Today we look at progressivism and analyse it from a Christian perspective. We also think about why there was such an extreme reaction after Roe vs Wade was overturned, and have a reflection on Romans 3v9-20.
In a recent article I mentioned abortion as the most egregious example of the barbaric way our society treats children. The other day, I was struck by another angle: abortion could be compared with the transatlantic slave trade. Let me explain.
It seems to me the pro-choice argument largely boils down to a question of rights. In the Roe vs Wade supreme court leak (which I mentioned last time), the biggest pro-choice response was to talk about “rights”. Sometimes you see people say “my body, my choice” – which is the same point, just worded differently. We should have the right to choose.
But rights must be linked with ethics and morality. For example, I don’t have the right to take someone else’s property without their consent. And we are agreed as a society that no-one has the right to murder another human being. Even if they’re really, really annoying!
So, saying that we have the ‘right’ to a particular course of action is neither here nor there, if the action itself is immoral.
A couple of hundred years ago, I can imagine someone making almost exactly the same argument about slaves. “It’s my right to own slaves… my property, my choice!”
“It’s my right to own slaves… my property, my choice!”
And, legally speaking, they were correct. A man did have a right to own slaves, you can’t deny it. The question is not whether he had the legal right, but whether it was actually a human right. Fortunately, we came to realise as a society – with great help from the work of Christians such as William Wilberforce and John Newton, amongst others – that slavery was wrong, and abolished it.
Some people would argue that abortion is a human right – not simply a legal one. There’s a case that needs to be answered. To help us, let’s look into some of the other arguments that people used to keep slaves.
These arguments are all found on the BBC Ethics page for slavery. As they say at the beginning:
A number of arguments have been put forward to try and justify slavery. None of them would find much favour today, but at various times in history many people found some of these arguments entirely reasonable.
“At various times in history many people found some of these arguments entirely reasonable” – never a truer word was spoken! People were very very keen to defend their rights when it came to owning slaves, but we need to consider the arguments that they used. Likewise, some people are very keen to defend their abortion rights, but we need to consider their arguments carefully.
Are some of the pro-slavery arguments that were used centuries ago anything like the pro-abortion arguments used today? I think so.
It’s almost impossible now to imagine that people used to think this: the idea that some races or people groups are inferior is anathema to the modern Western world. And yet, this is exactly what people used to argue. A few years ago, someone I was debating with on Twitter was shocked to discover that science had once been used to justify racism. But it’s undeniable!
There is a parallel with today’s thinking about abortion: people agree that a foetus is a human being, but an inferior being – a less-developed being – so it is not worthy of human rights. People once claimed that “blacks” were inferior to “whites” because they were less evolved – and therefore not worthy of treating with equal dignity. People now claim that foetuses are less developed human beings, therefore not worthy of treating with equal dignity.
But the problem with both is – where do you draw the line?
Where, exactly, is the line between a human being and … NOT a human being? How do you draw the line between blacks and whites? How do you draw a line between an embryo and a newborn baby? In fact, you may be aware that some philosophers such as Peter Singer argue for post-birth abortion – it has even been defended in the BMJ, which I wrote about ten years ago.
Do you draw the line in terms of self-awareness? But then what about someone with severe disabilities who never develops? Are they only worthy of life once they are born? Any attempt to divide “this side” as human and “that side” as not human is doomed to fail. That’s because eighteenth century slaves, and modern-day foetuses, are human – just as human as you and I.
If we don’t defend all human life as sacred and worthy of protection, then any line we draw is just a line in the sand. It doesn’t have any scientific or logical basis.
If we don’t defend all human life as sacred and worthy of protection, then any line we draw is just a line in the sand.
This is an argument from the way that things are, and it’s not a very good one! All sorts of things have been acceptable throughout history in our culture, and that doesn’t mean they’re right. As the BBC themselves point out:
if ethics is a matter of public opinion (Cultural Ethical Relativism) then some would say that slavery was ethically OK in those societies where it was the cultural norm.
Abortion and slavery are ethical issues which should be argued on those grounds – not on the basis of whether they’re legal or acceptable or not!
When it comes to abortion, you sometimes hear the argument that it would be better for a baby to be aborted early than born into a home where it was unwanted and unloved. It’s very sad when a child is born in those circumstances, but there are many who could testify to the fact that they would rather be here and around to contribute to society! Even though their start in life wasn’t ideal, they now enjoy life.
As the BBC ethics page points out:
While slavery may be the least bad option for an individual, this doesn’t justify slavery, but indicates that action should be taken to provide other better options to individuals.
If a child is going to be unwanted, the solution is to provide better options – not to kill the child. Pro-life activists are often accused of only caring about abortion and not caring for children, which I think at points has been a valid criticism. If we as a society say that abortion is wrong, we must do all we can to ensure that every child has a safe and secure upbringing.
