Social Ethics: Abortion

Hm, well I am anti-abortion, but you are braver than I posting about it on Facebook. I wouldn't even try. Many of my friends are pro-life, but my pro-choice friends are about 10000 times more passionate about their opinion. To a large extent, it's been made into a feminist issue, which adds a lot of emotion to the debate, and also makes it a bit politically incorrect to disagree with the pro-choice position because it's seen as being anti-woman or devaluing women's lives in favor of their role as mothers. I don't agree with the pro-choice arguments, but I can understand the reason for them. In many ways, the pro-choice position is the natural result of the modern direction our thinking as a culture has taken.

This is such a complicated issue, I could write a whole essay right now. To put it really simply, I think that we have devalued both life in general and motherhood. Being a mother is something you do for personal pleasure. It's not seen as necessary, honorable, admirable, or important in any way to the overall society. The fact that you are producing and shaping the future of humanity means nothing. Parenthood is a selfish act that has nothing to do with anyone else. This is a very dangerous thought trend, and the general acceptance of abortion is just another step in that path. My fear is that the end result is a society where mothers don't matter at all, where children are products and having a kid when you're not ready is no different from buying a car when you know you can't make the payments. Young single mother in need? Too bad, you should have had an abortion.

On the other hand, perhaps the larger issue is that we no longer consider life to be sacred- not just unborn children, but even ourselves. We do care about people because we are capable of compassion, and because we still generally see other people as "one of us", but we don't see anyone or anything as sacred. Many of my friends are truly astounded that I don't consider an unborn child to be the possession of the mother. We no longer understand that life cannot be quantified. We refuse to accept that anything is not an object to be used. We have decided to trade our divinity and become consumers instead.

If life is sacred, then life must be respected absolutely, without question, regardless of situation. If life is not sacred, then we as a society must decide the values of things and the standards of behavior. We can decide today that you matter as soon as you're born, or that you matter in the third trimester, but we can decide tomorrow that there is a different requirement. The thing is, there can't be a secular moral absolute. If we don't believe in the sacred, we can't believe in right and wrong. To quote Dostoyevsky, "if God does not exist, everything is permitted".

Anyway, I hope this makes some sense- I tend to be all over the place when I try to explain my thoughts on these things. Abortion is just the "tip of the iceberg" so to speak. I took a philosophy class last semester where every single person in the class other than me decided without even having to think about it that it would be ok to kill one or a few innocent people to save a larger number of people. Just another demonstration that lives are thought of as quantifiable things, and that without sacred value, there is no difference between having a life lost because of factors beyond our control and intentionally destroying it. I think that attitude leads to a lot more problems than any of us realize.

On the other hand

Having explained my moral/spiritual/philosophical thoughts on this issue, in terms of practical action, I don't actually think our main concern should be legislation against abortion. Pro-choice women have a point when they say "you're not stopping abortion, you're just making it less safe". I do not believe in a society where legislation creates morality, and if I could snap my fingers and make all abortion illegal right now, I would have achieved nothing but turning millions of people with no violent intentions into criminals.

Practically, our efforts should first go toward creating a society where mothers are valued and taken care of. If I am going to insist that a woman preserve the life of her baby, I feel that I am responsible for contributing to a society where she will not feel that doing so will put her in a desperate situation. If we do not want to allow abortion, then we must also not allow mothers who are not able to care for themselves or their children because their situation in life is not ideal.

Spiritually, we must do what we can to encourage a view of life and of all creation as sacred. I have no idea how that can be done, but it's the only solution I can see for many of the issues in our society.