The recent midterm elections and the hysterical furor after the Dobbs overturning of Roe make clear: abortion is the defining conflict of our time, of the last 50 years and the next. No other issue compares. In our history only slavery rivals it in moral gravity.
Do you know anyone who would disapprove of: low crime and gun violence? reduced inflation and unemployment? lessened global warming and protection of our environment? adequate but not extravagant safety network for the needy? a controlled but welcoming immigration process? support and accountability for police?
Of course not! We all agree on those. We can disagree on the best means to get there and on the relative value of competing values. But on those goods we agree.
Legal abortion? Here we find an absolute contradiction. Here there is no compromise, no dialogue, no negotiation. The unborn baby lives or dies. The binary is absolute. It is like slavery. Abortion is the core moral problem that polarizes our society so radically.
Abortion is not a single issue, separate unto itself. It is a culture, a religion, a way of life. It is the nexus of a myriad of values, beliefs, practices. In this also it resembles the slave society of our South.
1. Euthanasia, assisted suicide, and even infanticide (as in partial birth abortion) come with abortion as murder of the weak and powerless.
2. Contracepted and sterilized sex are the root causes of abortion, which is back-up to failed birth control. If you accept contraception, the inevitable consequence is abortion. The widespread idea that contraception prevents abortion has it entirely backwards: having decided for contracepted sex, an unintended pregnancy moves inevitably towards abortion.
3. The sterilization of sex, the rupture of intercourse from procreation, trivializes sexuality and opens the door to cohabitation without marriage, homosexual marriage, increases in divorce, adultery and pornography and the decline of marriage and family.
4. The technological intrusion extends itself to artificial reproduction: surrogate mothers, artificial insemination, and eventually movement towards human cloning and blending with other animal species.
5. It attacks "woman" as maternal, welcoming, nurturing. It destroys the mystery of masculinity/femininity in their dignified, equal, complementary yet asymmetrical generosity. It isolates the woman as disconnected, defensive, unprotected, and hostile to the unborn life within her.
6. It attacks the father, grandparents, brothers and sisters of the conceived. It ruptures the bonds that bind us in family on behalf of an isolated, autonomous individual. It is a sin against previous and succeeding generations.
7. It flows from and feeds into the breakdown of communal bonds of family, Church, local and smaller associations of value. It atomizes the individual and constructs a dependence upon cancerously large corporations and state.
8. In deconstructing the woman as maternal, it reconfigures femininity into a social and personal construct, removed from nature, and leaves her stripped of dignity except as an object of masculine desire (beautiful, glamourous, popular) or as productive within the all-encompassing careerist, meritocratic technocracy. In devaluing the incompetent embryo, all who are not successful and achieving are also considered "losers" without value. So we have the bifurcation of our society into two classes: the "haves" and the "have nots." The new Class War.
9. In deconstructing the man as paternal, it leaves the young fatherless and adrift: pandemic of pornography (even among young women I am surprised to learn), crime and violence, deaths of despair (suicide, overdoses), anomie and rage among men, self-hatred among young women.
10. It is a renunciation of God as the source and meaning of life. It idolizes the deciding Self as a mini-god unto him/herself. It is violation of the moral order, the very logos of creation.
On that last point consider a thought experiment. Imagine we had technology that could remove any fetus from the mother's womb and place it into a safe, nurturing technological surrogate. Imagine enough pro-life families were willing to adopt all such babies. Would the pro-choice movement serenely hand over the little ones, satisfied with a woman's "right to her own body?" I think not! This abortion movement would insist on the "right to choice"...the right to kill the little life even if it is no longer a threat to the woman. This is because, I believe, there is something deeper, more sinister here than the understandable need of a vulnerable woman for her own bodily integrity. There is a rebellion of the creature against creation and the Creator.
The Culture of Death is powerful in our country. It holds at least half of us, even among Catholics, in its grip. We cannot merely legislate against it. We empathize with the vulnerable women afflicted with an unintended pregnancy. Our is a huge moral obligation to support such women. I suggest that our efforts and energy in that direction should be 100 times more strenuous than the politics of ending abortion. But abortion itself is a further violation of the already violated woman. It is not the cure. Abortion is a moral infection, a cancer, a contagion. It is out of our control. It is of the Kingdom of Darkness. We cannot easily get rid of it.
We cannot cooperate in this evil. Let us detach and resist. Less by political activism than by lives of prayer and holiness, by acts of Mercy. Let us must maintain our own integrity in our reverence and tenderness for human life in all its forms, especially the most powerless. Let us shine light into an increasingly dark world by our deep communion with each other, in Christ, and open our femininity and masculinity to the radiance of generosity.
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