Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a number of studies 50 years ago on the “Obedience to Authority.”
“He was highly interested in the reasons why the average person would submit to obedience through an authority figure although he/she knew that he/she was harming an innocent third party. This research was prompted by the events of the Holocaust and later the Nuremberg Trials in which Eichmann, an infamous Nazi, supported his actions of genocide as simply following orders.”
His article “Obedience to Authority”, published in Harper's Magazine, at that link (the Dec.6, 1998 Wayback save) shows it was “Abridged and adapted from [the book] “Obedience to Authority” by Stanley Milgram. Copyright 1974 Stanley Milgram.”
Additional quotes and other details, timeline and bibliography of Milgram’s work can be read here [Copyright Michael Goret, Amanda Zega, Lorraine Voss, and Gillian Fawcett-Hammalian. 1998. “Stanley Milgram.” Accessed 20 Jan. 2005]
In Milgram’s experiment, two people met with
“an instructor who appeared to be conducting the experiment. This instructor superficially appeared as an authority figure…displaying the necessary credentials as a professor such as a white lab coat and clipboard. The two ‘subjects’ were then taken to a room where one was strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode was placed on their arm. The other individual who was called the ‘teacher’ was taken to an adjoining room where he/she was instructed to read a list of two word pairs. He/She would then ask the ‘learner’ to read them back. If the ‘learner’ got the answer correct, they would then move on to the next set of words…
However, if the answer was wrong the ‘teacher’ was…required to administer shock to the ‘learner’. These shocks started at 15 volts and increased in 15 volt increments to 450 volts for each incorrect response…The ‘teacher’ was never coerced into doing so, they were simply told by the instructor that the experiment required them to continue.
This in fact is what made this study so intriguing; the ‘teacher’ could have discontinued the experiment at any time but…the majority continued to shock. The ‘teacher’ was fully under the assumption that he/she was administering discipline to the ‘learner’ however, they never really did [so]. The ‘learner’ was actually a confederate, a student or actor, who was never actually harmed.”
The phony shock switches used by the ‘teacher’ were marked “slight shock,” “moderate shock,” “strong shock,” “very strong shock,” “intense shock,” “extreme intensity shock,” “danger: severe shock.”
I watched a film of this very experiment in psychology class in college.
It was harrowing to watch—and hear—the “teachers” continue administering what they thought were horrific, convulsion-causing shocks to another living being, past the point where their screams were piercing and they pounded on the wall to make it stop. Shocks continued to be administered even after question-answering and even screaming ceased, implying that the subject had been rendered unconscious from the torturing pain.
“According to Milgram, every human has the dual capacity to function as an individual exercising his or her own moral judgement and the aptness to make their own moral decisions based on their personal character. The question is therefore raised: What becomes of the average person who is obedient to authority when it overrides their own moral judgement?”
Indeed.
How much of our decisions to abort stems from being subjected to outside influences we perceived, even subconsciously, as authorities? We object to the insinuation, but we all fall sometimes to the pressures to conform to a group, society, the culture, the “prevailing authorities.” Obedience to or placating authority, “taking the easy way out” is wrapped up and sugared over—sometimes by others, sometimes by ourselves—to look like virtues of loyalty, discipline, self-sacrifice, justice:
LOYALTY:“My mother said I’ll ruin this family if I have this baby.” DISCIPLINE:“My doctor says it’s unsafe for me to have this baby now, what with my/the baby’s condition. I’m just doing what the doctor ordered. He’s the doctor.” JUSTICE: “Everyone says I shouldn’t have to carry this ‘spawn of rape.’” SELF-SACRIFICE:“I really want this baby, but my husband doesn’t, so I’ll go along.”
Most if not all of us who are post-abortive probably would say we didn’t let these things make our decision for us, that we’re smarter or more educated than that. And we may be right. But a recurring theme in so many women’s stories is that of pressure or outright coercion—“do the right thing” or “you’ll be ostracized otherwise”—from parents, boyfriends, husbands, girlfriends, grandparents, doctors and nurses, student health centers, so-called feminist groups, classmates, teachers, co-workers, bosses, politicians, entertainment and the media.
Even if not direct impacts, we see them almost everywhere we look:
4) Pamphlets from Yale University (where Milgram taught) Student Health center, listing abortion and birth control predominantly under the heading “women’s health issues,” while adoption was barely mentioned and campus prenatal care not at all,
5) College campus women's groups trying to get post-abortive women’s talks disallowed or otherwise unsupported or censored,
7) Virtually every news outlet, and now, social media platform, except the Washington Times, Fox News and Macneil-Lehrer Hour (I know. This is a Classic post).
“…most teens (aged 13 to 17) do not consider abortion to be a morally acceptable choice, and most also believe that it should only be a legal option under specific circumstances, if at all.
