Note to the reader: As previously noted, I (JEA) will begin by presenting my argument, which serves as a response to Fetzer’s points from our initial exchange. Fetzer’s reply will appear below. Part III will constitute the final stage of our discussion and will follow the same format. Should any questions remain unresolved, I have informed Fetzer that we can address them in the comment section. After the third phase, Kevin MacDonald has agreed to join the conversation, and we will continue from that point.
I am once again grateful for the opportunity to engage in dialogue with Fetzer on these vitally important issues. We were originally scheduled to discuss them about ten years ago, following his dialogue with Kevin Barrett and E. Michael Jones on the topic of abortion. However, the written debate between Fetzer and myself never materialized for various reasons, though we did have a brief online interaction, which has almost certainly been lost to the ether.
I also appreciate that Fetzer, unlike some interlocutors I have encountered in the past, refrains from ad hominem attacks, red herrings, and straw men. I hope that throughout this exchange, we can focus on serious arguments, counter arguments, and evidence, while maintaining good sportsmanship and cordiality—even though, as readers of the first installment have observed, our views are already on fundamentally different paths. I have no interest in trivializing or misrepresenting Fetzer’s arguments. This current response is lengthy because I have meticulously read and reread his work, carefully providing counter arguments from historical, philosophical, and logical perspectives. I hope he will take these issues seriously and respond cogently. I would far prefer a thoughtful, long-awaited response to a hasty one that sidesteps the issues, introduces red herrings, or disregards what I have actually said.
Now we turn to the key issue raised by Fetzer. I must emphasize that, despite being the author of Render Unto Darwin, Fetzer is not a Darwinian when it comes to morality. His opposition to the concept of “might makes right” implicitly positions him against Darwin himself—who, as I have demonstrated in my articles on Kevin MacDonald and Nathan Cofnas and on eugenics, endorsed ideological principles that he ultimately could not swallow, either personally or universally.
The reader should note that, instead of appealing to Darwin or the Darwinian paradigm, Fetzer turns to Carl G. Hempel, who articulates a set of criteria that any rational person would likely find legitimate. However, from CA-1 to CA-4, these criteria pose serious challenges to Fetzer’s position. Take, for example, CA-1: if a principle must not be reduced to “might makes right,” how is it that a small group of people ended up defining what constitutes life in the womb and imposed that definition upon the vast majority of people? As I argued in the first presentation, the Supreme Court first exercised such authority in the Dred Scott decision and then repeated the pattern in 1973 with Roe v. Wade—a ruling based on a central fabrication, namely that Norma McCorvey, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, had been raped and therefore required an abortion. Yet this fabrication was used to justify imposing a principle on the so-called democratic United States. Clearly, those involved had power and believed that imposing it on the majority was legitimate. So why does Fetzer not challenge this exercise of power if he wishes to remain consistent with CA-1?
It is important to note that the principle of “viability” did not emerge organically as a longstanding philosophical category; it arose only after defenders of abortion sought a rationalization that would appear medically or legally persuasive. As we shall see shortly, the viability criterion collapses both from a medical and technological standpoint. Yet Fetzer repeatedly insists that, “Forcing women to carry unwanted fetuses to term turns them into reproductive slaves—and those who cannot acknowledge as much appear to be seriously morally impaired.” If anything trivializes the issue, it is precisely this kind of sloganeering.
But putting that aside, would Fetzer also accuse Kant of being “seriously morally impaired,” given that Kant would have unequivocally rejected abortion? Should we likewise consider Senator Josh Hawley—a sitting U.S. senator and scholar—who recently introduced legislation both to ban abortion and to prohibit child sex-change surgeries, as “seriously morally impaired”?[1] I am still trying to understand the logic behind this claim: If someone is pro-life and opposes the killing of the unborn, how does that make him “morally impaired”?
With respect to CA-2, this presents another problem for Fetzer’s position. As I suggested in my presentation, if we apply the abortion issue to countries such as Japan, South Korea, Iran, and even the United States, we encounter a serious population concern. Both South Korea and Japan are facing demographic decline in large part due to policies that effectively imposed abortion on the population. Perhaps it is worth briefly examining this issue from a historical perspective to fully understand its implications.
The Demographic Time Bomb: Japan and South Korea
After World War II, particularly when the Allied Forces took over Japan, “abortion played a drastic role in the rapid and drastic reduction of the Japanese birth rate…”[2]
US Army Colonel Crawford F. Sams headed the Public Health and Welfare, which was one of the largest Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) programs in Japan. Sams was highly involved in reducing fertility rates.[3] In fact, SCAP used the print media in Japan to spread the gospel of birth control and contraception to the population. SCAP also fought against the Japanese Ministry of Health, which tried to
“limit public access to contraceptives through the Law on Control of Contraceptive Appliances… SCAP told the Japanese leaders to add a list of approved contraceptives to the new Pharmaceutical Law (passed in March 1947 and promulgated in July 1948). As a result of this law, contraceptives were now treated like any other drug that could be advertised and sold openly once approved by the MHW [Ministry of Health and Welfare]. To advertise the availability of these contraceptives, Sams helped organize a ‘traveling exhibition’ on accepted methods of birth control. The exhibition started in Tokyo in June 1948 and moved throughout Japan during the following year… Sams also worked actively to assure the production and supply of contraceptive materials, in particular, rubber. These efforts led Sams to conclude in mid-1948 that “all measures which [were] practical and sound ha[d] already been undertaken by SCAP to provide incentive and means” of fertility control for the Japanese.”[4]
After seeing “demobilized soldiers, sailors, and airmen…trying to go home or to locate their families who had either been evacuated before the bombings or killed in the attacks,” Sams declared that the population issue was “a problem of first magnitude.”[5] Sams ended up focusing on the population rather than dealing with the war that had just devastated the Japanese civilians. Sams wrote:
“It was estimated that the homes of 8.5 million people had been destroyed in the cities of Japan, 6.5 million Japanese were to be repatriated from countries outside of Japan and relocated in Japan. Some of the people who had already returned to the ashes of their homes had erected lea-tos of any material they could find undestroyed, such as sheets of galvanized iron from their former roofs. They were without jobs, and most of them were destitute.”[6]
Obviously, population was not the central issue. However, SCAP implemented an ideological and pernicious solution to the challenges faced by Japanese civilians. By reducing the population, SCAP avoided dealing with destitute Japanese who had lost virtually everything—including family members—during the war. Through its programs, the Allied Forces covertly promoted abortion and contraception in Japan.[7]
It should also be noted in passing that Malthusianism was influential in many circles in the United States. As historian Linda Gordon points out, the American birth control movement drew its ideas from British Malthusians and neo-Malthusians.[8] Malthus was opposed to contraception, but it can easily be argued that his ideas laid the foundation for what was later known as neo-Malthusianism, which essentially became the holy grail of the birth control movement.
The neo-Malthusians did not overturn Malthus’s basic assumptions; rather, they carried them to their logical conclusions by incorporating contraception and birth control into the Malthusian framework. If population must be controlled, they argued, and if famine and natural disasters act as population regulators, and if attempts to raise wages are counterproductive, as Malthus claimed, then why not employ contraception, birth control pills, abortion, and similar measures—which appear far more humane than famine, disease, war, and other natural disasters?[9] Francis Laplace, “the most prominent neo-Malthusian of the 1820s,” saw contraception as a logical extension of Malthus’s ideas.[10] “In 1822, Place published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, in which he rejected moral restraint and put the theoretical social and economic case for the preventive or physical checks, that is, contraception.”[11] Malthus, like Darwin, was not prepared to accept the social and moral implications of his ideas.
One of the many leading figures who ideologically colonized Japan through the neo-Malthusian system was Warren Simpson Thompson, a sociologist at Miami University in Ohio. Thompson “was credited with persuading Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru to adopt birth control as Japan’s policy.”[12] Thompson’s Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Population: A Study in Malthusianism (1915), and it was essentially a reformulation of what Thomas Malthus postulated almost a century earlier. By 1929 and 1930, Thompson expanded his thesis in books such as Danger Spots in World Population and Population Problems. Japan was particularly interesting to Thompson because the country was in a period of rapid population growth, and “rapid Westernization not only reduced death rates but also brought about the rise of military power, nationalism, and industrialization.”[13]
Central to Thompson’s thesis was that socio economic crises, such as poverty, food shortages and unemployment, were the direct result of overpopulation, and hence birth control could balance the population equation.[14] Thompson deliberately ignored the fact that the crises in Japan after the Second World War were not caused by overpopulation but by the Allied bombing of Japanese cities. Consequently, Thompson could not acknowledge that Japan had not faced an “overpopulation problem” long before the Allied occupation. He also failed to admit that the Allied Forces deindustrialized Japan with the explicit aim of reducing the Japanese standard of living. This policy created the conditions for widespread famine, making it implausible for neo-Malthusians like Thompson to claim that overpopulation caused Japan’s crisis when the Allied Forces had effectively dismantled the country’s means of production. In short, it was the bombing and subsequent Allied occupation that transformed Japan, and these events had nothing to do with overpopulation. As historian Andrew Gordon puts it,
“For nearly seven years the Japanese people faced the unprecedented experience of occupation by a foreign power wielding the authority to rewrite laws, restructure the economic and political system, and even seek to redefine culture and values…The initial American strategy in Japan was encapsulated in two words: demilitarize and democratize. To achieve the first goal, SCAP dissolved the army and navy immediately: Japan’s armed forces were officially disbanded on November 30. To follow up on this order was a daunting task. It meant demobilizing the gigantic Japanese military, and repatriating to the home islands a total of 6.9 million people. When the war ended, nearly ten percent of the population of Japan was overseas: 3.7 million soldiers and 3.2 million civilians in Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, as well as the far-flung wartime empire to the south. With the exception of about 400,000 people who remained prisoners in the Soviet Union, and smaller numbers left behind in Manchuria, demobilization and repatriation were completed by the end of 1948.