There are many ways of doing that – I think one such way would be to do more to promote marriage. But we could get into that another time.
The more I think about the slave trade and its parallels with abortion today, the more I think history is repeating itself. The abortion industry today has many powerful advocates in government and in the media. It is clear there is a lot of money involved – abortion providers don’t work purely out of the goodness of their hearts!
It was the same back in the days of the slave trade: powerful and rich people kept the industry going, because it made them lots of money. And yet, it was ended.
My sincere hope is that, one day, as a society, we will look back at abortion with the same horror that we look back at the slave trade today. In my view, abortion is not a complex ethical issue, it’s about as black and white as you can get: killing a human life is simply wrong. (This is not to say there are other problems e.g. the case of ectopic pregnancies and so on – but those are complex ethical issues on their own and account for a tiny number of the 200,000+ abortions per year in the UK).
As Martin Luther King once said in his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
All men were guaranteed a right to life. It would be wonderful if we as a society could recognise that all human beings – yes, unborn as well as fully grown – had the same right to life.
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If this is true, then we must live in a barbaric society: it struck me forcefully yesterday that our society routinely throws children under a bus.
Consider:
I’ve been wondering whether that final point – abortion – is the one which underpins the rest.
What I simply can’t work out about the “pro-choice” party is the way that people treat it with an almost religious zeal. When section 8 was repealed in Ireland back in 2018, there was literally dancing in the streets.
To my mind it looked like a scene from the end of World War II!
Why? Why the unfettered joy that a woman might have the ‘right’ to remove some unwanted “pregnancy tissue”?
Earlier on today I was watching some of the reactions to the news that Roe vs Wade might be overturned (more on that in a minute). One of the things that was striking to me was how many people saw it as simply a matter of rights.
There’s no complex ethical debate about what’s best. There’s no dilemma about whether a foetus is a unique human being which has its own rights. I’m not trying to paper over the fact that there are complexities and shades of grey. Some dear friends had to go through an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago – I understand some of the nuances involved. But this is exactly my point: for the “pro-choice” side, there is no need for nuance or debate.
All they care about – or at least, the ones who are making the most noise on Twitter – is rights. The right to decide what to do with our own bodies; the right to have sex with whoever we want without consequences; the right to choose; the right to live according to our own rules. Who cares about the complexes of ethical debate when there are rights at stake?
And that seems to be symbolic of the kind of society we have become: we demand our own rights, in the process stamping all over the weakest and most vulnerable in our society – the unborn. We sacrifice children to our gods. Of course, we don’t call them “gods”, but effectively I think that’s what these rights have become. Particularly the “right” to have sex without fear of the consequences – the fruits of the sexual revolution.
This is in complete contrast to the way that God has given for us to live. The Bible often uses looking after “orphans and widows” as a shorthand for doing the morally right thing: protecting the weak and vulnerable is close to God’s heart.
Abortion is a symbol of our society now: self-obsessed, narcissistic, willing to kill even the weakest and most vulnerable to preserve our own autonomy.
Our society is not the first to sacrifice children to its gods. A brief glance down at the Child Sacrifice entry on Wikipedia shows several times in the past where civilisations have practiced it.
The Bible condemns child sacrifice in strong terms. Let me quote just one example, from Psalm 106:
They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to false gods.
They shed innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
and the land was desecrated by their blood.Therefore the Lord was angry with his people
Psalm 106:37-38; 40-42
and abhorred his inheritance.
He gave them into the hands of the nations,
and their foes ruled over them.
Their enemies oppressed them
and subjected them to their power.
This Psalm is a sort of retrospective, looking back at the sins of Israel to lead them where they were. The sacrifice of children to false gods comes as a climax. It’s interesting that it says “the land was desecrated by their blood”. Shedding innocent blood, and particularly children’s blood, has an effect wider than simply the individual concerned. It has an effect on the whole land.
And then we come to the second paragraph I quoted – starting with that key word: “Therefore”. Because of what precedes, “The Lord was angry with his people”. The Lord did not take kindly to a society which shed innocent blood – in fact, it invoked his wrath and judgement.
I believe this is what we are seeing today: a narcissistic society, where people put themselves first over the rights of children, is a society that is under God’s curse. I believe that the problems we see in society today – the way that as a society we seem to be disintegrating – are a judgement from God for abandoning him.
This is not to say that I think you can draw a straight line from one thing to the other, but rather a society which habitually sacrifices children for its gods is a society that is destined for judgement. It was inevitable that a land which killed children would invite God’s judgement. We have sown the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.
There is a way back, but it’s not a way which we are keen to consider. This is what it says in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14:
‘When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
If we humble ourselves, seek the Lord, and repent – he will hear, and will bring healing to our land. This is the way; this has always been the way. This is the heart of the message that Jesus came to proclaim – “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47).
