Abortion
July 20, 2019 § 5 Comments
When thinking as a Quaker about my personal testimony on abortion, I find myself looking through two lenses and asking questions about where they intersect. The first lens is the legal/political, the second is the moral/religious.
The opponents of abortion rights base their argument on moral and religious grounds: the fetus is a human being and it is wrong to kill other humans, especially those who cannot protect themselves. But is an embryo or a fetus a human being? When does a fetus become a human being?
For conservative Christians, even the embryo is a human because it has a soul, which it “acquires” at conception, though I’ve never heard anyone explain the mechanism at work here. But the Bible is clear about the mechanism of “soul implantation” and about when a person becomes a human. Genesis 2 makes it clear that a person becomes a human/receives its soul when it draws its first breath: “…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (verse 7)
This anthropology/mythology regarding the nature of life and the soul gets reaffirmed by the gospels’ account of Jesus death: “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and gave up the spirit.” (Matthew 27:50) Note that my NRSV translates “breathed his last” with a note about “gave up the spirit” because the word for breath and for spirit in both Greek and Hebrew are the same. In the Bible, life begins and ends when you breathe your first and breathe your last. And that is when the spirit enters and leaves you.
Now put aside the first-order question of whether this mythology is an appropriate authority for determining the theological question about when human life begins in the first place. We’ll get to that later. Let’s assume that this particular Christian mythology is authoritative for a moment. This means that the Bible does not consider an abortion a murder and the conservative Christian anti-choice argument is unbiblical.
Meanwhile, however, it certainly is the case that embryos and fetuses possess a precious and mysterious status and relationship with our humanity—with whatever the soul is, if you will. Embryos become fetuses; fetuses become human persons.
I am saying that the moral/religious approach to abortion does still hinge on our understanding of the human soul, by which I mean whatever makes us uniquely human persons.
Many liberal Quakers pivot right here to their understanding of “that of God in everyone”, which they usually take to mean some kind of divine spark. In essence, liberal Friends equate “that of God” with “the soul”—or at least they would make some sort of association.
So for the pro-choice liberal Quaker, at least those who believe that there is that of God in everyone (which I don’t, in the divine-spark sense, just to be clear), the question is, when does a fetus possess “that of God”? If you base your peace testimony on the belief that everyone possesses “that of God” and therefore we should not harm them (a faulty argument that misunderstands both Fox and the peace testimony, in my opinion), then you should not abort a fetus—at some point in its development, at least. When is that point?
This is a screaming irony. Conservative Christians and liberal, that-of-God Quakers use the same theological argument. The conservative Christians ignore the error in their theology and liberal, that-of-God Friends ignore its truth.
But back to when an embryo or a fetus becomes a human person. Conservative Christians tacitly rely for their argument on a crude, quasi-scientific understanding of fetal development, focusing on its continuity rather than on its developmental milestones, to say that at least the fetus is a person. In a way, this is an evolutionary argument. They have embraced the kind of science that they often reject when discussing creation; they ignore the actual creation myth for their theology of the soul and embrace the science that the creation myth denies. Another weird irony.
But liberal Friends, especially that-of-God believers—and indeed all of us who want to get abortion law right—have to decide when humans become persons, because, presumably, we all agree that killing humans is wrong. Various states in the US are making claims about this with their new laws. This will inevitably force the courts to start making moral/theological decisions about the nature of the human and, by extension, the nature of the human soul.
This is what’s wrong with the legal/political lens we’re using. The state has no business making these decisions, not about theology or human nature, not about a woman’s right to control her own body. It has nothing to do with privacy, which is the unfortunate foundation for Roe v Wade, and one reason why I think it will go down. It has to do with the separation of church and state.
For this entire argument is Christian-centered, and the state has no right to make its decisions for all Americans based on one religious mythology/theology. What do our American Hindus believe about the soul and when a fetus becomes a person? Or our Muslims and Jews? Our Arapaho and Comanche? Our atheists?
The entire abortion debate rests on a violation of the separation of church and state. In a religiously pluralistic country, the state has no right to base such questions on the moral mythology of one of its religious communities.
Meanwhile, what about us liberal pro-choice Friends? When do we believe a fetus becomes a person? If we believe everyone possesses “that of God”, what does that really mean, when does that happen, and how? These are the questions that I think should guide an individual choice regarding an abortion.
I am tempted to fall back on a common-sense default position that a fetus becomes a person when it enters the world and draws its first breath. This is a final, breathtaking irony.
Using the breath defines human consciousness in relation to the world, our shared world. Now the fetus did have a world to relate to; it used its own native brain activity to respond to the world of the womb, to the mother as one’s world, a world in which some of its senses are not even fully up and running yet.
