Now available in Polish at Racjonalista. (Thanks to Malgorzata and her trnaslators. I should have been doing this all along.)
A new advertising campaign has begun in Dublin (h/t to Ophelia over at Butterflies and Wheels, for the link). Sponsored by a group known as “Youth Defence,” the poster campaign has put up posters all around Dublin — like this one:
Some people are very upset:
Some of the posters have been defaced by members of the public angry with their message
And, while we might agree that people should have the right to get their message out, there’s something troubling about the kind of message that Youth Defence is putting up all round Dublin. It’s not true that women’s lives are necessarily torn apart by abortion. Indeed, for many, no matter with what moral gravity they may approach the issue, it comes as a relief.
Youth Defence would have you believe that it’s always alright to force women to make what they consider to be the “right” decision. Trouble is, it’s not a decision then, is it? For instance, on the Youth Defence blog, the claim is made that there are people missing. Here’s their example:
As many of you know, the X case was brought before the Irish courts in 1992. A 14-year old girl’s pregnancy as a result of rape was being ruthlessly exploited in an attempt to introduce abortion in Ireland. The Supreme Court, by a split decision, ruled that the girl, known only as Miss X to protect her identity, could travel to England for an abortion.
Abortion does not reverse a pregnancy, it does not reverse the crime of rape, it is not a cure for depression or other medical conditions – it kills the child and subjects the mother’s body to another act of violence, thus inflicting even more pain and heartbreak on the two innocent victims in the situation. Rape victims need counselling, love and support, not the cold and cruel ‘quick fix’ “solution” of abortion. But this blog is not about the argument of whether or not abortion helps victims of rape, that is a debate for another day, and deserves a blog post of its own, this post is about the one billion people who are missing from our world.
You know those movies where the main character thinks “What if I’d never been born?” and then wakes up the next day to find that nobody knows who he is and he sees what life would have been like without him? Well, we’re living in that kind of parallel universe every day of our lives… there are people missing!
But that’s simply not true. It’s a lie. There isn’t always a better way. They are playing on the idea, which is a real concern in parts of the world where women’s lives are not valued, that in places there are a lot of women missing, because families, for whom daughters are a burden, in patriarchal societies, are making sure that they don’t have female children.
But this is a whole different issue. The “missing women” trope has nothing at all to do with those women, who, after careful consideration (or even careless consideration — it really makes no difference), consider that having a child at this time is not convenient, for any number of reasons. It’s not up to us to decide for others, and this is precisely what Youth Defence is all about. The writer of the post from which I just quoted is Maryanne, and she says:
I’m just a student with a dream, there’s nothing very unusual about that. But my dream affects every person in the world.
Yes, you know what, it does, because she has a dream of control. She wants to fulfil the Vatican dream of making abortion a criminal act in every country in the world, where women will be handcuffed to their beds in the hospital, as they recover from back street abortions. It’s a dream that does not take into account 14-year-old Miss X, who was raped and made pregnant, and who would be forced, by a draconian religious law, to carry her rapist’s “child” to term — and then what?
Maryanne fatuously says:
Abortion does not reverse a pregnancy, it does not reverse the crime of rape, it is not a cure for depression or other medical conditions – it kills the child and subjects the mother’s body to another act of violence, thus inflicting even more pain and heartbreak on the two innocent victims in the situation.
This is truly fatuous nonsense. Of course an abortion reverses a pregnancy. It takes a pregnant woman and makes her non-pregnant. How much more of a reversal can you have? And it is not an act of violence. It is an act which can be done by gentle, caring people, who are concerned for the health of the person who counts here. Blastocysts, embryos, blastocysts: not one of these is a person. The have no hopes or dreams; they have no plans or purposes; they pursue no ends, and expect nothing. They are potential human beings, potential persons, but they are not persons with lives to lose. The women who seek abortions are persons, in that full sense of the word. They have lives and plans and hopes for the future. Should those lives and plans and hopes be allowed to be completely overturned by a rapist’s violent act? No, of course not. How can you be so silly?
