We’re told that Joe Biden is a moderate Democrat because he’s “personally opposed” to abortion but unwilling to “impose his views” on women who want to terminate their pregnancies. Many conservatives have pointed out that this view is inconsistent, even hypocritical. What few seem to notice is that Mr. Biden’s position is actually worse than your run-of-the-mill pro-choicer’s.
Imagine if Mr. Biden were as devout a Hindu as he is a Catholic, and he said, “Personally, I believe a cow’s life is equal to a human’s. But I’m not going to impose my views on someone who wants to buy a hamburger.” We’d have to reach one of two conclusions. On the one hand, he’s lying, and doesn’t place much value on bovine life. On the other, he’s telling the truth, and doesn’t place much value on human life.
Well, far be it from me to call Mr. Biden a liar.
This is a reality that the pro-life movement will have to reckon with sooner or later. We’ve told ourselves over and over that, if only pro-choicers would look at the science with an open mind, they would see that a fetus is a human being. It’s alive. But that was never really in doubt. Of course it’s alive. A tree is also alive, and yet nobody’s going to charge me with murder for chopping down a couple of white birches.
The question isn’t whether science can prove that something is alive or not. The question is what value we place on that life. And, after all, what’s a fetus with a heartbeat except “cells and electrical activity”?
Then again, what are you except cells and electrical activity? What am I?
This is the reason why the abortion debate never gets anywhere. The pro-choice camp isn’t willing to be honest about their position. They’re not willing to admit that, for whatever reason, they don’t believe that human life has the same inherent worth as we do. They won’t come out and say, “We’re just not as bothered by killing people as you are.”
Really, I don’t mean that as an insult. Throughout history, most civilizations have felt the same way. In Egypt, the pharaoh’s servants and concubines were buried with him. In India, it was common for widows to be cast onto their husbands’ funeral pyre—a practice known as sati (“virtuous woman”). The British Empire did its best to stamp out sati but it survives to this day in rural parts of the country. Forced abortions and infanticide were also routine under China’s one-child policy, which was only repealed in 2016.
Not every example is so brutal. In 1912, Count Nogi Maresuke committed junshi on the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral. Junshi is a form of seppuku, or ritual suicide, which a vassal commits following his lord’s death. There’s something noble, even beautiful, about a warrior choosing to follow his master into death.
Yet it often was brutal, especially towards babies. The Japanese—like the Spartans and the Vikings—didn’t consider children to be people until they were several months old. In the meantime, their parents could kill them for any number of reasons: if the child was weak, or sickly, or illegitimate, or if the parents were unhappy with its sex. In the Roman Empire, as well as in many Native American tribes, it was acceptable for the poor to abandon babies they couldn’t afford to feed. The Carthaginians and Aztecs would sacrifice infants to appease the gods’ wrath or bring about a bountiful harvest.
What’s curious is that, for many years, modern historians assumed the Romans were slandering the Carthaginians by accusing them of sacrificing babies to their god Moloch. It was inconceivable that any civilization could approve of such behavior. Then, in 2014, a collaborative paper in the journal Antiquity proved beyond all doubt that—alas—the Romans were right.
One of the paper’s authors, Dr. Josephine Quinn of Oxford University, told an interviewer:
Perhaps it was out of profound religious piety, or a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life of the child. We have to remember the high level of mortality among children. It would have been sensible for parents not to get too attached to a child that might well not make its first birthday…. We should not imagine that ancient people thought like us and were horrified by the same things.
That all seems very dispassionate, very scientific. And yet They did it because they thought it was a good thing to do isn’t exactly a major insight into the Carthaginian psyche. Why offer such an “explanation” at all? Because, in just the last few decades, Westerners have moved much closer to the Carthaginians’ view. We can easily see how ending the life of a child may ultimately serve the good of his family or community. Pro-choicers make that argument all the time.
What changed? How did we go from the older historians’ denialism to Dr. Quinn’s apologetics? Put simply, the influence of Christianity on the Western mind has nearly vanished in the last few decades.
The idea that all human beings are equally valuable really began in ancient Israel. As King David sang,
For thou hast possessed my reins:
thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
The Christian church carried this belief beyond the borders of Palestine. Its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, taught that God is not only our creator but our Father. He loves us. He’s personally invested in us, as individuals. And it’s His love—and only His love—that makes us worth more than the dust from which He fashioned us.
That’s why Christians can’t condone a practice like junshi, no matter how noble it may seem. It’s why we can’t support abortion, even when the child is conceived in rape. It’s not that we place such a high value on human life. That’s not our call. It’s God’s. He decided that each and every one of us is equally and infinitely precious. So, that’s the end of that.
Without that God, and without His love, few of us would place such a high value on human life. No culture did so before the advent of Christianity—and if the West is anything to go by, no culture will do so after its decline.
I don’t say this to judge pro-choicers, or secularists, or even Carthaginians. Of course, I think infanticide in any form is abominable. But we have to go into this debate with eyes wide open.
Seriously, we don’t realize how many of our basic moral judgments we take from the Christian faith. The absolute dignity and worth of the individual is just one example. And as Christianity become a minority religion in this country, we can no longer take for granted that most Americans share that view. The value of human life is dropping faster than Spotify stocks.
None of which I say to discourage the pro-life movement (or Spotify). On the contrary. I only hope we go into the abortion debate without any illusions. It’s worth trying to appeal to irreligious voters, but there will never be a secular pro-life movement. There will be no end to elective abortion unless and until America experiences a mass reversion to Christianity—a new Great Awakening. And I don’t think that’s as unlikely as it sounds.
Deep down, most of us really do believe Jesus’s signature teaching, his Greatest Commandment: to love God above all things, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. He didn’t say “be nice” or “help out” (though that may be implied). No: he used the L-word.
We know we’re supposed to love our fellow man. And we know that elective abortion is incompatible with love. We know that society that not only tolerates but celebrates abortion is suffering from a disease—a disease of the heart.
When they’re ready, our countrymen will go looking for the Man who said, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” And He’ll be waiting.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying a copy of my new book The Reactionary Mind (Regnery, 2021). Peace and the Good!