“While this was a relatively swift and smooth process, to absorb such a vast number of people was a complex undertaking which left a legacy that has not yet been fully studied or understood. Repatriates, both civilian and military, often felt out of place back “home,” regarded with a mixture of pity for their poverty and scorn for their role in pursuing what now appeared to have been a hopeless war.”[15]
Gordon continues to say: “Between 1945 and 1948, the occupiers purged over two hundred thousand men from positions in the government and business world who were judged responsible for leading the war effort.”[16]
The war brought unprecedented disasters to the entire country. Historian Takemae Eiji, who sympathizes with the Allied Forces, writes:
“Some 14.5 million people, or one out of five, were indigent with no means of steady employment, and 10 million of these were on the verge of starvation…Civilian repatriates from Japan’s overseas empire were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry plus the equivalent of 1,000 yen in currency. Few had any means of sustaining themselves in Japan. Moreover, transportation was disrupted and families were scattered and unable to perform their habitual role of assisting close relatives in time of need. Traditional poor-relief institutions, run almost exclusively by non-governmental agencies, had virtually collapsed.”[17]
So, was the issue truly overpopulation, as Thompson and others claimed? Hardly. Thompson’s hypothesis was never plausible, since the so-called overpopulation problem only arose after the Allied occupation of Japan. Even the eugenic laws implemented at the time were a direct consequence of the wartime context. As Eiji again points out, “The eugenic law was a hybrid creature, part product of the war era, part product of the unsettled social and economic conditions of the early postwar period. Demobilization, repatriation and the return of the war evacuees from the countryside produced a baby boom in the years between 1947 and 1949.”[18]
In 1949, 24,600 pregnancies were terminated. That number rose to nearly 64,000 in 1951. “The 1949 revision [of the Eugenic Protection Law] approved the sale of contraceptive pharmaceuticals but also authorized abortions where birth would pose an undue economic hardship on the mother. The 1952 changes made the physician who would perform the abortion the sole judge of eligibility, assuring that this method remained the preferred mode of birth control in Japan for many years to come.”[19]
Aiko Takeuchi of Stanford argues that Thompson’s work in world population issues got the attention of institutions like Scripps Foundation and the IPR (Institute of Pacific Relations). Takeuchi writes that the IPR, “which originated from a conference held in Honolulu in 1925 in response to the Asian exclusion movements and the subsequent 1924 Immigration Law,” eventually
“brought a fairly large number of scholars from Asia. Since Japan seemed to face the most urgent problem pertaining to population increase, a Japanese economist, Nasu Shiroshi, took the lead in the discussion. The conference’s research committee then set up plans to initiate international projects investigating the issues of food supply and population pressure.”[20]
Certainly Thompson’s work, argues Takeuchi, “provided the necessary groundwork for tackling the global population problem in the following decades.”[21]
In 1949, Thompson was specifically hired by the Rockefeller Foundation as a consultant to the Natural Resources Section of SCAP.[22]
In other words, Crawford Sams and Thompson were following the same ideological trajectory.[23]
It was Sams who collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation to enable fourteen of its agents to serve as public health and welfare advisers to the Japanese government.[24]
Both Sams and Thompson agreed that birth control was a solution to Japan’s population growth. This aligned perfectly with the Rockefeller Foundation’s objectives in Asia since the 1920s. Thompson was again compensated to persuade the Japanese population to accept the Rockefeller agenda: “In meeting with local officials, business executives and opinion leaders across the country, this high-profile delegation delivered the message that family planning was the primary condition for economic rehabilitation.”[25]
By 1948, “Sams was actively involved in passage of the Eugenic Protection Law.”[26] Sams bragged that The Welfare Ministry in Japan “could not do anything unless I said so—I ran it.”[27]
By 1949, Thompson was openly advocating for government-sponsored birth control programs in Japan, a stance that quickly made international headlines. At the same time, General Douglas MacArthur was considering a presidential run and “feared losing the Catholic vote.”[28] He quickly shielded both himself and SCALP from criticism by claiming that Thompson was expressing only his personal opinion, not the policy guiding SCALP’s operations.
In a memo to the Catholic Women’s Club in Japan, “MacArthur stated that population control was not part of the occupation’s mandate.” Yet privately, “SCAP officials agreed that they would still continue to furnish the Japanese with ‘technical advice and information about birth control’ and that they would not censor Thompson’s statement.”[29] SCALP also hired Harvard professor Edward Ackerman, who said around the same time that “control of the birth rate” was the way to stabilize the population in Japan.[30]
MacArthur’s 1949 Birth Control draft unquestionably proved that he was lying to the Catholics both in Japan and in the United States. It stated in part:
“With the knowledge that an uncontrolled increase in population in Japan would have a serious effect on the economic situation and would mitigate against the accomplishment of the long range objectives of the occupation to establish a peaceful, democratic, stable Japan, the Far East Commission, in February 1947, approved the SCAP policy of permitting an industrial level equivalent to that of 1930-34 in order to reinitiate the population shift from rural areas to urban centers and provide an incentive for limitation of the size of families and a decrease in the birth rate.”[31]
The Vatican newspaper in 1949 called birth control “a greater disaster to Japan than the Atomic bomb.”[32] If one questions the accuracy of this assessment, Japan’s present demographic collapse serves as compelling confirmation that the Vatican paper’s warning was well-founded. Takeuchi writes: “Sams’s public endorsement of birth control, however, provoked strong criticism from American Catholics in Japan. As a result, SCAP became defensive and maintained a hands-off policy—what they called ‘benevolent neutrality’—regarding the population issue in Japan, at least on the surface.”[33]
In short, oligarchic organizations like SCAP—along with Malthusians such as Thompson—made birth control and contraception widely available to the Japanese public. Thompson in particular used the Japanese press to promote the idea that birth control was Japan’s only hope for survival, warning, as Tiana Norgren summarizes, that “if Japan failed to curb its population growth, the United States might cut off food assistance, or the country might again fall prey to communism and militarism.”[34] This was simply window dressing, precisely because “SCAP freed Communist Party members from jail as early as October 4, 1945.”[35]
Contraception was known in Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was through Western countries like France and England that contraceptive devices such as condoms gained momentum in Japan. In fact, one of the condoms which was being transported from England was called “Malthus Depose.”[36] Moreover, two names used in marketing and in advertising for contraceptives were none other than “Malthusians” and the “New Scientific Malthusian Appliance.”[37] At the same time, a coterie of Japanese intellectuals aspired to compete with the West in birth control technology. According to Takeuchi-Demirci, this was part of a “neo-Malthusian economic theory.”[38]
Surely those Japanese intellectuals were also aware that utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham advocated contraception through the use of vaginal sponges.[39] Bentham heavily influenced John Stuart Mill who, according to Margaret Sanger herself, postulated that “the production of large families was to be regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any other physical excess.”[40] In his Principles of Political Economy, Mill left the question to be answered by what he called “the legislator.”[41]
With the advance of the feminist movement from the 1920s and onward in Japan, and with Japanese feminist luminaries getting support from American radicals like Margaret Sanger and others,[42] the incubation period was inevitable: Japan is now demographically a dying country, and if nothing is done in the next fifty years or so, Japan will be replaced. South Korea has been undergoing a similar demographic trajectory.
“With the Population council’s assistance,” writes historian Donald T. Critchlow in Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, “South Korea started a National Family Planning Program in 1961, with an annual budget of $8.3 million.”[43] Planned Parenthood also found its way to South Korea around the same time. It was called Planned Parenthood of Korea (PPFK).[44] By 1966, under President Syngman Rhee (a puppet of the United States), the government itself began to sponsor transportations to “outlying areas to provide greater access to new birth control technologies and related services.”[45]
According to Doo-Sub Kim of Hanyang University in Seoul, the birth rate decline started in the 1960s when South Korea began normalizing contraceptive devices.
During that decade, the country experienced significant population growth, yet the government—much like Iran’s leadership in the late 1970s—embraced the misleading belief that the population was becoming unsustainably large. Under the banner of “family planning,” contraceptive measures such as vasectomies and condoms were then promoted and widely introduced. Once these measures began to take effect, and as South Korea transitioned from “natural fertility” to “controlled fertility,” the population began to decline dramatically. Kim notes that in the 1960s, “remaining single was never supported in Korea.”[46] He adds: “Rising age at marriage, increase in induced abortion, and diffusion of contraception were three major factors causing the first fertility transition in Korea.”[47]
Kim emphasized that late marriage and abortion, which inherently involve contraceptive methods, “were the most significant factors contributing to fertility decline in the early 1960s.”[48]
As already noted, Korea became aware of birth control and other contraceptive methods through the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), founded in 1952 by Margaret Sanger and Lady Rama Rau during the Third International Conference. In collaboration with the Korean government under President Park Chung-Hee, Korea established its own version of planned parenthood, called the International Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea. Following the implementation of this ideology, the population began to decline.
