The question as to why God is necessarily “all-powerful” is a formidable question. In order to answer it properly, one must also reflect upon what the term “all-powerful” is, as even that term is not always well-understood. I can think of a couple of reasons why God must be “all-powerful.” The first (and weaker) is related to the ontological argument for God's existence, and the second (and stronger) to the cosmological arguments.
The ontological argument is that God is the greatest Being who can be thought to exist: no greater Being can be imagined. Human imagination is nearly limitless, which means that God must Himself be limitless; since people can imagine a Being of great power, and since a powerful being is greater than a powerless one, God's power must be greater than that imaginable by humans. But this is only possible if humans are limited in their ability to imagine, or if God is unlimited in His power; the two pose a conceptual difference, but do they pose a significant difference?
I would say not essentially, for this reason: it is possible to imagine in the abstract a thing which God cannot do. CS Lewis treats such ideas in his The Problem of Pain: he rightly calls them “intrinsic impossibilities.” A commonly used example is that a God who can do everything still cannot create an object which is too heavy for Him to lift; if He could create such an object, then he cannot lift it, and thus can not do everything. Hence, the use of the words “all-powerful” cannot denote that God can do everything, but rather that He can do everything which is not intrinsically impossible. Thus, our ability to imagine things which God cannot do implies that we can imagine ultimately everything which may be done—and thus a Being who can do all of these things. Hence, God must be all-powerful, because He is the greatest Being whom we can imagine.
The cosmological argument actually has two branches, reflecting two different version of the argument: the first attributed to Kalam, the second to St. Thomas Aquinas. Kalam’s argument essentially states that everything which began to exist must have been caused to exist, and that the First Cause was God, who never “began” to exist, but rather has existed eternally and thus was not caused. As applied to the question as to why God must then be all-powerful, the answer is that since He caused everything else in existence to begin to exist, he must have the power to do so. What’s more, “everything” in the universe must be more than the mere matter, but also the abstracts, including the laws that govern the universe. As God created these things, He must also have the power to change them.
That being said, one definition of omnipotence (being “all-powerful”) is that He is the Being who can change anything which He wants changed. This includes not only the universe itself, but also the laws which govern nature. Furthermore, He and He alone is capable of changing all of these things in such a way that everything else is affected by the changes; God himself would not necessarily be affected by such “universal” changes, but everything else must be. Hence, God is essentially and uniquely all-powerful.
St. Thomas Aquinas formulated his cosmological argument in a different manner. He essentially said that anything which is contingent on something else for existence cannot exist without that something else’s also existing. But the only thing which exists and which is not contingent on any other thing is God; hence, everything else which exists must be contingent on something else and therefore ultimately on God. But since everything else which exists depends upon God for its continuing existence, God must have the power to allow these existences to continue. He thus also has the power to cause any or everything to cease to exist.
Such a power must be at least as infinite as the universe itself, including everything within the universe and everything underlying it, for all time. The universe itself is essentially infinite, as it is bounded in every direction by that object which exists farthest from its center (most likely light), and is thus essentially unbounded, meaning infinite. Hence, the Being who must sustain the universe must also have the power required to sustain the universe, meaning and infinite amount of power. Thus, God must have infinite power, which means that He must be all-powerful.
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If you enjoyed this post, here are some related ones:
Unstoppable Objects, Immovable Walls, and Omnipotence (Nicene Guys)
Does Hell Matter?
The Problem of Pain: A Brief Theology of Theodicy
Who Made Evil?
Of Infants and Salvation (Nicene Guys)
Cosmological Evil: Some Thoughts
_____
Or return to Equus Nom Veritas Home.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Pro-Life Motives
Note: This is a conceptual sequel to the articles "Motives, Compassion, and Abortion" and "Abortion Rationalizations and Motives."
The motivation behind a movement is of great importance in shaping the form and plotting the direction which that movement takes. I’ve discussed how the motivations behind the pro-choice movement are often in conflict with each other, but I’ve said nary a word about the motive behind my own side, the pro-life movement. Instead of trying to speak for everyone in the pro-life movement, I would like to give my own testimony, as it stands so far. I may not be able to give reasons for every individual of the pro-life movement, but I can say why I am pro-life—and why to me and so many others it is more than just another political movement.
Those of us who are pro-life first came to this position for a variety of reasons. Some people, such as Professor Mike Adams or Dr. Bernard Nathanson, became pro-life upon seeing ultrasound images of unborn children, or seeing the emotional devastation that abortion leaves in its wake; others became pro-life for religious reasons. I became pro-life for the latter reason; having grown up Catholic, the concept of being pro-life is a part of my religion. The Church leaves no doubt about this; the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states unequivocally:
The Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion is one which is common the Christian community at large. The Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, evangelicals, and myriads of other denominations and nondenominationals all teach a common truth, which is that abortion is an act of murder against a fellow member of the human race, and that as such it is a grave moral wrong. Professor Peter Kreeft went so far as to state that the pro-life cause is one which is at come level common to all religions. In an Intercollegiate Studies Institute sponsored debate against Professor David Boonnin, Kreeft stated that, “All the religions of the world say human life is a sacred mystery. Opposition to abortion, then, is instinctively religious, but not sectarian. The idea that life is sacred is by definition a religious idea, but it doesn’t belong to any one religion, it belongs to the human race.” A part of that sacred mystery is that life begins well before birth—at conception, by the reckoning of many religions, including my own.
But what informs this concept of the beginnings of human life? The idea has been in the Church explicitly since its own infancy. The Didache, a set of early Church teachings (circa 70-80 AD) has this to say about abortion: You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor [shall you] destroy a newborn child.” Tertullian is just as explicit in his Apology, stating that “In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb….To hinder a birth is merely a speedier mankilling; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth (Apology 9:8).”
Thus, the Church’s teachings against abortion are rooted partly in Tradition. But this is not the sole basis for teaching against abortion. There are many Protestant denominations which stand with the Catholics on this matter—most of whom do not regard the Church’s Tradition or teachings as authoritative. Nor does Tradition explain why peoples of other religions, such as Jews, Muslims, and eve some atheists oppose abortion. Even the very Tradition which informs the Church’s teachings on abortion is itself informed by the idea that life begins before birth. It is the fifth commandment, and not the sixth, which the Church is upholding in its opposition to abortion, and in which it is joined by the many people of other religions or no religion in doing so. We affirm that the unborn humans are still humans, and that they must thus be given the same rights and protections as other people, which includes most importantly that fundamental right to life.
