Notice the phrasing in my question. It’s not, why should Christians support abortion, but rather, why support the right to abortion?
Because if we get real technical about it, then ideally, with a heavy emphasis on ideal, we should oppose all medical procedures. A perfect world would not have hospitals. A perfect world would not have illness, nor disease, nor anything else like that.
If you talk to any woman who’s had an abortion then you’ll know that it’s not exactly a fun thing. There’s a lot of edgy and contrarian liberal feminists who pretend as if abortions are fun or whatever in some misguided attempt to anger their party political rivals, completely forgetting that this is a real issue that affects real human beings.
Personally I’d categorise abortion as one of those things that is more necessary than good, like radiation treatment. Bombarding the human body with radiation in an effort to cure cancer is, in my opinion, not so much the height of medical technology as it is a desperate gambit to combat an illness which we cannot treat in any other way. I think a thousand years from now, doctors will look at radiation treatment in the same way we look at leeches.
Because technically speaking leeches have medical merit, it’s just that we’ve advanced a lot since then. This is how I see abortion. It can really only be argued against when held up against an ideal. A very romanticised view of the world we live in, and the consequences of such a world.
There is a lot of conservative fearmongering about the dangers of abortion, and in fact my ex-wife, who is a qualified physician and is currently a medical researcher told me about some of the very graphic mishaps that can occur with a botched abortion. But I would turn this argument on its head, and say that it is actually another reason to favor the right to abortion.
The word used by doctors for one of the more common procedures is scraping. They scrape the genetic tissue off of the ovarian wall (I think, not a doctor, but it involves scraping anyhow). Do you see why I think doctors of the future might regard this as primitive? I think I speak on behalf of many women when I say that we all yearn for the days in the future when scraping is replaced with zapping, or something to that effect.
Possibly, maybe firing a medical laser beam into the human vagina is not as comforting of an idea as I’ve made it out in my head. Their body their choice I suppose.
But anyhow, about the scraping. So one problem that can occur with the scraping is that, somehow, and I don’t exactly understand how but I reiterate a physician told me this, but somehow, you end up having your entrails pulled out through your genitalia. That’s not ideal. That’s a bit of a mishap.
Under clinical conditions, this is rare, obviously not all doctors are sober but for the most part this doesn’t happen.
But do you know where it does happen? It happens with backalley abortions. It happens outside of clinical conditions. It happens when the attending physician knows how to conduct an abortion from watching youtube tutorials as opposed to going to a medical school.
The Christian argument against abortion is an idealist argument, you can make the exact same argument against any medicine. In the perfect world there would be no abortions, no surgeries, no pills or medication, it would all be managed by miracles.
Sadly though we do not have a miracle God, we do not have a magic genie God. We do not have the God of wishing wells or oil lamps. We have a stoic God. We have a watchmaker God. We have a God who made a universe, and gave us a manual on how to live in such a universe, and then gave us the freedom to do with this as we please. We have a wonderful God in this sense, a God who, in the most radical way, has faith in us.
Not many people think about that, how God gave us free will, that’s an act of faith. How God didn’t want some kind of existential dollhouse of beings of appeasement or entertainment, how we are not mere magical wind up toys for God’s amusement, but God rather has faith in us just as we have faith in God.
That’s pretty amazing in my opinion. And it shows that we have a God of compassion, a God of rights. Granted, Stoic rights are a bit different from the postmodern idea of anything goes, and how every half cocked whim and impulse is some kind of Bohemian act of genius behavior.
I do think it is nourishing for people to practice temperance, and discipline, and introspection. To show restraint and to find direction, because the most oppressive existence in my opinion is the existence of impulses. What separates us from cockroaches is our ability to refrain.
What defines us as individuals is not what we do, but what we don’t do. People who truly fulfil themselves are people who turned down millions of choices and focused on one thing they were passionate about, in a weird way, freedom is about these boundaries.
And I think that’s true about sex as well, everything is good in moderation. But I also don’t think we should punish people who are excessive, and we certainly shouldn’t do so by forcing them to have back alley abortions. That seems barbaric to me. Plus, a lot of people who get abortions are perfectly Stoic, they just had bad luck.
It doesn’t say much about who someone is, anyone can end up in such a situation, especially in a society of austerity and precarity, in which people live on means measured by the passage of not months, nor years, but weeks. If you have just enough to make it through the rent cycle, how is there room for a child? If you have just enough to feed yourself, how is there food for two?
