Gosnell, Law, and Modest First Steps

The Gosnell case shows us that a society’s laws teach, and if they teach a lesson of injustice they will corrupt its people over time. Indeed, contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights and constitutional government.

Imagine a society, all of whose laws were just, and in which no law essential to the protection of the natural rights of its citizens was absent or deficient. In this society the law is also fairly and efficiently administered.

Then imagine the very opposite sort of society, one whose laws systematically favor some over others, allow unjust discrimination, even to the point of unjust killing, rape, or enslavement of some disenfranchised class of persons, and in which even good laws are unfairly or only occasionally enforced.

And imagine both societies not just at one time, but as they exist over several generations, as children are born and raised under such legal regimes, coming to accept and internalize the demands made or not made, the values recognized or not recognized, by the legal fabric of their society.

Such thought experiments make clear that the law does not simply create a stable pattern of behavior—just or unjust—over time, although it does do that. Rather, the law also creates a culture, and it does this precisely insofar as it instructs citizens about the moral code that will govern them and therefore constitute its cultural outlook and framework. The law, that is to say, teaches.

A legal regime that permits the killing of innocent human life, then, does morethan simply permit an injustice against some class of persons: As we have seen in the case of Kermit Gosnell, now awaiting a verdict in Philadelphia on multiple charges of murder and illegal abortion, the law teaches the legitimacy of this injustice, and thus erodes its citizens’ understanding of the nature of justice.

In the Gosnell case, of course, the primary “lesson learned” concerns the denial of the moral claims that all human beings are equal, and are not to be treated as things. Thus, the wrongness of the law is not simply a matter of its practical consequences; a permissive abortion law that—somehow—resulted in fewer abortions would still express precisely the wrong lesson to a nation’s citizens. And a citizenry whose culture is founded on a radical misunderstanding of justice is, to that extent, a weakened, and even, for reasons that I will explore shortly, an unfree people.

Read more at Public Discourse.