For the nonreligious, this support of the pro-life cause comes from seeing that there is no magical occurrence to the child itself upon passing through the birth canal (let alone the direction in which it travels). The newborn baby being held in the arms of his mother does not undergo some magical transformation to become something which he was not only moments before; he does not suddenly become a human when he was not before. To believe otherwise is to embrace what Professor Robert P. George refers to as a rationally untenable dualism which separates the person from the body. In his Clash of Orthodoxies, Professor George writes that
The former view entails the belief that all human life, from the unborn child to the vibrant teenager, from the young professional to the aging professor, and from the new mother to the comatose grandmother, is inherently sacred, that as humans we have a certain dignity which must be respected and protected by society and any just government. The latter view means that life is only as good as what a person can do, or how much she enjoys it, or whether he is wanted by or useful to society. The latter view is rationally untenable, utter nonsense, as Professor George explains:
Another way to look at this question is to ask when “personhood” is conferred upon a person. If we are our souls alone, then when do we begin to exist? At what point do we begin to inhabit our bodies? The secularist Sam Harris, an avid opponent of religion of all forms theistic and a self-proclaimed man of rationality and reason puts it in his The End of Faith, Free Will cannot be rendered conceptually coherent if “No one has ever described a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would attest to its existence.” While I disagree strongly with Harris’ analysis, it is true in-as-much as it can be applied, not only to Free Will but also to any nonphysical element of our being such as the soul, etc., in that if it was not with us from the moment of our conception, there is no means to explain how it could suddenly exist at some arbitrary point in time. Perhaps those who disagree with me may mean to say that the soul arises when we become conscious, but this would imply that if we ever suffered a moment of unconsciousness, it would during that moment be morally permissible to kill us, having been momentarily deprived of our souls. To say otherwise would be to insist instead that the right to life is contingent only on a matter of degree.
There is, in fact, no point at which a line may be drawn between our being persons and nonpersons other than that moment of conception. Any other time would be completely arbitrary. Perhaps at birth? But nothing magical happens to us during our passage through the birth canal to transform us from nonpersons into persons. The age of reason? But when exactly does this begin? We don’t wake up one morning as “reasoning” people when we weren’t previously. The generation of brain waves? We don’t necessarily know when this happens, either—suppose our instruments are simply not fine enough to detect a certain level: should human rights be conferred based entirely on technological capability? It is at fusion of egg with sperm that a new entity is formed, a separate biological being from the mother and the father—a sudden change from parts of two separate beings becomes a new and distinct individual.
We must confer the full dignity of humanity on the unborn, the elderly, and the handicapped, or we must face the possibility that no one’s humanity is definite, and thus that no one’s rights can be inalienable. As professor Kreeft puts it in his Three Approaches to Abortion, “The only alternative to rights based on metaphysics is rights based on might.” That is, we either have rights because they are inherent to our being, as humans, or because we happen to be strong enough to claim those rights for ourselves. He says moreover that “there are only two possibilities: either all have rights or only some have rights.” If rights are based on metaphysics, then all must have those rights—which must include the unborn, the handicapped, and the disabled as well as those who are able-bodied and sharp-minded.
Thus, one reason why I am pro-life is for the self-interested reason that I may in fact be defending not only the life of another, but also my own life. In extending the franchise to the unborn, I may well be preserving it for myself. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,
The culture of death does far greater harm that even the killing of innocents would suggest. For it is not even strangers killing each other, tragic as that though is. It is far, far worse. For who makes the decision to have an abortion, but the pregnant woman, often under the counsel of her significant other, of her parents, of her closest friends. Nay, it is not a stranger who chooses to kill the child, but his own mother and often his father too. And at the other end of the spectrum, it is most often children killing their own parents, or husbands killing their wives. Thus, support of abortion, of euthanasia, of the culture of death which besets us destroys the very foundations of our civilization: the family. How can we survive as a cohesive society if we can’t even stand up for our own families? Pope John Paul the Great puts it most bluntly, that “The future of humanity passes by way of the family.” If our families are turned to destroying themselves, what chance has humanity of survival?
In conjunction with destroying the family, abortion must ultimately also destroy morality and any form of ethics which may be based on it. In the closing of his debate with Boonnin, Kreeft poses a question, also found in Three Approaches to Abortion:
Another other bit of fallout from abortion is that it induces emotional and psychological trauma in women. I have never worked in a crisis pregnancy center myself, but I have known a number of people who have. They all report the same thing about the women they’ve met who have undergone abortions: it’s not a pleasant topic for them. There is a definite pain there, and it’s not the same trauma experienced by a person who didn’t enjoy having their tonsils removed (though that is sometimes present as well). The pain is something deeper, something darker—a sense of being haunted by having done something awful. To borrow the image often used by Professor J. Budziszewski, they are pursued by the five furies of guilty knowledge as their spurned consciences seek revenge. The knowledge that abortion is wrong is, as Budziszewski puts it, something that we can’t not know—which means that deep down, every woman who has had an abortion knows what she has actually done; the remorse may not be their, but the other four furies are with her always, tormenting her relentlessly. As one crisis pregnancy center worker put it, “We know that abortion shatters women’s lives because after the abortion is done, we’re the ones who often are left to pick up the pieces.”
Now, as I said, I don’t work in a crisis pregnancy center, but I have spent enough time in the pro-life movement to see the pain experienced by women who have undergone this procedure. I’ve been involved in political movement and had many discussions, debates, and even outright arguments over everything from social security and the welfare state to illegal immigration; there are few issues that illicit the kind of emotional investment as abortion. I’ve been able to have arguments with people in which we don’t see eye-to-eye about anything in the argument, and in which we’ve both left feeling frustrated; the reaction that women who have had abortions (and even some of the men who have encouraged, advised, or otherwise convinced them to do so) is something entirely different. Rationality often is thrown completely out the window before any discussion can even begin.
How many other issues elicit the angry reactions of passers-by? I can honestly say that when I have been out arguing to end social security that I do not get people to scream insults and obscenities at me as they pass by. The only displays or booths which I have ever manned which are consistently damaged or otherwise destroyed by passers-by are the pro-life ones. It furthermore does not matter what the actual aim of the display happens to be—whether the aim is to overturn Roe v. Wade or just to hand out information about alternatives to abortion—there is inevitably one woman who has had an abortion who acts in a vitriolic and sometimes even violent manner to the mere presence of the display. It has only been more recently that I’ve come to realize why this happens—the booth reminds her of what she’s done. The furies are unleashed, and she must silence them; she can only do so by striking out at the one who has inadvertently loosed them.
Thus, the pro-life movement is for me more than another cause: it is a ministry. This is still more true for those of us whom happen to be Christians, and it is another call for us to be witnesses. We must oppose abortion, because it does hurt women, whether they prefer to admit it or not. What can be a greater injury to womanhood than to destroy the bonds of love between a woman and her child? And what can be a more heinous deed than to willingly take a human life, and not just any other innocent life, but that of your own son or daughter?