Following the Malthusian ideology, which was largely discredited even during Thomas Malthus’ own time, Sanger aimed to advance the eugenics movement by establishing birth control clinics across the United States. Her efforts extended the birth control movement to countries such as Japan and Korea. Sanger found her feminist voice in Japan through a woman named Shidzue Kato (also published as Shidzue Ishimoto), who stated in her memoir that her first meeting with Sanger felt like accepting “my true mission in life.”[49]
Kato had read Sanger’s work as well as the writings of figures like Havelock Ellis, and began to denounce traditional marriage as an obstacle to sexual freedom, a freedom she strongly advocated. A small underground movement called the “new women” in Japan also began to embrace these views.[50]
However, when Kato met Sanger in person in late 1920—through the introduction of Agnes Smedley, a Communist revolutionary and spy who conducted espionage for the Comintern and the Soviet Union,[51] and who was also known for her numerous love affairs with figures such as Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy, and Ozaki Hotsumi, a correspondent for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun—they quickly formed a lasting friendship. Their correspondence continued until Sanger’s death in 1966. Sanger became the driving force behind the birth control movement in Japan, while Kato served as her mediator, carrying the banner of the movement throughout the country. After just a few encounters with Sanger, Shidzue began to embrace her true calling, declaring, “Yes, Mrs. Sanger’s fight must be fought in my country too! I will carry the banner of birth control in Japan!”[52]
Kato was one of the first women to be elected to the Diet of Japan, the national legislature of the country. Since then, she became actively involved in the birth control movement throughout Japan and was even named “the Margaret Sanger of Japan.” Elise K. Tipton of the University of Sydney, Australia, declares: “For Ishimoto, Sanger provided not only the patina of a Western authority, but ongoing practical support and guidance.”[53]
What was the result of her birth control project? The Japanese government legalized abortion in 1948. This was an ideal opportunity for the birth control movement because, after Japan’s surrender in 1945, the country faced economic chaos and the threat of widespread famine. The birth control movement seized this moment to promote the use of contraception across the nation. As Tipton puts it, “the Government’s and the medical profession’s opposition to birth control disappeared. Prewar birth control pioneers such as Ishimoto, now Kato, reemerged to lead the movement to achieve its goals… This was also the period when Margaret Sanger made her triumphal return to Japan.”[54] By 1952, Japan left the decision on induced abortion to the discretion of individual doctors, and by 1955, more than 700,000 abortions had been performed. Tipton writes in his study Modern Japan: A Social and Political History:
“In that year the government worked with the private Family Planning Federation of Japan to promote contraception instead of abortion… Doctors licensed to perform abortions had no desire to promote other, more reliable forms of contraception as they became available, and the Family Planning Federation of Japan itself came to rely on income from the sale of condoms, which it bought at a heavily discounted price from a large condom manufacturer.”[55]
In short, this outlines the tragic trajectory resulting from the long-term use of abortion, birth control, and contraceptive devices in South Korea and Japan. Regarding the abortion and birth control movements in the United States, Iran, and elsewhere, readers are referred to E. Michael Jones’ two archival studies: Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing and Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, the latter of which has been updated. Ayatollah Khamenei later expressed regret for having supported the abortion and birth control policies that the Islamic Republic had inherited from the Shah, acknowledging that these programs ultimately suppressed fertility growth in Iran. Reflecting on this decision, he lamented: “We should have abandoned the population control policy… I myself played a role in this mistake… I hope Allah the Exalted and history forgive us.”[56]
Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also recognized the demographic dangers posed by abortion, birth control, and widespread contraceptive use, describing such policies as “a prescription for extinction.” In response, he implemented pro-natalist measures, offering financial incentives to parents for each child they had[57]—similar to the approach later adopted in South Korea.
Turning to Fetzer’s principle as articulated in CA-3, it is closely related to broader ethical considerations, given that abortion has historically been regarded as morally objectionable. Only a small minority continues to advocate for its normalization, seeking to impose their position upon the vast majority of the world’s population. Moreover, as I argued in the first presentation, abortion cannot be universalized as a moral principle—a fundamental reason why Kant and other prominent ethicists would have rejected it outright.
Fetzer writes, “Mine are independent arguments as to why the policies embedded in Roe v. Wade–of no restraint during the 1st trimester, of the state’s interest in how abortions are performed during the 2nd, and that abortions other than to save the life of the health of the mother during the 3rd properly qualify as ‘murder,’ which hinges upon the status of personhood occurring at the end of the 2nd trimester and extending into the 3rd and beyond.”
To begin with, Fetzer repeatedly invokes Roe v. Wade in support of his thesis—both in the article under discussion and in his book Render unto Darwin. Second, consider a brief thought experiment: if Fetzer’s principle were applied to the United States as a whole, how many people would genuinely support it? Fifty percent? Thirty percent? The historical data indicate otherwise. As Donald T. Critchlow documents in Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, support for such policies has never been a grassroots movement; rather, it has consistently been driven by a small elite seeking to impose these ideas upon the broader population.
Thus, Fetzer cannot legitimately invoke terms such as “democratic society” to substantiate his position. Furthermore, the viability thesis that he has advanced for more than a decade has been repeatedly challenged in the scholarly literature. It remains perplexing that he has not engaged with—or perhaps has simply ignored—the extensive body of academic work refuting this very claim.[58] Some pro-choice scholars even admit that viability is not morally and intellectually defensible. With respect to viability, the Oxford philosopher Jeff McMahan, who argues in favor of abortion, declares that
“On reflection, it seems hardly plausible to suppose that there could be a sharp dividing line of this sort. Twenty weeks is 140 days. Is it really acceptable to suppose that an abortion performed 139 days after conception would be perfectly innocuous while an abortion performed a day later would be gravely wrong? Certainly it seems odd to suppose that abortion could go from being innocuous to being murder just as a result of the establishment of a few more synaptic connections in the fetal brain. As opponents of abortion often observe, fetal development is a smoothly continuous process in which it seems impossible to identify an event that is significant enough to make the difference between permissible killing and murder”[59]
Objection Overruled
Fetzer objects to my claim that he appeals to the Supreme Court in support of his thesis. To be clear, I never stated that Fetzer regards the Supreme Court as his final authority, or—as he puts it—his “stand alone” source of justification. My claim is narrower but undeniable: Fetzer repeatedly cites the Supreme Court, both in Render unto Darwin and in his article, as evidentiary support for his position. For instance, in Render Unto Darwin, he writes: “The strongest inference that could be drawn from Roe v. Wade is that a person is a human fetus that has attained the status of viability. And that, indeed, appears to be a responsible position to adopt.”[60] If this is not an appeal to the Court’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade in order to bolster his own argument, then what is the purpose of that statement?
Fetzer replies: “But nothing could be further from the truth. I was explaining why the Court’s reasoning was sound.” Yet the Court’s reasoning is “sound” for him only because it aligns with his own premise—while running contrary to the views of a large portion of the American public. The issue, therefore, is not whether a majority supports my position; I am not appealing to popular opinion as a moral foundation. Rather, the problem is that Fetzer continues to portray this line of reasoning as “democratic,” when in fact it circumvents the conclusions of the very public whose will he invokes.
In other words, he cannot simultaneously appeal to “democratic society” as justification for his position while grounding that justification in a judicial ruling that bypasses the electorate. At that point, the term “democracy” functions rhetorically, not philosophically; it is the same kind of ideological branding routinely used by governments to legitimize predetermined outcomes. A good parallel is Reuters’ 2021 reporting that Bashar al-Assad won a democratic election with 95% of the vote.[61] Other news outlets declared the same thing. The Washington Post declared that “Yes, Assad won reelection,” but concluded that “Syria’s elections serve another purpose.”[62]
Soon enough, Neoconservatives and other warmongers began beating the war drum on behalf of the state of Israel, insisting that Assad was “liquidating his own people” — the same people who had actually put him in power! The narrative was then used as a pretext for regime change, just as we have seen repeatedly in modern geopolitical history: delegitimize the sitting government, brand it as an enemy of its own population, and then justify foreign intervention under the banner of “democracy” and “human rights.” Similar interventions elsewhere have produced precisely the kind of puppet regimes that outside powers desire. We have seen this pattern over and over again.
Astute researchers are well aware that the Anglo-American establishment overthrew a democratically elected Iranian president, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. And what language was deployed to justify it? The claim that Iran was “not being democratic” — because it would not allow Anglo-American interests to seize and extract its oil wealth while leaving the Iranian population impoverished, politically destabilized, and economically broken.[63] For nearly a century, the warmongers and political machines in both Britain and the United States have repeatedly weaponized buzzwords like “democracy” and “freedom” to delegitimize governments, fracture sovereign nations, and install regimes more compliant with Western geopolitical objectives.[64] And now, remarkably, we are hearing the very same rhetorical strategy reappear in the abortion debate.
Fetzer then asserts that “the pro-choice position is the only one treating women with respect in accordance with Deontological Moral Theory. The pro-life position, which would require a woman to carry an unwanted fetus to term, turns women into reproductive slaves!” Once again, I am still waiting for Fetzer to engage the scholarly material that directly undermines this claim — namely, that Kant himself, the very architect of Deontological Moral Theory, would categorically reject the principle he is invoking. Anyone even moderately familiar with Kant’s ethics — and willing to consult Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, which I cited in a footnote in my first presentation — would immediately recognize that there is simply no interpretive basis for concluding that Kant would endorse the idea Fetzer is advancing.
The Collapse of Viability
Fetzer has been advancing the viability criterion for years now, but it is not at all clear that he has reckoned with the scientific and technological challenges that have emerged in the last decade—challenges that increasingly undermine the very foundation of the theory. As James E. Brown of the University of Michigan School of Law acknowledges, “The artificial womb is a threat to the current understanding of viability, and its arrival is by no means far-fetched.”[65] If viability no longer depends on the child’s own biological development but on the contingent state of available technology, then it ceases to be a defensible position. If this sounds like an overstatement, then consider the following. Long before Fetzer published Render Unto Darwin, the viability criterion was already collapsing under the weight of empirical data. As far back as 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published a groundbreaking study titled “The Limit of Viability—Neonatal Outcome of Infants Born at 22 to 25 Weeks’ Gestation.” The researchers examined 142 infants born at just 22 to 25 weeks’ gestation between 1988 and 1991 in a single hospital. Their conclusion was unambiguous: “Improved obstetric and neonatal interventions and aggressive techniques of resuscitation have gradually improved the survival of preterm infants and lowered the limit of viability.”[66] In other words, viability was already demonstrably a moving target more than three decades ago, long before artificial womb technology or modern NICU standards pushed the threshold even further downward.
