The rest of the world and I are growing apart. It’s like being a raft, drifting for a while in the pull of a great steamliner – now separated by the widening waters, watching the other cut its path ever onwards through great waves, making Progress.
For the longest while I thought we all shared a vessel, and I had only lazy half-thoughts about our bearing, presuming the wind to be in our sail. Now I realise that some are locked full ahead, and I see the watery expanse opening up between us as I become ever more sceptical about the navigatory logic which derived their setting.
In coming to discuss morality in politics and law, I hold up two hands. In one rests the idea that people are accountable to God for the extent to which they live within his definition of what is good and right. In the other, the idea that people ought not to be prevented from doing whatever on earth they want to do, so long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. You may detect a potential for discord.
Hand the First: Colours to Mast
Uncurl my fingers and peer at the idea nestling within: God is the comprehensive reality. He has brought reality into being, and ordered it. God has the only canon definition of what is good and of what is ungood, and this applies to everyone and everything.
Consider for a moment that belief in this God, the LORD, is belief in a Creator who cares about right and wrong, who is passionately committed to upholding the oppressed and the lowly, and to reversing the fortunes of the downtrodden. I believe in this God who has made firm purpose to bring about the end of all injustice and to bring low those who perpetuate oppression and wrongness. I believe in a God who has enough compassion to walk among us and be moved, and to spend himself in the service of those who need him – binding wounds, embracing the excluded, bringing satisfaction to the drifting soul. I believe in this God who gave himself to his executioners as our substitute, and who was raised from the dead to show us that there is hope for one day being gloriously, truly fixed.1
And so, as a direct consequence, I believe in the importance of striving to improve the lives of others, to ensure just societal systems which look after those who have less, and to ensure that all people are able to live their lives as much as possible without the interpolation of harm.
Goodwill towards men is only half the picture. I believe in the importance of living however this God requires me to live, in the beauty of the morality which Jesus exemplifies, and of striving to meet his standard of what is good and just and right. That includes seeing every life as a particular, significant, sacred creation, every body as a dignified, holy space, intentionally set apart for God – to experience his presence within and without. If this is what my body is, then it matters what I do with it. I hold sex as sacred – a holy rite of marriage. I hold marriage as sacred – a holy duty of love to help us understand how Christ loves his bride, and how we should love Christ in return. I hold all life as sacred – all people as valuable, worth helping and protecting. These beliefs are core to me, even as my behaviour frequently falls far short of the standard they anticipate (thus, the Gospel).2
Hand the Second: the Liberal Yang
A moral way of living exists, and it places the same demands on me as on you.
But it’s also important for me to recognise that not everyone believes that. Many people don’t believe in my God, for one. Many people don’t believe that a universal moral legislation exists. Probably many today would stare blankly at the notion of holiness or of the sacred. A relatively negligible slice of the planetary population (i.e. the Church) agree a core morality, hold other issues with a looser grasp, and differentiate their moral formulations by nuance.
It follows, therefore, that not everyone ought to be legally/societally accountable to the moral standard I believe exists. See now centred in my second palm a liberal yang to the moral yin: if you don’t accept the demands of Jesus on your life, if you honestly don’t consider your body to be sacred, why should you be prevented from living in whatever manner you choose?
Of course, this does not negate the existence of such a transcendent moral standard, nor does it mean that one can escape the consequences of rejecting God and choosing what is unholy over what is holy. God’s Way is not morally relative. But since human law is to uphold justice for all folk alike, it ought not to enforce legal accountability on people for the beliefs of some. Living according to God’s standard ought to only be undertaken by those who have signed up to live as subjects of his Kingdom, and ought only to be enforced within the Church.
These two hands flow around each other, a yin and a yang, a horrific mixed metaphor, a perfect sphere with just a little bit of friction – causing the whole thing to judder embarrassedly every so often.
In real life, holding the yin and the yang most frequently manifests in a silent, unobserved choice to live in a way different from those around me (i.e. intoxication, sex outside of marriage). Occasionally it manifests in a vote (i.e. advocating for legally allowing people (who are outside the Church) to do what they want to do with their bodies).
Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland holds a referendum to see its Constitution’s 8th Amendment repealed, revoking legal provision for a foetus to be recognised as having a right to life equal to that of its mother.
Rhetoric hurtles and spatters and eats away at lampposts.
The yang judders.
The hand-sphere wobbles inelegantly.
Frictionful are the times.
