“If liberal individualists had campaigned against abortion, it would,” observes John Waters in the Irish Times, “have become unacceptable years ago.” (Thanks to my friend Mark Barrett for the tip.) Writing after joining in the annual March for Life during a trip to Washington, he explains:
My hunch is that, rather than opposing abortion per se, they would have concentrated on changing the meaning of pregnancy and birth. And I suspect they might have adapted for this purpose a particular aspect of the technology of modern reproductive care: the ultrasound image. . . .
Had liberals chosen to oppose abortion, they would have started somewhere like this – agitating for the recognition, perhaps legal registration, of unborn children long before autonomous “viability”.
In such a parallel world of possibility, we might now regard the moment of birth itself as relatively unimportant, a distracting and arbitrary instant in the growth of a human being.
Waters (who is not the famous American maker of perverse movies, just in case you were wondering) is the author of the very good book Lapsed Agnostic and other books well worth reading, and one of the few writers in the major Irish press saying things like this. Here’s another example:
One striking feature of the march was the high visibility of faith and religious groupings. This may seem a superfluous observation the way present-day culture is set up, the presence of crosses and rosaries provoking the tautological idea that objection to abortion is simply an expression of religiosity. This short circuit offers the culture a shallow explanation for the “pro-life” position.
In my experience, people do not oppose abortion because they are religious – they see the killing of unborn children as self-evidently barbarous for the same reasons that they recognise the religious dimension, which essentially relates to an acceptance of dependence and a certain view of human dignity.
February 19th, 2013 | 2:45 pm
In my experience, people do not oppose abortion because they are religious – they see the killing of unborn children as self-evidently barbarous for the same reasons that they recognise the religious dimension, which essentially relates to an acceptance of dependence and a certain view of human dignity.
Having been involved in the Pro-Life movement for years (since before Roe) it has been my experience that it is easy to get sincere Christians involved in the movement and nearly impossible to get the non-religious involved. It is not like there are a plethora of “atheists for life” groups out there. Waters is right, though, that involvement in the Pro-Life movement seems to hinge on one’s view of human dignity. If humanity is no more than the accidental result of mindless, purposeless processes, as atheism sees it, then humanity has no more of a God-given, inalienable right to life than does a cow. And just as with cows, it is not all that big a deal if they get butchered by the millions for the convenience of others.
February 20th, 2013 | 8:25 am
Harry – In this, as in so many other areas, your accounts of the motives and beliefs of others fail to match my experience.
February 22nd, 2013 | 2:00 pm
“In such a parallel world of possibility, we might now regard the moment of birth itself as relatively unimportant, a distracting and arbitrary instant in the growth of a human being.”
The problem is not the moment of birth. The problem, which conservatives elude over and over, is WHERE the fetus is located (inside the body of a personn).
February 22nd, 2013 | 3:14 pm
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One likes to be kind to commenters, but this is a ridiculous statement. Moral conservatives aren’t “eluding” the location of the unborn child because it is not a “problem” in the sense Mr. Mendez asserts that it is. The problem here is that some people think the child’s natural location in his mother’s womb a moral problem in itself. (Though it may, of course, be a practical and pastoral problem for some mothers.) To disagree with people who assert that deficient morality is not to elude anything, but to recognize a natural relation and the moral responsibilities it brings.
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