Similar findings have been reported in independent studies conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics as recently as last year. These studies, covering births from 2020 to 2022, confirmed the same pattern: advances in neonatal care continue to push the limits of survival earlier in gestation. The implication is clear—viability is not a fixed or reliable moral threshold, and the principle that Fetzer relies upon simply does not hold water.[67]
Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, Associate Professor of Biolaw at the University of Durham, argued in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2020 that the incoherence of the viability principle logically leads to “a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation. This is both because of the fluidity of the concept and because how it has been thus far understood in the law is unsupported by medical realities.”[68]
Romanis examines the incoherence of the viability principle in the United States, England, and Wales, and it is clear that anyone continuing to marshal this theory without carefully considering the underlying bioscience and emerging technological challenges is on precarious ground. Fetzer’s assertions that “Viability and personhood properly correspond” and that “Only then does the fetus have the ability to survive apart from its mother and deserve to be treated as a separate ‘person’ with the legal, moral, and social status that personhood conveys” simply fail to align with empirical reality. Advances in neonatal care, the emergence of artificial womb technology, the fluidity of survival thresholds, and the insights of Kantian philosophy together render the viability standard both scientifically unstable and philosophically untenable.
If viability is defined as “the ability [of a developing fetus] to survive independent of a pregnant woman’s womb,”[69] then the issue is effectively settled—no baby, at any stage, can survive completely independently of maternal or societal care. Should we simply allow a baby to die because it cannot survive entirely on its own? And of course, we recognize that children cannot survive independently until they reach full maturity. By this logic, would we deny care or moral consideration to all minors until they become fully self-sufficient? Clearly, defining personhood or moral status solely in terms of independent survival is both absurd and ethically indefensible.
Once again, the viability theory is so ambiguous that it leaves the door wide open for ideological organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, to manipulate the system—and from the very beginning, that is exactly what has happened. In other words, it is not science or even practical reason that determines viability, but whether a particular group—namely, Planned Parenthood—is entitled to impose its will on the rest of society. In this sense, Planned Parenthood—and, by extension, our esteemed opponent James Fetzer—are effectively aligned with what David Irving has often described as “the traditional enemy of the truth.” The question remains: who are they?
Jewish organizations and activists have long promoted the idea that abortion is, in fact, “a Jewish value.” In September 2022, Jewish women activists brought their campaign to advance abortion access to the U.S. capital, staging a demonstration outside Congress and meeting with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.[70] At the Jewish Women’s Council protest in front of Congress, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz declared: “Every blow of the shofar in public spaces unifies us in solidarity as we sound a wake-up call to our people and the nation that abortion is essential health care and abortion justice is a Jewish value.”[71]
Wasserman, the Jewish congresswoman from Florida, unequivocally declared:
“The shofar, or ram’s horn, has been used to call the Jewish people to action for millennia. The shofar blasts and sharp broken tones [act] to start us from our slumber and draw our attention to the challenges and opportunities of our world. In the Jewish year 5782, we lost our legal rights. And in the start of our new year 5783, we must fight for ownership of our own reproductive freedom. Our protests sound the alarm from coast to coast to protest complacency and proclaim loudly that [we] will not tire from the fight over abortion. We must fight like our own lives depend on it – because they do. We cannot allow a government takeover of women’s bodies, and that’s what’s happening. It is outrageous and unacceptable.”[72]
Danya Ruttenberg, a rabbi and scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women, reinforced Wasserman’s position by publishing an article in The Atlantic entitled, “My Religion Makes Me Pro-Abortion.”[73]
Perennial Problems in Fetzer’s Ethics of Evolution
Fetzer writes in his article: “Insofar as ethics concerns how we should behave and evolution concerns how we do behave, they might very well stand in direct opposition. If we sometimes do not behave as we ought to behave toward one another, ethics as a domain of inquiry may transcend the resources that evolution can provide.” But does this mean that evolution has nothing to contribute to questions of how we should behave? If that is indeed his claim, then Fetzer would greatly benefit from engaging with the extensive Darwinian literature on morality and ethics.
Fetzer is familiar with E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which Wilson axiomatically declares that “sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis for all social behavior.”[74] Not some social behavior, nor merely the “major” forms, but all social behavior. In other words, biology—not objective morality—serves as the metaphysical foundation for social conduct. Anticipating the philosophical and moral implications of this claim, Wilson goes on more than five hundred pages later to propose that “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.”[75]
Moreover, Fetzer must be aware that the Darwinian paradigm does not posit that ethics and evolution operate in separate spheres, nor that “ethics as a domain of inquiry may transcend the resources that evolution can provide.” On the contrary, the Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that ethics is, in essence, an illusion. This is not a straw man, red herring, or mischaracterization. For instance, Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson explicitly stated in The New Scientist: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves as a powerful purpose without existing in substance.”[76]
Ruse further developed these ideas in Taking Darwin Seriously (1986) and The Darwinian Paradigm (1989). Furthermore, this is not merely a case of Ruse and Wilson presenting views at odds with the Darwinian framework; other scholars affirm the same perspective. Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg, for example, argue that “natural selection and its application to biological data explains why morality is at most an instrumentally useful illusion.”[77] Similarly, theoretical physicist Brian Greene asserts in Until the End of Time that concepts such as “right and wrong, good and evil, destiny and purpose, value and meaning” are simply qualities that “we invent.”[78] (These are the same individuals who insist that the Holocaust is an established historical fact and that any deviation from the official narrative can only arise from either moral depravity or anti-Semitism. Yet Nazi Germany itself was wrong precisely because it attempted to invent its own moral code!)
More importantly, the Darwinian paradigm is fundamentally incompatible with objective morality, as I have already shown. The very fact that Fetzer is relentlessly arguing that abortion is true, right, and moral means he is operating outside the Darwinian framework he elsewhere invokes. Under Darwinian orthodoxy, there are no objectively binding categories such as right and wrong, good and evil; and even where such sentiments appear, they are dismissed as evolutionary byproducts—useful biological adaptations, not moral truths. As Ruse and Wilson state plainly, moral injunctions such as “Be kind to children” stand on the same footing as absurd imperatives like “Treat cabbages with the respect you show your mother”—both are, in their words, “crazy imperatives,” rooted not in moral truth but in evolutionary utility.[79] Once again, for Fetzer to argue that one must be “treated with respect” is not a Darwinian category at all—unless such “respect” is reduced to the principle of reciprocal advantage (the evolutionary equivalent of “I scratch your back and you scratch mine”). The idea of universal respect is pure fiction within the Darwinian framework. If Fetzer intends to invoke deontology, then he must apply it coherently, not smuggle in Kantian concepts while grounding his moral reasoning in biological reductionism. As Wilson bluntly states, “no set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population. To impose a uniform code is therefore to create complex, intractable moral dilemmas.”[80] If Wilson is right, then on what grounds is Fetzer imposing his moral standard—namely, that abortion is right—upon the rest of us?
In preparation for this exchange, I also reviewed chapter eight of Fetzer’s The Evolution of Intelligence, which he referenced in his article, where he makes the following claim:
“Because individuals are the agents who perform actions, it might be supposed that, since they are the actors, the rightness or wrongness of their actions must be a function of their motives. But, as in the case of other consequentialist theories, the rightness or the wrongness of acts is determined by their contribution to promoting the survival of the species, provided, of course, that personal rights are respected. Whether an action is right or wrong, therefore, is not determined by whether or not an agent recognizes that fact. Right acts can be done for wrong reasons.”[81]
I am not entirely sure what to make of this paragraph, and I would ask Fetzer to expand upon it. Is he suggesting that morality is not objective? Is he claiming that morality is merely a function of people’s motives? If so, then he is already undermining his own position by cutting off the very branch on which he is sitting. For if morality reduces to motive, then Fetzer’s own defense of the viability principle is nothing more than the expression of his personal motives—meaning there is no rational or moral obligation for anyone else to accept it. To avoid a straw man, I invite him to clarify precisely what he means. He must tell us plainly whether morality is objective or nonobjective. And if he affirms that morality is objective, then he must also explain how such objectivity can be reconciled with “evolutionary ethics,” which by his own framework is supposed to be its foundation.[82]
Fetzer — and here we are partially in agreement — acknowledges that “morality cannot be reduced to biology alone.”[83]
Morality has never been a part of biology, for biology concerns itself with what is, while morality—another way of speaking about practical reason—concerns what ought to be. I have argued for years that any political or ideological system which refuses to subordinate its claims to practical reason inevitably collapses into contradiction, and this is precisely what we are witnessing in Darwinism. While Fetzer does maintain at the end of chapter 8 that he defends a deontological position, he still has not explained how this is supposed to be compatible with the Darwinian evolutionary ethics.
From Fitness to Bloodshed: The Philosophical Cost of Darwinism
When I raised further objections to Fetzer’s appeal to Russell, he attempted to bolster his point by expanding the scope of his examples. He replied that he could cite, “myriad additional examples (from the 20th century alone),” such as what he calls the “Jewish Bolshevik” mass killings after the seizure of power in Russia, the “declaration of war by Judea upon Germany,” and the subsequent deaths (while excluding what he terms “the mythology of the Holocaust,” which he insists were merely labor camps rather than centers of extermination), as well as various conflicts in the Middle East that he attributes to racial and religious hostilities. He then asked rhetorically whether we must have “a world war between Christians and Muslims (as the Zionists would prefer) for the point to be made (again).”