A Dichotomy of Rights
The pro-abortion rhetoric of ‘just a clump of cells’ that I was taught about in school was conspicuously absent in the ROI referendum campaign; the rhetoric of ‘an unwanted intruder in my sovereign bodily territory’ was much more common.3 If the foetus is seen as a trespasser within the sovereign territory of a person’s body, then we’re thinking in terms of a dichotomy between the preferences, goals and rights of woman and those of foetus. Where there is a dichotomy of rights, there are two sides of a story. When it comes to abortion, it seems that only one side of that story is worth talking about. It seems as though large swathes of populations decide, in a way that makes out as though it is morally obvious, that a woman’s right to autonomy is far more significant than a foetus’ right to life, that bodily autonomy is the prime moral good.
What I’m wondering: why is this crusadeable upon? How come this approach to abortion has become so obvious that it’s now a moral imperative? It seems far from obvious to me. Rather, it seems to me a bizarre subversion of typical morality, in which the right to autonomy acquires a greater emotive pull than the right to life. From whence comes the righteous zeal, the indignation, the contemptuous-obviosity which blinds large numbers of people to the complexity of a contentious moral issue?
A Complete Capacity for Self-Actualisation requires Abortion, or An Unwieldy but Functional Subheading
Here in the West, the spirit of the age whispers in our ear that a meaningful life is attained by self-actualisation through individual expression. Anything that hinders the pursuit of this goal is repressive and regressive, and ought to be cut out.
If self-actualisation is prime, it is achieved by self-assertion, and ruthlessly. If we are to be fulfilled, we need to achieve a perfect unity of what is true on the inside with what is true on the outside. We need to enact ourselves, an enterprise which is thoroughly self-oriented, and inevitably locks us in competition with one another.4
A particularly odious manifestation of this is in the modern relationship. Love is lost as relationships become about the continued propagation of happiness and pleasure. Once a partner fails to maintain felicity, they can be dropped, fairly.
Another is in the moral superiority of a married person ‘coming out’ as opposed to staying ‘closeted’. The logic here is that living closeted is an evil since it is an untrue representation of the self. It is superior to ‘come out’ (i.e. not just to disclose one’s orientation to one’s spouse, but to leave said spouse in pursuit of other sexual relationships) even if destruction is wrought, because to do otherwise is to live a lie. And so men tear their marriages and families apart for the sake of individual expression, sacrificing the higher good of others, their wellbeing, and communal unity for the gratification of self-oriented desires.
Boil it all for long enough, and it reduces down to this:
if x prevents me from self-actualisation,
then it is within the bounds of appropriate behaviour to ensure x is nullified
Substitute x for pregnancy and we can see how an interminable pregnancy becomes a matter of oppression.
Disallowing pregnancy termination restricts a woman’s right to self-determination in a critical domain of life, making irreversible a transformation which carries irrevocable weight and change. There is a horror in being locked into a nine-month biological morph, followed (most of the time) by a seismic and lifelong personal, social, economic, vocational, etc, shift. To restrict a woman’s right to choose abortion restricts her autonomy to make meaningful self-determinational decisions. A desire to affirm and facilitate such a capacity in law and policy follows naturally. As women have been forbidden from self-determination and autonomy in social domains since time immemorial, we feel compelled on moral grounds to affirm and fight for their right to choose in this most particular of moral subject matters.
But life is growing inside life, and it all gets complicated quickly. Decisions made about one’s own body no longer just implicate the self. The rights and desires of the self come to a hard stop against the needs of another.
This is when things start to boggle.
Usually, the morality of a liberal society is defined by a) not doing harm to others, b) ensuring all are treated fairly, and c) ensuring all are not oppressed.5 With abortion, c has massively overtaken and outweighed a. Concern for oppression totally eclipses concern for harm. One way this manifests is in denying harm altogether (foetuses can’t feel pain, therefore abortion is ok). The other is in the simple prioritisation of adult oppression over foetal harm (a lack of bodily autonomy for an adult is a more grievous loss than a lack of life-potential for a foetus).
The Abortional Crusade for a Self-Actualised Existence
So it becomes a matter of weighing the freedoms and autonomies that an abortion provides against the right of a foetus to be given time to develop into a significant enough life to save.
Many resolve this conflict by exalting the role of easy access to abortion to that of an essential human right. For advocates, abortion can be not just permissible, but a good in and of itself – a body-positive, feminist, throwing-off-the-shackles-of-patriarchal-oppression act. The heavy preference for self-actualisation over all other concerns is manifested in people who ‘love [their] abortion’, for whom abortion is merely a convenient measure lightheartedly taken in order to retain the job they like, avoid a responsibility they feel unready for, and to not be tied to a man they have cooled towards.6
In my opinion, this is how the causal relationship works – abortion is believed to be positive, and then (as a result) abortion is believed to be harmless.
