In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor’s Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate’s also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there’s also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid’s argument:
The prolife position is not merely about “reducing the number of abortions,” though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.
A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy.
As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:
What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization’s future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.
So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, “death panels”).
That’s about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.
This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one’s convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one’s pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.