But notice that Fetzer is again essentially making my point: he is implicitly assuming that perpetual wars are wrong, which means he is already smuggling in a moral standard that cannot be grounded on Darwinian premises. If he wishes to condemn such conflicts, then he is—perhaps unwittingly—stepping outside the very evolutionary framework he claims to inhabit. Darwinian ethics, by contrast, treats conflict as a natural and even beneficial mechanism for the “fittest” to prevail. And lest I be accused of creating a straw man, let me bring in The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology, where we are told that E. O. Wilson—again, one of the leading architects of sociobiology—explicitly argues that “human behavior such as aggression, territoriality, warfare, genocide, xenophobia, mating systems, homosexuality, the sexual division of labor,” etc., are all “partly genetically caused fitness-enhancing adaptation[s], and can be explained in terms of sexual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and other principles devised and used to explain nonhuman behavior.” If that is the case, then on Darwinian grounds there is no moral basis for calling war an evil act—it is simply another “middle passage” through which the fittest emerge stronger and more prosperous. Fetzer therefore cannot appeal to moral outrage against war unless he first abandons Darwinian ethics altogether.[84] In a 2012 article for Discover magazine entitled “Is War Inevitable?,” E. O. Wilson declares that “group-versus-group competition was a principal driving force that made us what we are.”[85] When Wilson was asked the question, “Are you envisioning groups fighting with each other or chasing each other off of good territory?,” he responded:
“All of the above. It’s one of the most powerful forces still today and can range all the way from aggressive, extirpative warfare to control of neighbors’ territories through the advantage of a controlling group. Or it can simply include superior technology that allows a group to use land more effectively so that it can create larger populations and spread that way… Within groups, selfish individuals win and between groups, altruistic groups beat groups of selfish individuals.”[86]
This perspective is widely echoed in the Darwinian literature, including works such as Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict.[87] In other words, this is once again survival of the fittest—the central driving force of the Darwinian paradigm. Darwinian enthusiasts often struggle with this idea because it is morally repugnant and logically contradictory, which has led to extensive mental gymnastics to avoid facing its implications. Wilson and other scholars are intellectually honest enough to confront these consequences directly. Fetzer, by contrast, seems unwilling to see the tree for what it truly is, because doing so would force him to critique Darwin and potentially repudiate some of the claims made in Render Unto Darwin. At the end of his article, Fetzer expresses genuine fear that the Israelis might act rashly, plunging the world into another catastrophic conflict. As he writes, “The severe dimensions and consequences of a global thermonuclear catastrophe are looming and (alas!) may even transpire before we complete our philosophical exchange.”
So if Darwin is right, why is Fetzer complaining about wars? Why does he seem to be having a heart attack at the mere prospect of nuclear conflict? What is wrong with Bolshevism—would it not, by Darwinian principles, be a positive development if it advanced the fitness of certain groups, as Darwin might predict? Once again, we encounter an inevitable contradiction, one that presents a perennial problem for thinkers like Fetzer and even MacDonald. It is impossible to maintain the intellectual plausibility of the Darwinian paradigm while simultaneously condemning those who employ aggression, warfare, and conflict to advance their “evolutionary” interests. Fetzer would almost certainly be celebrated in the Darwinian brotherhood if he could resolve this perennial problem—a problem that, as I have argued elsewhere, even Darwin himself could not solve.
The second issue we would highlight is this: even if we were to attribute tragedies like the Bolshevik Revolution to religion, it is worth noting that Stalin and his Jewish collaborators, for example, operated under the banner of what one scholar described as “organized atheism.”[88] Major historians—across a variety of ideological backgrounds—have documented both the demographic makeup of the early Bolshevik leadership and its explicitly atheistic ideological orientation. For example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in Two Hundred Years Together[89]) provides a detailed account of the disproportionate number of Jewish revolutionaries among the Bolshevik elite and their adoption of militant materialism.
In other words, the Bolshevik Revolution was driven primarily by Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries who had already embraced atheistic materialism as their foundation. This same revolutionary atheism—originally championed by leading Bolshevik Jewish revolutionaries—later found fertile ground in China, where Mao adopted and radicalized its materialist and anti-religious ethos, resulting in policies that led to the deaths of at least 40 million people, according to historian Frank Dikotter of the University of Hong Kong.[90] As historian Stephen J. Morris puts it, “the frontal assault upon religion and individualism constituted an application and extension of Maoist ideology to the most extreme degree.”[91] Mao himself declared: “Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself…I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.”[92] In 1912, when Mao was just eighteen, he encountered socialism through the writings of Jiang Kanghu, a Chinese politician influenced by Chinese anarchists in Paris. Jiang founded the Chinese Socialist Party, and his motto was simple: “No government, no family, no religion: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As British historian Philip Short notes, “This was strong stuff, and Mao wrote enthusiastically about it to several of his classmates. Only one, he remembered, sent a positive response.”[93]
Mao, like the late Christopher Hitchens after him, axiomatically declared that “religion is poison.”[94] Mao, two biographers writes, “was bent on destroying religion, the essence of most Tibetans’ lives.”[95]
Maoist ideology was subsequently exported to Africa and embraced by dictators such as Robert Mugabe, whose guerrilla fighters received direct training from Chinese Maoists.[96] As Mao himself put it, “The target is the Chinese revolution, the arrow is Marxism–Leninism. We Chinese communists seek this arrow for no other purpose than to hit the target of the Chinese revolution and the revolution of the east.”[97] Mao even had some Jews working in his government.[98]
What was true in China with respect to messianic politics and Jewish subversive movements under the banner of atheism was a fortiori true in Cambodia under Pol Pot,[99] in Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh,[100] and even in Korea through the communist movement[101]—each of which embodied the same atheistic, revolutionary ideology and drew from the same Jewish ideological and political current. Interestingly, the United States ended up working with Ho Chi Minh’s communist cells in Vietnam to fight against Japan during the final year of World War II.[102]
The Khmer Rouge’s systematic persecution of Buddhist monks, Muslims, and Christians is thoroughly documented across a wide range of scholarly literature. The regime maintained that “religion is treachery — treason against the revolution, against the Leninist line … and therefore had to be abolished.”[103] By 1976, the regime declared that there was to be “only one religion—Khmer religion,”[104] and any religious groups that deviated from this official decree were ostracized, persecuted, and, in some cases, brutally tortured and killed. During the first three years alone, one of the regime’s stated goals was “the destruction of religion.”[105]
The regime specifically “intended to destroy the Cham Muslim religious group,” and accordingly forbade them, “under threat or use of force, from practicing their Islamic religion… The regime’s systematic extermination of Cham community and religious leaders, let alone the massacres of tens of thousands of ordinary Chams, are further evidence of its genocidal intent.”[106] In that sense, the entire regime, as one historian puts it, was “hyperMaoist.”[107]
So if Fetzer is quick to blame religion for much of the war, evil, and bloodshed of the twentieth century, then he certainly has a lot of historical homework to do, as these issues are far more complex and cannot be reduced to simplistic explanations without careful examination. We may conclude this point by noting that, although the Bolshevik Revolution was heavily influenced by Jewish revolutionary figures, the ideological weapon it deployed was atheism.[108] That same ideological framework was later adopted by Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh, each of whom, following Marx, regarded religion as the “opium of the people.”
The third point Fetzer fails to acknowledge is that he does not look far enough back—long before the rise of the three major religions. What was civilization like then? Was it truly a state of peaceful harmony? Perhaps Fetzer might set aside the viability theory for a moment and consult some of the historical and anthropological studies conducted over the past fifty years on the prevalence of war. Key works include War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, and Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton. If Fetzer wishes to examine ancient Greece and other early civilizations, he might also consider conflicts such as the Peloponnesian War, the Pyrrhic War, and the first through fourth Macedonian Wars. As Keeley observes, “The earliest annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Romans are concerned with wars and warrior kings. Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the genealogies, biographies, and military exploits of Mayan kings. The folklore and legends of preliterate cultures, the epic oral traditions that are the precursors to history, are equally bellicose.”[109] Will Durant notes that in ancient Greece, on the island of Crete, “internal wars decimated the island’s manhood, and left it disunited against foreign attack.”[110]
In order for Fetzer’s claim—that religion is largely to blame for recent wars—to hold, he would have to ignore entire civilizations. If wars have been occurring since the dawn of human history, long before the emergence of the three major religions, then the causes of conflict cannot be so easily attributed solely to religion, even though religious factors may indeed contribute.
Finally, Fetzer would have to blind himself to overlook the practical applications of Social Darwinism in the twentieth century, which perpetuated the notion that the weak of society must be eliminated so that the fittest may survive. In my lengthy article, “Why Eugenics Fails: A Philosophical and Historical Challenge to David Skrbina,” I cited numerous historical and scholarly studies that detail the real and often horrific implications of Social Darwinism. While Fetzer admits that he is not “an authority on world religions or the conflicts they have generated”—a candid acknowledgment we appreciate—he should nonetheless avoid making authoritative claims without carefully examining the metaphysical premises behind why certain religions have historically been associated with wars.[111]
James Fetzer’s Second Response to Jonas E. Alexis
[Editor’s note: I have fixed certain infelicities, such as a few typos, an incomplete sentence or unintended misstatement.]
In his magisterial Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (1952), Carl G. Hempel, the noted philosopher of science for whom I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Princeton (which was a the time #1 in the world in math, physics, and philosophy), distinguishes between four modes of definition:
(1) nominal definition, whereby one word (the definiendum) is defined by means of other words (the definiens) by stipulation (convention or agreement);
(2) meaning analysis, whereby students of language specify the meaning-in-use within a language-using community as a function of linguistic research;
(3) empirical analysis, whereby the properties of physical things are subject to observation and measurement to define objectively and scientifically; and,
(4) explication, the process of proposing refinements in meaning intended to clarify and illuminate those concepts, especially for philosophical purposes.
Hempel was a master of methodology and would not regard an explication as adequate unless it were properly formalized, which could extent to the application for formal logic to codify the conditions that must be satisfied to properly apply, where he focused on capturing the nature of scientific theories and of scientific explanations, which became models–even paradigms–of philosophical rigor for generations of professional philosophers, which are not much in evidence today (alas!)
My Class of ’62 was the first to include as many public-school graduates as private, which marked a turning point in the history of Princeton as an institution of higher learning. It was also al male. After 35 years as a professor of philosophy, I have concluded that same-sex institutions have intellectual advantages over mixed-sex institutions, primarily because of the distracting effects of social interaction between the sexes. I would serve four years on active duty as a Marine Corps officer commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant at graduate, where nothing could be more obvious than that having women serve aboard submarines would be an act of colossal stupidity, because the sailors would have their minds on sex rather than the performance of their duties. Similarly for undergraduates.
