Abortion and moral discourse

A contemporary example: Rich business men tell us that anyone who does not reduce tax liabilities to the minimum needs their head read. Is it not the right of the individual to manage their money so as to achieve maximum benefit for themselves? Here the freedom of the individual is trumpeted. On the other hand, these people are a part of a community that shares resources such as healthcare, roads, schools, defence, universities and the whole panoply of Government services. Should not they also contribute? Here we have a fundamental dilemma: the rights of the individual versus the responsibilities to community. Our society is riven with such dilemmas that make discussion and resolution impossible. Unfortunately the assertion of competing rights further ossifies the debate. In fact, a society ruled by individual choice is as intolerable as one ruled by forced collectivisation.

The politics of our day is polarised by just such positions and is subsequently frozen. This explains why we have shallow point scoring from both sides of the house and no real political debate. It is the abortion debate all over again. Ground is staked; positions taken, co-operation ruled out and "war by other means" prosecuted. It is not democracy that has failed us but a failure of personal depth. Our politicians have adopted the behaviour of the schoolyard.

It is increasingly apparent that choice is an illusion since we lack the means to decide. Choice is often based on shallow emotivism, habit, fear and self interest, hardly the motives of a rational adult. But choice has been raised to be the pinnacle of freedom and the cause celebre of the Liberal Party. It is also at the centre of the pro-abortion debate.

This state of affairs has come about because of the Enlightenment priority for the isolated rational subject who stands apart from tradition and other voices in order to spin rational positions out of his mind. We now know that this is an illusion; we have no sound basis at all on which to make the choices that determine our lives. The result is a chaos of competing ideas all of which must be respected. This is a democracy of the lost.

So were to we go from here? A return to what was called Christendom is not an option if only for the fact that we find ourselves in a completely different situation that removes that possibility. But a return of sorts is possible but on a radically different ground.

In my last articles I argued that Israel rejected the mythological consciousness of its neighbours. In it's worship it did not rehearse the world's mythological origins but the origin of the nation and the land. That is, it turned to history rather than to the gods to understand reality. It turned to experience. Paradoxically, this was the discovery of the Enlightenment, so what is the difference?

The difference was that Israel as a community pondered its experience in a theological framework and wrote narratives, stories, poetry etc. formed by its experience, as did the early Church. The result is a potent understanding of the human dilemma. That is why the Church has survived for more than two thousand years.

The reason that autonomous reason cannot arrive at a similar synthesis is that it has to hand only the experience of the individual and refuses experience that is not easily formalised i.e. the subjective. It is thus isolated from the voices of community and from the artistic, affective and tradition. As such it can only produce a shallow understanding of what it means to be human and this necessarily produces shallow choices.

Christianity does not offer a system of ethics; it offers a community to belong to who will transform us into a people who will live righteously. That will not save us from ethical dilemmas because they are part and parcel of being human. We may find ourselves in a position in which aborting a child is the best we can do. We may also find ourselves in a position of having an unwanted pregnancy and making ourselves open to receiving a gift that will transform our lives.

We are free to do either. But what I object to is the framing of what we do in a way that disguises our actions. Let us stop using the word "foetus" as a shield for our conscience. I know of no pregnant woman who does not refer to the person growing inside her as a baby. After all, the traditional reference to a pregnant woman is that she "is with child."