Abortion and Racism: Intersectionalities in the Era of Symbolism

NANTICHA LUTT

In this paper, I will problematize Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by C.

Everett Koop (former surgeon general of the U.S.A) and Francis A. Schaffer. Through their use of slavery-as-abortion metaphor, highlighting its displacement of slavery from the abortion rights narrative, the movement’s paternalistic view of slaves, and how capitalizing on the legacy of slavery for pro-life issues that target a white audience erases the autonomy that slaves possess. Delineating autonomy to fetuses and white children representative of abortion, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? dehumanizes black individuals and this pro-life argument holds hypocritical, paternalistic attitudes towards people of color. In both the book and the movie, Whatever Happened to the

Human Race? positions slavery and abortion as a part of a deliberate sequence of historical human failures. Photographs representing these atrocities in high-contrast and black-and-white supplement the printed version of the lecture.

Autonomy is defined as “as self-government or self-direction: being autonomous is acting on motives, reasons, or values that are one's own.”1 Autonomy is used as a framing mechanism to discuss the comparisons between slavery and abortion.

Comparing the white fetus’ and children’s autonomous value to the slaves and black

1 Natalie Stoljar. "Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 1 children in the images and rhetoric of Koop and Schaffer’s argument shows how the metaphor of slavery-as-abortion dehumanizes black individuals and prioritizes their white audience. Granting the white child agency, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? demonstrates the lack of power black individuals represented in their work possess indicating a dismissive, paternalistic, racialized gaze cast onto people of color. However, it is interesting to note that in Koop and Schaffer’s horrible construction of humanity, the only people who exist are black and white. Besides a small acknowledgement of “brown

[and] yellow” babies, their rhetoric revolves almost entirely around black and white individuals.2

The first image presented to the viewer shows three black people chained together around the throat. Their faces are shadowed, with a bright light coming from the left. Their eyes are somewhat visible, and they all look in different directions. The reader can infer that they are slaves: their clothing is ragged, they are all barefoot, and the sole woman in the photo is pregnant. These three individuals appear to be passive, and there is no resistance or fury in their body language. They are not active agents; these black people are merely waiting for someone to save them. Koop and Schaffer are both white men, so by deliberately depicting these black individuals as powerless and forlorn they develop an embedded white-savior complex. How these ‘slaves’ further the pro-life argument only serves to elevate their position as Samaritans. Koop and Schaffer have recognized slavery as a great atrocity; they are the good white people who have

2 Charles Everett Koop and Francis August Schaeffer. Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. (Crossway, 1979), 90.

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 2 also recognized abortion’s sinfulness. This is the pro-life construction of slavery, because analogous to an unborn child, these black individuals are waiting for deliverance.

Deliverance must come to them because they are not autonomous beings; they are chained together and not resisting, so they must not be capable of moral judgment, they must not be able to assess their situation.

This photographic image of slavery supplementing the text is especially problematic paralleling the analogy of abortion. It separates out the issue of slavery from abortion, which obscures structural violence and racism. A black woman’s fertility increased her value to plantation owners, who treated black women slaves like

“breeding sows.”3 However, this analysis of reproductive slavery is lost in Whatever

Happened to the Human Race? The text details abortion as a result of the increasing moral complacency of humanity without recognizing the possibility that enslaved women used abortion as a method to thwart the reproductive tyranny of rape by slave masters.4

Though as white saviors, Koop and Schaffer do recognize the oppressive conditions of slavery, they grant no agency to the women who experienced it. Slave women were autonomously aware of their oppressive conditions and actively resisted them through birth control and abortion. Ross writes about the awareness former slaves had about their abortion experiences:

When black women resorted to abortion, the stories they told were not so much about the desire to be free of pregnancy, but rather about the

3 Loretta J. Ross. "African-American Women and Abortion: A Neglected History." Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 3.2 (1992), 274-284. 4 Ibid.