The pain which abortion inflicts gives another call to those who would be witnesses for the pro-life ministry; we cannot merely work to make abortions illegal. We must do more; a part of that is to help “pick up the pieces” after the abortion, as happens in so many crisis pregnancy centers. We must also work to make abortion not merely illegal, not merely socially unacceptable: we must convince women to make the choice for life as well. We must build Pope John Paul the Great’s “culture of life,” a culture in which pregnancy and motherhood (not to mention fatherhood) are looked on by all as a blessing and not merely an inconvenience. We need to work to change the attitude of society towards children until they are viewed as gifts; this in turn means also working towards improving the social view of sex as something greater that just another contact sport.
This means, among other things, working to repeal the false progress cast upon society by the proponents of the sexual liberation, for abortion itself did not experience its resurgence in society by way of a complete vacuum. We had to forget something as a society first—namely, that sex was meant for more than mere orgasm. But how could we have forgotten this, had we not previously forgotten that sex itself is a good thing, a wonderful thing, created for us and in part for our pleasure? The prudery that viewed sex as being for procreative purposes alone may very well have lead to a backlash that saw it for pleasure alone, with procreation being a mere “side effect,” to be dealt with accordingly. Had our ancestors not forgotten that sex is good and pleasurable, the revolutionaries of the day would not have been able to claim that they had discovered a new use for it, perhaps its only true use.
We must instead return to the view espoused by John Paul the Great in his Theology of the Body. Only by convincing society of the Church’s real teachings about sex can we also save it from such horrors as abortion. That teaching does involve that couples be open to new life when entering into the marital embrace, and yet it also teaches that that embrace is a very pleasurable experience. We’ve lost sight of the unitive purpose of sex, of the whole idea of self-giving. We instead confront a society which teaches that sex itself is merely the means to an end, that of pleasure, of the great orgasm—in short, that sex is about taking and not giving. If we can’t view sex as the sharing of the self with another, as an expression of such love as to be totally open to the other and to totally give of the self, if we can’t see it as the joining of our bodies and, if only for the briefest of moments of our souls, how then can we be surprised to find women unwilling to carry their pregnancies to term?
In hindsight, it is no miracle that Chesterton predicted that the self-indulgent sexual morality of his time would lead to the sexual revolution, and that the widespread use of contraception would lead to the legalization of abortion in Europe and America. Once we come to expect to be able to engage in sexual activity without the “burden” of pregnancy or the “hindrance” of raising children, it is difficult to stop at some point along the way; having long ago divorced sex from the generation of new life, we embraced first contraception and then abortion when that failed. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his majority decision for the case Planned Parenthood v Casey,
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Apologetics: Arguments and Motivation
If You Love the Sinners, Warn Them of the Sin
Tolerance, Charity, and Dignity (Nicene Guys)
Speaking Up, If Painfully
Social Services and Blood Money
On Being Pro-Life
Righteous Fear of the Lord and the Pro-Life Movement
_____
The motivation behind a movement is of great importance in shaping the form and plotting the direction which that movement takes. I’ve discussed how the motivations behind the pro-choice movement are often in conflict with each other, but I’ve said nary a word about the motive behind my own side, the pro-life movement. Instead of trying to speak for everyone in the pro-life movement, I would like to give my own testimony, as it stands so far. I may not be able to give reasons for every individual of the pro-life movement, but I can say why I am pro-life—and why to me and so many others it is more than just another political movement.
Those of us who are pro-life first came to this position for a variety of reasons. Some people, such as Professor Mike Adams or Dr. Bernard Nathanson, became pro-life upon seeing ultrasound images of unborn children, or seeing the emotional devastation that abortion leaves in its wake; others became pro-life for religious reasons. I became pro-life for the latter reason; having grown up Catholic, the concept of being pro-life is a part of my religion. The Church leaves no doubt about this; the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states unequivocally:
“Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person—among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.”Two entries later, the CCC states the penalty for abortion: “Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against humanity.” In light of the strong and constant teaching of the Church against abortion, no faithful Catholic can support abortion while retaining his or her religion. To do so is heresy, which breaks the bonds of community with the Church.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion is one which is common the Christian community at large. The Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, evangelicals, and myriads of other denominations and nondenominationals all teach a common truth, which is that abortion is an act of murder against a fellow member of the human race, and that as such it is a grave moral wrong. Professor Peter Kreeft went so far as to state that the pro-life cause is one which is at come level common to all religions. In an Intercollegiate Studies Institute sponsored debate against Professor David Boonnin, Kreeft stated that, “All the religions of the world say human life is a sacred mystery. Opposition to abortion, then, is instinctively religious, but not sectarian. The idea that life is sacred is by definition a religious idea, but it doesn’t belong to any one religion, it belongs to the human race.” A part of that sacred mystery is that life begins well before birth—at conception, by the reckoning of many religions, including my own.
But what informs this concept of the beginnings of human life? The idea has been in the Church explicitly since its own infancy. The Didache, a set of early Church teachings (circa 70-80 AD) has this to say about abortion: You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor [shall you] destroy a newborn child.” Tertullian is just as explicit in his Apology, stating that “In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb….To hinder a birth is merely a speedier mankilling; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth (Apology 9:8).”
Thus, the Church’s teachings against abortion are rooted partly in Tradition. But this is not the sole basis for teaching against abortion. There are many Protestant denominations which stand with the Catholics on this matter—most of whom do not regard the Church’s Tradition or teachings as authoritative. Nor does Tradition explain why peoples of other religions, such as Jews, Muslims, and eve some atheists oppose abortion. Even the very Tradition which informs the Church’s teachings on abortion is itself informed by the idea that life begins before birth. It is the fifth commandment, and not the sixth, which the Church is upholding in its opposition to abortion, and in which it is joined by the many people of other religions or no religion in doing so. We affirm that the unborn humans are still humans, and that they must thus be given the same rights and protections as other people, which includes most importantly that fundamental right to life.
For the nonreligious, this support of the pro-life cause comes from seeing that there is no magical occurrence to the child itself upon passing through the birth canal (let alone the direction in which it travels). The newborn baby being held in the arms of his mother does not undergo some magical transformation to become something which he was not only moments before; he does not suddenly become a human when he was not before. To believe otherwise is to embrace what Professor Robert P. George refers to as a rationally untenable dualism which separates the person from the body. In his Clash of Orthodoxies, Professor George writes that
“If we lay aside all of the rhetorical grandstanding and obviously fallacious arguments, questions of abortion, infanticide, suicide, and euthanasia turn on the question of whether bodily life is intrinsically good, as Judaism and Christianity teach, or merely instrumentally good, as orthodox secularists believe.”