But the ban on women on subs was lifted in 2010 and they began serving the following year–and Princeton went co-ed in 1969. Whether these were good or bad depends upon your objectives. If they are to maintain the highest level of military preparedness, putting women on subs was a calamity. Similarly, if you want to develop the mental abilities of your students to the highest degree, co-ed is not the way to do. Should your objectives differ, however, such as seeking to treat the sexes the same in spite of their obvious differences (or to give women equal opportunities to obtain a Princeton education), then those decisions deserve praise rather than condemnation. The point being that judgements of desirability of political decisions depends upon the outcomes that the vested parties want (or prefer) to obtain.
Criteria of Adequacy
Hempel’s contributions included four criteria of adequacy for the comparative evaluation (or “cognitive significance”) of theories, which I have introduced above:
(CA-1) the clarity and precision of the language in which alternative theories are expressed;
(CA-2) their scope of application for the purpose of explanation and prediction;
(CA-3) their respective degrees of empirical support on the available evidence; or,
(CA-4) the economy, elegance or simplicity with which they satisfy (CA-1) – (CA-3),
where I have argued that they can equally well be applied to conspiracy theories, which are, after all, theories–“What’s Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?” (`7 April 2021, unz.com–but where their application for the purpose of evaluating moral theories requires variations in their formulation, which I proposed (in the mode of explication) as follows: :
(CA-1*) they must not reduce to the principle, “Might makes right!”, which is the source of the problem;
(CA-2*} their scope of application for the purpose of explaining and predicting the moral character of acts;
(CA-3*) their proper classification of acts generally acknowledged as right and wrong; and, additionally,
(CA-4*) the extent to which they shed light upon and clarify more complex and controversial cases.
My arguments support the conclusion that, among alternative moral theories, only Deontological Moral Theory can satisfy these conditions, where (perhaps) the most complex and controversial case involves abortion, as I learned during 35 years of discussion and debate in courses on Critical Thinking, where I conclude that deontology supports Roe v. Wade. And providing objective independent grounds to support a position is not begging the question by assuming it to be true.
My position can most appropriately be understood as an explication of personhood (or of what it means to be a person with the legal, moral and social rights attendant thereto). What I am contending is that biology and morality need to converge on an appropriate conception to sustain the nature of inalienable rights, legal duties and moral obligations. Thus, the most promising combination appears to be (a) the biological attainment of viability combined with (b) the most primitive right to life, which coincides with Roe. The strongest case for the existence of the fetus as a person in its own right appears to derive from its ability to exist apart from the intrauterine environment (on its own), which is a function of heart, brain, and lung development (regardless of the state of medical technology). And this has nothing to do with the specific circumstances under which Roe was decided and later discarded.
Jonas, as an opponent of abortion, very appropriately wants to turn my own criteria of adequacy against my conclusion, which of course became the focus of his rebuttal to my initial response. Rather inappropriately, however, he claims that I beg the question by presuming that Roe v. Wade was correctly ruled (though now returned to the states and creating a patch-work quilt of laws and statutes governing abortion) as though I were using Roe as a premise of my argument. That, of course, would be mistaken, since my position instead is that it emerges as the conclusion of a thorough and systematic review of relevant considerations, which make a difference to the validity (or soundness) of Roe as being the morally-correct position to adopt about abortion, which every rational and moral person ought to adopt as their own.
Among the aspects of this exchange that I like the most is that Jonas does not pull any punches, makes the strongest possible case he can for the immorality of abortion, and (clearly) sincerely believes everything he says. There is nothing artificial or pretentious about his position, which as an agnostic I suspect has deep roots in his personal beliefs about God and human existence, which I shall address as appropriate in the response that I now present. And I want to express my appreciation to Jonas for having the interest and the integrity to initiate this philosophical exchange.
(CA-1*) they must not reduce to the principle, “Might makes right!”, which is the source of the problem
As Jonas astutely observes, “despite being the author of Render Unto Darwin, Fetzer is not a Darwinian when it comes to morality. His opposition to the concept of ‘might makes right’ implicitly positions him against Darwin himself”. My position (in a nutshell) is that the capacity for morality elevates the human species above all others but that specific groups (such as Israeli Zionists) have abandoned their potential for humanity by committing genocide against the Palestinians to steal their land. As a Limited Utilitarian Entity, creating the Nation of Israel as a Jewish State (in retrospect) appears to have been an enormous blunder.
But, even more so. combining the Old Testament (featuring a God of vengeance and retribution, where genocide abounds) with the New (featuring a God of compassion and love) into a single volume may have been the gravest intellectual atrocity of world history. And the enthusiasm with which Christian Zionists embrace a religion that (in its most virulent forms) REQUIRES the death of every Christian on Earth for their Mashiach to return to Earth is confounding. From the perspective of Deontological Moral Theory, the Old Testament represents a profoundly immoral (Limited Utilitarian) point of view, while the New exemplifies exemplary deontological moral values, such as The Golden Rule (of doing unto other as you would they do unto you).
Remarkably, Jonas seeks to use my own criteria of adequacy for moral theories (CA-1*) to (CA-4*) as “pos(ing) serious challenges to Fetzer’s position”:
Take, for example, CA-1: if a principle must not be reduced to “might makes right,” how is it that a small group of people ended up defining what constitutes life in the womb and imposed that definition upon the vast majority of people? As I argued in the first presentation, the Supreme Court first exercised such authority in the Dred Scott decision and then repeated the pattern in 1973 with Roe v. Wade—a ruling based on a central fabrication, namely that Norma McCorvey, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, had been raped and therefore required an abortion. Yet this fabrication was used to justify imposing a principle on the so-called democratic United States. Clearly, those involved had power and believed that imposing it on the majority was legitimate. So why does Fetzer not challenge this exercise of power if he wishes to remain consistent with CA-1?
Here Jonas addresses the circumstances under which Roe was passed rather than its merits as a principle or policy for the United States under the Constitution. I am not arguing that Roe is right because it was adopted by the Supreme Court but that it is the right policy for the Supreme Court to have adopted. Jonas would have me citing the Supreme Court as an appeal to authority, when the validity of its conclusion is the question at stake. I endorse Roe not because it was adopted by SCOTUS but because SCOTUS made the right decision then (on independent grounds) and made the wrong decision by returning the issue to the states.
I think his commitment to the pro-life as opposed to the pro-choice position has affected his objectivity in responding to my position. Roe was right because it drew (what I take to be) the right distinction between the first and second trimester in the development of the fetus and the third, which (as he correctly observes) revolves about the concept of viability (the ability of the fetus to survive on its own beyond the intrauterine environment), which turns out to be a function of lung rather than of heart or of brain development. Absent the ability to survive independently of its mother, a fetus does not possess the crucial property of personhood with the legal, social, and moral properties thereby attained, but remains a special kind of property of the gestating woman without its own independent standing.
And that profound commitment also leads him to commit another subtle fallacy, when he maintains that “medical and technological” developments have caused the viability standard to collapse, which misrepresents the issue by combining a trivial truth with a significant falsehood. Yes, medical and technological advances make it possible to maintain the life of a fetus outside the womb via artificial devices. That is the trivial truth. But the law of biology–that the fetus cannot survive on its own with attaining lung development that occurs at the end of the second trimester–remains intact. Viability remains viable apart from modern technology.
And he further blunders by suggesting that Kant–the father of deontological moral theory–would have unhesitatingly rejected abortion as morally wrong. But the situation may not be as clear-cut as Jonas implies. Kant would certainly object to women using a fetus as a means to her own ends, such as for the purpose of avoiding the inconvenience of pregnancy or of childbirth or perhaps because abortion does not respect the potential of the fetus for rational agency. But a more nuanced reading invites the response that the woman possesses rational agency herself and the fetus is not (yet) a rational agent. He also cites “Senator Josh Hawley—a sitting U.S. senator and scholar—who recently introduced legislation both to ban abortion and to prohibit child sex-change surgeries, as ‘seriously morally impaired’? I (Jonas) am still trying to understand the logic behind this claim: If someone is pro-life and opposes the killing of the unborn, how does that make him ‘morally impaired’?”
He adds, “Fetzer repeatedly insists that, ‘Forcing women to carry unwanted fetuses to term turns them into reproductive slaves—and those who cannot acknowledge as much appear to be seriously morally impaired.’ If anything trivializes the issue, it is precisely this kind of sloganeering.” But surely, it’s not “sloganeering” to observe that forcing women to carry unwanted fetuses to term IS a form of reproductive slavery! What could be more obvious? It’s only by begging the question and taking for granted the pro-life position while ignoring the issue of personhood that justifies taking such a strident position in opposition to the obvious fact of the matter. Only the pro-choice position allows every woman to decide for herself on the basis of her personal circumstances, her conscience and her faith. Pro-choice is democratic. Pro-life is not.
(CA-2*} their scope of application for the purpose of explaining and predicting the moral character of acts
When Jonas turns to (CA-2*), moreover, he commits another (subtle) blunder. Because so much attention focuses on the phrase, “Abortion is murder’, which cannot be true unless the fetus qualifies as a person (because “murder” is defined as the deliberate and unlawful killing of a person”, which given the standard of viability does not occur until the end of the 2nd trimester), abortions during the first two trimesters cannot properly qualify as murder. And (as I must repeat lest the point be lost) insofar as the deliberate killing of persons by police in the performance of their duties, by soldiers in combat, and by civilians in self-defense likewise does not qualify as murder because they are not illegal acts, the question becomes more complicated. Even under Roe, the deliberate killing of a fetus during the 3rd trimester (other than to save the life or the health of the mother) properly qualifies as murder.
So, even though parties like Jonas may have a profound commitment to the pro-life position, they should not therefore fail to draw the distinctions relevant to an objective philosophical resolution of the moral question posed by abortion. As long as the developing fetus has not attained the status of personhood, abortion (during the first two trimesters) cannot properly qualify as murder. I would like to believe that we have progressed at least this far by clarifying the status of personhood as the fundamental question about the moral status of abortion. Period!
