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.

---

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