The former view entails the belief that all human life, from the unborn child to the vibrant teenager, from the young professional to the aging professor, and from the new mother to the comatose grandmother, is inherently sacred, that as humans we have a certain dignity which must be respected and protected by society and any just government. The latter view means that life is only as good as what a person can do, or how much she enjoys it, or whether he is wanted by or useful to society. The latter view is rationally untenable, utter nonsense, as Professor George explains:
“Implicit in the view that human life is only instrumentally and not intrinsically valuable is a particular understanding of the human person as an essentially non-bodily being who inhabits a nonpersonal body. According to this understanding—which contrasts with the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person as a dynamic unity of mind, body, and spirit—the ‘person’ is the conscious and desiring ‘self’ as distinct from the body which may exist (as in the case of pre- and post-conscious human beings) as a merely ‘biological,’ and, thus, sub-personal reality. But the dualistic view of the human person makes nonsense of the experience all of us have in our activities of being dynamically unified actors—of being, that is, embodied persons and not merely persons who ‘inhabit’ our bodies and direct them as extrinsic instruments under our control, like automobiles.”In other words, we are or minds, our spirits, our consciousness, our souls if you will, but we are also our bodies—these things are inseparable.
Another way to look at this question is to ask when “personhood” is conferred upon a person. If we are our souls alone, then when do we begin to exist? At what point do we begin to inhabit our bodies? The secularist Sam Harris, an avid opponent of religion of all forms theistic and a self-proclaimed man of rationality and reason puts it in his The End of Faith, Free Will cannot be rendered conceptually coherent if “No one has ever described a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would attest to its existence.” While I disagree strongly with Harris’ analysis, it is true in-as-much as it can be applied, not only to Free Will but also to any nonphysical element of our being such as the soul, etc., in that if it was not with us from the moment of our conception, there is no means to explain how it could suddenly exist at some arbitrary point in time. Perhaps those who disagree with me may mean to say that the soul arises when we become conscious, but this would imply that if we ever suffered a moment of unconsciousness, it would during that moment be morally permissible to kill us, having been momentarily deprived of our souls. To say otherwise would be to insist instead that the right to life is contingent only on a matter of degree.
There is, in fact, no point at which a line may be drawn between our being persons and nonpersons other than that moment of conception. Any other time would be completely arbitrary. Perhaps at birth? But nothing magical happens to us during our passage through the birth canal to transform us from nonpersons into persons. The age of reason? But when exactly does this begin? We don’t wake up one morning as “reasoning” people when we weren’t previously. The generation of brain waves? We don’t necessarily know when this happens, either—suppose our instruments are simply not fine enough to detect a certain level: should human rights be conferred based entirely on technological capability? It is at fusion of egg with sperm that a new entity is formed, a separate biological being from the mother and the father—a sudden change from parts of two separate beings becomes a new and distinct individual.
We must confer the full dignity of humanity on the unborn, the elderly, and the handicapped, or we must face the possibility that no one’s humanity is definite, and thus that no one’s rights can be inalienable. As professor Kreeft puts it in his Three Approaches to Abortion, “The only alternative to rights based on metaphysics is rights based on might.” That is, we either have rights because they are inherent to our being, as humans, or because we happen to be strong enough to claim those rights for ourselves. He says moreover that “there are only two possibilities: either all have rights or only some have rights.” If rights are based on metaphysics, then all must have those rights—which must include the unborn, the handicapped, and the disabled as well as those who are able-bodied and sharp-minded.
Thus, one reason why I am pro-life is for the self-interested reason that I may in fact be defending not only the life of another, but also my own life. In extending the franchise to the unborn, I may well be preserving it for myself. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,
“They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Gypsies, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Gypsy. Then they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then, when they came for me, there was no one to speak up for me.”I may one day be the handicapped old man, and I certainly was once the unborn child—I thus must now speak up for the people who are presently in these positions, in the hopes that one day they may speak up for me.
The culture of death does far greater harm that even the killing of innocents would suggest. For it is not even strangers killing each other, tragic as that though is. It is far, far worse. For who makes the decision to have an abortion, but the pregnant woman, often under the counsel of her significant other, of her parents, of her closest friends. Nay, it is not a stranger who chooses to kill the child, but his own mother and often his father too. And at the other end of the spectrum, it is most often children killing their own parents, or husbands killing their wives. Thus, support of abortion, of euthanasia, of the culture of death which besets us destroys the very foundations of our civilization: the family. How can we survive as a cohesive society if we can’t even stand up for our own families? Pope John Paul the Great puts it most bluntly, that “The future of humanity passes by way of the family.” If our families are turned to destroying themselves, what chance has humanity of survival?
In conjunction with destroying the family, abortion must ultimately also destroy morality and any form of ethics which may be based on it. In the closing of his debate with Boonnin, Kreeft poses a question, also found in Three Approaches to Abortion:
“It seems to me that abortion simply unjust, unethical, unfair, it seems to me that it is not a complex issue at all. If it’s not wrong for big strong people to kill little weak people just because they don’t want them to live, then what could possibly be wrong? What could the word ‘wrong’ possibly mean, then? Only perhaps that the only thing that’s wrong is using the word ‘wrong.’”Father Frank Pavone puts a different way when he asks how we can fight any other social problem, how we can have any code of ethics, and how we can claim any sense of justice, when we kill our own children.
Another other bit of fallout from abortion is that it induces emotional and psychological trauma in women. I have never worked in a crisis pregnancy center myself, but I have known a number of people who have. They all report the same thing about the women they’ve met who have undergone abortions: it’s not a pleasant topic for them. There is a definite pain there, and it’s not the same trauma experienced by a person who didn’t enjoy having their tonsils removed (though that is sometimes present as well). The pain is something deeper, something darker—a sense of being haunted by having done something awful. To borrow the image often used by Professor J. Budziszewski, they are pursued by the five furies of guilty knowledge as their spurned consciences seek revenge. The knowledge that abortion is wrong is, as Budziszewski puts it, something that we can’t not know—which means that deep down, every woman who has had an abortion knows what she has actually done; the remorse may not be their, but the other four furies are with her always, tormenting her relentlessly. As one crisis pregnancy center worker put it, “We know that abortion shatters women’s lives because after the abortion is done, we’re the ones who often are left to pick up the pieces.”
Now, as I said, I don’t work in a crisis pregnancy center, but I have spent enough time in the pro-life movement to see the pain experienced by women who have undergone this procedure. I’ve been involved in political movement and had many discussions, debates, and even outright arguments over everything from social security and the welfare state to illegal immigration; there are few issues that illicit the kind of emotional investment as abortion. I’ve been able to have arguments with people in which we don’t see eye-to-eye about anything in the argument, and in which we’ve both left feeling frustrated; the reaction that women who have had abortions (and even some of the men who have encouraged, advised, or otherwise convinced them to do so) is something entirely different. Rationality often is thrown completely out the window before any discussion can even begin.
