So what if abortion ends life?
I believe that life starts at conception. And it's never stopped me from being pro-choice
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life.” Life! Who wants to argue with that? Who wants be on the side of … not-life? That’s why the language of those who support abortion has for so long been carefully couched in other terms. While opponents of abortion eagerly describe themselves as “pro-life,” the rest of us have had to scramble around with not nearly as big-ticket words like “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.
As Roe v. Wade enters its fifth decade, we find ourselves at one of the most schizo moments in our national relationship with reproductive choice. In the past year we’ve endured the highest number of abortion restrictions ever. Yetsupport for abortion rights is at an all-time high, withseven in 10 Americans in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand,allowing for reproductive choice in all or “most” cases. That’s a stunning 10 percent increase from just a decade ago. And in the midst of this unique moment, Planned Parenthood has taken the bold step of reframing the vernacular – moving away from the easy and easily divisive words “life” and “choice.” Instead, as a new promotional film acknowledges, “It’s not a black and white issue.”
It’s a move whose time is long overdue. It’s important, because when we don’t look at the complexities of reproduction, we give far too much semantic power to those who’d try to control it. And we play into the sneaky, dirty tricks of the anti-choice lobby when we on the pro-choice side squirm so uncomfortably at the ways in which they’ve repeatedly appropriated the concept of “life.”
Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.
When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.
When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?
We’re so intimidated by the wingnuts, we get spooked out of having these conversations. We let the archconservatives browbeat us with the concept of “life,” using their scare tactics on women and pushing for indefensible violations like forced ultrasounds. Why? Because when they wave thenot-even-accurate notionthat “abortion stops a beating heart” they think they’re going to trick us into some damning admission. They believe that if we call a fetus a life they can go down the road of making abortion murder. And I think that’s what concerns the hell out of those of us who support unrestricted reproductive freedom.
But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them aboutmen and women in other nations. We make them aboutprisoners in our penal system.We make them aboutpatients with terminal illnessesandaccident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise.
It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better. Instead, we let right-wingers perpetuate the sentimental fiction that no one with a heart — and certainly no one who’s experienced the wondrous miracle of family life — can possibly resist tiny fingers and tiny toes growing inside a woman’s body.We give a platform to the notion that, as Christina Locke opined in a recent New York Times Op-Ed,“motherhood had slyly changed us.We went from basking in the rights that feminism had afforded us to silently pledging never to exercise them. Nice mommies don’t talk about abortion.”
Don’t they? The majority of women who have abortions – andone in three American women will–are already mothers.And I can say anecdotally that I’m a mom who loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks, and is also now well over 40 and in an experimental drug trial. If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.
My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless. We can’t have it if those of us who believe that human life exists in utero are afraid we’re somehow going to flub it for the cause. In an Op-Ed on “Why I’m Pro-Choice” in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that“Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too.”She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.
Blatchford or Chesterton? You Choose
by Mark Shea09/14/2015
It is common knowledge in our secular culture that the Catholic Church is "anti-choice" and that the only hope for a truly liberated future is to trust to the forces of scientism, birth control, and rational materialism to crush the Dark Age superstition of a Church that shackles the minds and souls of free people everywhere. But an average Millennial American, climbing into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and setting the dial for 1903 London, might be in for a few surprises if he peeked in on one of the grand-daddies of this sort of secular utopian thinking, Robert Blatchford. To do so would provide many people with a startling revelation of how just how far worshippers of Progress have regressed in their arguments and just how little Catholic truth has altered as it points out the obvious.
Blatchford was a man deeply concerned about the oppression of the poor, who allied himself with Progressive thought. He was a man full of the scientific future who had little patience with Christian mumbo-jumbo. He felt it essential to get past unscientific dogmas like human sin and look to scientifically quantifiable factors as heredity and environment for social change. In his newspaper,The Clarion, he wrote, "Before we can propagate our religion of Determinism and Humanism, we must first clear the ground of Free Will [and] of Sin against God..."
Here our time traveler murmurs approvingly, "So far, so good. Here is a man unshackled from the religious dogmas of the past. A free thinking man of the future."
But now enters into the fray a Christian named G.K. Chesterton who dares to label Blatchford's opinion "heresy". It is all very well, Chesterton observed, to say we are purely the products of heredity and environment and that free will is an illusion. But why then go about railing against social failure and saying (as Blatchford and millions of progressive thinkers rightly said) that "man can be unjust and cruel and base and mean towards his fellow man, and he often is. He can sin against his fellow man, and he often does." If, as Blatchford maintained, the Christian belief in sin is ridiculous, so was Blatchford's belief that a cruel sweat shop owner can be blamed for his actions. For to blame the sweat shop owner assumes he has free will and could do otherwise if he chose.
Blatchford attempted to skirt this problem by saying he had misspoken. People, he maintained, actually do bad things as the results of environment and heredity and so cannot be "blamed" any more than sharks can be blamed for eating swimmers. But they can still be resisted as we would resist a shark. Likewise, said Blatchford, he could scold his clerk for educational purposes without blaming him for his actions.
Chesterton wrote back:
What is the use in this real and living world of people who will do nothing against public nuisances but knock them down or lock them up? What is the use of saying that society is a garden and the wicked are weeds? You cannot grub up selfish brothers with a spade. You cannot go about with a rake weeding out hypochondriac old gentlemen. You cannot scatter Keating's powder and find the ground strewn with the corpses of interfering aunts. These are the real problems of society, and if they are to be resisted, they must be blamed.
