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Some of you also may have read the following piece, but I thought it worth reading again. It is a beautiful, thoughtful article I first read many years ago, from a non-religious but famous pro-lifer:

CAN THEY DEFEND THEMSELVES?

KEN KESEY

author of

“ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST”

DISCUSSES THE VALUE OF LIFE

Excerpts from “An Impolite interview with Ken Kesey” by

Paul Krassner, Editor of The Realist (Vol. 90, Dec.’71)

Q. Since you’re against abortion, doesn’t that put you in the position of saying that a girl or a woman must bear an unwanted child as punishment for ignorance or carelessness?

A. In as I feel abortions to be probably the worst worm in the philosophy, a worm bound in time to the righteousness and life from the work we are engaged in, I want to take this slowly and carefully. This is the story of Fredddy Schrimpler:

As part of his training, a psychiatric aide must spend at least two weeks working in the geriatric wards. These wards are concrete barns built, not for attempted cures or even for attempted treatments of the herds of terminal humanity that would otherwise be roaming the streets, drooling and disgusting the healthy citizenry, but for nothing more than shelter and sustenance, waiting rooms where the old guys spend ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years waiting for their particular opening in the earth. At eight in the morning they are herded and wheeled into showers, then to Day Rooms where they are fed a toothless goo, then are plunked into sofas ripe with decades of daily malfunctions of worn-out sphincters, then fed again, and washed again, and their temperatures taken if they are still warm enough to register, and their impacted bowels dug free in the case of sphincters worn-out in the other direction, and their hair and cheesy old fingernails clipped (the clippings swept into a little pink and grey pile), and fed again and washed again, and then usually left alone through the long afternoons.

Even the Doctors Call Them Vegetables

Some of these derelicts still have a lot going and enjoy trapping flies and other such morsels in the snare of their baited hands, and some engage in contented garrulous conversations with practically anything, and some watch TV, but most of them lie motionless on the plastic covered sofas or on the gurney beds, little clots of barely breathing bones and skin under the government sheets. Even the doctors call them vegetables.

Let Them Die!

In caring for these men something becomes immediately obvious to all the young aids undergoing their first real brush with responsibility. The thought is very explicit. After the first meal is squeezed into a slack mouth, or after the first diaper change or catheter tapping, every one of the trainees have thought this thought, and some have spoken it:

“Without our help these guys would die.”

And, after the hundredth feeding and diapering and changing, the next thought, though never spoken is: “Why don’t we just let them die?”

An awful question to find in your head, because even young aids know that age can happen to anyone. “This could I someday be!” But even fear of one’s own future can’t stop the asking: Why don’t we just let them die? What’s wrong with letting nature take its own corpse? Why do humans feel they have the right to forestall the inevitable fate of others? Freddy Schrimpler helped me find my answer:

Freddy was 70 or 80 years old and had been on the Geriatrics Ward for close to twenty years. From morning until bedtime he lay in the Dayroom in a gurney bed against the wall, on his side under a sheet; his little head covered with a faint gossamer that seemed too delicate to be human hair – it looked more like a fungus mycilium joining the head to the pillow – and his mouth drooling a continual puddle at his cheek. Only his eyes moved, pale and bright blue they followed the activity in the ward like little caged birds. The only sound he made was a muffled squeaking back in his throat when he had dirtied his sheets and, since his bowels were unusually impacted, like most of the inmates who couldn’t move, this sound was made but rarely and even then seemed to exhaust him for hours.