This is why I think the Roe vs Wade news is fascinating: I think covid has brought things to a head – children have been treated so badly over the last couple of years, people have really started to notice. At the same time, there is now a glimmer of hope that things could change. Just because abortion has been legal for years doesn’t mean it always has to be the case. Things can change for the better as well as for worse.
I believe that we stand now at a crossroads as a society – will we choose the road of protecting our own rights at the expense of the most vulnerable, and stand to be wiped out, or will we return to God and his ways?
Cathy Warwick has been in the news lately – she signed the Royal College of Midwives up to support a legal campaign for the removal of abortion limits in the UK. (Currently, if a woman undergoes an abortion outside of the law, it is a criminal offence.) This would effectively allow abortion to happen up until birth for any reason. You can read a midwife’s response here, see the links through to the original story.
This has raised – once again – the question of abortion. Many people see abortion as a woman’s rights – a foetus is simply a few cells connected to a woman, and having an abortion is no more morally problematic than having your appendix out.
The fact that a human life has to die is basically irrelevant: it is justifiable because at that point in the foetal development, the foetus is not a ‘person’. Notice here that I am using medical terms like ‘foetus’ rather than words we might normally use such as ‘baby’, ‘child’ or ‘mother’. This is because it’s important to understand that a foetus is not a baby – a baby implies a person, whereas a foetus is simply a medical term for a living organism inside a womb. A foetus is a group of cells; a baby or child is a person. A foetus cannot feel pain, has no understanding of itself as a separate entity, and so on – it’s not a person and so can be terminated at will.
I think this line of reasoning is deeply flawed and troublesome for a number of reasons. Chiefly, I think the problem is that it makes an arbitrary concept of ‘personhood’ the key factor in whether it is right to terminate life or not. Who decides what is a person and what is not? There’s a good question.
There was a very helpful article posted today, Why abortion makes sense. The authors make the point that such dehumanising has been the stock in trade of just about every genocidal regime throughout history. Once you have determined that ‘they’ are not human, you can exterminate them with a clear conscience. In fact, more than that, it is morally right and proper for them to be killed.
Once life is valued not for the sake of being life but because of some arbitrary concept we impose, then it can be redefined at will. The whole article is worth reading and I’d suggest having a look through it.
Coming back to Cathy Warwick – I think her position is interesting because it’s entirely consistent. Once you define a foetus as a nonperson, then where do you draw the line? Isn’t 24 weeks simply arbitrary? And then, if you’re going to allow abortion up to full term – what’s the difference between a 37 week child inside and outside the womb? Not much. This is why some ethicists have argued for post-birth abortion (an article published in the British Journal of Medical Ethics, by the way, not some hack rag). They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
I think most people see through those kind of arguments, which is why the reaction against Cathy Warwick has been so strong. And yet, many people seem unwilling to concede that the position is entirely logical once the premises of abortion have been granted in the first place. Once you say that abortion is OK, any lines you draw are essentially arbitrary ones.
The BBC recently reported that abortion rates are stable – there were 185,824 in 2015. Nearly 200,000 abortions in one year – that’s incredible. That statistic makes me feel nauseous. And yet we as a society brush this away because we are ‘pro-women’.
In reality, I think many women feel uncomfortable with abortion – from the article I posted at the start, an Angus Reid poll in 2012 found that 59% of women favoured a reduction in time limits for abortion (i.e. decreasing from 24 weeks). Only 2% favoured an extension.
In the name of being ‘pro-choice’, it turns out that a lot of women are actually pressured into abortion: if a woman falls pregnant unexpectedly, and in inconvenient circumstances, then all of a sudden abortion becomes the most attractive option for everyone except the woman concerned. Many women find they are pressured into it, simply because it is what is expected. Some choice.
All in all, I struggle with our society which permits what I think is essentially state sanctioned murder. However, I hope that Cathy Warwick’s comments will raise the profile of this issue – abortion is usually kept pretty hush-hush. Talking about it, rather than simply brushing the whole thing under the carpet, is a step in the right direction.
My last post has generated a fair bit of controversy – I don’t think I’ve ever made a blog post which has attracted so many comments!
I’d just like to write a very brief postscript to that with a link to a blog post about after-birth abortion: two doctors have written in the Journal of Medical Ethics a paper entitled: “After-Birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” This is part of the abstract:
the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
In other words, once a baby has been born, it should be possible to kill it as it does not yet have any moral status as a person.
Now, this sounds like very shaky ground to me. The blog post I linked to above makes the point that once you allow for abortion, any lines you draw in the sand are essentially arbitrary. When I was writing my blog post last week, I just suggested that a secular society might lead us in a direction we didn’t want to go. I’m wondering whether this is a concrete example of what one of those directions might be.