Abortion 

   Is it an unborn child? Is it just a fetus, a part of a pregnant woman's body - like the appendix? Depends on whether you see it as a human being at a certain stage of development in the light of love (mothers and fathers to be do love their unborn babies) or reduce it to a biological phenomenon that makes no claims on us to exist. That in turn depends on how you see the world, and whether you see the world right.

 I wrote a long, tortured essay on the morality of abortion, but the matter is quite simple. (The debate around the legal right to kill an unborn child is a different topic.) Taking the morality, that is, taking the responsibility out of sex, imagining it is a purely personal matter between consenting adults, implies a right to abortion. Sex cannot be separated from fertility – except for surgical sterilization. None of the contraceptive technology is full-proof or fool-proof – life finds a way. Therefore, pregnancy is always possible. Unwanted pregnancies are a predictable outcome given our sexual culture. Most people don't want the Church or the morality police in their bedrooms (which I can understand); thus most people believe they must be free to deal with unwanted pregnancies as they see fit. 

       That reality imposes obligations on every sexual encounter if conceiving a child is a morally serious matter. Which it is, though our culture makes it hard to see it. The “fetus” – de-meaing if precise biological language replaces the language of love, like conceiving an amazing forest as “raw material” to be killed for the profit of the capitalist. We must devalue that which we intend to damage or kill to remove the pain of guilt that comes from lucid understanding. We do it all the time: the masters did it to the slaves; the miners to it to the land; the Europeans did it to the native peoples; the military leaders do it to the bombed populations; the lazy student does it to the math they don't feel like learning. We de-mean that which we can't include as one of "us." We don't give the hog a name we slaughter and eat; we don't slaughter our pets, who have names, making them one of us. In this we resemble lions: they feel no pity for the antelope they are about to kill and devour. 

   To not take seriously the possibility that a woman suffering remorse because she had an abortion is lucid is to be in the grip of a rationalizing ideology. We can't stipulate what is real or not. We can't stipulate that the unborn child is not a human being any more than we can stipulate that the African slave, the Cherokee, or the Palestinians or Jews are not human beings. We can't stipulate what things mean. Our 'autonomy' does not include that power - contra Milton's Satan. We don't choose whether the unborn child is a human being; our love is a response to the fact that is it a human being, one we brought into being. Or our guilt over the lack of a love that should be there is a response. To make a thing out of an unborn child in the mind is a form of meaning blindness.

     The valuing of the right to sex-without-responsibility over the unborn child is the sum total of the moral issue. Almost the sum total: extreme cases like rape and incest pose different questions; sometimes genuine health concerns must be considered. Indeed, nothing causes so much irrationality and suffering as sex in our post-community world. I agree with liberals: the state forcing women to bear children no matter what raises still other problems - I don't think the state should, but don't want to argue that here. What I do want to argue is that both adult lovers are morally bound to accept the consequences of their actions (all things being equal). 

     The right of adult pleasures, additions, lapses of judgment, or lusts should not weigh more than the life of an unborn human being because of our alleged 'autonomy'. Well, we do have a legal right to - consensually - have all kinds of bad, irresponsible sex. And few would want an Iranian type "morality police" to enforce taking away that right. (Not the state but the community and culture has to job of limiting bad irresponsible sex - and capitalism have destroyed both.) We have a right in many circumstances to lie, cheat, betray, and otherwise sin. Having a right to some behavior doesn't imply that behavior is good - expresses love, respect, reverence, decency, sanity. The consequences of irresponsible sex can be soul-destroying, even if the state shouldn't intervene. 

     Abortion is part of a capitalist culture that literally mines our sexuality to sell shit and entertain. It is part of a culture of family breakdown, divorce, uprootedness, autonomy, and quiet (and not so quiet) desperation. I have been right in the middle of that breakdown, suffering from it and contributing to it. You won't find me casting stones. But it is part of a capitalist culture that sees all of nature – and thus the body – as property to be disposed of as we see fit, empty of all intrinsic meaning and reality. Property is a way of demeaning that which makes a claim on us to exist, to be loved. Slaves' bodies were conceived as property. Why would I want to conceive my body or yours in similar terms?

    The right language to see the reality of the unborn child is not the language of rights, property, or the market, but the language of love. A father and mother falling in love with their unborn child is not sentimentality but a response to the reality of the unborn child. Seeing the unborn child as a capitalist sees his property in forests is a denial of that reality. It is really that simple, morally. Using fetus outside of the biology class, in moral contexts, is to use it as a euphemism, as when someone giving a tour of a slaughter house refers to the chickens going through the killing machine as "units of production" to mask their reality.

     I know in the fallen world we face all kinds of horrible dilemmas that result from historical damage and irresponsible choices. I am in the middle of this. I have absolutely no authority to condemn anyone morally. I can imagine circumstances in which well-meaning people can disagree how to feel about an abortion in particular cases. In few other areas is it more important to simply obey Christ and love and refuse to condemn - whether you are Christian or not. But that doesn’t negate the Idea of goodness any more than the messy, imperfect circles I have drawn negate the Idea of the perfect circle that judges them. Kyrie Eleison. 