This organisation, Youth Defence, even though it makes no acknowledgement of dependence upon the Roman Catholic Church, if it is not funded by or supported by the Roman Catholic Church, it expresses Roman Catholic opinions, it makes the same kind of inhuman demands that the Roman Catholic Church customarily makes. The Roman Catholic Church is not only on record as opposing abortion, it carries out heavy-handed campaigns to make sure that abortion is criminalised in those jurisdictions where it still has the power to influence public decisions. It makes of women’s lives a misery. It would force women to die, instead of having abortions that could save them. It has excommunicated people associated with the abortion of twins from a 9-year-old girl in Brazil! In Phoenix, Arizona, a nun hospital administrator was excommunicated for approving the abortion of a woman whose heart condition would inevitably lead to the death of both woman and child. (And in this case we can consider it a child, because the woman really wanted to have this child. To her it was an expected and wanted child.) This was known, and yet it carried no weight with the male idiot in charge of the diocese. His decision was upheld by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican. These people are dangerous. They care not a whit for individuals and the hopes, plans, fears and anxieties — and their decisions. Their god, they believe, has created a law-bound world, and that law has been revealed to them. They accept no demur from anyone, no matter how exalted, and they expect their will to be submitted to, regardless of the harm to human persons and their lives. We need to say to these religious thugs: Fuck you! Things simply do not work this way! And to the bishops: Don’t have abortions, if you don’t believe in them. But let others decide for themselves in ways that accord with their lives, their hopes and their own conception of how life might be best for them. And to so-called Youth Defence: Be honest. Own up to your religious prejudices. Acknowledge that you are the glove in which the bishops’ mailed fist is raised against all those who question their — and therefore their god’s — authority. There isn’t always a better answer, and even if you believe there is, you have no right to impose it.
Typical religious bullshit that tries to force their dogma on every one else. Your faith tells you not to have an abortion, fine, don’t. But I don’t subscribe to your, or any other faith. Keep your nose out of my business.
A good friend of mine has a sister who got happily pregnant. At some point early in the pregnancy, something was clearly amiss. She had tests done and found the baby was anencephalic. No brain.
She had two choices.
1. Continue with the last 6 months or so pregnancy at some risk to her life. Most likely, the baby would be stillborn, or live only a few minutes to hours outside the womb. There was no hope for any better outcome.
2. Abort the fetus.
She genuinely agonized over the decision before coming to the conclusion that the most-moral, ethical, and humane thing to do would be to have an abortion.
I’m with you, Eric. Fuck each and every person who would in any way deny her that choice.
The billboards imply that abortion leaves women damaged and broken–torn. Well, I had an abortion and it was the right thing to do. And I have never for one moment regretted it. It’s nonsense and folly to say that abortion abuses women. I’m glad I had a choice.
In a post I wrote, I quoted from a letter to the editor. The letter writer’s words are appropriate to the subject of this post:
“Stand up parishioners and shed the shackles of the old virgin men who believe they, better than you, should control your lives.”
http://tinyurl.com/7t4v4ro
I have an opinion of this question also but am concerned that I might have exceeded my quota of and your tolerance for my contrary views. However I’ll give it a shot and hope it doesn’t offend too much. Please let me know Eric when I’ve outstayed my welcome and you’d rather I desisted from voicing my clumsily expressed, and I assume unwelcome, views in future.
The pro-choice/right-to-life argument is something that really throws into relief the difference it makes to live with belief in a God and that we are His creations. To an atheist, a clear-thinking one, there should be no hesitation on such a matter – should there? Since the arrival of a newborn baby would present some difficulty, even if only an inconvenience, to them, why wouldn’t they choose to terminate it before it was born if it was legal to do so, given that evolution is based on survival of the fittest? (I certainly believe btw that atheists have the same conscience that Christians have, it’s explaining these impulses, perhaps rationalising where they come from, that is difficult for them.)
Am I missing something? Why do atheists get involved in justifying the decision in theist terms when they have the law on their side anyway (I’m talking about States where abortion is legal). The matter of whether or not the embryo or foetus is really an individual human seems to me to be unnecessarily treading dangerous ground. Eric’s attempt above demonstrates this. His list of things missing in an unborn – hopes, dreams, plans, purposes, ends, & expectations – might, awkwardly, also apply to newborns.
As a theist, I’d be wondering how God would feel about abortion. My gut feeling, from having spent quite a lot of time with Him lately
, is He’d want to treat each case on its merits. There might be times it would be the right thing to do and others when not. He’d be wanting us to choose right, as always, because He knows that to do otherwise is to bring on ourselves great, long-lasting, remorse and regret, the worse the offence the worse the damage to ourselves. How He’d feel about the rights of the unborn I couldn’t begin to guess. Are they His beloved children? Are they space occupying lesions? I don’t know.