In life generally, we expect our behaviour to be shaped by our beliefs. Oftentimes however, this causal relationship is reversed and our (desired/actual) behaviour moulds the content of the beliefs which (ought to) underpin them. This is, unfortunately for rationality, how our beliefs work most of the time. It’s known as motivated reasoning.7
When logic and argument are constrained by internal pressures to the necessity of arriving at a conclusion which enables the thinker to live the life they want to live without dissonance – this is motivated reasoning. Our embodied existence allows us to nullify any significant intellectual/moral barrier which conflicts with our chosen course of action/belief.
If I am oppressed, then that oppression suddenly becomes endowed with much more moral heft than any concern with harm to an abstract, other, not-self person. What is at stake in abortion for many people is nothing less than the meaning of life itself (i.e. self-actualisation). If pregnancy and parenthood are seen as inhibiting my self-actualisation, then there is a juggernaut of a motivation for me to arrive at a moral conclusion which not only nullifies my objections to abortion, but which affirms my choice to have an abortion as an exercise of sacred bodily autonomy.
The dichotomy of rights makes all of this easier to swallow, and simplifies abortion as a social policy. The woman is inarguably a matured life who has consciousness, feels pain, suffers, and has all the defining criteria of human. The foetus has, at least, fewer of these. Women are capable of being vocal, of organising and protesting, of becoming a political force to be reckoned with, of mobilising a moral crusade in order to legislate for the protection of their rights. Foetuses, obviously, can do none of these things. So if we have to choose between an entity to protect, it makes logic to protect the life that is obviously human in preference over the life that is ambiguously human. It’s also politically and morally expedient to shift from the question of what is true to the question of what is obvious. I suppose this is the foundation upon which has been built the unquestioned moral consensus that the rights of a woman are in all cases superior to the rights of a foetus. And when abortion is an unquestioned moral good, moral consensus becomes moral crusade. Safeguarding foetal rights means denying female rights. The dichotomy deepens.
In this situation, it’s easiest to nullify all concern for harm done to another by logicking away the existence/significance of the existence of that other. It is easy to make oppression the primary concern, and easy to brush harm good and far under the rug.
A Pact with Moral Relativism
My simple contention is that abortion is not a domain in which a right to self-determination ought to be the prime relevant concern.
The barest fact we can assert uncontroversially is that significant debate exists over whether a foetus constitutes a significant enough life to not kill. If so, then supporting a woman’s right to make a personal, subjective determination about whether or not to have an abortion is upholding a fundamentally relativist worldview, where individuals ought to choose (based on subjective, internal criteria) between facts, to decide what is real and true for themselves.
In other issues of life and death, we accept that while a person may make a judgement about the ethics of terminating the life or shortening the life-potential of another, they are held to account by a wider truth – that it may be wrong, and punishable to do so.8
There’s a hypocrisy in being outraged at a post-truth (conservative) political landscape, and then demanding the reification of its underpinning assumptions (truth is intrinsically personal, not external) in order to support a woman’s right to choose. We abhor the dismantling of objective truth and the dismissal of moral imperatives, but demand the inalienable right to define what is good and what is wrong on our own terms, when it comes to something closer to the bone.9
As someone who believes in an external moral reality, I think that promoting a choose-your-own-reality approach is reckless. I think it’s especially irresponsible in this (at-least-maybe) life and death issue. Promoting such an approach in a context in which the decision makers (women) are in situations which often provide motivation for them to decide the ethical quandary in a particular, materially favourable way is irresponsibiler still.
Just as the morality of men towards sexual coercion fluctuates when aroused10, so too may the morality of women bend when facing down massively life-changing life changes, and a path to mitigate them. This is not the controlled environment in which we would like to find ourselves when deciding what constitutes life and death.
The Crooked Path
You’ll have picked up by now that I think abortion ought not to be considered an obvious and unalienable human right, nor an unambiguous social good. One of my reasons why is that abortion-on-demand seems to stem from this preoccupation with the concerns of the self over the concerns of the other. It says, in essence, ‘My right to the life I want is greater than your right to a significant existence’.
To me, this is not a mark of social progress, but a manifestation of what is wrong with our petty species. The natural condition of people is to perceive from a prior occupation with the self, since all of our moralities are refracted first through the prism of the self.
This is opposite to the moral ideal. The good and true and right way to live is to give ourselves up for one another. The true and new human way is to lay down the self for the sake of others.