I do not think it is very compassionate to condemn a child to hunger and poverty. Two things I knew in my own childhood. I do not think it is good to condemn anyone, child or adult, to hunger pains and starvation. I have starved, sometimes when I lived in poverty, I could go a whole week without food.
I know what it’s like to have your stomach eating itself, to have your insides fill up with bile and bacteria as your immune system declines.
The best meal I have ever eaten was a plain baguette, a fuet, and apple cider. Very plain foods by European standards, and do you know why it was so good? Why it was better than proper restaurant quality meals? Why it is the most memorable explosion of sensations and scents and flavor and dare I say ecstasy that I have ever had the privilege to enjoy?
Because the proverb rings true: Hunger is the best spice. Even if I become senile in old age, that memory, that simple joy, will be burned into my mind forever.
So who are we to condemn people to learn this lesson? Who am I to force a child into such a circumstance? Who am I to hide from the harsh reality, behind a false promise of a perfect world?
What compassionate person, what person who professes God’s love, can in an earnest sense proclaim that hunger, precarity, poverty and foster care is something we have the right to impose upon others?
I also disagree with the notion of murder, that abortion is murder and that life begins at conception. Because fundamentally, this is heresy. This is a fatalist argument, and theosophy completely contradicts this. There is no fatalism, God made us the stewards of the Earth, the Earth is ours to tend. We may reap its fruits, and live in balance, we may become Stoic and disciplined and live within our means, we may choose between being the sacrificial lamb, and the gluttonous beast. Nothing stops us except for ourselves.
God did not prescribe Hitler, or Caesar Augustus, God did not prescribe the slave trade or the plague. God did not prescribe the circumstances as produced by our actions, whether it is the negligence which caused the plague, or the imperiousness of Adolf Hitler. These were the deeds of humanity, and we are not God’s dollhouse, and nothing we do is fatalistic.
We can destroy the Earth, we can maintain it for generations to come. We can endow it with love and compassion, or we can ruin it by our own lesser impulses, the choice has always been ours, and pretending God is going to step in, that God is going to turn the universe into a dollhouse, is a dangerous and fanatical notion.
God can guide is with wisdom, God can explain the laws of the world, God can answer our prayers and deliver prophecy, but what we do with this has always been our choice. The spirit and the body has always been a thing of two realms. The spirit does not force our actions, it merely makes us regret them.
And since this is indeed the case, how can a thing which is bereft of choice, a thing which is bereft of thought, and reason, and spirit, be a thing which is alive? Only in fatalism is this true.
Only in the prescribed notion of a holy plan, in this God of perfect worlds, this God that tells us to stay at home and let the powers that be prosper without question or scrutiny, this convenient God that seems to always make room for kings and emperors and crimes against humanity, does life begin at conception.
To anyone else, to anyone who believes in the holy gospel however, life begins at life.
This is why, while I am acutely aware of the many perils which abortion entails, I still support it. Because all medicine is perilous, and we should not fault the surgeon for the blood they spill. Their work is still holy, and they are healing the sick.
Perhaps in a perfect world where every child is welcome, where poverty and misery is a distant memory, in a perfect world where pregnant women aren’t neglected and mistreated, where single mothers aren’t persecuted and shunned, one could argue that as long as we look after someone, they owe the foetus 9 months of what would in such a circumstance be mere inconvenience. If we made it our collective duty to care for children, from cradle to grave, then I think it is a perfectly valid topic to revisit.
But until such a status quo exists, until compassion is a sincere thing that embodies every faucet of life, rather than to be twisted into a bludgeon with which you abuse vulnerable women, it is simply folly.
If you want to morally admonish abortion, if you want to call it murder, then fine, do so. But do not point the finger at the blameless individual. Point it at the government, at the school system, at the landlords and the bankers and the creditors who make this world a cruel and hostile one.
Accept the true Stoic reality here, how the abortions are inevitable, question is who you blame. A social order that is callous and unforgiving, especially to motherhood, rather than individuals who struggle with one of life’s hardest choices.
If God compels you to beat down the downtrodden rather than to rebel against the emperor, then you have misunderstood God. Christ was the crucified, not the crucifier. To put the poor into conditions where they are forced to suffer is to inflict upon the same same stigmata that drew the blood of Christ. Only an imperial Roman would kick the downtrodden in such a shameful way.
And you are better than that. God inspires you to be more. To make the tough choices, and to walk the longer path.