Without suggesting Jonas is grasping after straws in his pro-life defense, he surprisingly submits that (CA-2*) works against my stance on abortion because various nations–he cites Japan, South Korea, Iran, and even the United States–have population problems that abortion only exacerbates. Thus, he observes,
With respect to CA-2, this presents another problem for Fetzer’s position. As I suggested in my presentation, if we apply the abortion issue to countries such as Japan, South Korea, Iran, and even the United States, we encounter a serious population concern. Both South Korea and Japan are facing demographic decline in large part due to policies that effectively imposed abortion on the population. Perhaps it is worth briefly examining this issue from a historical perspective to fully understand its implications.
I say “surprisingly” because the subject of discussion has thereby shifted from the morality of abortion to the social consequences of abortion policies, which may be a shift that is subtle but also philosophically telling. The consequences that may follow from the truth of an assertion is not a reason for denying its truth–at least, not in a philosophical forum. It qualifies as a fallacious appeal to pity. While I have no reason to dispute the facts he asserts to be the case for those nations whose demographic problematics he describes, none of that is relevant to the question of the morality of abortion. Here Jonas addresses questions of public (or social) policy and whether they would be appropriate to adopt by nations confronting demographic challenges. As I understand it , that’s not what we are debating.
And the answer to that question–like those of whether to station women on submarines or to turn Princeton co-ed–depends upon your objective or goal. “Political correctness” (as it has come to be known) has been an unqualified calamity for those who believe the nation requires the highest level of military preparedness and that instilling intellectual rigor in its students should take priority over social graces. My first serious girlfriend (who, like myself, had also graduated from South Pasadena High School) attended (then all-female) Vassar, which would itself succumb to co-education (also in 1969) and became the first all-women’s college in the US to go go-ed.
Whether these were good moves or not obviously depends upon your objectives and goals, no matter whether with regard to military service readiness or undergraduate intellectual development. Not all of us share the same opinions about these changes either. Ironically, my first wife’s son from her second marriage would attend Vassar and won many awards for swimming, but it was on the up-and-up. He did not pose as a girl but won as a man. I am equally appalled on deontological grounds how trans-swimmers and other men-posing-as-women have corrupted girls and women’s sports, which I (along with the rest of the world) applauded when it attained federal funding via Title IX in 1972. We seem to take one step forward, then two back. But things are getting better.
Jonas also discussed Margaret Singer, Planned Parenthood, and birth control. He comments on 700,000 abortions having been performed in 1955 as follows:
“In that year the government worked with the private Family Planning Federation of Japan to promote contraception instead of abortion… Doctors licensed to perform abortions had no desire to promote other, more reliable forms of contraception as they became available, and the Family Planning Federation of Japan itself came to rely on income from the sale of condoms, which it bought at a heavily discounted price from a large condom manufacturer” quoting from Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (2002)
Jonas summarizes his review as “outlin(ing) the tragic trajectory resulting from the long-term use of abortion, birth control, and contraceptive devices in South Korea and Japan. Regarding the abortion and birth control movements in the United States, Iran, and elsewhere, readers are referred to E. Michael Jones’ two archival studies”. But the consequences are only “tragic” depending upon one’s long-term objectives and goals. If the objective were to diminish the population to advance a world-control-by-the-elite agenda, as we have with “The Great Reset” and the World Economic Forum, these losses in population would be regarded as an astounding success. Indeed, via The Georgia GuideStones, the master plan remains to reduce the world’s population from over 8 billion to 500 million, which remains in place for those who want to rule the world.
While I am dumbfounded at the savagery and gall of such a project, that’s an entirely different question from the morality of abortion. And, given the extent to which women have gained greater control over their lives because of birth control, I have a hard time taking those who oppose it as other than Neanderthal in their thoughts and attitudes. I am all for women’s freedom to live their lives according to their own preferences, a practice that men have exercised long since (apart from those who have been subjected to slavery and other immoral practices women have also had to endure).
(CA-3*) their proper classification of acts generally acknowledged as right and wrong
When Jonas turns to (CA-3*), his arguments seem to me to fall decidedly short of their intended aim. Consider the following passages, for example:
Turning to Fetzer’s principle as articulated in CA-3, it is closely related to broader ethical considerations, given that abortion has historically been regarded as morally objectionable. Only a small minority continues to advocate for its normalization, seeking to impose their position upon the vast majority of the world’s population. Moreover, as I argued in the first presentation, abortion cannot be universalized as a moral principle—a fundamental reason why Kant and other prominent ethicists would have rejected it outright.
Fetzer writes, “Mine are independent arguments as to why the policies embedded in Roe v. Wade–of no restraint during the 1st trimester, of the state’s interest in how abortions are performed during the 2nd, and that abortions other than to save the life of the health of the mother during the 3rd properly qualify as ‘murder,’ which hinges upon the status of personhood occurring at the end of the 2nd trimester and extending into the 3rd and beyond.”
How can Jonas seriously suggest that “only a small minority continues to advocate for its normalization” (which I shall charitably interpret as meaning the adoption of policies parallel to Roe), when woman make up over half the population of the world and (I have no doubt) overwhelmingly support the policies of Roe)? He seems to have no understanding of the plight of women in the world, who have been subjugated by men since the dawn of time. And when he cites Kant as opposed to abortion on grounds of its incapacity for universalization,
Moreover, one must ask what Immanuel Kant—the philosopher who formulated the deontological moral framework upon which Fetzer bases his argument—would have said regarding the issue of abortion. If Kant considered acts such as onanism and homosexuality not only contrary to nature but tantamount to self-murder, then it follows with little doubt that he would have condemned abortion. Kant scholars are virtually unanimous in maintaining that he would have regarded abortion as morally impermissible.
The reason is straightforward: abortion cannot be universalized without contradiction, and therefore fails Kant’s categorical imperative. Empirical evidence further reinforces this philosophical point. Once the principle of abortion gained cultural and legal acceptance, national populations began to decline markedly. This trend has been observed in Japan, South Korea, the United States, Iran, and numerous other nations. The irony, however, is profound: the very elites who have advanced the ideology of abortion now express growing concern over the demographic crises it has helped to produce!
“Onanism”, for those who may be wondering, includes coitus interruptus (withdrawal prior to orgasm) and (even) masturbation. That Kant considered them (and homosexuality) as tantamount to self-murder is hardly a good reason to oppose abortion. On the contrary, they would appear to be good reasons to regard him as a “whack-job” who lost his way in the thick shrubbery of sexual relations. What stuns me is that, for all his claims of my having cited the Supreme Court as an appeal to authority (where I was offering Roe as the right conclusion to draw from independent premises), here we have Jonas himself citing Kant as his appeal to authority for opposing masturbation and abortion.
Remember, the crucial issue is personhood: the status of the fetus as an entity capable of independent existence apart from its mother’s womb (with the qualifications addressed above). It would have been candid of Jonas to acknowledge that Kant did not discuss the concept of personhood in relation to abortion, which (in my opinion) supersedes what he had to say on the subject. As for universalizability, we are not talking about every woman aborting every fetus but every woman having the right to determine whether or not to bear her fetus to term, which is another thing. I must say that these aspects of his position are not his strongest arguments, which, as I have sought to explain, fall decidedly short of their objective of defeating mine.
(CA-4*) the extent to which they shed light upon and clarify more complex and controversial cases.
Joans does not actually address (CA-4) per se, which is excusable since he has been (throughout) attempting to debunk my position on abortion. Instead. he makes rather sweeping condemnations of the work of E.O. Wilson, Michael Ruse, and others on the relationship between ethics and evolution with which I largely agree:
Fetzer writes in his article: “Insofar as ethics concerns how we should behave and evolution concerns how we do behave, they might very well stand in direct opposition. If we sometimes do not behave as we ought to behave toward one another, ethics as a domain of inquiry may transcend the resources that evolution can provide.” But does this mean that evolution has nothing to contribute to questions of how we should behave? If that is indeed his claim, then Fetzer would greatly benefit from engaging with the extensive Darwinian literature on morality and ethics.
Fetzer is familiar with E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which Wilson axiomatically declares that “sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis for all social behavior.” Not some social behavior, nor merely the “major” forms, but all social behavior. In other words, biology—not objective morality—serves as the metaphysical foundation for social conduct. Anticipating the philosophical and moral implications of this claim, Wilson goes on more than five hundred pages later to propose that “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.”
Moreover, Fetzer must be aware that the Darwinian paradigm does not posit that ethics and evolution operate in separate spheres, nor that “ethics as a domain of inquiry may transcend the resources that evolution can provide.” On the contrary, the Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that ethics is, in essence, an illusion. This is not a straw man, red herring, or mischaracterization. For instance, Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson explicitly stated in The New Scientist: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves as a powerful purpose without existing in substance.”
While I like Wilson and Ruse and have conversed with them upon occasion, my conclusion has long been that they had no grasp of the nature of morality or of why morality distinguishes the human species above all others. The very idea that “Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized” qualifies as more than faintly absurd. Like Kant on masturbation and homosexuality, Wilson and Ruse are feeble representatives of serious positions on the nature of morality.
We can choose to rise about our animal origins as products of evolution or we can succumb to self-interest on a personal level or to Limited Utilitarianism on a grander level. Either way, we thereby diminish ourselves and impoverish our lives and those around us. My own suggestion is that, by displaying respect for other persons and their entitlements to life and liberty, we are enriching ourselves and our species. It’s an obligation we bear toward other persons, which has all-too-frequently been abandoned by those who want to prosper from abusing others. We are surrounded by our lessers but affirm our true character by rising above our animal origins to the glory of the species Homo sapiens.
James Fetzer, Ph.D., is Distinguished McKnight Professor Emeritus on the Duluth Campus of the University of Minnesota.
