Lot, his daughters and the abortion debate

There is a large painting in a small museum by Strasburg Cathedral, of Lot being seduced by his daughters. Lot takes centre stage, curly hair, smiling and in his cups. To the left, one daughter wears a cheeky smile and carries a goblet and a jug of wine. On the right, the other daughter is giving her father an amorous look and her left leg, only partly revealed, is provocatively turned outward in invitation.

This is a very sexy painting, but its sexiness is complicated by the subject: a father and his daughters and the universal taboo of incest. If you go to the book of Genesis chapter 19, you will find the tale of Lot and his daughters. Lot was Abraham’s nephew and when the Lord told Abraham to leave his father’s house and land and to go to a land that the Lord would show him, we are told that Lot went with him. Their ways parted and Lot and his family end up living in Sodom.

The story of Lot is taken up again when two angels (men) come to Sodom and Lot gives them hospitality. But the inhabitants of Sodom demanded that Lot release them so that they may “know them”. Lot refuses and surprisingly offers his two virgin daughters. The offer is refused but the angels strike the inhabitants blind and urge Lot to flee with his household because the Lord was going to destroy the city. The sons-in-law who were to marry Lot’s daughters stayed and were consumed and Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back.

Lot ends up living in a cave with his daughters who, in the absence of their potential husbands, plan to seduce their father so that they may bear children. The text is adamant that Lot knew nothing of their actions and is therefore innocent of the crime of incest. The daughters became pregnant and the sons they bore became the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites. This is where the tale of Lot ends, but it is not the end of the Moabites. Ruth, who is a Moabite, seduced the rich Boaz on the threshing floor and thus saved her and her mother in law’s life. The son she bore to Boaz was the father of David and she is listed in the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew. Thus the immoral act of the daughters of Lot cascaded down the generations into the genealogy of the saviour of the world.

I tell this story because it is just one example in biblical literature in which life is extended via all sorts of hanky panky. This culminates in the pregnancy of Mary who is betrothed to Joseph. It seems that the way of God is found through the scandalous and the unexpected, even to the point that Pilate and Judas are instruments in God’s hands. It seems that the bible is not a moral manual after all.

Blood brothers, aired on the ABC’s Four Corners, is the story of an English couple whose first born son had a disease that prevented him from making his own red blood cells. The only way he could be cured was for the mother to give birth to a child with the right genetic make up so the stem cells could be used to establish a new blood cell factory in the sick child. The ethicists protested that this was the commodification of reproduction and the British Government would not allow the selection of the right cells from the mother’s embryos. Undaunted, the Whitakers went to the US where the procedure went according to plan and they ended up with two healthy sons. In the face of this success, the ethicists backed down and the Government changed it stance.

This is a very biblical kind of story, for life triumphs out of all kinds of adversity even over quite rational objections to the path that is taken. No one seeing the two healthy boys playing together could object. This is just another way that academic ethicists get it wrong.

We are, presently, engaged in two dilemmas involving the medical ethics of stem cell research and abortion. It is a sign of our moral confusion that they are lumped together. While stem cell research promises much healing and extension of life, abortion can only mean the death of a potential person. In the biblical mentality, the womb is the sight of the action of God. In story after story we are told that God opened or closed a woman’s womb in blessing and in curse. To be a barren woman was one of the worst fates.

We are not talking about some divine law that we can turn our back on because we no longer believe in God: we are dealing with historical experiences that tell us what it is like to be a human being. To be human is to count children as a blessing. The abortion debate is really about what kind of community we have become by ignoring that blessing. Instead, we predict a sordid future that we do not want by acting to do away with the one we see as its cause. The nameless daughters of Lot and their descendant Ruth act against morality in order to secure life, while we act against morality to foreclose a future we cannot know, by killing the promise of new life.

The reason the debate about abortion does not go anywhere is because it is bogged down in abstract arguments about whether and when the fetus is a person, although we all know that from implantation on development is an unbroken continuum. Just as abstract are the rights of the woman to govern her own body as if she exists apart from the father, the grandparents, other siblings and the community, all of whom have a genuine interest in the welfare of the child. We are not islands unto ourselves, we live in close connection to others and indeed that is the core meaning of the neighbour in Christian theology.

The isolation of decision-making is just another side of the isolation that precipitates a woman’s decision to abort. We are dealing with two myths when we speak of individual human rights. First, that we exist as individuals in any important aspect of our lives, and second, that human rights have some warrant other than that we think something is a good idea. When the feminist movement insists that abortion is a woman’s choice and that men are excluded even from having an opinion, we establish a deep schism in our humanity and further isolate the woman. We also hear that abortion is a medical not a moral issue.

How nice to have the world so neatly divided so that we are saved from moral questions. The other red herring that has reared its ugly head is that when people with religious orientations talk about what they believe they are accused of foisting their beliefs on others, when what has happened is that first wave feminism and utilitarian thinkers have foisted their opinions on all of us. There has been a determined attempt to keep religion and morality out of the debate. We may wonder what we have left?

Abortion is about how a community cares for its children, how a community is open to the new life that a child inevitably brings to us. While we worry about the fate of a few fetal cells in a test tube fertilised in a laboratory, we destroy healthy fetuses that have been created by two people coming together in love. The few cells in the test tube have no social context and no future unless they are successfully implanted in a uterus. They are not the same thing at all as the fetus that makes its mother sick and her breasts sore, that has a father hopefully interested and grandparents mostly very interested. To equate the two is to succumb to scientific reductionism.

Biblical narratives often revolve around the child who becomes the driving force of history. That is why the genealogies crop up so often - they enumerate the history of births and so also the history of the nation. Israel was not like the other nations that practiced child sacrifice. They lived in hope of the blessed child. To kill a child before birth would have been the worse blasphemy, because it cut off the promise of God. Jesus was the unexpected one who arrived, without the preparation of marriage, into a family in which the father had determined to put the mother aside. His situation was less than ideal so perhaps it would have been “responsible” to abort him? 

New technology gives us increasing control over our lives. Reliable contraception has inaugurated the “post pill paradise” in which the unmarried may sport themselves as they may, and the married can avoid a child a year until menopause halts the flow. Medically safe abortion - and that includes the morning after pill - has further increased the control we have over our lives. These new freedoms have almost universally been welcomed by libertarians, who respond to any question about them with “why not?”. The ability to choose our desired life has brought about the sexual revolution among the unmarried, the absurdity of the chosen childless marriage, later and later family starts (in order that all of the material paraphernalia of modern life has been installed) and abortion on demand.

The danger here is that we move towards idealised forms of life that are disconnected from our true natures as revealed by the gospel. The more our lives become manufactured by desire, the more shallow and estranged they become. The protest of the church, when it is brave enough, is not mere conservative spoil-sportsmanship but springs from insight into our deepest nature that is in danger of being left behind.

Many will, no doubt, dismiss these opinions by attacking the authority of obscure biblical narratives. They will prefer arguments about abortion from the newly invented field of medical ethics shaped on the notion of rights. But it is the power of biblical narrative, shaped over generations of experience, that rightly tell us the truth about humanity.

As a friend recently wrote, the nature of the gospel is to do with what constitutes reality. In modernity we have been taught that the nature of things may be found without reference to history, and is available to us through reason alone. But medical ethics, which relies on this method, is helpless when we are confronted by the unhappy dilemmas of the abortion debate. We need a deeper source of wisdom than the utilitarian and the opposition of one set of rights against another. That is why the abortion debate must become theological if we are to see any progress beyond entrenched ideological positions.