December 21, 2023

Additional thought. What disturbs me as well about the way the abortion debate is framed is what it means for "human dignity" - the sense, emotional and intellectual, that every person is somehow a limit to my will; that remorse would be an intelligible response to wronging anyone; that someone might intelligibly grieve their death; the belief that everyone has someone in them that makes it intelligible to see them in the light of some form of love, if even only pity. Or using a religious picture, that we are created in the image of God, who created us in love and loves us still. 

    Imagine an American woman who is grieving over the loss of a child. Imagine that woman watching TV and observing the "grief behavior" of a Palestinian mother who has lost her child in a bombing raid. The American woman is briefly tempted to commiserate as she is also a grieving mother, then stops and says: "It is different with them. They can always have more." This is a familiar racist attitude. Our grief is genuine because our lives have the kind of meaning that can only come from feeling - more a matter of feeling than intellect - that each one of us is an individual in a special way. Sometimes we speak of a "soul" to capture this difference. Animals are not individuals in this way. They are more tightly bound to their species-character. They can't love and be loved as a soul. You don't tell stories or write biographies about mice. And their lives - the Palestinians - can't mean what ours do for the meaning-blind. "They can always have more" means that they lack the kind of individuality, the kind of meaning that we have. They display grief behavior but it will pass; it doesn't go deep. We love and grieve; they can only "love" and "grieve." I think we all recognize this familiar racist way of seeing other people.

   Presumably it would mean something different if one of us - remaining in this racist world - had an abortion and one of them did. Well, the we-group have lives that matter, feelings that go deep (disclose the reality of the kind of individuality we mean with abstract concepts like "dignity"). But in the world of those who feel abortion is morally unproblematic, who believe that the unborn child is not a limit to our will in the way a newborn baby is, who believe it is purely an individual decision whether the unborn child is seen as an intelligible object of love or raw material for the pharmacy industry - in that world no unborn child is part of us, except by decision of the mother. No unborn human being has inborn dignity. At that stage, any mother can always have more. Well, bodies are property, and we are sovereign over our own property, can do with it what we want. Property -whether a car, slave, or unborn child - by definition does not make claims on us to exist, does not limit our will. Who can be a person is not given by nature, is not a question of what is real; we define who can be and who cannot be a person, as long as we have the power to do so, of course. The unborn are completely powerless, like the rest of nature we dispose over. And the aborted fetus is generally raw material, given to the industries profiting from genetic technologies. Stem cells are worth quite a lot on the market. 

   The attitude I am focusing on here, I submit, is based on feelings that do not know of human dignity, feelings and thoughts which see the unborn as the racist sees the demeaned other. When we come to feel that we can always have more, when this attitude becomes the taken-for-granted cultural norm, then we have lost the conceptual space for "human dignity." This is what is at stake, culturally. I have known a woman who, after an abortion, took the body of the fetus and in grief solemnly buried her - having given her a name - in a quiet woods. No putting the stem cells on the market. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   If you think of yourself as a limit to others' wills, if you think of yourself as more than just an exemplar of an original model, a variation of the same species-theme, then it seems obvious that you were just that particular unborn child at one stage of your life. Had your mother decided to abort you and have more, someone else and not you would have existed. If it doesn't matter, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   I have know mothers and fathers who loved their unborn child. Who named the child, talked to it, anticipated its advent, seeing all the changes in the woman's body in loving ways. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   And when our culture uniformly believes that we or the state, not reality, defines which lives have meaning and which do not, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. We can always change our definitions. 

  Abortion is the perfect expression of the worldview of capitalist-industrialism, of science-engineering-technology. Whoever of us has the power become the lords and masters of nature, the conquers of nature. The contempt the capitalist feels for the forest they want to log, many of us - feminists included - feel for the body. To see the body as "my property" and thus the unborn child as my property is to be blind to the reality of the body and the unborn child, a reality that only discloses itself in the language of love. This kind of feminism is one of the saddest things I know, for I cannot but see it as a form of extreme contempt for women and their bodies. That many women see capitalism-science-technology as a liberation from nature only reinforces this. 

   Philosophically, I have just been explicating one world version, and pointing out the consequences of another. Within the worldview of science-capitalism-technology, abortion makes perfect sense, as does the use of fetuses as raw material for industry. Within the worldview of science-capitalism-technology, the form that feminism takes - of which the philosophy of the pro-abortion movement is a part - makes perfect sense. My argument is that if the worldview of science-capitalism-technology becomes the only possible worldview, not only the lives of the unborn will be demeaned and unprotected. 

  I confess: most pro-life people do not represent my way of thinking. So many of them are too full of hate, too devoid of compassion. So many of them use the abortion issue to feel self-righteous at the expense of the bad guys - something they perhaps learned from their progressive opponents. But apart from all the smugness, what some people call "the culture war" is the very real conflict between capitalism-science-technology and its political expressions on the one hand, and world versions that leave space for human dignity grounded in nature or reality on the other. This is a real conflict. Abortion is one of those areas - morally - where there is no middle ground. I am unequivocally an opponent of science-capitalism-technology as a worldview.

[Again, this moral issue is too deep for the state. Given that birth is a choice mothers - and I think fathers, as the child is also their responsibility, morally - have to make, the state should not criminalize abortion. That movement is, with important exceptions, not an attempt to preserve human dignity but punish ideological enemies.]