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miserable social conditions which dissuaded them from bringing new lives into the world.5

By displacing the narrative of black women and the active control they maintained over their bodies through abortion, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? can capitalize on the emotional trigger of slavery without acknowledging what role abortion had in mitigating tyranny. This can then persuade the audience that to be complicit that abortion is the moral sin just as owning a slave. Debora Threedy writes

“[i]mages of the slave and the abuses of slavery carry a powerful emotional charge for white and black people in [America],” thus coupling the image of abused, resigned, and powerless black individuals with an argument for protections for unborn children with taps into a similar emotional history.6 The pregnant black ‘slave’ woman in fig.1 does this very thing: invoking strong sympathetic reaction from the reader. The woman is barefoot, her clothes are torn, she is worked very hard, and she is chained. The use of the pregnant woman elevates Koop and Schaffer’s patronizing gaze, capitalizing on the affect of an enslaved, vulnerable soon-to-be mother. This takes away this woman’s autonomy completely by erasing any part of her identity that is not related to being a slave or being pregnant. She becomes a tool for Koop and Schaffer to use without recognizing that slave women had the capacity and knowledge to abort the children which allows them to mitigate their suffering and control their bodies in a way that does not involve the intervention of white saviors.

5 Ibid. 6 Debora Threedy. "Slavery Rhetoric and the Abortion Debate." Mich. J. Gender & L. 2 (1994), 3.

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This direct analogy to abortion-as-slavery also captures the moral certainty of the legacy of slavery. By condemning the abuses of slavery as a great human atrocity, civil rights movements and supporters gain an easy moral high ground; their opponents are just bigoted racists.7 Koop and Schaffer even explicitly compare the outrage of the legalization of abortion to the lack of rights for black people:

In our day, quite rightly, there has been great protest because society in the past viewed the black slave as a nonperson. Now, by an arbitrary absolute brought into the humanist flow, the law in similar fashion declares millions of unborn babies of every color of skin to be nonpersons.8

Koop and Schaffer make five direct references to slavery throughout the book, and their characterization of slaves as “small, voiceless, defenseless” like unborn babies is a harmful patronizing mentality that entrenches racist values. This is a hypocritical position that derails their position as good anti-racists (white people). Threedy elaborates on the harmful nature of this discussion: “the fetus is voiceless and dependent, not because the law renders it so, but because the fetus has not developed biologically to that point where speech or autonomy is possible,” so the comparison of the slave to a fetus is a over-bearing paternalism.9 This projects a passive, unresisting image of black people within their oppressive situations. Needless to say, this is an inaccurate depiction of power and takes away autonomy from slaves and civil rights movements, where rights were demanded by slaves and black individuals.10Black

7 Ibid. 8 Koop and Schaffer, 14. 9 Ibid. 10 Carol Mason. Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics. Cornell University Press, 2002.

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 5 people actively organized for justice in their communities but, Koop and Schaffer portray them as infants waiting for rescue.

The way Koop and Schaffer depict slavery completely dehumanizes black individuals, and places the burden of liberation onto their white audience. Whatever

Happened to the Human Race? has a strong savior complex, compelling their readers to take action against the horror of abortion, just like good white people (like Koop and

Schaffer) had to take action against slavery. This is power placed in the hands of white people. The slaves in the photo do not have the ability to end their suffering, but white people do. Similarly, the fetuses do not know they are suffering, so the viewer has to take action as well. Whatever Happened to the Human Race? places the reader in a hierarchy, assumed to have autonomy, and their gaze is cast upon those who lack it.

Figure 1 (below) depicts a single white child. This image has a single wooden crate suspended against the darkness of the background. Inside the elevated crate lies a white infant illuminated with a halo of white light. In high contrast and black and white, the photo shows the baby’s skin merging with the whiteness of the light. Unlike the other groups photographed, this baby is clearly crying. The aura around the child, the elevation of the crate, the whiteness of both the light and skin color of the baby strongly alludes to Western Christian iconography of the Christ Child.11 This baby is present, aware, and due to their Christ-like aura, ready to cast moral judgment. There is an autonomy awarded to the Christ Child that is not given to the victims of slavery, and the

11 Mason, 116.

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 6 inconsistencies of personhood are a sign of Koop and Schaffer’s active dehumanization of black individuals.

