There is a growing stream of people with little knowledge of physics who justify with the most outlandish reasons the notion that the Earth is still flat, as was believed before the ancient Greeks. Particularly laughable is the Flat Earth Society, which also has a large group of naïve people who follow it on social networks. It is a typical case of cognitive dissonance.
With very similar reasons and behaviors, there are millions of people driven by self-styled “progressive” ideologies who, under the pressure of huge amounts of money, claim the lives of millions of people around the world every year.
This gigantic eugenic genocide can only be maintained on the basis of an enormous cognitive dissonance created to make people believe that the human being, in its early stages of gestation inside its mother’s womb, is not human and therefore, is not worthy of being protected; nor is it a subject of rights, unlike the mother who carries it within her. In some languages, these people are called fetoplanists, since they have many points in common with terraplanists (flat-earthers). We will refer to them here as pro-aborts.
Pro-aborts present cognitive processes to justify immoral actions. The four textbook symptoms are present:
- Moral justification of the immoral act.
- Denial and rejection of individual responsibility.
- Denial and rejection of negative consequences.
- Denial and rejection of the victim.
Let’s look at each of these points separately and, specifically, how they apply on abortion.
Moral justification of the immoral act
It consists of reinterpreting the immoral act as an action that will be beneficial to achieve acceptable objectives according to moral and social norms. There are several strategies:
- Application of utilitarianism that legitimizes action. The superior end justifies the immoral act.
- Highlighting the comparative advantages of the immoral act in relation to actions committed by others that would have been worse. For example, the non-intervention of a witness to an act of violence is justified by arguing that the lack of commitment is much less serious than the immoral act itself.
- It can also be oriented towards the selection of the hackneyed “lesser evil”. Between the two evils, the one that produces the least damage is taken.
In the case of abortion
The child is killed to save the psycho-affective health of the mother. Faced with the two evils: killing the child and saving the mother, the harm caused (abortion) must be minimized and the potential evil that is avoided must be maximized: the psycho-affective health of the mother, although this is a nebulous and elusive concept that is difficult to quantify objectively.
The decision-making capacity of the mother overrides the decision-making capacity of the unborn woman. The US Supreme Court, in 1973, decided that the woman, protected by the right to privacy–under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment–could choose whether or not to continue with the pregnancy; that right to privacy was considered a fundamental right protected by the US Constitution and therefore could not be legislated against by any state. This is the famous Roe v. Wade ruling.
It is also used to justify the exceptional use of the act as a last resort when all other means have failed. This act is justified, despite its moral rejection, because it is an extraordinary decision to which the “victim-mother” has been forced.
To amplify the potential damage caused, sociology and statistics focused on the atrocious sufferings of mothers and the “fact” that a child that is “unwanted” would grow in an unloving environment, therefore abortion as an “act of mercy” would spare the child these future sufferings, which he or she is guaranteed to have and which will be very hard.
Denial and rejection of individual responsibility
The individual responsible for committing an immoral act maintains that he or she did not intend to harm the victim(s) by his or her behavior. Normally, the individual says that circumstances led him to commit the immoral act. The perpetrator perceives himself as being controlled from the outside and, therefore, without any responsibility for his immoral acts. This external control has many names: society, poverty, one’s sexual condition…
It is also possible to find cases in which the individual responsible for committing an immoral act perceives himself as an unimportant part of the group. As a result, he perceives that his actions have no major consequences and that, in the end, he is not hurting anyone. After all, everyone does it.
Among the most common examples, people usually resort to clichés such as shoplifters who argue that shoplifting is not important because many people do it (“everyone does it”) and at the same time, there are also thieves who steal much more than us, such as corrupt politicians (a minor part of the group), as well as people who do not care about the environment because no one does it and all in all, I have only thrown one can in the field.
In the case of abortion
Among the most common examples used by people who have had abortions are clichés such as:
- Everyone does it. This is an established practice. Thousands of abortions are performed each year. I am not the only one.
- I only comply with the law. My responsibility is transferred to the state, which adopts the laws that I can neither alter nor influence. Here the pedagogical effect of the law and the moral force of the masses come together.
- There are even more abortions in the USA or China. This excuse implicitly highlights the goodness of the woman who has had an abortion since she could have been worse off than she already is and what she has done is not so…. “so much”.
- Ultimately, it’s only an abortion. What’s that compared to the millions that happen every year around the world?
Denial and rejection of negative consequences
In the end, the consequences of an immoral act do not directly harm anyone. For example, we can observe the use of this mechanism when a car thief justifies a theft by claiming that the owner of the stolen car will get a new one because the stolen car was probably insured.
In the end, the owner of the car will only suffer bureaucratic hassles and will have to pay some money, but in exchange, he will have a brand new car again. Of course, the fraud committed against the insurance company, which is the one that will have to pay the money for the new car, the expense to the public treasury for all the legal costs and the increase in insurance policies that all drivers will have to suffer because of this type of behavior are ignored.
This mechanism predicts that, when people are not confronted with the suffering of their victims, their willingness to commit immoral acts will increase.
In the case of abortion
Post-abortion stress syndrome is very often dismissed, and the suffering of fathers, grandparents, siblings and the entire social circle around the mother is ignored.
The denial and rejection of the human dignity of the victim is another of the typical resources of denial of consequences.
Mothers are denied hearing the heartbeat of their children, the vision of their children’s death is hidden from them in order to prevent them from facing the agonizing suffering of their children. Since there are no consequences, their willingness to commit immoral acts will increase. And so it has happened with the percentage of women who have had abortion for the second time, which has not stopped growing since fetal murder was decriminalized, becoming, in some cases, just another means of contraception, either by chemical means (morning-after pill) or by surgical means.
Denial and rejection of the victim
The person responsible for committing an immoral act holds the victim responsible, attributing guilt for the situation. This makes the person responsible for immoral actions feel not guilt, but a feeling that he is doing just and necessary actions. In cases of domestic violence, a mother may legitimize violent actions toward her child on the grounds that she deserved it because she got a bad grade in school.
Another way of morally disassociating oneself from the victim is dehumanization, which consists of a progressive process of degradation that ends up subtracting the victim’s rights, personal traits and any type of characteristic that could generate empathy with other human beings. Torture and killings in genocides and wars are usually legitimized through a process of dehumanization. The terms in which the ETA members used to refer to their victims, the contempt with which the Nazis treated the Jews, who were considered subhuman, or how slavery was justified at the beginning because blacks were like monkeys and not actually human, are clamorous.
In the case of abortion
The fault for getting pregnant lies with the mother for not knowing, not wanting to use or misusing contraceptive methods. The responsibility for the whole process lies with the mother. The pressure from parents, boyfriends and other social circles can be tremendous.
The use of the technique of denial and rejection of the victim (see the end of the article) is by way of dehumanization. This technique is very effective because it is not really killing a person, but removing pieces of tissue as if it were a cancer, a lipoma or a wretched wart. On the other hand, the dehumanization of the fetus is clamorous in abortionist circles, and this technique is very effective in anesthetizing consciences. It is part of the scapegoating process and has worked very well in the past with Jews under the Nazi regime, dissidents in the Russian Gulags, black slavery in Anglo-Saxon countries and recently with unborn children.