Is the prenatal consciousness human? Is the prenatal consciousness a person? I think personhood is defined in relation to our shared world. Human consciousness is reflective; it is aware of itself. It needs something in which to see its reflection—the world. The fetus—even the late-term fetus—has only itself and the sensations it receives from outside itself, but which register only within itself, because its senses are so constrained, and which it must therefore process (I think) without any sense of itself as a self.
All that said, a fetus is something precious and alive and fully “human”, if not fully a person. I have pro-choice friends who think that hunting dear, say, is borderline evil. How much more so the killing of a fetus? I don’t think abortion is murder—quite. But . . .
Through the Flaming Sword 
Thank you for this. The best discussion I’ve seen about the nuances of abortion was – unsurprisingly- in OnBeing in a dialogue between a pro-choice Catholic woman and a pro-life Baptist man (“Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Dialogue,” https://onbeing.org/programs/david-gushee-frances-kissling-pro-life-pro-choice-pro-dialogue-2/). One of the lines that stuck with me is that just because the fetus isn’t a “person” doesn’t mean that it’s nothing or that it has no moral value.
Often there’s the assumption of an on/off switch of moral value, but it isn’t true. In many states, it’s a felony to kill a dog without good reason. Is a growing human worth less? At what point does it have the same value? If our God “knew us before we were formed in our mother’s womb,” isn’t it a bit overbold – even devilish (recalling that Lucifer took an authority that was rightfully God’s) – to seize the power of life and death with anything but the greatest fear and trembling?
This discussion is fraught in the extreme. Polarization rules the conversation and begins with the two false constructs that label the opposite camps. Neither “pro-life” nor “pro-choice” accurately describe the faith/political perspectives that seem so diametrically opposed.
If the Christian communities for whom “pro-life” is claimed as the standard were truly pro-life, they would manifest this belief in more ways than just defense of the fetus. These churches would be universally opposed to war and capital punishment and demand care for the needy. That is certainly not the case and the hypocrisy is stunning. In fact, theirs is more a political position created by those who gain politically; justified by questionable interpretation of ancient texts. Those ancient texts were written by men who had zero comprehension of the biology involved and to my knowledge never mention pre-natal reality. “I knew you in the womb” in context is more than a stretch.
The secular communities for whom “pro-choice” is the standard have focused entirely on the pregnant mother as if another, completely unique and separate human did not exist until some arbitrary moment in which they, God-like, discern this entity becomes sufficiently human not to kill. And kill is the correct word. Dispensing entirely with faith and the “soul” and taking a 100% scientific perspective, it is incontrovertible that an embryo or fetus is 100% human and 100% unique and that abortion kills that being.
My personal position is that the establishment clause of the constitution precludes the state from making laws based solely in faith constructs. It is my hope that we begin to treat one another as children of a common Parent, as members of a single family. That is also scientifically certain. I disagree with those who say this decision should be left to the females of the family. I am a man and was not aborted and a member of the family and half of that new human arises in my genes. That feminist exclusion of men from the conversation has not well served their political motives.
My belief: If every pregnant mother were confident that both she and her baby would be loved, fed and cared for by a loving community, abortion would become rare and likely limited to infrequent medical necessity.
“It has to do with the separation of church and state.”
There is no separation clause in the Constitution. Such is a judicial interpretation of the “Establishment Clause”. I posit that the interpretation arose as the means by which this Nation’s secular intellectuals carved out a ‘sacred’ space for both themselves, and a favored ‘right’ to be irresponsible within the expanding privilege of a limited liability law enabled free (of responsibility) market economy. With the 1953 “Johnson Amendment” to IRS legislation, our economic meme of CapitalismFail was further – functionally – established as our state religion.
I observe this because with this law the intrinsic political responsibilities of our religious communities have were legally gifted with a desired ‘right’ to be irresponsible. This was accomplished under the guise that there is a separation between church and state. Rather, and what this essay frames as a duality, is competition; is political. Morality and law dance. And, for a civilization to function, such competition needs to be a civil dance.
When I was a member and served a monthly meeting as its clerk, a item of business came up that would have been easily resolved via an assumption that abortion was morally correct: the item of business was a request for a ‘political’ minute in support of the right to an abortion. There were several members for whom this right was not their experience of moral behavior, but they understood that theirs was a minority position. As clerk I experienced a burden to include them in this decision. As a result, the Meeting’s minute on abortion became a six month process of engaged [private & ad hoc committee] laboring by the women of the Meeting. In the end it was this process, not the minute, that made the Meeting morally more whole. Those with the minority position no longer felt they were morally second class folk. Morality and politics danced. Love led. Choice, not abortion, was supported in the resulting minute.