“More than 7 in 10 teenagers (72%) said that abortion is morally wrong. Thirty-two percent of teens think abortions should be illegal in all circumstances, and 47% said that abortions should be legal only under certain circumstances. Fewer than one in five teens (19%) believe abortion should be legal in all circumstances.”
Screenshot from https://news.gallup.com/poll/9715/teens-lean-conservative-abortion.aspx
Those 79% of teens from 21 years ago—who felt abortion should either be illegal in all or at least some circumstances—are now 34 to 38 years old. Are they taking the easy way out now, going along to get along with the too-loud, vitriolic radical feminist movement? Maybe they stay silent out of self-preservation.
Is it so far-fetched to note how pressured we have been to placate or obey authority? Compare Milgram’s basic experiment to the following:
“As Dr. Brewer explained, medical students go against their conscience by learning to perform abortions because their residency chief insists they must if they ever want to become doctors. The residency chief is an authority, and authorities exert an automatic hypnotic effect on suggestible people. (Indeed, people’s vulnerability to an authority’s ‘suggestion’ is a core principle of hypnosis.) And what makes the ‘subject’ here suggestible? The fact that the med. student’s future career is at stake provides a strong inducement for him to give up his principles to fulfill the requirements for success in his chosen field.”
If educated doctors and nurses started—over 20 years ago—“giving up their principles” to obtain success from the authorities, then it isn’t about how educated or smart we are.
“Milgram has noted reoccurring themes (as found in Obedience to Authority):
1. People who are doing a job as instructed by an administrative figure are following the instructions of that administrative outlook and not the outlook of a moral code.
2. The feelings of duty and personal emotion are clearly separated.
3. Responsibility shifts in the mind of the subordinate from himself/herself to the authority figure.
4. There is a well-defined purpose behind the actions or goals of the authority, and the subordinate is depended upon to help and meet those goals.”
So we lose our moral code, we stuff down our horrified emotions about the truth in classic cognitive dissonance, we think “it was someone else’s doing” (the rapist, boyfriend, parent, job, peer pressure) and we become a cog in the wheel of that well-defined purpose behind the authority’s goals.
What is that purpose? Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the world, has long made most of its money from abortions (look for that post in the future), and when that revenue declined over the past 20 years, they added selling baby parts. GOAL = $$$.
Don’t agree? If Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers really cared about “women’s health” instead of $$$, Kermit Gosnell wouldn’t have happened:
Didn’t you ever wonder why, prior to 1983 or so, you almost never heard of women in their 30s and 20s being diagnosed with breast cancer? And that since then, it’s become much more prevalent?
Screenshot from American Cancer Society’s “Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2019-2020”
It took only 25 years for the rate of breast cancer in women aged 20+ to increase 900%.
Big $$$ for the American Cancer Society, wouldn’t you say?
Those only between 20 and 50 saw breast cancer rise from ~ 2 per 100,000 women to almost 20 per 100,000. But the 50+ crowd had breast cancer increase, from 1983 to 2008, from 10 to as high as 80 per 100,000.
Ten years after Roe v. Wade, it took only 25 years for women aged 50+ to have breast cancer rates increase 700%.
Another purpose? satan, the biggest liar and murderer in the world, has always wanted to destroy the traditional family and wants us to lose our moral code. GOAL = SEPARATE US FROM OUR CREATOR. He’s doing a bang-up job, isn’t he, but do you really think he wants you happy? Guess again. satan exists, is a creature like you and me, and a miserable wretch who cannot bring you or anyone peace. Once he thinks you’re his, he can only make you as miserable as he is. Take it to the bank. He looooooooves abortion. Every day.
“What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e., the value of a memory experiment, even after it became clear that continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e., don't hurt someone who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, ‘You can call yourself Eichmann,’ I hope I deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter.”
How many argue and, nowadays, try to force “compliance to a central idea”, namely, abortion rights, every day?
That surely isn’t coming from any quote-unquote authority, right?
Isn’t it, though? Those who now say the Supreme Court should be guard-railed, packed with more liberal justices, or otherwise delegitimized, are trying to assert their authority over SCOTUS.
If you are against abortion instead of for it, you go against the “prevailing authority” of our day and are screamed at, hated, bullied, defamed, cancelled, attacked and worse. You risk losing friends, family, even jobs, for not toeing that party line. Being obedient and compliant to the authority of radical feminists threatening to “blow up the White House” and other acts of violence is the easier way out.
Even if it “hurt[s] someone who is helpless and not hurting you.”
So what happens when people choose to be obedient and compliant to “prevailing authority”?
The Holocaust. Stalin. Holodomor. Putin. Rwanda. Darfur. Abu Ghraib. Jonestown, Jim Jones’ Guyana Kool-Aid mass suicide. Hussein’s genocide of his own people. Abortion.
