Several years ago I wrote about the way elective abortion punishes rather than liberates women. It’s an argument that others have made to various degrees, and essentially it boils down to this: elective abortion doesn’t alleviate pressure on women, it just changes the direction of that pressure.
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Instead of the pressures and burdens of raising unwanted children, women are instead pressured to avail themselves of technologies that make those unwanted children like they never happened. In other words, the female prize for meeting excess male demand for sex is a painful trip to a sterile room and the enduring memory of a life unrealized.
Choosing life, choosing death
I was grateful when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the Dobbs decision, and I continue to believe this is a step toward progress. If our commitment to protecting vulnerable life isn’t reflected in our laws, how can we hope for change?
Some one million pregnancies are aborted per year in the U.S. — the vast majority posing no threat to the mother’s health. Iceland has virtually eradicated Down syndrome, not by curing it, but by exterminating it.
This is but one example of the real choice which elective abortion puts before us: whether our goals as a society are best enacted through life — with the burdens and responsibilities that entails — or through death.
Sexual availability
If we accept abortion as necessary for female autonomy, one outcome evident all around us is a culture that expects women to be sexually available and then to quietly disappear any unwelcome consequences.
Not only does this not make a woman freer, it weaponizes the unique and powerful capacity to create life against her. Even after a woman endures painful or barbaric abortive procedures, she also shoulders the lifelong regrets that many women report after ending the life of their own unborn child.
And how has our culture responded? With more death, but this time, of conscience. “Shout Your Abortion” and other forms of sloganeering around reproductive freedom are aimed at socially engineering the guilt out of choosing death at a time when the last thing we need is a more calloused disposition toward human life.
The value of human life
No one on the radical right actually wants immigrant children to die in government detention; it’s simply accepted as an expedient of justice. It’s not personal, and that’s the problem. The plight of a fellow human being has failed to register at a personal level.
When it comes to abortion, there is a similar unwillingness to allow the humanity of the individual life in question to register.
There is no debate about when human life begins, as that’s a biological question that has long been settled. There is only a debate about when human life becomes valuable, and it’s a misdirection.
Everything good about life as we now know it has arisen from placing more, not less, value on individual human life.
Our laws, art, technology and institutions — in short, everything that has made our current society possible — are founded upon a belief that individual human lives are the supreme good and that they are equally significant.
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A vicious, ancient precedent
For most of human history, people understood themselves as cogs in the wheel of an indifferent universe, and it showed. Some of the oldest extant writings in human history are accountancy records, and one of the main commodities they track is enslaved people.
A nonexhaustive list of peoples and places that engaged in human sacrifice includes all the major pre-Columbian civilizations, Celts, ancient Germanic and Norse peoples, Egyptians, ancient China, assorted biblical and near-East societies, India, Greeks, Romans, and precolonial Africa.
In fact, it’s difficult to find a single civilization that didn’t believe life could be made a little better by throwing grandma off a cliff or wetting altars with the blood of children. It sounds horrific, but to the rationalizations of the day, it was just pragmatic.
If the welfare of the many depends on a little bloodshed, then the calculations become pretty straightforward from there.
A blow to our humanity
When we find ourselves asking when it’s OK to end a human life for the greater good, we are conceding some of the hardest-won ground in human history.
And by treating vulnerable human life as an acceptable sacrifice in the pursuit of our ideals, we have lost sight of the one ideal that has materially improved human life.
Reducing a human being in embryonic form to “a clump of cells” or likening the biological symphony of pregnant mother and child to hosting a parasite is not a triumph of reason, it’s a blow to our humanity.
To look at a burgeoning human life — which in all but a few cases will grow to laugh, dream, dance and contemplate constellations — and see only expendable tissue is not enlightened, it’s a step back into the darkness that has plagued human progress from the beginning.
A universal ethic
All of this is informed by my religious beliefs insofar as I think God values both women and new life at every stage, that human life is particularly valuable to the divine, which in our faith are Heavenly Parents.
If I want to know anything at all, I want to know how God feels about human life. But my reasons for wanting policies that reflect these values have nothing to do with forcing people to share my religious beliefs.
Heaven forbid that recognizing the miracle and magnificence of human life become the province only of the religious.
My motivation is this: only people who are alive to the miracle of life and who are willing to make room for it will make this world more worth living in.
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