There’s an obvious difference between abortion and euthanasia. Abortion is choosing to end someone else’s life for your benefit. I can’t see God having a problem with anyone’s just wanting to short-cut their own dying to avoid a lot of pain, if they’re going to die soon anyway. If anything I expect He would be relieved to see His child’s suffering finally end, provided they weren’t going to come to a sudden understanding of truth in the time they had left. I guess that is always the problem.
I remember reading, and appreciating greatly, Christopher Hitchens’ brave VF articles on his last days and agonising with him over the question of how much pain-killing medication would be best, whether it might be better for the doctor to accidently give him a little bit too much, as I suspect often happens.
But as a Christian it occurred to me that Hitch’s trip through the furnace of terminal cancer might, where nothing else could, bring him into God’s presence while he still had time to somehow make some sort of preparation for his life in the infinite realm which, according to my belief at least, he was about to go into.
What are the odds of that happening I wonder? A good thief on the cross outcome? I expect the longer we commit ourselves to one set of beliefs and the louder we proclaim their rightness, the less likely it is we’ll change overnight.
Incidentally I remember being once surprised to hear Christopher stating that in his view abortion did involve the killing of a human being and that he unequivocally opposed it except in extraordinary circumstances.
OK – that’s all I’ve got. Thanks for listening.
Controversial subject. I agree with the author, although I see too much subjectivity and emotion.
Thank you Marta…. There was subjectivity and emotion, deliberately, because this kind of thing made me angry. I try to keep emotion to a reasonable level, but this, it seemed to me, warranted a bit of anger, so I let it rip. I promise not to make a habit of it, but, really, the Roman Catholic Church is such a predictable offender when it comes to theocratic nonsense which they impose, by the sheer effect of apparent consensus — since they have so many organisations and can activate them so easily — that I get angry and emotional. This is one of the occasions, and I felt in this case that it was justified, though I am aware of the dangers, and try, for the most part, to express myself with academic restraint.
Antonio…. I have nothing against contrary views per se, and you are welcome to comment, though sometimes your responses do tend to be a wee bit undigested. However, to the case this time:
Find the practice of capitalising pronounds a bit odd. Odder still is the idea that you’ve spent time with “Him”. Guessing that “He’d” want to treat each case on its merits presents a bit of a challenge to you, doesn’t it? How could you know? Spending time with “Him” scarcely qualifies you to speak on “His” behalf, so I assume you are bringing your own guess as to what “on its merits” means in this case. That’s always the problem with religious morality. It usually comes down to justifying your own.
As to the atheists point of view on abortion. Obviously, Hitchens is an exception, but no one said that abortion has no moral weight, even for an atheist. It is after all the termination of a life that could, if allowed to proceed without interference, be one of us. And most women in this situation take the decision with appropriate moral seriousness. But it is a matter of women’s rights, since no one else has the right to interfere with what they do to their bodies.
Here is where Hitchens is simply wrong, in my view. He believed that abortion is wrong because it is the termination of a human life. But that is only true if by ‘human life’ you mean living human tissue. A human life is actually much more complicated than that. The American ethicist, James Rachels, distinguishes, rightly, in my view, between biological and personal life (hence my inclusion of plans, projects, hopes and fears — which a personal perquisites). Does this have the “awkward” result that a newborn baby is at a disadvantage when it comes to the possession of personal characteristics? Yes it does, but not for long. Clearly distinguishable personal characteristics appear early, and independently existing human beings have another characteristic — namely independent futures. Nothing needs to be done to the mother vis-a-vis decisions about a baby, so keeping a baby alive is not an intrusion into the mother’s life. The fact, however, that babies are marginal persons in the respect you consider means that, in cases where the baby is seriously defective, and only has the chance of a greatly reduced quality of life for a relatively short period, it may make sense either not to feed or hydrate it, and allow it to die, or to actively kill it, in order to minimise suffering. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer’s book Should the Baby Live? is relevant reading here.
Another consideration. Some human beings never develop the mental and other abilities to a level that other animals achieve. It seems, on the face of it, that, whether or not we think it appropriate to terminate their lives, the fact that other animals do have intelligence and sensitivity higher than some humans does seem to make a case for respecting their lives with at least as much diligence as we would pay to humans with similar abilities. The days of human exceptionalism ended with Darwin.
I suggest you read The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), specifically chapter 12 “Nice guys finish first”, to understand the evolution of empathy and altruism. Note, particularly, the last sentence of that chapter: “…even with selfish genes at the helm,nice guys can finish first.”
The difficulty that atheists have with the question of conscience is why Christians (among others) think that a trait that is commonly seen in humans (and some other animals) can only be explained by recourse to a supernatural cause.