So what? If my mom had a headache the night I was conceived, I wouldn’t be here either.
My mom had a miscarriage in 1968. If she had carried the baby to term and had given birth in ’69, it’s certain I would not be here, because my parents would not have wanted another child so soon. So I owe my life to the early termination of a pregnancy.
But again, why does any of that matter? A million things could have happened to prevent my existing. It's futile to dwell on the what-haves, near-misses and might-have-beens. Once I emerged into the world, I became a person—not in some Platonic, image-of-God way, but by my importance to family, community and society. By joining the whirl (and whorl) of existence.
I also find offensive the idea that parents of special-needs children have some special right to comment on the morality of abortion. The dynamic is the same whether the child is born healthy or sick, conventionally formed or not; once in the world, the infant joins the community of man. There is no cosmic symbolism to the birth of a special-needs child; this child is loved for who they are, like any other child.
Worst of all is the notion that mothers who sacrifice their lives on behalf of an unborn child are nobler, more saintly, than the rest. There is a Catholic saint, Gianna Beretta Molla, who was canonized for her refusal to save her life by having surgery that would, as an unintended consequence, end the life of her first-term fetus. She eventually died after giving birth, leaving behind a husband and four children.
Here we have a sacrifice on behalf of an idea—that of the inviolability of a zygote implanted on the placenta—taking precedence over the prerogatives of the born. Her choice was truly not “of this world” because it put a theory of personhood above the actuality of personhood, and turned the suffering of the body into a signifier of a higher cause (what could be more Catholic than that!). The mother-to-be becomes mortal vessel for the divine spark. Perhaps this is best understood as the dehumanization of a woman as tradeoff for the humanization of the embryo.
Believing that people are formed in the word and by the world means believing that the world matters; it is not just a symbol or staging ground for some higher or future purpose. Each one of us is here because of a series of dynamics, adaptations and choices stretching back millions of years; not random, but beautiful. This includes the choice of whether and how our parents decided to get pregnant and have a baby.
2 comments:
Read an interesting essay by orthodox Catholic apologist Sherif Girgis refuting the pro-choice position of Princeton philosopher Elizabeth Harman. Harman argues that, while fetuses gain moral standing due to their achieving consciousness in the future (though they have not yet done so), the act of abortion prevents the eventuality of consciousness, cancelling out moral objections. Girgis takes the position that, as human fetuses, the unborn are conscious creatures in their essential nature regardless of whether they live to achieve self awareness.
I am especially interested in Girgis’ rejection of Cartesian dualism and they way he uses it to argue for the inviolability of the fetus, which has relevance to the argument I’m making in the blog post above. Basically, he argues that because humans are formed *in* the world, our bodily nature is essential to our humanness, so conception—when taken as the beginning of physical growth on the earthly plane—creates and confirms our humanity, realized and literally embodied from the time we start to grow in the womb.
The problem with his argument is that our humanness comes not only from being *in* the world, but from being *of* the world. In other words, it is not just physical existence, but our position as part of the community of man—loved and loving, essential to society and the social relations that define us—that creates our humanness. Human relationships make us what we are; as philosophers have asserted, the “me” of me does not reside within my sack of bones but is created and exists in the dynamic between myself and the world I live in.
Embryos have the potential to be sentient, it is true, but are not human in any real sense until they emerge into the world. This is why born humans are humans, regardless of their physical or mental status. Despite what Girgis implies in his essay, people do not mourn miscarriages the way they would mourn the death of a toddler. Nor should they.
Read Girgis' essay here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/08/19891/
Another example of Girgis’ way of thinking is found in an opinion piece by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “Among the Abortion Extremists,” from April 2018. Referring to fetuses, Douthat argues that everyday liberalism is “muddled... by a failure to imagine oneself as all of us once were: tiny and dependent and hidden, and yet still essentially ourselves.“
Ultimately this line of reasoning comes down to a belief in our immutable souls. To quote a Bible verse often cited by anti-abortionists, “Before I formed you in he womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” Our essential nature is given to us by God and exists apart and away from the shaping dynamics of the world. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is a dangerous way to took at our relationship to the reality which forms and sustains us as a species.
Post a Comment