TO AN UNTRAINED EYE

TO AN UNTRAINED EYE

TO AN UNTRAINED EYE

by James V. Schall, S.J. On April 23, 1989, THE NEW YORK TIMES carried an unsigned item datelined Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The article was about the principle of a local grammar school who barred a young girl in the seventh grade from exhibiting her competitive display for the school’s science fair, which was devoted to the theme, “Life Science.” The young student’s evidently well-prepared presentation was of ten human fetuses in various stages of development. “The fetuses, kept in preservative solutions, were from pregnancy stages ranging from 6 weeks to 5-1/2 months.” The girl’s mother, it seems, was an art teacher in the same school, while her uncle, from whom she obtained the fetuses, was a local pathologist. The fetuses, according to the mother of the student, came from miscarriages. The life-science presentation of the Gatlinburg seventh- grade student was, it seems, quite a good one. It was so good, in fact, that the principal arranged for the display to be given a blue ribbon, but no student was allowed to see the display. Why? The principal held it was “inappropriate for the age group here.” Evidently, somewhere along the line, some age group would find this sort of exhibit “appropriate”? One cannot help but suspect that this was not the real issue. In this connection, I have also heard that pro-life debaters are often forbidden to show similar displays, even just photos or slides of them, to college audiences on the grounds that this is an unfair tactic, too “emotional.” One wonders just how old we must be to see a display of human fetuses without confusing them for human beings. In any case, this prohibition is apparently one of the few things that students are not allowed to see — one might here piously hope, in this instance at least, that the normal prurient interest of the healthy adolescent might manage to sneak a look at this forbidden object, just to see what it is that the elders do not want him to know. Significantly, also, in the article, there was no record of the civil rights groups rising in wrath to protect the rights of students to express their artistic talents and have others see what kind of “life” was revealed in their “sciences.” We should note, however, that the very fact that the principal arranged for a “private” blue ribbon ceremony indicates that he did at least want to protect himself against the accusation of prior censorship or discriminating against a hard-working student. He did fear a certain kind of liberal opinion. Again we suspect that what was at issue was the effort to prevent the students from seeing what one sees when looking at a human fetus. The fear was that the students would see what someone did not want them to know about. What was this sight that the school wanted to prevent the students from observing? The curriculum director of the local county schools, in explaining this prohibition of freedom of speech, gave this remarkable explanation: “To an untrained eye, the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was definitely a child.” Needless to say, what this “5-1/2 months along” fetus is to the “trained” eye was not remarked, nor was it explained just how we go about so “training” our eyes that they see something else in the jars besides objects that definitely look like the human child. The hidden key to this whole little report was, no doubt, right here in the fear of the supposedly “untrained eye.” At first sight, however, along with the realization that some children do not naturally come to term (a fact that children ought also to know about, for many in fact have had mothers or relatives with miscarriages), it would normally seem that we would want children to know of the wonder of human growth, its stages, its linear development that leads from conception, through the stages in the womb, to birth, to the state of life a seventh-grader is. Someone does not want children to know this sort of fact of life. Gatlinburg, Tennessee is not, of course, the center of the universe, though it does have a certain charm in the world of country music. The song I recall about Gatlinburg, in fact, is a very violent one, so the area is not a stranger to human disorder. We can, if we wish, look on this incident as a sort of amusing parody of what happens when someone, even a seventh-grade student in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Eastern Tennessee, seeks to explain reality. Yet, it is precisely in such incidents, in such small, out-of-the-way places that the whole irony of the death-and-killing society we have developed in our hospitals and laws and, yes, mores is revealed most graphically. It is in such places that we can see most clearly what we have brought about with our practices that we do not want our children to see. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there were no abortion culture. Let us assume, furthermore, that we lived in a scientifically honest and open society. Furthermore, let us assume that in some school there came a proper “moment” to explain the growth of the human fetus, from conception to birth. We will likewise presume that there would be a normal number of miscarriages which were attended to by local pathologists, one of whom had a niece who proposed such a science project. We are assuming, in other words, nothing in the least immoral or unnatural in the fact of miscarriages or in the legitimate scientific or educational effort to study and explain the condition of human growth. In such a situation, would there be any reason to forbid the girl’s display? In our current situation, however, it simply cannot be a question that the average seventh-grader has not been exposed already to a wide-spread knowledge of matters from sex to drugs, so that the presumption of the principal in the present case cannot be based primarily on the innocence of the students forbidden to see the display. We need not doubt that this principal knows that even our courts do not require pregnant teenagers — only slightly, if any, older than these seventh-graders — to report their situation to their parents. Rather, the prohibition is based on the fear that seventh-grade children, seeing such a display, with their own eyes and brains, will see the horrible lie that has been presented to them in various classes or programs that explain that abortion does not deal with the death of an otherwise normal human child. In other words, the schoolteachers do not want their whole authority underminded in the light of the lie that our society has chosen to present in this matter. “To an untrained eye, the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was definitely a child….” Here we have a professional curriculum director at a county school system in one of our states — and therefore, I take it, somewhat typical of the problem we face — actually suggesting that we must train the students not to see what is in fact there. I believe it is possible for a 5-1/2 month fetus actually to survive, and some have done so. But the fetus already looks “human” long before five and a half months. What would normal students make of this display? Obviously, they would make of it just what the curriculum director and the principal thought they would. That is, they would have thought of it as a human child. And they would have found no evidence that this was not what it was or what it would become if left to grow normally. What the sytem did not want the students to know was what these things in the bottles really were, for this information would cause great consternation when it came time to present other subjects later on in the school curriculum. Take for example the Declaration of Independence Let us suppose that this class of seventh- graders were allowed to see this display of ten fetuses in various stages of growth. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were obtained rather from abortions, though in that case they might be chopped up or scalded or otherwise mutilated. The question of the right to life is to be discussed in the following class as part of our national heritage and national principle, that this nation under God recognizes that there are norms or standards of human worth and value, that this is what makes us different from totalitarian societies, which do not respect human worth. No doubt, in this situation, some perceptive student will inevitably ask the teacher about those ten fetuses, “Do they have some sort of right to life, since they certainly look human and came from human mothers and fathers?” If the teacher were to say, “Why, yes, certainly, they are human,” then he would have to answer the question about the practice of killing them, which every seventh-grader knows about even if he is not allowed to see the results. This civics teacher, in this circumstance, would, moreover, immediately find himself in trouble from the pro-abortion front for presuming to “indoctrinate” his views on people who have a “right” — a right to what? A right to call a human fetus something else so that it does not come under any protection of the law as described in our Declaration. So better not to let this happen. Keep the students from seeing the display. It will make teaching civics easier later on. No one will defend a teacher’s obligation to call a fetus what it is. No one will protect a student’s eyes to tell him that what he sees is indeed what he sees. In this manner, then, the whole school system, and through it society itself, are corrupted in the name of “protecting” the children so that they do not “see” what is before them. “To an untrained eye, the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was definitely a child….” Or to put it in a converse fashion, to train the eyes of our children can mean nothing but the establishment of the lie as the norm of our educational system. This consequence, to be sure, is not a theme unfamiliar to political philosophy. We do not have to go much beyond Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, to discover that the ultimate issues remain largely what Plato had said they were, that there are indeed some who would prefer their own opinions to the WHAT IS before their very eyes and those of their children. When indeed does it become “appropriate” for us to see what is in the ten jars containing the fetuses in the various stages of normal growth that the seventh- grader displayed at Pi Beta Phi Elementary School in Sevier County, Tennessee? The Greeks and the writer of the Declaration, no doubt, would have been grimly amused to contemplate the abiding pertinence of their theories.

Fr. James V. Schall, a Jesuit priest, teaches political science at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. This article was taken from ALL About Issues/November-December 1989. Copyright 1989 American Life League, P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22554 The American Life League grants permission to reprint this item provided that credit is given to American Life League, that their address is mentioned, and that a copy of your publication is sent to Editor, All About Issues, at the above address.