Real Stories

Posted by on June 5, 2009

As has been mentioned in the comments, Andrew Sullivan has been posting a series of actual stories from people’s experiences of facing into the difficulties of pregnancy and abortion. Whatever your position on these issues, these stories bring it home. The tangible reality of this whole nexus of painful and tender issues should not be ignored in the name of ethical flag-waving, as sometimes tends to be the case for people on all sides of the issue.

Here are all the posts so far:

Current Events, Ethics

9 Comments.

  1. kim fabricius kim fabricius June 5, 2009 at 11:52 am

    Since I read it ten years ago, I have always found the chapter on abortion in Richard B. Hays’ magnificent The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) exemplarily theologically level-headed. Of course Hays easily demolishes the discourse of “rights”; equally, however, he dismantles as quite unbiblical the notion of the “sacredness of lfe”. But, even further, he writes: “It is inappropriate to approach the issue of abortion by asking, ‘When does human life begin?’ or ‘Is the fetus a “person”?’ Such questions are unanswerable, both from a scientific point of view and from the biblical evidence. There is no basis in Scripture for answering – or indeed even asking – such questions.” But Hays then adds: “They are also exceedingly dangerous questions if they seek to justify abortion by defining marginal cases out of the human race. This is, for obvious reasons, a bad precedent to set. Jesus’ persistent strategy was, on the contrary, to define the marginal cases in.”

    This anti-abortion paradigm of defining the marginal case in seems to me to be not only right, but also a useful point of contact (if you like) for the purpose of moral apologetics, particularly as the woman is rare indeed who, pregnant, regards an abortion as simply the cosmetic removal of an inconvenient cluster of cells. And, ironically, even pro-choicers will look askance at pregnant women who smoke or drink excessively.

    However the thing is that, inevitably, if uncomfortably, even if you make the case for the marginal case, you are going to get marginal cases of the marginal case, of the kind that Sullivan sensitively draws to our attention. And then, further, particularly in a society where the concept of the common good is otiose, ousted by radical libertarian individualism, inevitably, if tragically, what Rowan Williams calls “moral slippage” sets in, the slippage “between thinking compassionately about exceptional cases and losing the sense of a normative position.” And that’s where we’re at now – at best. Is there a way to retrieve the normative position?

    The language of “murder”, let alone state sanctioned mass murder, will get us nowhere, not only because it generates more heat than light but because it simply does not ring true. The vast majority of people, including Christians, simply do not react the same way to an abortion as they do to the killing of a child, and I am not convinced that this asymmetry is simply the result of cultural habit or moral stupefaction. It thus strikes me as semantically and ethically obtuse to speak of abortion statistics and the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide, in the same breath.

    Nor do I think that the holy grail for Christians is the overturning of Roe v. Wade or, here in the UK, the repeal of the 1967 Abortion Act (and the latter just ain’t going to happen). The real issue here is not public policy, it is the ethos of death itself which is the soil of public policy, which includes not only abortion but also the legitimation of capital punishment and war – indeed the valorisation of war. Thus is Williams himself “genuinely puzzled by political parties, governments or churches that appear to find a greater moral problem in abortion than in the manufacture, marketing and use of indiscriminate weaponry.”

    I submit that as long as such violence is thinkable – and thinkable as necessary, even redemptive – among Christians themselves, even the normative case against abortion will be not only morally inconsistent but morally unintelligible. Judgement begins in the household of God. Pacifism, as I have suggested before, goes all the way down, or else violence, in one form or another, will always find a way to rise to the top. As it is, because nonviolence, not only in the US but quintessentially in the US, is the great unthinkable, the only way to be consistently anti-abortion is to be foundationally anti-American.

  2. Michael Gorman Michael Gorman June 5, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    The comments by Kim and Doug are right on target and consistent with points made not only by Richard Hays but also by Stanley Hauerwas in various places and by Ann Loar Brooks and me. In Holy Abortion? A Theological Critique of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (a 2003 Wipf and Stock book), we show the parallels in various approaches to both abortion and war.

  3. kim fabricius kim fabricius June 6, 2009 at 12:45 am

    You guys are very kind. I’m not sure how I can expand the comment. Geez, I felt guilty enough about posting such a lengthy reflection in the first place (it’s 650 words)! You may, Halden, by all means translate it from comment-slot to post if you like, though I confess to having already posted it at “Connexions” (after the initial feedback here from Doug, Nathan, and Michael – a “shucks” moment) – where it has so far met with a deafening silence. I’m too IT-ignorant to do links! Up to you.

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