One afternoon, as I made my rounds to probe with rectal thermometer at the folds of wasted glutious maximus of these gurney bed specimens – hospital policy made it clear that the temperature of anything breathing, even vegetables, had to be logged once a month – I heard this stifled squeak. The squeak came again, slower, and sounding remarkably like speech! I moved closer to the pink and toothless mouth, feeling his breath at my ear. In the days that followed I brought my ear to that mouth as often as the nurses let me get away with it. He told me his story. A stroke years ago had suddenly clipped all the wires leading from the brain to the body. He found that while he could hear and see perfectly, he couldn’t send anything back out to the visitors that dropped by his hospital bed more and more infrequently. Finally they sent him to the VA, to this ward where, after years of effort, he had learned to make his little squeak. Sure, the doctors and nurses knew he could talk, but they were too busy to shoot the breeze and didn’t really think he should exhaust himself by speaking. So he was left on his gurney to drift alone in his rudderless vessel with his short-wave unable to send. He wasn’t crazy, in fact the only difference that I could see between Freddy and Buddha was in the incline of their lotus position. As I got to know him I spoke of the young aides’ thoughts.

“Let a man die for his own good?” he squeaked, incredulous. “Never believe it. When a man…when anything…is ready to stop living…it stops. You watch…”

Before I left the ward, two of the vegetables died. They stopped eating and died, as though a decision of the whole being was reached and nothing man or medicine could do would turn this decision. As though the decision was cellularly unanimous. (I remember a friend telling me about her attempted suicide; she lay down and placed a rag soaked in carbon tetrachloride over her face. But just before she went out completely there was a sudden clamor from all the rest of her: “Hey! Wait! What about us? Why weren’t we consulted?” And being a democratic girl at heart she rallied over mind’s presumptuous choice. “Our mind has no right to kill our body,” she told me after the attempt. “Not on the grounds of boredom, anyway…” and met with the satisfaction of all concerned.)

Right To Life Defended

Punishment of unwed mothers? Care of neither the old or the young can be considered to be punishment for the able, not even the care of the un-dead old or the un-born young. These beings, regardless not only of race, creed and color but as well of size, situation or ability, must be treated as equals and their rights to life defended! Can they defend themselves?

You Are You From Conception

You are you from conception, and that never changes no matter what physical changes your body takes. And the virile sport in the Mustang driving to work with his muscular forearm tanned and ready for a day’s labor has not one microgram more right to his inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than has a three month’s fetus riding in a sack of water or the vegetable rotting for twenty years in a gurney bed. Who’s to know the value and extent of another’s trip? How can we assume that the world through the windshield of that Mustang is any more rich or holy or even sane than the world before those pale blue eyes?

Abortion Is Fascism

How can abortion be anything but fascism again, back as a fad in a new intellectual garb with a new and more helpless victim?

I swear to you, Paul, that abortions are a terrible karmic bummer, and to support them – except in cases where it is a bona fide toss-up between the child and the mother’s life – is to harbor a worm of discrepancy.

Q. Well, that’s really eloquent and mistypoo, but suppose Faye were raped and became pregnant in the process?

A. Nothing is changed. You don’t plow under the corn because the seed was planted with a neighbor’s shovel.

Q. I assume that would be her decision though?

A. Almost certainly. But I don’t really feel right speaking for her. Why don’t you phone and ask?

(Krassner phones Faye Kesey in Oregon and reviews the dialogue. She asks: “Now, what’s the question – if I were raped, would I get an abortion?” “That about sums it up.” “No, I wouldn’t.”)

Q. But would she marry the rapist to give the child a name? What would you have done in my place before abortion was legalized and someone with an unwanted pregnancy came to you for help, and you knew of a safe doctor as an alternative to some back-alley butcher/

A. I have been in your place and done what you did. I think now – not just because of religious stands but of what happened to the girls’ heads as a result – that I did a great disservice because I was being asked for more than money or the name of a guy in Tiajuana. In the last few years, when asked the question, I’ve found myself able to talk the women out of it. I could have talked them out of it back then as well. There are girls with kids coming and no old man to carry his share of the load. Women sense far better than a man what the bearing and raising of a child means in terms of a lifetime commitment. It all comes down to a pact of support first, how can he blame the woman for pulling out hers? Next time you’re asked to choose between hygiene and a back-alley butcher, Paul, try choosing instead against both possibilities and for life instead.

[This article was originally published in pamphlet form by the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition, Hasting-on-Hudson, N.Y.]