infertility treatment or have been donated for the sole purpose
of providing research material, and from “potentially, human
(or hybrid) embryos generated asexually by somatic cell nuclear
transfer cloning techniques.” With the exception of the
first source — which is controversial for other reasons
— an embryo’s stem cells can only be extracted at
the cost of killing that embryo.
Given President Reagan’s writings and beliefs,
it is clear to me that he would oppose research with stem cells
derived from human embryos, no matter what the potential benefits
of such research might be. He would see the moral incoherence
of using an embryo to acquire its stem cells, thus ending one
human being’s life so that another can reacquire the capacities
the younger human being was not allowed to develop.
Ironically, the President’s son, Ron, in
a June 23 interview on Larry King Live, inadvertently offered
an insight into the depth and clarity of his father’s convictions
that would lead one to think that Ron has not taken seriously
his father’s published work on the nature of the unborn:
“My father used to just say what he meant. If he felt something,
felt it strongly, he’d go out and talk about it. I never
got the feeling that there were different rules for him and the
rest of us.”
Nevertheless, there is a way that Mrs. Reagan
can honor both her late husband’s memory as well as his
deeply held convictions about the nature of the unborn. She can
shift her focus away from embryonic-stem-cell research and support
the promotion of research on adult stem cells. It seems to have
much promise, as Wesley J. Smith has pointed out on NRO.
During the week following Reagan’s death,
several commentators asked how President Bush would handle the
delicate situation of publicly assessing Mrs. Reagan’s policy
recommendations. But they were making the wrong inquiry. The important
question is not, “What will President Bush do?” but
“What would President Reagan do?,” since it is on
behalf of his memory that Mrs. Reagan is making her case. It is
that question that must be respectfully asked of Mrs. Reagan and
those who agree with her.
President Reagan, in his usual winsome fashion,
knew how to convey the moral power of this reasoning: “Abortion
concerns not just the unborn, it concerns every one of us. The
English poet, John Donne, wrote: ‘… any man’s
death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore,
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”
CBHD
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