How many other issues elicit the angry reactions of passers-by? I can honestly say that when I have been out arguing to end social security that I do not get people to scream insults and obscenities at me as they pass by. The only displays or booths which I have ever manned which are consistently damaged or otherwise destroyed by passers-by are the pro-life ones. It furthermore does not matter what the actual aim of the display happens to be—whether the aim is to overturn Roe v. Wade or just to hand out information about alternatives to abortion—there is inevitably one woman who has had an abortion who acts in a vitriolic and sometimes even violent manner to the mere presence of the display. It has only been more recently that I’ve come to realize why this happens—the booth reminds her of what she’s done. The furies are unleashed, and she must silence them; she can only do so by striking out at the one who has inadvertently loosed them.
Thus, the pro-life movement is for me more than another cause: it is a ministry. This is still more true for those of us whom happen to be Christians, and it is another call for us to be witnesses. We must oppose abortion, because it does hurt women, whether they prefer to admit it or not. What can be a greater injury to womanhood than to destroy the bonds of love between a woman and her child? And what can be a more heinous deed than to willingly take a human life, and not just any other innocent life, but that of your own son or daughter?
The pain which abortion inflicts gives another call to those who would be witnesses for the pro-life ministry; we cannot merely work to make abortions illegal. We must do more; a part of that is to help “pick up the pieces” after the abortion, as happens in so many crisis pregnancy centers. We must also work to make abortion not merely illegal, not merely socially unacceptable: we must convince women to make the choice for life as well. We must build Pope John Paul the Great’s “culture of life,” a culture in which pregnancy and motherhood (not to mention fatherhood) are looked on by all as a blessing and not merely an inconvenience. We need to work to change the attitude of society towards children until they are viewed as gifts; this in turn means also working towards improving the social view of sex as something greater that just another contact sport.
This means, among other things, working to repeal the false progress cast upon society by the proponents of the sexual liberation, for abortion itself did not experience its resurgence in society by way of a complete vacuum. We had to forget something as a society first—namely, that sex was meant for more than mere orgasm. But how could we have forgotten this, had we not previously forgotten that sex itself is a good thing, a wonderful thing, created for us and in part for our pleasure? The prudery that viewed sex as being for procreative purposes alone may very well have lead to a backlash that saw it for pleasure alone, with procreation being a mere “side effect,” to be dealt with accordingly. Had our ancestors not forgotten that sex is good and pleasurable, the revolutionaries of the day would not have been able to claim that they had discovered a new use for it, perhaps its only true use.
We must instead return to the view espoused by John Paul the Great in his Theology of the Body. Only by convincing society of the Church’s real teachings about sex can we also save it from such horrors as abortion. That teaching does involve that couples be open to new life when entering into the marital embrace, and yet it also teaches that that embrace is a very pleasurable experience. We’ve lost sight of the unitive purpose of sex, of the whole idea of self-giving. We instead confront a society which teaches that sex itself is merely the means to an end, that of pleasure, of the great orgasm—in short, that sex is about taking and not giving. If we can’t view sex as the sharing of the self with another, as an expression of such love as to be totally open to the other and to totally give of the self, if we can’t see it as the joining of our bodies and, if only for the briefest of moments of our souls, how then can we be surprised to find women unwilling to carry their pregnancies to term?
In hindsight, it is no miracle that Chesterton predicted that the self-indulgent sexual morality of his time would lead to the sexual revolution, and that the widespread use of contraception would lead to the legalization of abortion in Europe and America. Once we come to expect to be able to engage in sexual activity without the “burden” of pregnancy or the “hindrance” of raising children, it is difficult to stop at some point along the way; having long ago divorced sex from the generation of new life, we embraced first contraception and then abortion when that failed. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in his majority decision for the case Planned Parenthood v Casey,
“To eliminate the issue of reliance that easily, however, one would need to limit cognizable reliance to specific instances of sexual activity. But to do this would be simply to refuse to face the fact that for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”I earlier asked the rhetorical question as to what may be more heinous that for a mother to kill her own daughter, or for a father to be complicit in the murder of his own son. I can think of only one thing, and it is my most non-negotiable reason for being pro-life. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Christ gives a description of the last judgment, saying:
“Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee? And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me. Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink. I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you covered me not: sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. Then they also shall answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee? Then he shall answer them, saying: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me.” (MT 25:34-45, Douay-RheimsThus, it is more than simply a child who is killed during an abortion, it is Christ Himself against whom this atrocity is committed. As Kreeft puts it, again in both his debate against Boonnin and in Three Approaches to Abortion:
Translation)
“Here is my most non-negotiable reason for fighting for the pro-life cause, and the reason why pro-lifers will never, never, never give up, why we can never give up, why we have no choice—we are not pro-choice, here we stand, we cannot do otherwise, God help us. It’s because the face that confronts us, in some way, however inchoate and unconscious, is not just the tiny innocent face of a human baby, or the face of the woman, but the enormous, totally innocent face of God, Who has designed and created us, and the woman, and the baby. It is that image that abortion kills. Abortion is homicide, and homicide is deicide, because man is God’s image, God’s child.”This is a powerful claim, but in light of Christ’s words, “as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me,” it is nevertheless true. As Christians, we are called to love even our enemies (MT 5:44), for even they were created in the image of God, and thus contain that holy Image. A powerful commandment this is, and yet we cannot even do the same to our own children. In the words of the First Epistle of St. John (1 JN 4:20, Douay-Rheims Translation), “If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?”
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Apologetics: Arguments and Motivation
If You Love the Sinners, Warn Them of the Sin
Tolerance, Charity, and Dignity (Nicene Guys)
Speaking Up, If Painfully
Social Services and Blood Money
On Being Pro-Life
Righteous Fear of the Lord and the Pro-Life Movement
_____
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Abortion Rationalizations and Motives
Note: This is a conceptual sequel to the article “Motives, Compassion, and Abortion.”
There is always more to a movement than its intellectual support. Underlying each cause are the motives which people have for supporting it. Mere intellectualism is never enough to drive a people in a particular direction: they must have some reasons for holding the worldviews to which they subscribe. This is as much true for those involved in the abortion debate as anywhere else: both pro-lifers and pro-choicers. For example, the mere insistence that an unborn child is “just a clump of cells” does not sufficiently explain the intensity of the commitment of many on the pro-choice side to their cause. There must be some other motive, something which impassions people and galvanizes their wills, to explain why a person may be so unwaveringly pro-life or so undauntedly pro-choice.
From the pro-life side, the reason given is the knowledge that the unborn child is still a human child, and that he or she must be given the same rights and protections as any other human being. Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have a variety of motives for supporting legal abortion, each of which would take the movement down a different path. Far from bolstering each other, these motives are often completely unrelated, and in some cases actually tend to contradict each other as to what the ultimate aims of the abortion lobby are.