Notes
[1]https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Prohibiting-Abortion-and-Transgender-Procedures-on-the-Exchanges-Act.pdf .
[2] Tiana Norgren, Abortion and Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. For related studies on this issue, see Deborah Oakley, “American-Japanese Interaction in the Development of Population Policy in Japan, 1945-52,” Population and Development Review Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1978): 617-643.
[3] Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 135-136.
[4] Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 122.
[5] Crawford F. Sams, Medic: The Mission of an American Military Doctor in Occupied Japan and Wartorn Korea (New York: Routledge), 30.
[6] Ibid., 31.
[7] Deborah Oakley, “American-Japanese Interaction in the Development of Population Policy in Japan, 1945-52,” Population and Development Review Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1978): 617-643.
[8] Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1974 and 2007); see also Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 87.
[9] See Caroline Rusterholz, Women’s Medicine: Sex, Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective, 1920-70 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020), 10.
[10] Gordon, The Moral Property of Women, 42-43.
[11] Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54.
[12] Aya Homei, “The Science of Population and Birth Control in Post-War Japan,” David G. Wittner and Philip C Brown, eds., Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 231.
[13] Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 105.
[14] Aya Homei, “The Science of Population and Birth Control in Post-War Japan,” David G. Wittner and Philip C Brown, eds., Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 231.
[15] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 229.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Takemae Eiji, The Allied occupation of Japan (New York: Continuum, 2003), 406.
[18] Ibid., 431.
[19] Ibid., 432.
[20] Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 107.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 123.
[23] Ibid., 120.
[24] Eiji, The Allied occupation of Japan, 192.
[25] Ibid., 433.
[26] Oakley, “American-Japanese Interaction in the Development of Population Policy in Japan, 1945-52,” Population and Development Review Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1978): 617-643.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Norgren, Abortion and Birth Control, 87.
[29] Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 127; see also Eiji, The Allied Occupation of Japan, 433.
[30] Ibid; see also Aya Homei, “The Science of Population and Birth Control in Post-War Japan,” David G. Wittner and Philip C Brown, eds., Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 231.
[31] Norgren, Abortion and Birth Control, 88; emphasis added.
[32] Oakley, “American-Japanese Interaction in the Development of Population Policy in Japan, 1945-52,” Population and Development Review Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1978): 617-643.
[33] Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 120.
[34] Tiana Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 87.
[35] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 231.
[36] Y. Scott Matsumoto, Akira Koizumi and Tadahiro Nohara, “Condom Use in Japan,” Studies in Family Planning, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Oct., 1972): 251-255.
[37] Claire L. Jones , The business of birth control: Contraception and commerce in Britain before the sexual revolution (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020).
[38] Takeuchi-Demirci, Contraceptive Diplomacy, 3.
[39] John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 226; Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 35; see also Norman E. Himes, “Jeremy Bentham and the Genesis of English Neo-Malthusianism,” Economic History, Vol. 3, No. 11 (FEBRUARY, 1936): 267-276.
[40] Margaret Sanger, The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 125.
[41] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163.
[42] For a serious scholarly study on the feminist movement in Japan, I would highly recommend Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
[43] Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences:Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 27.
[44] John DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 111.
[45] Ibid., 109.
[46] Doo-sub Kim, “Theoretical Explanations of Rapid Fertility Decline in Korea,” The Japanese Journal of Population, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2005: page 6.
[47] Ibid., 7.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 183.
[50] Helen M. Hopper, A New Woman in Japan: A Political Biography of Kato Shidzue (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 15.
[51] See Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5-9. Smedley, whose first love interest was a woman, pursued sexual liberation without hesitation and made no apologies for her relationships with numerous men. For instance, upon arriving in China, she openly embraced her ideals of sexual freedom and wrote explicitly about her experiences: “Out here, I’ve had chances to sleep with all colors and shapes. One French gun-runner, short and round and bumpy; one fifty-year-old monarchist German who believes in the dominating role of the penis in influencing women; one high Chinese official whose actions I’m ashamed to describe; one round left-wing Kuomintang man who was soft and slobbery.” Ibid., page 4.
[52] Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 183.
[53] Elise K. Tipton (1997). “Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan,” Women’s History Review, 6:3, 337-355, DOI: 10.1080/09612029700200151: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029700200151.
[54] Tipton, “Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan,” page 350.
[55] Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (New York: Routledge, 2002), 183.
[56] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and political Control (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2022), 859.
[57] Ibid., 861.
[58] See for example Francis J. Beckwith, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (New York: Routlege, 2022); Robert P. George & Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Princeton: Witherspoon Institute, 2011); Patrick Lee, Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
[59] Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 272.
[60] Fetzer, Render unto Darwin, 112.
[61] “Syria’s Assad wins 4th term with 95% of vote, in an election the West calls fraudulent,” Reuters, May 28, 2021.
[62] “Yes, Assad won reelection last week. But Syria’s elections serve another purpose,” Washington Post, June 1, 2021.
[63] For a fascinating historical account, see Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003 and 2008).
[64] See Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006).
[65] James E. Brown, “How Viable is Viability? Artificial Womb Technology and the Threat to Abortion AccessThreat to Abortion Access,” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, Volume 31, Issue 1: 2024, chrome-extension://kdpelmjpfafjppnhbloffcjpeomlnpah/https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1313&context=mjgl&utm_source=chatgpt.com.
[66] Marilee C. Allen, Pamela K. Donohue, and Amy E. Dusman, “The Limit of Viability — Neonatal Outcome of Infants Born at 22 to 25 Weeks’ Gestation,” New England Journal of Medicine, November 25, 1993, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199311253292201?utm_source=chatgpt.com .
[67] Erika M. Edwards, Danielle E. Y. Ehret, Roger F. Soll, Jeffrey D. Horbar, “Survival of Infants Born at 22 to 25 Weeks’ Gestation Receiving Care in the NICU: 2020–2022,” https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/154/4/e2024065963/199459/Survival-of-Infants-Born-at-22-to-25-Weeks?autologincheck=redirected ; see also Pierre-Yves Ancel, François Goffinet, “Survival and Morbidity of Preterm Children Born at 22 Through 34 Weeks’ Gestation in France in 2011
Results of the EPIPAGE-2 Cohort Study,” JAMA Pediatrics, Vol. 169, No. 3, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2091623?utm_source=chatgpt.com .
[68] Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, “Is ‘viability’ viable? Abortion, conceptual confusion and the law in England and Wales and the United States,” Journal of Law and the Biosciences, October 9, 2020; 7(1):lsaa059. doi: 10.1093/jlb/lsaa059. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8249091/
[69] Ibid.
[70] “HAARETZ: ‘Abortion Justice Is a Jewish Value’: U.S. Congresswomen Use Shofars to Sound Alarm,” https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2891.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Danya Ruttenberg, “My Religion Makes Me Pro-abortion,” Atlantic, June 14, 2022.
[74] E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975 and 2000), 4; emphasis added.
[75] Ibid., 562.
[76] Michael Ruse & E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics” (1985), New Scientist, 85(1188), pp. 50–52.
[77] Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg, “Darwin’s nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaninglessness of life,” Biology and Philosophy, volume 18: 653–668 (2003).
[78] Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 276.
[79] Ruse and Wilson, “The Approach of Social Biology: The Evolution of Ethics,” 310.
[80] Wilson, Sociobiology, 564.
[81] James H. Fetzer, The Evolution of Intelligence: Are Humans the Only Animals with Minds? (Chicago and Lasalle: Open Court, 2005), 179.
[82] Ibid., 182.
[83] Ibid.
[84] Lance Workman, Will Reader, and Jerome H. Barkow, The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 63.
[85] E. O. Wilson, “Is War Inevitable?,” Discover, June 12, 2012.
[86] “What Does E.O. Wilson Mean By a ‘Social Conquest of the Earth,’” Smithsonian, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-does-eo-wilson-mean-by-a-social-conquest-of-the-earth-162888428/.
[87] Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lawrence: University Press of Kentucky, 2022).
[88] Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), chapter 2. For similar studies, see William B. Husband, Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 199); Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[89] A review of the book can be found in E. Michael Jones’ The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008).
[90] See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Walker Books, 2010).
[91] Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 71.
[92] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005), 13.
[93] Philip Short, Mao: The Man Who Made China (London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co., 1999 and 2017), 50.
[94] Chang and Halliday, Mao, 553.
[95] Ibid., 556.
[96] See Stephen Chan, Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xi.
[97] Quoted in Donald M. Lowe, “The Function of “China” in Marx, Lenin, and Mao (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 117.
[98] See for example Tom Segev, “The Jews Who Fought With Mao,” Haaretz, July 27, 2012; Paul Ross, “Mao’s Jews,” Jewish Journal, November 20, 2015.
[99] See Timothy M. Carney, Communist Party Power in Kampuchea Documents and Discussion (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977); Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia, 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); James A. Tyner, From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, and Labor under the Khmer Rouge (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); David P. Chandler, et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution Since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
[100] For studies on Vietnam, see Alec Holcombe, Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945-1960 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020); Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Virginia Morris and Clive A. Hills, Ho Chi Minh’s Blueprint for Revolution: In the Words of Vietnamese Strategists and Operatives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2018); William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (New York: Routledge, 1981 and 2018).
[101] See Dae-Sook Suh, Documents of Korean Communism, 1918-1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea: The Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972); Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[102] See Dixee Bartholemew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War against Japan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
[103] Ben Kienan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996 and 2002), 274.
[104] Ibid., 269.
[105] Ibid., 57 and 273; see also Ian Harris, Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Munks Under Pol Pot (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013).
[106] Kienan, The Pol Pot Regime, 462.
[107] Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, 71.
[108] A similar ideological pattern is evident among contemporary Jewish intellectuals such as Sam Harris, who openly identifies as both an atheist and a committed Zionist.
[109] Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.
[110] Will Durant, The Life of Greece (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939), 21.
[111] If Fetzer wishes to gain an introduction to this issue, we would recommend consulting the following studies: Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