...On your principles, you would say, "My blameless Ruggles, the anger of God against you has once more driven you, a helpless victim, to put your boots on my desk and upset the ink on the ledger. Let us weep together." If that is the way clerks are scolded in theClarionoffice, gaily will I now apply for the next vacancy in that philosophical establishment.
Now before our time traveler leaps out of the Wayback Machine to join in this intellectual fray, let us set our dial for a return to the present and reflect upon the remarkable content of this exchange.
Of course, if we have learned our secular catechism as we ought, we know perfectly well that Christians hate the very idea of open-mindedness and freedom of choice. They prefer being told what to think by Dogmatic Authority. Progressives resist slavery to religious dogma, celebrate liberty of mind, and prefer to think for themselves.
That's what the secular catechism says. What the Progressive Blatchford says, however, is that liberty of mind is sheer illusion. It's the dogmaticChristianwho is staunchly "pro-choice", who celebrates freedom, and who insists we are able to think.
This is big clue that the old Catholic view of choice is easier, harder and odder than we have been led to believe by our media guides. Let us then see this strange sight more closely that we might fathom the riddle.
The postmodern affirmation of Free Will typically styles itself under the political rubric "Pro-choice." By this label its adherents claim to affirm the "individual's right to choose".... something. However, those who fly the "pro-choice" banner are curiously reticent to attach anobjectto that choice. The sense seems to be that the focus remain simply on the act of choosingper seas intrinsically meritorious, without regard for the thing chosen. This is especially striking in the schizophrenic language used to refer to the fate of the unborn human being (who is, in fact, the object of that choice). If slated for the suction machine, the unborn baby is referred to as a "fetus" or "tissue mass." However, if that same child is the subject of a pre-natal care advertisement by the obstetrical wing of the hospital, it is referred to, rightly, as "your baby" and someone who "deserves the best care possible."
Typically, however, it is preferable not to discuss the object of our choice at all. Advocates of abortion simply demand the "right to choose" while in fact demanding freedom from theconsequencesof choice. This is shown beyond question when the "pro-choice" advocate rails against "Right to Know" legislation (which would assure that women got the same information about the processes, dangers and results of abortion as they are required to have when submitting to surgery for a planter's wart). Obviously, what is at stake for the opponent of such legislation is not the "right to choose"intelligentlybut the demand to not face what we have, in fact, chosen. Every choice is "right".
Now the reality is that demanding everything be right and nothing wrong is, in Chesterton's phrase, like demanding everything be right and nothing left. In other words, it is to demand that choice notmatter. For to demand freedom from real consequences is to demand freedom from real power--that is, freedom from choice.
However, the "pro-choice" advocate, having immunized himself against thinking will seldom pause to remark on this. Instead, he will trot out rhetoric about "scientific progress" vs. "dogma" that has served him well ever since Blatchford's day. But if we are paying attention today, we will find that many in the sciences, particularly those involved in brain studies, make similar arguments to Blatchford--arguments which in fact undercut the pro-choice position. Only instead of appealing to Blatchford's now-unfashionable discussions of Adam, they simply engage in some good old-fashioned Nothing Buttery. This favorite tactic of materialist atheists is to point out that concepts like "soul" and "spirit" cannot be weighed or measured and are unscientific and therefore non-existent. Sounds like a promising support for Planned Parenthood's attack on religious superstition, no?
No. For by this reckoning, the mind therefore is "nothing but" a function of the atoms and molecules that compose the brain. And since atoms and molecules function according to strict physical laws, it follows that our so-called "choices" are nothing but a function of the pre-determined motion of the atoms and molecules in our brains. Both of these ideas are fatal, not to Catholic belief, but to the claim of "freedom of choice" as it is articulated by Planned Parenthood. Secular materialist "scientific" rhetoric tends to paint itself into the same corner Blatchford did.
In contrast, Catholic faith begins, as you might expect, with a God Who chooses things. I do not mean here merely the Chosen People. I mean that everything in Creation is chosen by Him according to the Catholic view. He chose that the sun be brilliant white, not blue; that the ocean be made of water, not champagne: that the little kid down the block have that charming cowlick, but not brown eyes. It could have been otherwise, but He chose this. Moreover, He chose itex nihilo, somewhat as a tale-teller might pluck the elements of a story from thin air. There is in this view a way of seeing the world which the Catholic shares with the child, the ancient mythmaker and the modern Native American storyteller: a kind of vision alive to the mythic dimension behind reality. It is what Chesterton called "fairy tale philosophy".
Now, the fairy tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality of choice.
In short, the Catholic view of the "chosenness" of Creation by the Choosing Creator makes the world, first and foremost, astoryrather than a mere hardwired set of inevitable dominos of electromagnetism, hormones and class conflicts. To be sure, the world contains systems, just as stories contain elements like theme, setting, character, metaphor and whatnot. But to seeonlythe systems without the dimension of choice and story animating them is like describing Hamlet as a series of black marks on white paper. The explanation explains everything, but leaves everything out. Hamlet is that, but it is a lot more than that too. Similarly, the systems which science observes have not only activity but purpose in the choosing mind of God.