Often cited as the main motivation for pro-choicers is that a woman ought to have control over her own body. Anyone who has ever sat through a debate on the subject knows that this argument is the “bread and butter” of the movement, and it is certainly a possible motive for being pro-choice. However, if you were to listen to the rest of the pro-choice rhetoric, you’d soon discover that this cannot be the sole, or even the primary, motive for the pro-choice movement as a whole. Perhaps it never was.
Most debates between pro-life and pro-choice advocates do involve a cursory exchange between the two about when life begins, as the pro-choicer may attempt to argue that human life doesn’t begin at conception. With the deprivation of this point in development as a start of human life, the pro-choicer is generally backed into picking some other arbitrary point during the child’s development after which to confer the full rights and status of humanity upon him or her. Often this after a certain amount of development has occurred: generally, pro-choicers try to push for some time after the second trimester (at the earliest), and more often after birth.
Unfortunately for the pro-choicers, the advent of ultrasound technology has effectively destroyed their arguments for anything so late. Some try instead to argue that humanity is conferred upon the detection of brain-waves, but again, this occurs approximately 40 days after conception—well before the end of the first trimester. This being far too early into the pregnancy to draw the line for most abortion lobbyist’s tastes, they thus must make some arbitrary choice as to when abortion should no longer be “ok.” Hence Senator Barbara Boxer’s statement that “I think when you bring your baby home…the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights [of any other human].”
Inevitably, the topic of the debate will then switch to other points of debate. This is especially true if the debate allows audience questions. It is at this time that the full variety o pro-choice motives are seen on display. Whether or not any progress is made in demonstrating that the fetus is not human, and thus that a woman undergoing an abortion is only exerting control over her own body rather than that of somebody else, a variety of new arguments in support of legal abortion are made. These arguments run the gauntlet, from questioning whether the world has enough resources to provide for the extra children to suggesting that abortion is the most merciful thing that can be done for a child who would be born with “defects” or into poverty.
The first problem with this arguments, of course, is that they are mostly not arguments for any sort of “choice” on the part of the woman. Rather, such arguments. If followed to their natural conclusions, would end with mandating abortion for women under a variety of situations. If it is “merciful” to kill the child, then why should the woman be given the choice to keep him alive? Such, at least, was the reasoning of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who said that “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it [1].” She also proposed the American Baby Code, which states that “No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child… without a permit for parenthood [2].” So much for leaving the choice up to the woman.
The fact that many of these argument are really arguments to mandate abortions for all women falling below a certain income level or who have had more than a certain number of children (as in China) aside, one has to wonder why pro-choicers seem to keep inventing new arguments to support their cause. It’s as if they know that the old arguments are insufficient, not only in the sense that they may be factually wrong, but in the sense that they are not enough to justify abortion even if they were right. How is can one explain that people will cite contradicting reasons for allowing abortions? One can either be for abortion because it ought to be a woman’s right or because abortion is the only merciful thing that can be done for a defective child. We need it either because we don’t have the resources to support one more child or because the child’s birth may threaten the life of the mother (in which case, we would have one less person using up the world’s resources). One cannot logically hold all of these views simultaneously, and yet pro-choicers often will use all of these and more to defend their stance on abortion. Apparently, the maxim, “Repeat a lie often enough, and you will begin to believe it,” is true even if the lie contradicts itself.
That all of these things are so frequently and so widely used by pro-choice advocates to support abortion suggests at least one of two things. The first is that the people using these arguments don’t actually believe them at all and really have some darker motives in mind. Such was certainly true in the case of Sanger, whose ultimate aim was to use abortion and birth control as a tool for eugenics to eliminate blacks, Catholics, and any other type of person who didn’t fit into her view of what an ideal society ought to be. Such is almost certainly true for many of the unmarried sexually active men who support abortion—for them it’s as much an economic issue as a social one.
The second thing which the use of this contradictory web of arguments may suggest is, as I mentioned earlier, that many on the pro-choice side aren’t themselves convinced that abortion is right. Many have had abortions, or convinced other to have abortions, and so for there is nothing wrong with abortion because there can’t be. It must be a right, and thus it has to be ok. For if it is otherwise, then they have killed their own children, and worse, it was a pre-meditated act. Even in the depths of despair, they know tat what they have done was wrong, and try as they might, they can’t explain it away as being completely out of their control. And that’s for the women who have actually had abortions. For those who have encouraged abortions, for those who have performed them, the guilt is even worse: there was no despair driving them to do it, no plea of temporary insanity can be made.
G.K. Chesterton once said that “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” Professor Budziszewski takes this a step farther, noting that “To avoid traveling the next dark stretch of the road, there is no alternative but to make peace with the Furies [3], and travel back on the stretch we have lately come.” For some, the horror of taking responsibility for such acts is too great—they can’t turn back and face their guilt, and are forced to go forward.
[1] Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.
[2] The American Baby Code, Article 4. http://www.abortionfacts.com/learn/sanger_and_planned_parenthood.asp
[3] “What We Can’t Not Know.” Budziszewski’s five Furies are the conscience’s response to guilty knowledge, and include remorse, and the needs to confess, to atone, for reconciliation, and for justification.
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Apologetics: Argument and Motivation
Abortion and So-Called "Lebensunwertes Lebes" (Catholic America Today)
Pro-Life Motives
Remarks on My Twenty-Third Birthday
Tactics for Avoiding a Terrible Fact: "Famous Violinist"
How to Lose the Culture War
Being Tactful and Being "Nice"
_____
There is always more to a movement than its intellectual support. Underlying each cause are the motives which people have for supporting it. Mere intellectualism is never enough to drive a people in a particular direction: they must have some reasons for holding the worldviews to which they subscribe. This is as much true for those involved in the abortion debate as anywhere else: both pro-lifers and pro-choicers. For example, the mere insistence that an unborn child is “just a clump of cells” does not sufficiently explain the intensity of the commitment of many on the pro-choice side to their cause. There must be some other motive, something which impassions people and galvanizes their wills, to explain why a person may be so unwaveringly pro-life or so undauntedly pro-choice.
From the pro-life side, the reason given is the knowledge that the unborn child is still a human child, and that he or she must be given the same rights and protections as any other human being. Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have a variety of motives for supporting legal abortion, each of which would take the movement down a different path. Far from bolstering each other, these motives are often completely unrelated, and in some cases actually tend to contradict each other as to what the ultimate aims of the abortion lobby are.
Often cited as the main motivation for pro-choicers is that a woman ought to have control over her own body. Anyone who has ever sat through a debate on the subject knows that this argument is the “bread and butter” of the movement, and it is certainly a possible motive for being pro-choice. However, if you were to listen to the rest of the pro-choice rhetoric, you’d soon discover that this cannot be the sole, or even the primary, motive for the pro-choice movement as a whole. Perhaps it never was.
