Such is the view of the Rev Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president of the US National Abortion Federation (NAF). To a British ear this acronym sounds like an aptonym, though I don’t think it evokes the same phonetic associations in America.
The Rev Katherine has issued a statement, saying, inter alia, that: “Abortion providers are some of my personal heroes and modern-day saints.”
These words would sound incongruous when uttered by just about anybody, never mind a Christian minister. Then again, it’s conceivable that the Episcopal Church, to which the Rev Katherine belongs, has its own standards of sainthood.
It certainly has its own, generally accepting, stand on abortion, even though the Anglican Church, with which it’s in communion, still opposes it, if only halfheartedly.
If pressed, the Rev Katherine would doubtless argue that neither Testament contains an explicit injunction against abortion.
However, such a literalist stand, typical of Protestant denominations, would set her up for a counterargument: homosexuality, on the other hand, is prohibited in both Testaments, which doesn’t prevent the Rev Katherine being married to another woman. How consistent is that?
Actually, she interests me much less than the relevant general question. Can a Christian, lay or especially ordained, be pro-abortion? Both apostolic Churches, Western and Eastern, answer this question unequivocally: no.
However, most mainstream Protestant denominations give a different answer, mainly because Christian tradition means nothing to them. As St John Henry Newman once put it, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”
Yet my subject here is neither the inherently heretical nature of Protestantism nor the Rev Katherine’s objectionable personality. For I don’t think an argument against abortion can only be made from a theological, indeed any fideistic, viewpoint.
One can argue the case persuasively from secular morality (if such a thing exists), logic, or even Aristotelian philosophy. For a sensible exponent of any religion or none will accept this starting moral position: any innocent human being has an inalienable right to life.
Hence any abortion advocate has to argue that a foetus isn’t a human being. Thus the whole complexity of the issue can be stripped down to its bare bones. We must simply agree when a human life begins.
There’s the rub – we can’t. Proceeding by elimination, we can agree when it clearly doesn’t begin: at the moment the neonatal baby crawls out of the womb. Those who think otherwise will face an unenviable task of arguing that a foetus becomes a human being one minute after delivery, but not one minute before.
That’s illogical on any number of levels, including the biological one. Prior to delivery the baby already has the same DNA, organs and sensitivity to pain it’ll have immediately thereafter and for life.
Clearly, all those aspects of a human being are developed at some time during gestation. But when exactly?
In the UK abortion is allowed 24 weeks into pregnancy. Implicitly therefore, the authorities believe that’s when a foetus becomes a human being with an inalienable right to life.
That belief is flawed. What about 23 weeks and six days? Precisely what happens in that seventh day of the 23d week to change the foetus’s status so dramatically?
And what about 23 weeks and five days? Four? Three? In other words, it’s easy to show that the 24-week cut-off point, as it were, is arbitrary. In fact, at any time during gestation at least some doubt should persist that abortion just may be tantamount to killing a human being.
Now, our jurisprudence demands proof beyond reasonable doubt to sentence a pickpocket to six months in prison. Shouldn’t at least as rigorous a standard apply to a situation where a human life may be at stake?
The only point that’s not open to such speculation is that of conception. Any other point is subject to reasonable doubt, which has to rule abortion out.
As far as I’m concerned, this clinches the argument. However, I mentioned Aristotelian philosophy earlier, and it can be brought in by way of reinforcement.
The anti-abortion argument can draw on Aristotle’s teaching about potentiality and actuality. As applied to the issue at hand, the argument from potential will point out that, unless its development is interrupted, a foetus will eventually become a person. That’s the potential that abortion nips in the bud.
Opponents of the argument from potential, such as the ‘philosopher’ Peter Singer (who, as a side line, advocates sex with animals) argue that a foetus hasn’t yet developed a consciousness and hence the will to live. Nor can it survive without its mother’s body.
Yet Prof. Singer would be hard-pressed to argue against post-natal abortion on that basis (actually his ilk don’t argue — they pronounce).
After all, a new-born baby’s consciousness is no more developed the day after delivery than the day before. And in neither case can it survive on its own. It can, however, develop to term in vitro from an early stage of gestation, with mother’s body nowhere in evidence.
As ever, the apostolic Christian position on this issue is more rational than any other. Although one has to admit that the Rev Katherine is a living argument in favour of postnatal abortion – say, 60 years after delivery.
The argument often used by abortionists, apart from the woman’s sovereign right over her ‘own’ body, are unconsented preganancies: rape for example. This is a reasonable and probably the best argument, with which most people would likely agree. At first sight.
Who among us would look at a chap, the ‘product’ of a wartime rape perhaps, no better or worse than the next bloke, and say to him, or to ourselves even: “You shouldn’t have existed chap. It was terrible that they forced her to have you.”
“the Rev Katherine being married to another woman.”
Now why did that come as no surprise at all?
Ask the Reverend when does the soul enter the body. At the exact moment you come out of the womb? How are we able to determine? We are not.
I’m not sure she believes in the soul.