In this series I am addressing four prominent and urgent moral battles of our times. These are battles that churches cannot ignore as they pertain to fundamental human concerns– concerns about human freedom, love, dignity and justice. In the first post I discussed the growing sense of totalitarianism in what is now a very politicized scientific community. In the last post I argued that the church must take a stand against LGBTQ+ ideology and reaffirm the God-given design for human sexuality and sanctity of marriage. Here, I will talk about the continuous “legal” murder of the unborn, perhaps the greatest moral atrocity since the Holocaust.
Silence is Violence
In an incisive essay on the destruction of black lives, Alveda King and Evan Musgraves highlight the hypocrisy of those who claim to speak on behalf of black bodies, yet are noticeably silent on the targeted slaughter of unborn black bodies:
One cannot address the sin of racism in the United States without addressing the issue of abortion, specifically the ways in which abortion has affected the black community. Unfortunately, those who talk most about the presence of racism in American society often ignore the gruesome reality of abortion.
King and Musgraves, “Little Black Lives Matter: The National Covenant and The Right to Be Born” in Race and Covenant, 161
Of course it is not just silence on abortion in black communities that is disconcerting. It is the allegiance of groups like Black Lives Matter to the cause of abortion that is egregious:
Movements such as Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March not only ignore abortion but actively promote “a women’s right to choose.”
King and Musgraves, 161
The authors go on to describe the harrowing account of Margaret Sanger’s vision for a pure society and the founding of Planned Parenthood (originally the American Birth Control League) as the means to instantiate that society. Sanger’s embrace of eugenics, around the time social Darwinism was taking hold in pre-war Germany, laid a roadmap for an American future that would have happily excluded black bodies from that future. Sanger’s way forward was not terribly unlike Hitler’s roadmap for a Jew-free Germany (albeit a bit more sanitized and indirect in its approach).
In ‘Birth Control and Racial Betterment,’ Sanger succinctly laid out her theory of the usefulness of birth control, including abortion, for eugenic purposes. Sanger began by arguing that both advocates for birth control and eugenicists ‘are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.’
King and Musgraves, 164
King and Musgraves further point out that although one might think that Sanger’s use of the term race in “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” means only the human race broadly, Sanger nevertheless did not hold to the equality of all races (165). And this was at a time when the idea of race as a biological feature was prevalent:
But this does not mean Sanger believed in the absolute equality of all races. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that Sanger targeted the African American community, specifically poor African Americans, for her birth control project. For example, in 1939, Sanger started the Negro Project, the aim of which was to promote her birth control ideology in poor black communities in the South.
King and Musgraves, 166
Even more nefarious was Sanger’s method for advancing the Negro Project, namely using the black church to promote her life-negating doctrine:
Part of her public relations strategy for promoting this project was to ‘hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.’
King and Musgraves, 166 (in a 1939 letter from Sanger to Dr. C.J. Gamble)
Sanger even proposed her plan to KKK leaders at the time who, like her, saw blacks as “the great problem of the South.” But there is an abundance of evidence as to Sanger’s agenda and her actual racism (in the classical sense of the word). I need not rehearse it all here. Further, although it is bad enough that Sanger’s eugenic vision of a perfected future society, the vision that gave rise to the modern practice of abortion, was also a racist vision, it is not only abortion’s racist origins that matter. It is Sanger’s, and the resulting contemporary pro-abortion, view on life in general that is rotten to the core.
But the racist origins of abortion in America cannot be passed over in silence. Silence on abortion, especially abortion in black communities in America, is no different than the German Bürger who kept silent as cattle cars rumbled through their villages carrying off their Jewish neighbors. Churches must speak out on these issues if they are going to be committed to real justice. Those who fail to speak on behalf of the most defenseless in society, can hardly claim the moral high ground when they speak on behalf of those who at least have a fighting chance in that same society given their matured physical, intellectual and moral capacities for self-determination and self-improvement. There exists a hierarchy of needs in all human societies and the unborn are clearly the most needy of all.
Man In Authority Over Man
While Sanger and pro-abortionists may argue they are only trying to improve the quality of life, what becomes clear very quickly are two fundamental distortions of the human soul: first, is the presumption of authority over life and death itself. In making man the ultimate arbiter of what counts as human life and who and who does not deserve to live based on malleable and relative understandings of what it means to live “qualitatively,” human beings literally put themselves in the place of God, the creator and sustainer of all life.
Sanger’s eugenics (as well as the eugenics of Hitler’s scientists) placed human society in the role of governing humanity at every level of existence. Displeased with humanity, Sanger sought to perfect it in her own way and guide it to her own preferred ends. It just so happens that for her those ends excluded the existence of black people. Perhaps today this white-washed dystopian future would be more difficult to promote than in Sanger’s day (at least openly). And certainly we can thank God that conditions as such have changed. However, that some type of intentional, programmatic exclusion from the human family is being advanced is evident now in places like Iceland. Human beings simply cannot stop in trying to dehumanize some part of the human population.