Most debates between pro-life and pro-choice advocates do involve a cursory exchange between the two about when life begins, as the pro-choicer may attempt to argue that human life doesn’t begin at conception. With the deprivation of this point in development as a start of human life, the pro-choicer is generally backed into picking some other arbitrary point during the child’s development after which to confer the full rights and status of humanity upon him or her. Often this after a certain amount of development has occurred: generally, pro-choicers try to push for some time after the second trimester (at the earliest), and more often after birth.
Unfortunately for the pro-choicers, the advent of ultrasound technology has effectively destroyed their arguments for anything so late. Some try instead to argue that humanity is conferred upon the detection of brain-waves, but again, this occurs approximately 40 days after conception—well before the end of the first trimester. This being far too early into the pregnancy to draw the line for most abortion lobbyist’s tastes, they thus must make some arbitrary choice as to when abortion should no longer be “ok.” Hence Senator Barbara Boxer’s statement that “I think when you bring your baby home…the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights [of any other human].”
Inevitably, the topic of the debate will then switch to other points of debate. This is especially true if the debate allows audience questions. It is at this time that the full variety o pro-choice motives are seen on display. Whether or not any progress is made in demonstrating that the fetus is not human, and thus that a woman undergoing an abortion is only exerting control over her own body rather than that of somebody else, a variety of new arguments in support of legal abortion are made. These arguments run the gauntlet, from questioning whether the world has enough resources to provide for the extra children to suggesting that abortion is the most merciful thing that can be done for a child who would be born with “defects” or into poverty.
The first problem with this arguments, of course, is that they are mostly not arguments for any sort of “choice” on the part of the woman. Rather, such arguments. If followed to their natural conclusions, would end with mandating abortion for women under a variety of situations. If it is “merciful” to kill the child, then why should the woman be given the choice to keep him alive? Such, at least, was the reasoning of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who said that “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it [1].” She also proposed the American Baby Code, which states that “No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child… without a permit for parenthood [2].” So much for leaving the choice up to the woman.
The fact that many of these argument are really arguments to mandate abortions for all women falling below a certain income level or who have had more than a certain number of children (as in China) aside, one has to wonder why pro-choicers seem to keep inventing new arguments to support their cause. It’s as if they know that the old arguments are insufficient, not only in the sense that they may be factually wrong, but in the sense that they are not enough to justify abortion even if they were right. How is can one explain that people will cite contradicting reasons for allowing abortions? One can either be for abortion because it ought to be a woman’s right or because abortion is the only merciful thing that can be done for a defective child. We need it either because we don’t have the resources to support one more child or because the child’s birth may threaten the life of the mother (in which case, we would have one less person using up the world’s resources). One cannot logically hold all of these views simultaneously, and yet pro-choicers often will use all of these and more to defend their stance on abortion. Apparently, the maxim, “Repeat a lie often enough, and you will begin to believe it,” is true even if the lie contradicts itself.
That all of these things are so frequently and so widely used by pro-choice advocates to support abortion suggests at least one of two things. The first is that the people using these arguments don’t actually believe them at all and really have some darker motives in mind. Such was certainly true in the case of Sanger, whose ultimate aim was to use abortion and birth control as a tool for eugenics to eliminate blacks, Catholics, and any other type of person who didn’t fit into her view of what an ideal society ought to be. Such is almost certainly true for many of the unmarried sexually active men who support abortion—for them it’s as much an economic issue as a social one.
The second thing which the use of this contradictory web of arguments may suggest is, as I mentioned earlier, that many on the pro-choice side aren’t themselves convinced that abortion is right. Many have had abortions, or convinced other to have abortions, and so for there is nothing wrong with abortion because there can’t be. It must be a right, and thus it has to be ok. For if it is otherwise, then they have killed their own children, and worse, it was a pre-meditated act. Even in the depths of despair, they know tat what they have done was wrong, and try as they might, they can’t explain it away as being completely out of their control. And that’s for the women who have actually had abortions. For those who have encouraged abortions, for those who have performed them, the guilt is even worse: there was no despair driving them to do it, no plea of temporary insanity can be made.
G.K. Chesterton once said that “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” Professor Budziszewski takes this a step farther, noting that “To avoid traveling the next dark stretch of the road, there is no alternative but to make peace with the Furies [3], and travel back on the stretch we have lately come.” For some, the horror of taking responsibility for such acts is too great—they can’t turn back and face their guilt, and are forced to go forward.
[1] Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.
[2] The American Baby Code, Article 4. http://www.abortionfacts.com/learn/sanger_and_planned_parenthood.asp
[3] “What We Can’t Not Know.” Budziszewski’s five Furies are the conscience’s response to guilty knowledge, and include remorse, and the needs to confess, to atone, for reconciliation, and for justification.
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Apologetics: Argument and Motivation
Abortion and So-Called "Lebensunwertes Lebes" (Catholic America Today)
Pro-Life Motives
Remarks on My Twenty-Third Birthday
Tactics for Avoiding a Terrible Fact: "Famous Violinist"
How to Lose the Culture War
Being Tactful and Being "Nice"
_____
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Motives, Compassion, and Abortion
As rational, reasoning beings, we have two essentials components to our minds: the intellect, and the will. As a result, one will find behind any philosophical worldview lies two types of argument: the evidential argument, which appeals to the Intellect, and the motivation argument, which appeals to the Will. The former are, of course, reasons for acting on or supporting the worldview, whereas the latter are given as a defense of the worldview, both in the sense of answering objections and in the sense of providing actual objections to opposing philosophies. This is no less true for the debate over abortion, a clash of two mindsets, one in which an unborn child is accorded equal standing with the rest of the human race, and the other in which the fetus is viewed as an object, a burden which a woman may choose to accept or reject. And while there is much to be said about the evidential argument, it is in the battle of motives where we find the ultimate directions of these movements defined.
The evidential arguments are necessary to a movement, but they are not sufficient for it. The mere claim that the unborn child is not a human life does not, nor can it, motivate abortion, anymore than that a cow is not a human life motivates slaughtering a calf. A motive must exist for the conclusion to follow: we are permitted to kill the calf because it is not human, but the reason why we kill it is because we want hamburger. Further, having established some motive for committing an act, mere intellectual arguments against the act are no longer always sufficient to prevent that act from occurring. Abortion is often the quintessential example of this, though the Will has worked against the intellect to justify everything from the sexual revolution to nihilism and the postmodernist movement. It is for this reason that Professor J. Budziszewski has noted that winning the intellectual argument is not enough, and why Professor Peter Kreeft has stated that the emotional, and not just the rational, elements of an argument must be addressed if a change of heart is to be affected.
