January 22, 1973 is one of the most devastating tragedies in our nation’s short history. On that hapless day the Supreme Court of the United States of America liberalized American abortion law by squashing the laws of the States and declaring abortion a legal right of women for virtually any reason and at any time. The court argued that such a right was a constitutive element of the so-called “right to privacy.” This impossible to define “right” represented the enshrinement of an impoverished belief in freedom as absolute autonomy in the American legal system.
In his encyclical Evangelium vitae, Blessed John Paul II identifies the “individualistic concept of freedom” as the heart of the culture of death (19).
John Paul notes that freedom as it is commonly understood exalts the solitary man to such a degree that freedom becomes license to do whatever is willed. Ultimately, this perverts and destroys freedom. John Paul writes, “When freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content, and its very meaning and dignity are contradicted” (19). The dominant cultural belief is that freedom is freedom from moral norms instead of freedom for the good or freedom for excellence. As Saint Paul reminds us, slavery is the just dessert for such an abuse of freedom (cf. Romans 6:16-19).
U.S. Supreme Court Justices in 1973
Since we are social beings and live out our freedom in community, the inescapable result of freedom as absolute autonomy is that individuals are pitted against one another. Each man becomes in a sense his own god, the arbiter of good and evil, the sole and exclusive executor and interest of his human estate. In John Paul’s estimation, “This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself” (20). Abortion, the argument is easily made, is paradigmatic of such an unfortunate definition of freedom.
With absolute autonomy, “rights” language is conscripted and corrupted to serve as handmaid of relativism and individualism. As noted, in the United States this notion of freedom has been enshrined into law as a “right to privacy,” which is an ambiguous “catch-all” term that essentially allows individuals to do whatever they please as long as it can be deemed “private.”
The State does recognize some limits to this “right to privacy,” however there are few limits to privacy and autonomy where it pertains to moral-social issues. The “right to privacy” increasingly protects and promotes aberrant moral behavior in the areas of abortion, euthanasia, contraception, homosexuality, and pornography to offer but a handful of examples.
The root of the societal emphasis on a right to moral and social evils (and the legal protection thereof) and the subsequent attack on fundamental rights such as the right to life and religious liberty is found, in part, in what John Paul refers to as “the mentality which carries the concept of subjectivity to an extreme and even distorts it” such that the genuine rights of vulnerable or inconvenient populations are simply ignored or directly attacked (19). This is made possible when the highest good to be protected is “privacy” or “absolute autonomy.” Since absolute autonomy pits individuals against one another, it is the powerful alone who benefit from protection of their autonomy and privacy. The weak are left out in the cold.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of abortion where the powerful act as though the human being killed is not a human being at all. The powerful may also recognize the humanity of the embryo but claim that these embryonic human beings do not possess any rights. Or, it is often claimed that the right to privacy of the woman trumps the right to life of the human being in her womb. Regardless, the unborn are ready victims to the regime which has enshrined absolute autonomy as the highest value.
One need look no further than the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision for a prime example of this distortion as the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge and recognize the readily available scientific evidence pertaining to when life begins, claiming that it was simply not possible to establish.
That the court deliberately remained ignorant – no small accomplishment given the scientific data already available in 1973 – makes clear that even though ours is an age in which we are ready to claim our own rights, ironically and tragically we deny the most fundamental rights of the powerless when we perceive them to be an inconvenience to our ability to act autonomously. Blessed John Paul II observes that this tendency in contemporary culture manifests a Promethean attitude – we declare ourselves the arbiters of life and death.
Prior to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the majority argued in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) that the right to privacy necessarily entailed a woman’s right to contraception. “If the right to privacy means anything” the Court claimed, “it is the right of the individual … to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
The principle articulated above not only creates a woman’s “right” to suppress her fertility, it also logically follows that a person should be free to no longer bear a child, and thus to terminate a pregnancy. Roe and Doe would follow a year later and declare that abortion was a legally protected means to terminate a pregnancy. These “reproductive rights” remain, in the eyes of the court, an essential element of privacy.
We face an all encompassing, moral, cultural, social, and political problem rooted in an inadequate notion of freedom. The view of the dominant culture and the courts is that freedom means absolute autonomy, which makes necessary a right to privacy that in turn entails a right to make oneself infertile, and finally, to even take the life of a human being in utero. It is believed that such actions are “legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be protected as actual rights” but, as Blessed John Paul emphasizes, “[t]hese attacks go directly against respect for life and they represent a direct threat to the entire culture of human rights” (18).
If we will protect authentic human rights, we must first reject and replace the modern notion of freedom, expressed so starkly in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.” Such a relativistic and individualistic notion of freedom ultimately leads to the destruction of the innocent. Further, the culture of human rights is undermined by an exaggerated notion of freedom as absolute autonomy.
We must rehabilitate freedom, recognizing that it is indeed a gift to be used for both the benefit of the individual and the benefit of others. Let us hope that our efforts are not too little, too late.
Arland K. Nichols served as HLI’s director of education and evangelization and executive editor of the Truth and Charity Forum until February 2014. He is currently president of the John Paul II Foundation in Texas, where he resides with his family.