Fortunately, the governance of the universe and all the contents therein are not in our hands alone. While we participate in the governance of the universe via concursive acts of free will, we are also subject to God’s providential plan and design for the universe. As much horror as human beings cause through the exercising of their freedom, they can never actually alter God’s moral order or design for human creatures. What Roman Catholic theologians have termed “natural law” will always reestablish itself in the course of human events. Or, as one Protestant theologian puts it, “ontology will always trump autonomy.”
Moreover, our free will itself is given to us, it is created causation. Being something created, free will exists subject to the divine law that presides over that creation. However, there is real misuse of created causal freedom, and each misuse of it (what we commonly call “sin”) is a repudiation of what God has intended for us to be or to become.
To try to engineer human destiny without reference to God, as Sanger and Hitler (and Marx) desired to do, is to violate the divine Nature and divine Purpose. It is the ultimate expression of self-deception and self-destruction. The main difference in the destruction that Sanger unleashed through her promotion of abortion, compared to that of Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot, is that the human devastation of abortion is less visible due to the size and location of the humans being destroyed as opposed to those gassed in Birkenau or shot on the killing fields of Cambodia.
Therefore, unless it can be shown, which it cannot, that a fetus is not human life, then any intentional damage done to a fetus is an aggression against the divine law of the universe. This defiance against the purpose and structure of God’s universe, which we all are aware of, regardless of how we try to suppress that awareness, reminds us that human life is sacred and inviolable. One need not be a Christian to know this. One need not be religious at all. Nor must one have had an abortion to know it, although those who have had abortions will, unfortunately, know it more intimately than those who have not.
Further, because we know intuitively, and through scientific data and rational reflection, that any act of harm against a fetus is an act of harm against an inviolable and sacred creature, we also know that any “quality of life” argument is ultimately empty in that it either is self-defeating (causing actual harm in order to prevent only potential harm) or narcissistic (causing actual harm in order to preserve one’s own privileged position). With regard to the latter, the killing of an unwanted person for the sake of preserving one’s own privilege in life, Sanger is explicit about her acceptance of this position:
In My Fight for Birth Control, Sanger’s callousness toward infants, born and unborn, was on full display. In recounting how she came to her pro-contraception and pro-abortion views, Sanger described seeing a baby with eczema born to a large family being thrown by the father into the snow, left to die. Sanger then said, ‘I remember having keen sympathy with that man!…Desperate for want of sleep and quiet, his nerves overcame him, and out of the door and into the snow the nuisance went!’ Sanger justified abortion and infanticide by arguing that these two acts were basically self-defense against a greater crime, the ‘violence’ and ‘slow murder’ of ‘involuntary motherhood.’
King and Musgraves, 165
While the potentially harsh conditions of the man who abandoned his infant to succumb to death may attenuate his moral transgression and allow us to empathize with his decision, Sanger’s reference to the child as “a nuisance” and a type of parasite upon the mother, show the second great distortion of the soul: the hatred of all things other than one’s self. This is the most fundamental reason why man cannot be in ultimate authority over men.
Hating Ourselves And Others
All sin is a rejection of what we are by God’s design. What comes after that rejection is usually evil in the form of self-centered narcissism. Milton speculated (correctly in my view) about Satan’s fall from grace as first and foremost a rejection of his own finitude, i.e., of being a created being at all. As such, in dialogue with another angel, Satan tries to convince himself that he has always been, that he is not created but eternal, and eternally so by his own power:
That we were formed then sayest thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learned: who saw
When this creation was? rememberest thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening powerExcerpt From: John Milton. “Paradise Lost.” Apple Books.
Displeased with being a creature Satan’s self-deception begins. As fallen human beings we mimic Satan’s response to God, angry at being made we first desire to be our own god. Then, assuming this false identity, we look around us and try to “fix” the rest of creation, not as stewards assigned a cultivating task by the Master of the house, but as disgruntled occupants upset about what has been given us. Simon de Beauvoir, one of the mothers of feminist theory, encapsulated this attitude of trying to manipulate nature to bend to our will:
The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation: for example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it; by contrast, an organ of slight biological importance like the clitoris plays a primary role in it. Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.
from The Second Sex, quoted in Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 256
From this quote alone we can see two things in de Beauvoir’s thinking: first, that the subject defines what it is, not “nature” and most certainly not nature’s Creator. In our hatred of what we are as a given self, we must now self-create or self “re-create.” The givens of nature must be reclaimed, they must succumb to man’s will.
Second, it is clear that if the subject defines herself, she can pick and choose which parts of her body to affirm and which to deny. For de Beauvoir the clitoris (the pleasure part of the sexed body) is to be affirmed while the structure of the ovum, (the part that can cause a manifold variety of discomfort and pain) is to be rejected or, at least, marginalized. And this is exactly what she proposes in her views on reproduction (a term that is itself a narcissistic twist on what is actually “pro-creation.”)