We find this beautiful, when we are in a position to be honest with the truth. Literature is full of the ache of the heart at the glimpse of the beauty of a person dying or living for the sake of another. It’s beautiful too in marriage – where we continually choose to prefer the other in all decisions, to step outside of the matrix of self-oriented decision-making, to give up career trajectories and experiences and parts of who we are to better love another person.
This is the trail blazed most beautifully by Jesus. To be God Himself, who spoke reality into existence, and then to come to live among us as a tradesman, to wash feet, to be hated and mocked and tortured and executed by the talking ape-monkeys, all because he loves us with a burning love, he delights in us, and wants to wash us clean of our filth and bring us tenderly to him. Jesus chose to act and teach and live in ways that limited himself, harmed his interests, destroyed his life, for the sake of those who hated him.11
This is the peculiar glory of God. It is achingly beautiful, and that beauty is reflected in self-binding, a splendid mirror of Christ our LORD. Our fatal condition is that the massive bulk of the self utterly eclipses it.
So, yes – for the Christian this means laying down one’s life for the life of a child. And for the non-pregnant Christian, how much more should we lay down our lives for the lives of women in difficulty and crisis, and for children? This means mobilising the resources and the love of the Church to a) extend non-judgemental compassion to women, b) provide for them, help them so that they are economically, socially, emotionally, etc, capable of raising a child. The Church, I think, needs to become more feminist – by ensuring that women don’t carry all of the burden of pregnancy by reason of their biology. Let this be our response to the beauty, the glory, and the grace of our LORD.
Liberal Yang Rising
In the spirit of not imposing minority religio-ethical beliefs, it is surely right to make provision for abortion in (at least) limited cases. In Northern Ireland, the highly particular beliefs of a non-majority prevent women from accessing abortions for reasons which aren’t ambiguously moralled (e.g. where the child will be born without an essential body part, as so is certain not to survive).
Arguing from the minimal case, if abortion at least raises significant moral concerns among a significant portion of people, societies ought to be cautious with it. We can all concede that it is at least arguable (evidenced by the existence of argument) that abortions oppose the safeguarding of vulnerable lives. In an ambiguous ethical dilemma, we surely ought to enshrine protection for these lives rather than extending more bodily autonomy to adults (in a case in which these may be mutually exclusive, and in which we are being cautious).
I think this is a pretty okay case for abortions to not be normalised as a typical healthcare procedure and so taken lightly, and for abortions to not be available on demand for any reason, despite these foundations in a God-centric worldview.
Consensus on Abortion is not Consensus on Ideology
So the questions become: is it irresponsible to liberalise abortion policy where this significant debate still persists? Oh, and does significant debate still persist?
When it comes to Ireland’s Referendum, the Yes vote was received as a moral victory for Ireland, a triumph for Progressivism’s continuing conquest over regressive, backwards attitudes.
The facts about why people voted Yes remain, as ever, under the fog of political bias. I’ve heard (from sources who believe freely available abortion is a moral imperative and a human right) that 70-something% of people voted Yes because they believed that women have a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. I’ve also heard (from sources who believe that abortion is morally wrong) that 48% of people voted Yes because they wanted Irish women to be able to have abortions in the so-called ‘hard cases’ (i.e. rape and pregnancies in which the foetus is not likely to survive outside the womb).
Whatever the truth may be, the referendum result was taken to signify that an overwhelming majority of Irish people believed that abortion ought to be freely available to all women, for any reason. While the referendum surely demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of Irish people believed that abortion ought to be legalised, it did not demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Irish people held to one particular moral ideology.
But anyway, a vote to legalise abortion was conflated with a vote to affirm that free access to abortion for any reason is a moral imperative and a human right. Which means, under this worldview, that a vote to legalise abortion was a referendum on whether Irish people like women, trust women, value women as part of society.12 The Irish government embraced it in this way, as did the hashtagliberalfakenewsmedia.13
We have arrived, friends, at my real and true beef: the moral triumphalism at the heart of the Progress narrative.
(The ships are a metaphor)
The great steamliner I have detached myself from is the good ship Progress. On board, a story is told about the exploits of the brave heroes Science and Liberalism, who mercilessly conquer, slay and generally have done with the savage cults of Regressivism and Superstition. Our heroes are waging a successful campaign, slowly transforming the West into a better place to live, a more tolerant, individual, free society. Science and Liberalism open the minds of the people in their fair star-spangled country, who consequently become Enlightened and finally do away with their base religious thinking and all that nasty backwards moral stuff, and at last recognise that the perfection of our species is within our grasp – a powerful, relativist utopia in which everyone gets to do whatever they want and self-actualise and achieve perfect, satisfied, self-fulfilment. Every time the story is told, the people on board cheer heartily, and sing wistfully for the consolation of their Utopia.
