by Mattias Caro
Yesterday, America marked the 39th year of legal abortion as a protected right under the US Constitution.
It is unfortunate that Americans’ understanding about abortion has largely been mediated by the political process. That is, since Roe v. Wade, politics has been largely the only prism to further our shared understanding of abortion. Culture, through the arts, and society, through the relationships we build, largely conforms itself to this reality. We are either for abortion or we are against it.
Politics is a limited prism. It considers largely how power ought to be applied according to principles. Thus, its limitations fail our considerations of abortion within the larger framework of our common humanity, together with the similar experiences of reality, which any member of the human race must confront. Chief among these realities is our mortality.
Death. Human beings have an odd relationship with death. All men are born into a reality where some day they will die. At first, it is a lived but not consciously known truth. It takes many years, if not decades, of living before people understand the common destiny we all share. Our present age seems, in particular, to inoculate us from this reality: not only do we enjoy life spans well beyond double and triple those of most human history but we do all in our power to maintain the vitality of youth beyond its fading days.
Nevertheless death surrounds us. Nature is a very cycle of life and death: seasons fade and days get shorter. We live off of death itself: plants, vegetables and fruits are grown precisely so they may die and nourish us. Ditto for cows, lambs, pigs and fish. We express our love through the gift of blooming yet dying flowers. In some respects, we are quite comfortable with death’s surrounding presence.
And yet, in other instances, we’d rather death be far away as possible. The terms “quality of life” enter into medical practice only when death’s knock seems all but inevitable. Nursing homes are places of care, but largely too carry that all familiar smell of death creeping, perhaps almost invited. Cemeteries remain far from city sights, save for the fallen soldiers of our nations, because their deaths meant something.
When it comes to abortion, it is without question on any side of the abortion debate that abortion results in a death. To deny this truth would be to ignore the very reality of abortion itself. A death occurs. The only question that really remains is what moral significance, if any, should we place on this death. Rightly stated, we human beings can be said to be stewards of death: because each of us knows that death is an integral part of our daily living experience, the question is never what death should we or should we not accept. But rather it is under which criterion do I accept that a particular death has a moral significance or not.
The political debate has served us very poorly in answering this question. All Roe v. Wade answered was that as a person I ought to have the power without the penalty of law to end an embryonic life. While that particular judgment reveals a legal opinion about the status of fetal life, it provides no real substance or guidance under which to morally perceive whether that preborn life is, in fact, morally worthy of our protection or under our power as stewards of death.
Ask a woman seeking an abortion, why do you want to end this life, and you’ll get a varying yet predictable set of answers:
“I don’t have the money.”
“I want to go to college.”
“I want a career.”
“I have no one to help me.”
As even pro-abortion supporters remind us, no one ever wants an abortion just to have one, as if eating a piece of cake. And yet, when it comes to life and death, why should money, preference, or situation impact our moral understanding of this fetal life?
A few years back, in the novel, Never Let Me Go, author Kazuo Ishiguro considered a society where humans were cloned and bred solely for the purpose of providing organs and other transplant materials to their diseased twins. The clones knew not the purpose of their life, save for the point of their death: to help another. Noble as silent lambs, our emotions are pulled as the clones discover the true reality of human life, experienced in a world outside their destinies and touched by true love.
Why ought we, then, allow our perception of abortion to be colored by and narrowed only to the question of whether we can do the thing? Should we not as an evolved people wish to consider whether we ought to do such a thing?
When it comes to abortion, our politics have much impoverished our discussion to the point that we consider the truth of fetal life only through the prism of our wants and desires. It’s a “baby” when I want to bring it to term; it’s a “termination” when for some reason I consider it not worthy of greater importance than a need, want or fear in front of me. Much like the clones in Ishiguro’s novel, the question of death requires a reasoned, cohesive, moral answer in order to justify our stewardship in our exercise.
Is abortion really a stewardship of death worthy of the human calling? Can it turn merely on a preference? This thought more than anything else should lead us to question our very assumptions and wonder if really our culture and our society remain good stewards of death, when we seem so lightly and uncritically to extend its power, our power, over our unborn brothers and sisters.
Mattias Caro is a lawyer from Great Falls, Virginia. In addition to his JD from George Mason University, he holds an MA in Moral Theology from Christendom College and a BA in History from the College of William and Mary. Mattias’s interests include history, theology, philosophy, law, and baseball. He currently dedicates himself to the practice of corporate law.
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ScottEF
/ January 25, 2012“Why ought we, then, allow our perception of abortion to be colored by and narrowed only to the question of whether we can do the thing? Should we not as an evolved people wish to consider whether we ought to do such a thing?”
1) We don’t. 2) Yes, we should, and many of us have. Perhaps you didn’t notice?
The same is true for appendectomies. An appendectomy kills growing human cells. Millions of them. I had one once. Those cells are now dead. I authorized their killing; millions of people do the same yearly. Do they do it merely because they “can” and “prefer” it? No; they do it because of a moral judgment: the moral harm of doing it is worse than the moral harm of not doing it; they judge that human well-being is furthered by that action, and not harmed by it. Why? Because the cells are not conscious, have no capacity for moral judgment, intelligence, higher-ordered thinking, and hence nothing significant counts against their death. True, if somebody has strong feelings about their bodily integrity, they may refuse an operation; their choice. If someone wants to take some of their non-conscious cells and clone or otherwise make new humans out of them, well, perhaps that might be ethically permissible, and if so anyone who interferes with their project is wrong, they have a right to proceed. But barring that, there are pre-existing reasons for thinking that not doing so is permissible, and so is a choice to destroy the cells that could be turned into new humans under the right conditions.
If you want to debate whether certain non-conscious cells have moral rights while others do, well fine, let’s hear your argument. But don’t pretend that people opposing your view haven’t already made moral judgments about this. This is the same old “my opponents must all be relativists/subjectivists/nihilists” that I’ve heard from Andrew, and frankly, from too many other Catholic theologians over and over again. It’s nonsense. Disagree with our moral judgments if you like; argue against us if you can. But pretending that we haven’t even *made* moral judgments to arrive at our conclusions is insulting, and furthermore it just exposes your ignorance, possibly a quite willful ignorance. We think the embryo is no more a moral person than the cells in my long-dead appendix, and *therefore* the choice to have an abortion or appendectomy is morally justified, and can proceed upon the “preference” of the individual concerned–which is about a million miles away from saying that there is no moral thinking involved at all, and that we think “preference” rules as some absolute law *instead* of morality. It is the basis of a moral judgment; it’s just that the relevant moral judgment was made long ago, and is pretty easy to make, and so in ordinary thinking about the procedure needn’t be consulted again at every moment, any more than I need to think carefully about whether, like Prufrock, I dare to eat a peach. It’s just pretty obvious that, barring some strange assumptions which would be wrong to compel others to accept, eating a peach is morally acceptable, and so is an appendectomy, and so is an abortion.
Alberto Hurtado
/ January 26, 2012Biologically speaking there is certainly a difference between an appendix as a group of cells and a fetus as a group of cells. If not, then we would all be talking about the amazing curing abilities of appendix cells.
ScottEF
/ January 30, 2012Lot
Of course there’s a difference, I never said there wasn’t. Please pay attention Alberto, and don’t waste your time attacking straw men.