Pregnancies, de Beauvoir argues, can be rationally integrated into a woman’s life. But, the reason for pregnancies is clear: because children too can bring pleasure to a woman. The conquest of nature by the human person in this case includes the conquest of the female reproductive organs, and the conquest of the reproductive organs has as its goal self-centered pleasures. Abortion is a means for us, women in particular, to fix the infernal creation that has been given us, while still reaping some of its benefits, like seeing cute babies coo.
This very “white” way of thinking about nature, i.e., dominating over it as opposed to participating in its mystery, destroys the inherent dignity of “the other” in its pain versus pleasure calculus. The other, here the baby, is not seen as the natural result of a pro-creative act, an act that mirrors God’s own creation ex nihilo and brings us most closely in union with that communicated attribute. Instead the baby is instrumental in bringing about more pleasure for the parents. Thus, if it appears that a baby will not fulfill that function, of bringing more pleasure than pain, the baby can simply be eliminated. This is, after all, what seems to be the case in Iceland’s genocide against Downs babies.
This is the perennial dynamic of sin: self-hatred followed by hatred of the other. It is for this reason, that the Church must always stand against abortion, in every context and at all times, for abortion is what philosophers call an “intrinsic evil.” There are no mitigating circumstances that can make abortion right, because not only does it destroy “the other” but it advances the self-destruction of the mother who chooses to do so while further reinforcing the grand societal lie that man is master over himself and the created order.
Are There Really No Attenuating Circumstances?
The denial of dignity to another has no attenuating circumstances, with the possible exception of cases where the life of the mother is also at stake. For here you have a true moral dilemma as there are two beings with inherent dignity whose lives are at risk. There are famous thought experiments, usually called “trolley experiments” that try to address genuine dilemmas like this. Other than that, however, there are no conditions which justify disregarding the inherent dignity of God’s greatest creation: man.
That said, we all know that in the concreteness of our broken reality, there are circumstances which give rise to tremendously difficult moral decisions. While those circumstances never outweigh the value of an unborn life or justify the killing of that life, we understand that some women have faced incredible stress when it comes to pregnancy. Poverty, stigma, and the cruelty of wicked men have often driven mothers to do the unthinkable.
Moderate pro-choice advocates will usually highlight those cases of incest or rape that seem to mitigate the immorality of the choice to abort. However emotionally powerful some of those cases may be, the act of abortion itself is still not justified, even if it becomes more understandable. There are all kinds of morally complex situations in this life that while not making an evil good or a wrong right, nevertheless, make the decisions quite understandable. As such they invoke our deepest sense of empathy and compassion. These are not Spartan women exposing the weak to die. Fortunately, Christianity has seen to it that we no longer live in that kind of world.
Women who have felt they must do the unthinkable of violating the most sacred aspect of their femininity will receive compassion and empathy from any God-fearing church. That there must be help for those who have committed the act of abortion goes without question. And that help must be genuine. But to be genuine it must be taken into account the full gravity of the immoral act. Redemption, for all of us, only comes as we move through pain and suffering and not around it. And all pain and suffering, or most of it, is usually comprised of evil that has been done to us and evil that we ourselves have done. It is vital to remind women who have had abortion that genuine help is out there.
I say these things, of course, as a man. However, nothing has (nor I doubt will) ever convince me that the mother involved in an abortion is not in some ways damaged even more than the child aborted. But nothing is beyond redemption in this life, so long as one fixes his or her eyes on He Who is the Redeemer of the world. And in recognizing Who is the Redeemer of the created order, we can undo the curse upon us and, in doing so, give up our vanity in trying to fix creation ourselves.
Conclusion: Every Baby is a Universe Unto Itself
There is an old Jewish saying, I think, that goes something like this: “Every human being is a universe unto themself.” When we consider the sheer complexity of the human person, what with all her longings, desires, fantasies (some good, some not so good), her dreams and hopes, we cannot help but see that each of us is made in the image of a divine Creator. The mystery of every person is unfathomable. It is incumbent upon the Church to keep this always in the mind of our nation, at the forefront of our thoughts.
The unborn child is not a means for parents to experience their own fulfillment. Although, to some degree, parents will be more fulfilled people upon having and raising children (or, if adopting, just raising them). Further, unborn children are not just pre-sentient biological putty. While there is a more robust metaphysical argument to be had here, it is now clear to almost all that at the moment of conception a new life, a new “universe” is in the making. It is a human universe.
Finally, children are not only as good as what they might inevitably produce for society. Arguments that rely on whether or not we might have “killed the next Einstein” are consequentialist in nature. As such, they do not sufficiently account for the innate value of human persons. Dignity is not acquired, it cannot be gained or lost. Dignity is, and we must act in accordance with it. If there is a church left in countries like Iceland, which it seems there is not, then to not speak out against what is going on there is an affront to human dignity and an enabling of genocide.
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