I think the good ship Progress is not going further, farther, upwards, onwards – it’s just going. It is like, as Dostoyevsky once said, the building of a crystal palace – a hopeless, groundless dream of a pure society of perfect tolerance, perfect pluralism and unhindered individual expression. Not only is it unattainable, but it is an endeavour riddled with sin from start to finish – not because tolerance and individual expression aren’t good, but because we have made them, in service to self, the primary good. Our grandest designs are for a glorious new Babylon shaking its fist at God, built and pursued from behind the blindfold of self-absorption.
We need wisdom to recognise with the Ancients before us that humankind is blighted by an unassailable bent towards nothing good. When we put self first, toxic pride and injustice and destruction follow after.
This human condition of ours places Isles of Enchantment in the encircling seas of human capacity. Valinor exists, but the horizon has been rounded. We will not reach it by force of will, or technological might, or the spread of liberal enlightenment.
An enhanced capacity to indulge our self-orientism will neither satisfy nor heal us. It will leave us dry and empty. Self-binding love is the way that satisfies – not for its own sake, but following after the God who bound himself beautifully for us.
If Jesus had taught in our age, he might well have paraphrased himself thusly, ‘Whoever wants to save their bodily autonomy will lose it, but whoever loses their bodily autonomy for my sake will find it’.
Note on references: Where I use scientific theories or principles, I am often applying a principle to a situation by reasoning and imagination. Please feel free to consider everything which does not have a reference attached to be opinion, or informed opinion.
References:
1: For God’s passion for justice and his demands on us for justice, see Deuteronomy 16:20, Isaiah 1:17, Amos 5, 1 John 3:17-18, James 1:27. For Jesus exemplifying this, see Isaiah 53, Luke, 11:39-42, Luke 14: 15-24. For justice as a theme running through Scripture, see The Bible Project’s video, Justice (https://tinyurl.com/y7a4svsv).
2: For God’s demand for his people to be holy, see Romans 12: 1-2, 1 Peter 1:15-16, as well as, y’know, the entirety of Hebrew Scripture.
3: I’d recommend a BBC documentary called ‘The Fight for Women’s Bodies’ (https://tinyurl.com/y7wo7fac) and subsequent article (https://tinyurl.com/y8zvkqgk) – pay attention to the language which surrounds the abortion debate. Also ‘Yes’ campaign websites are useful here (e.g. My Body My Choice, found at https://tinyurl.com/yb272q6l), though they don’t contain pictures of all of the rhetoric . Googling for posters/social media posts is a good idea.
4: For the role of self in the West and a discussion of issues surrounding post-modern culture’s interaction with the idea of God, see The Great Mystery, (McGrath, 2017).
5: See The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012), and accompanying website (https://www.moralfoundations.org). Also Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/nu6p4nm).
6: I’m referencing and quoting from Hadley Freeman’s article published in The Guardian in June 2018 (https://tinyurl.com/y8fphhyg). See also an article published in the same by Eva Wiseman (https://tinyurl.com/jgf2xlq).
7: For a chapter on motivated reasoning, see Ditto, Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/ya8f4kc6).
8: For example, the illegality of euthanasia (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7698636.stm).
9: I’m talking here about the rhetoric of ‘legalising abortion is trusting women to make their own healthcare decisions’ (e.g. https://tinyurl.com/z9yvfuj).
10: For the highly troubling study in full, see Ariely & Loewenstein, 2006 (https://tinyurl.com/yaqmedwm).
11: For Jesus’ radical selflessness, see Isaiah 53, Romans 5: 6-11, Ephesians 5: 25-30, Philippians 2: 5-11, 1 John 3: 16-18.
12: For example, Fintan O’Toole’s article in The Guardian, published in May 2018 (https://tinyurl.com/yaap5gcl). Here’s a bit of a relevant quote from it, ‘Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.”’
13: For example, The Guardian’s reporting on the referendum result, opening with the quote, ‘Ireland has voted by a landslide to repeal its near-total ban on abortion, an extraordinary victory for women’s rights that seals the country’s transformation from bastion of religious conservatism to one of Europe’s most tolerant democracies.’ Also Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s statement is reported within (https://tinyurl.com/y7kcd6y8).
chumpishly 