The Other Side Almost Agrees with Me

Worth noting is the fact that many pro-abortion writers come very close to agreeing with me.  One pro-abortion journalist quotes a pro-abortion counselor as commenting, "I am not confident even now, with abortion so widely used, that women feel it's OK to want an abortion without feeling guilty.  They say, 'Am I some sort of monster that I feel all right about this?'"   The counselor’s statement is very revealing.  Plainly, if a woman has guilty feelings for not having guilty feelings about deliberately taking innocent human life, sheer moral ignorance is not a good explanation.

In fact, the phenomenon of moral denial is taken for granted even by many people who commerce in abortion.  However – chillingly -- they regard denial as good.  One of the physicians involved in the clinical trials of the abortion pill remarked, "I think there are people who want to be in denial about whether it's really an abortion or not.  I think that's fine .... For some people that's a very useful denial and more power to them if they have to use that not to have an unwanted child."  The authors of the article, who are strongly pro-abortion, seem to agree:  "Indeed, denial may be considered a form of agency,” they write, “in that it enables women who are troubled about abortion to get through the experience more easily."[18]

Needless to say, even if everyone really does know that deliberately taking innocent human life is wrong, it does not follow that everyone knows the rest of the general moral principles as well.  So I do not claim to have proven St. Thomas’s claim that the general moral principles are all “the same for all as to knowledge.”  But I think I have made it plausible.

Notes

18.  Simonds, ibid., pp. 1318-1319.

Link to Part 12 of 14