It is also for this reason that the pro-choice side attempts to paint the abortion as a complex issue, while the pro-life movement is able to steadfastly state that the issue is very simple. Whereas the pro-life movement has only one major motivational argument, albeit one from which several minor ones spring forth, the pro-choice side has many different motives, some which are not compatible with each other. Ironically enough, it is the pro-life movement which works for a variety of solutions, and the pro-choice side which wishes to offer only one, albeit with several possible stages of implementation.
Why is this? The answer is not so complex: being pro-life, at its core, means caring for the life of the child—which does not, however, imply disregarding that of the mother—while being pro-choice means having to reconcile oneself with the notion that the fetus is entirely expendable. The former means recognizing humanity, whereas the latter means ignoring it, denying it, objectifying it; some prominent pro-choice philosophers, such as Judith Jarvis Thompson and David Boonnin, have gone so far as attempting to make a case for the killing of the unborn child even after granting his humanity. Philosophically, this doesn’t leave much room for compassion, and while not all pro-lifers are compassionate, it is the crisis pregnancy centers, and not the abortion mills, which offer such services as post-abortion counseling which can help distraught ex-mothers regain their dignity.
Ultimately, the motivation for abortion must be selfish, while that for choosing life is selfless. This shows up in debates, in writings, in the manner in which abortion mills are run as opposed to the operation of crisis pregnancy care centers, and in the contrast between groups such as Project Gabriel or the priests for Life with that of NARAL. Whether it’s offering counseling to women who are trying to recover from abortions, volunteering to help pregnant women who are on their own with household work, helping to find a good home in which to place children for adoption, the pro-life movement has demonstrated that we stand for more than merely making abortion illegal. Compare this to NARAL, whose campaign is built around making abortion legal, cheap, and convenient for all; or to Planned Parenthood, which seeks to keep parents uninvolved and uniformed about abortion-related decisions in their daughters’ lives, is reluctant to provide information about alternatives to abortion within their clinics, and generally fails to provide much in the way of post-abortion support groups for women; or perhaps to the defenders of abortion, who inevitably portray children as burdens and hindrances rather than a gifts of joy.
There is a pro-life ministry within the Church, but no equivalent exists in either the religious or the secular world for the pro-choice cause. Nor could such a ministry exist in any but the most crude and rudimentary form: anything more requires not only compassion, but selflessness, and a recognition of the dignity of the mother. For once dignity is denied to one group of humans, in this case the unborn, it can very easily be denied to another—such as women who are troubled after having an abortion. In a recent speech before a pro-life rally in Austin, Fr. Frank Pavone, founder and director of the Priests for Life, asked how it is that we can stand up for the dignity of the poor, or the oppressed, of any other people, if we have already embraced the killing of our own children. The answer, he unequivocally stated, is that we cannot.
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Warnings and Ignorance (Thirty Minute Musings)
Apologetics and Motivation
35 Years of Roe and Doe
Abortion Rationalizations and Motives
Pro-Life Motives
On Being Pro-Life
Righteous Fear of the Lord and the Pro-Life Movement
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The evidential arguments are necessary to a movement, but they are not sufficient for it. The mere claim that the unborn child is not a human life does not, nor can it, motivate abortion, anymore than that a cow is not a human life motivates slaughtering a calf. A motive must exist for the conclusion to follow: we are permitted to kill the calf because it is not human, but the reason why we kill it is because we want hamburger. Further, having established some motive for committing an act, mere intellectual arguments against the act are no longer always sufficient to prevent that act from occurring. Abortion is often the quintessential example of this, though the Will has worked against the intellect to justify everything from the sexual revolution to nihilism and the postmodernist movement. It is for this reason that Professor J. Budziszewski has noted that winning the intellectual argument is not enough, and why Professor Peter Kreeft has stated that the emotional, and not just the rational, elements of an argument must be addressed if a change of heart is to be affected.
It is also for this reason that the pro-choice side attempts to paint the abortion as a complex issue, while the pro-life movement is able to steadfastly state that the issue is very simple. Whereas the pro-life movement has only one major motivational argument, albeit one from which several minor ones spring forth, the pro-choice side has many different motives, some which are not compatible with each other. Ironically enough, it is the pro-life movement which works for a variety of solutions, and the pro-choice side which wishes to offer only one, albeit with several possible stages of implementation.
Why is this? The answer is not so complex: being pro-life, at its core, means caring for the life of the child—which does not, however, imply disregarding that of the mother—while being pro-choice means having to reconcile oneself with the notion that the fetus is entirely expendable. The former means recognizing humanity, whereas the latter means ignoring it, denying it, objectifying it; some prominent pro-choice philosophers, such as Judith Jarvis Thompson and David Boonnin, have gone so far as attempting to make a case for the killing of the unborn child even after granting his humanity. Philosophically, this doesn’t leave much room for compassion, and while not all pro-lifers are compassionate, it is the crisis pregnancy centers, and not the abortion mills, which offer such services as post-abortion counseling which can help distraught ex-mothers regain their dignity.
Ultimately, the motivation for abortion must be selfish, while that for choosing life is selfless. This shows up in debates, in writings, in the manner in which abortion mills are run as opposed to the operation of crisis pregnancy care centers, and in the contrast between groups such as Project Gabriel or the priests for Life with that of NARAL. Whether it’s offering counseling to women who are trying to recover from abortions, volunteering to help pregnant women who are on their own with household work, helping to find a good home in which to place children for adoption, the pro-life movement has demonstrated that we stand for more than merely making abortion illegal. Compare this to NARAL, whose campaign is built around making abortion legal, cheap, and convenient for all; or to Planned Parenthood, which seeks to keep parents uninvolved and uniformed about abortion-related decisions in their daughters’ lives, is reluctant to provide information about alternatives to abortion within their clinics, and generally fails to provide much in the way of post-abortion support groups for women; or perhaps to the defenders of abortion, who inevitably portray children as burdens and hindrances rather than a gifts of joy.
There is a pro-life ministry within the Church, but no equivalent exists in either the religious or the secular world for the pro-choice cause. Nor could such a ministry exist in any but the most crude and rudimentary form: anything more requires not only compassion, but selflessness, and a recognition of the dignity of the mother. For once dignity is denied to one group of humans, in this case the unborn, it can very easily be denied to another—such as women who are troubled after having an abortion. In a recent speech before a pro-life rally in Austin, Fr. Frank Pavone, founder and director of the Priests for Life, asked how it is that we can stand up for the dignity of the poor, or the oppressed, of any other people, if we have already embraced the killing of our own children. The answer, he unequivocally stated, is that we cannot.
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If you found this post helpful, some related posts may be found here:
Warnings and Ignorance (Thirty Minute Musings)
Apologetics and Motivation
35 Years of Roe and Doe
Abortion Rationalizations and Motives
Pro-Life Motives
On Being Pro-Life
Righteous Fear of the Lord and the Pro-Life Movement
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