However, in the series of photos depicting atrocities of humankind, the white child alone stands in the image representative of abortion. The victim of abortion is a white child, their halo indicative of purity and innocence. “For westerners, light conveys not only a sense of spiritual purity but also a racialized sense of whiteness.”12 This pro- life photograph is absolutely a projection of white, Christian, and western values. This valued white baby is a Christ child, a pro-life icon to rally and unite the populace. Only in the image of the child do the viewers see a resistance, and the face of the child not shadowed. The infant is almost emerging from the light, and the whiteness of their skin is in union with the halo around them. This white, angelic child is separate from the dirty, forsaken individuals in the slavery picture. The slaves have to wait for someone to save them, the slaves lack the autonomy to act for themselves. When Koop and Schaffer cast a paternal gaze onto the slaves, it is a clear disrespect for their autonomy. John

Christman explains the recognition of autonomy protects against such attitudes:

Respect for autonomy is meant to prohibit [paternalism]…because they involve a judgment that the person is not able to decide for herself how best to pursue her own good…so for the autonomous subject of such interventions paternalism involves a lack of respect for autonomy.13

This violation of autonomous respect is juxtaposed to the white child, full of life and vigor, who is the autonomous manifestation of the pro-life movement’s conception

12 Ibid. 13 John Christman. "Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 7 of personhood. By granting the right to protection to a subject portrayed as actively fighting back, the framing of slaves as passive and waiting for deliverance is an outright dehumanization.

However, in Whatever Happened to the Human Race? the authors insist three times in the book that they are inclusive of all races in its fight against abortion. Koop and

Schaeffer insist that “we are proponents of the sanctity of human life-all human life…born or unborn; black, white, brown, and yellow.”14 However, in Koop and

Schaffer’s visuals there are no depictions of races other than white or black. Only one time does a specific list (i.e. Asian, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Armenian) come up, and after this quote Whatever Happened to the Human Race? uses the phrase “all children.”15 The rest of the babies shown in the video are black or white. This implicates their use of black children as an emotional trigger; their care and white savior complex is only extended children of other races only if these children can do something for Koop and Schaffer’s argument. Black children are thus representative of slavery, and Whatever

Happened to the Human Race? exploits this in their video.

This “equality of value” is highlighted as the camera pans over a cloud-scape that depicts hundred of baby dolls piled together; aborted children in heaven.16 These plastic dolls are both white and black. However, the only live child ever shown in the video is white. In the introduction as the camera pans across cages filled with rabbits,

14 Koop and Schaffer, 90. 15 Koop and Schaffer, 116, 120. 16 Everett C. Koop and Francis Schaeffer. "Dr. Francis Schaeffer: Whatever Happened to the Human Race: ABORTION." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2016 8 rats, and snakes, the drumming in the soundtrack increases and views are treated to the image of a crying white baby locked in a cage next to the rabbits. The white baby is the fighting back, grabbing at and clawing at the walls of their prison, but the black doll is facedown as Dr. Schaeffer details the process of surgical abortion. The doll is passive and motionless, just like the photograph of the slaves.

The use of a white child in the cage is a statement about white privilege; by placing a black baby in the cage, it might be a statement about civil rights, racial discrimination, or even economic inequality, and that is a large, multifaceted burden to place on the reader. The white Christ Child does not carry any heavy historical context

(like slavery or racial injustice); the child’s whiteness exists in a vacuum in which the only logical conclusion for the viewer is to save the white child from the abortionist at all costs.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? might not have intended to create a racist analogy against abortion; but the consequences are the same. The marginalization of black individuals within the text leads to a historical devaluing of their autonomy, which in turn can lend to dangerously paternalistic laws and attitudes towards people of color. Social movements campaigning for rights that use historical legacies of human atrocities as a parallel to their cause must realize that all analogies carry rhetorical weight; there are real dehumanizing impacts that emerge from their arguments.

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Images Used:

Figure 1: White baby in an ‘animal testing cage’

Figure 2: Black and White Dolls

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