What About Abortion?

It’s a common occurrence on Catholic Social Media.  When someone mentions an aspect of Catholic Social Justice which is not related to sexuality or abortion, another person will commence criticism of the concern by asking why focus on something so insignificant so long as abortion remains in practice. Moreover, such critic will mention how many abortions they believe are being done every year as a way to indicate why nothing else matter until abortion is stopped. Usually, it will be assumed that the only way to stop abortion is through its criminalization and anyone wanting to try some other means are likewise accused of supporting abortion.

What about abortion? It’s really asked as a way to detract from grave moral problems, indeed, to sideswipe any legitimate moral conversation with gaslighting rhetoric.

When pondering what is being suggested by such an argument, it can become apparent how dangerous it can be. For the argument ends up suggesting moral considerations are to be based upon quantitative measure, that the gravity of the concern is relative in relation to the number of people involved. Quality is reduced to quantity. The more something is done, the more important it is.

Some truly believe this because they have not thought through the rhetoric, and so they repeat it like a mantra wherever they go. Most, however, just want to use it as a “get out moral concern card.”

Racism is prevalent. What about abortion?

Women are suffering from the effects of sexual harassment and rape. What about abortion?

Immigrants, documented and undocumented, are being abused by law enforcement agents. What about abortion?

Police brutality is on the rise. What about abortion?

Climate change is causing ecological problems around the world. What about abortion?

Refugees are being turned away by the United States. What about abortion?

Gun violence is killing our kids. What about abortion?

Poor people who are barely making it and cannot get a job are being told to get a job or die off due to lack of food, shelter, and health care. What about abortion?

What about abortion?

Those who ask this as a way to avoid other moral issues should offer us an explanation as to why they care about abortion in a way which does not imply the need to take care of the other moral concerns as well. If all they give is us the quantity of abortions being done they really give us nothing. By reducing moral concerns to an issue of quantity makes all moral concerns relative and, ultimately, of no concern. We can always take whatever number is given and find ways to add things up to be of greater quantity so as to reduce any quantitative concern to its nihilistic conclusion. We can find things more prevalent than abortion, such as lying, and ask why focus on abortion as long as lying, an intrinsic evil, continues to remain a great threat to society. If it works for abortion, then it works for lying. Moreover, we can look at each particular abortion as a single instance and ask people who are trying to prevent it why they take so much interest in one particular case, when so many others are also going on, which outweigh that one incident. Each particular case is less than the whole, so that if the quantitative concern was valid, we would find ourselves incapable of dealing with particular cases; combine the nothing which is done for each particular case together, we would be able to conclude that nothing should be done. The same inactivity suggested for other injustices in the world will strike back at those engaging “whataboutism” in relation to abortion and the poison will destroy them as well.

We should be concerned about evil, all evils, but we should also realize the concern should be qualitative, and the response should not only be something which we can actually do but also effective. If a particular solution to a problem is only going to cause the problem to get worse, we must reject it; this is why St. Thomas Aquinas did not think prostitution could be made entirely illegal. It is not because he believed in prostitution, but rather, because he thought there were other ways to address it, such as helping the women whose economic situation forced them into prostitution in order to survive. Likewise, when dealing with social evils, we must recognize sometimes we cannot immediately propose making such injustices illegal, for as Thomas believed with prostitution, often such legal solutions make matters worse (as Americans saw with prohibition in the twentieth century). We must find the causes of the evil and rectify them. We must recognize what is possible and what is not possible as we engage such evils; we must recognize how we change the situation for the better instead of making it worse. We must, likewise, recognize the complex social structure which evil develops in order to stay in power, seeing how evil reinforces evil, and we might have to chip away at the simpler, lesser evils first if we want to overcome the greater evil which we are facing.

This is why those who try to divert all discussion of social justice to concerns about abortion end up denying the means by which abortion can and would be properly dealt with; they want to focus on abortion through means which are impossible to enact, and, indeed, would be disastrous in a society which has denied the social safety net which is required to help understand and respect the dignity of life. When racism, sexism, xenophobia, violence, and poverty are on the rise, abortion will also be on the rise; when we show little to no concern about actual human live as it is lived in the world, when we say we believe in the dignity of life, we will not be believed. Our words will sound very hollow indeed.

This is why we must recognize the integral unity of morality, the seamless garment of life, for in this way and this way alone do we truly show we care about life itself. When life is being mistreated, when justice is denied, we must not ignore it. If we want people to believe in the dignity of life, we must first focus on making society act towards others with such dignity.

What about abortion? I really don’t think many who ask this really care about human dignity, and often, don’t really care about abortion. They know it is a rallying cry which distracts people from what needs to be done to change society for the better. They ask this question because they want to excuse themselves from the hard work dealing with real moral quandaries. If they really were so concerned as they say, they would not ask the question; they would realize all of these other issues directly relate to abortion. For the real issue is the dignity of life. Abortion is a symptom of a greater problem. So long as we ignore the real problem, the rampant disregard for humanity all around us, then why should we expect abortion would go away?

[Image=Question in a question in a question by Khaydock (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

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