The men of the Meeting left the labor to the women. It’s was clearly the women who held the passion to do so (this was back in the early ’90s). The men of the meeting basically had no moral issue with minuting support for abortion … and they also experienced a minority status, especially in this matter.
But framed differently, doesn’t the morality of abortion become a male prerogative? And if so (how could it rationally be otherwise), what do our current politics say about male morality? Is ours one of irresponsibility? If so, doesn’t this mirror the ‘right to be irresponsible’ that is now intrinsic to our economic system?
What would a minute on male sexual responsibility constitute? Another Steve, Stephen Gaskin (of Monday Night Class and The Farm fame), summarized male sexual responsibility thus: If you are living together you are engaged. If you are pregnant you are married. This doesn’t address the question of abortion directly, but, in terms of its politics, might such be an as-good-as-it-gets? Using the Meeting’s process as a guide, such is a labored conversation that is all but avoided. And isn’t the process of the civil dance that matters? Doesn’t it allows us to learn to hear, together, the music we dance to?
In terms of the tune we currently dance to under the tutelage of GREED-as-go[]d’s CapitalismFail, if one feels any life matters in its ‘theology’, one is sorely deluded by ones motivated reasoning. We are in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction event. It was born of our unwavering trust in this irrational belief: InfinateGrowthOnFinitePlanetCrazy. While life is, functionally, a “terminal disease” for the individual, within CapitalismFail, and together, we are busy aborting the means for the life that birthed us.
Collapse happens. Good is just. Freedom and wealth are the right to be responsible. So let’s labor over a pertinent abortion: that of responsibility … of which abortion is but a symptom. There is no such thing as a separation of church and state; of being a little bit pregnant.
sNAILmALEnotHAIL …but pace’n myself
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCeDkezgoyyZAlN7nW1tlfeA
life is for learning so all my failures must mean that I’m wicked smart
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Much of your argument seems to pivot around the assumption that there is a thing called human and that what counts as human remains relatively fixed even when we may disagree about what counts as human. I’m not sure I buy that rationale.
Social constructivism is the position that knowledge is socially constructed. What counts as human is socially constructed. So the entire abortion debate is riddled with bad language games. The argument isn’t that’s the fetus is or isn’t human, the argument is that our particular society at this particular point in its history and development should or should not deem the fetus as human. And the solution will be negotiated one which includes I hope marginal voices in the mix.
Consider atheist lens. A part of what “that of God in each of us” can mean is that God has in some sense stepped back from the mess and given us the authority to decide what counts as human. But at the same time requires of us that we live with the consequences of our decision.
We have a kind of Schrödinger’s baby here. The baby is or is not human at the same time until we slapped him on the rump. And I actually don’t have any serious investment on which way we go on this one. My concern is a little different. When we abort that fetus we are saying something about the value of the potential human that it is. And when that fetus has through prenatal testing been shown to be disabled — we are saying something either about the value of a disabled life or alternately the importance of the inconvenience it may cause to the parent. I don’t have a solution here. But at the same time I find the high number of abortions in cases where the fetus was diagnosed with a known birth the fact to be troubling — and as a person born with a birth defect — somewhat threatening.
Thank you, Steve, for raising this important, real-life issue!
I don’t have the answer.
I think I hear the truth and the passion on both sides of the issue. I also know that as a male, who might cause a pregnancy and then walk away from the woman who has to carry it, I should defer to the voices of women, who have just as much moral authority as I do, and more at stake.
I remember two early-childhood dreams recalling prenatal experience, so I *know* that not-yet-born souls are gathering experience. I *believe,* on the basis of scientific reports I’ve read, that fetuses are sentient beings who feel pain. I would never want to hurt a fetus. When my daughter was a teenager, I told her that if she ever had an unwanted pregnancy, I’d want her to bring the pregnancy to term, and I’d raise the child as my own. “Oh, DAD,” she said, with annoyance. But still, I said what I needed to say, and she heard me.
But Jesus Christ, whose willing servant I am, does not tell me what He thinks the secular state should do about humans’ cruelty to other sentient beings, or how I should try to make the civil state behave — except in specific instances where He has me warn candidates and policymakers, in love for their souls, not to cause moral injury to themselves or those who must carry out their policies.
I don’t know what to believe about the secular state’s moral compass. It gives itself the right to take human life in war. It rules by fear, not love, serving its own interests as against an informed sense of the good of the whole world — otherwise we’d have stopped global warming as soon as we knew about it. In this country, the secular state treats corporations as persons. If there is a being rightly called The Devil, I believe he rules ours, and all the secular states of this world, which is why I call myself a citizen of the kingdom of the Lord, Jesus Christ, who rules by love. But human legislators and human judges have human hearts, and consciences through which the Divine speaks. I pray that they will listen to them whenever they make policy, or interpret it, or try to enforce it.