The Secular Case against Abortion

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, November 11, 2021

 

I have been opposed to abortion since the very first moment I learned of it. For me, it is a pre-political and pre-ideological opposition. Growing up, I was neither knowledgeable about, nor much interested in, the broader world around me, but I knew one thing: I was against killing babies, and I did not understand those who were not.

 

I was not led to this position. Indeed, if anything, I arrived at it despite my environment, not because of it. In England, most people are pro-choice, and, insofar as the topic ever comes up, it is within a context that has never had any purchase on me: religion. As a staunch defender of conscience, I am friendly towards, and respectful of, religious believers. But I am not one myself, I have never been one myself, and I am not close to being one myself. Naturally, I am grateful to the religious traditions in which I was raised indirectly, and I am fully aware of the monumental influence that they have had upon the worldview that I spend my days defending. But I do not accept the metaphysical claims that it would be incumbent upon me to accept if I were to convert. I don’t believe in heaven, or hell, or the soul, or miracles, or the power of intercessory prayer — or in God, for that matter. I think that humans are exceptional and precious and worthy of unalienable rights, but I do not rest this upon anything supernatural.

 

I mention this because, almost every time I write about abortion, I receive letters in which I am accused of being a “religious fundamentalist.” But this, of course, is nonsense — in part because I am not even a religious layabout, and in part because one does not have to have any religious beliefs whatsoever in order to consider the most popular arguments in favor of abortion to be unpersuasive. As far as I am concerned, the core case against abortion neither presumes nor relies upon the existence of God, but holds simply that abortion involves the killing of an innocent human being, and that the killing of innocent human beings is wrong. For me, at least, God doesn’t enter into it.

 

In America, most of the rhetoric that is deployed by abortion advocates centers on the mother: “My body, my choice,” and all that. As a libertarian-leaning guy, I find this sort of argument appealing in almost every circumstance. It’s a free country, and if its free adults wish to inject heroin into their bodies, to cover their faces in tattoos, to decline to get a COVID-19 vaccine, or to cut off their genitals, I’m broadly indifferent to their decisions. But with abortion, we’re not really talking about the mother’s body, but about the other body at stake. And, while there is no doubt that pregnancy can be difficult, it is the other body that is facing certain death during an abortion. (What to do when the mother’s own life is at risk is, of course, a wholly different moral question.) It is fashionable, I know, to tell men such as I that what women choose to do with their own children is none of our concern. But this simply isn’t true when that choice involves ending those children’s lives. We know what will happen if we decline to kill the unborn: They will go on living. That, in certain circumstances, mothers do not wish this to happen cannot possibly be the end of the story.

 

The utilitarian arguments for abortion suffer from the same problem. “What,” people often ask, “if the parents don’t love the child?” “What if the child were to grow up poor?” “What if overpopulation causes us to run out of food, or leads the earth to warm up beyond the breaking point?” “What if the government doesn’t provide the level of welfare spending that some would like?” But unless these questions would be persuasive when talking about killing a one-month-old, or killing a five-year-old, or killing an 80-year-old, I don’t see what relevance they could have to the unborn.

 

I suspect that my horror at the idea that some people are simply disposable grew stronger as a result of my mum’s work. Before she retired, my mother taught preschool children who had special needs, such as those with autism, Down syndrome, and cerebral palsy, and for the better part of a decade, I volunteered to help at the weekly sessions she ran. In some countries, children such as the ones my mother taught are considered subhuman — in Iceland, for example, the government boasts frequently that it has “eradicated” Down syndrome, when what it means in practice is that parents in Iceland have killed all of the children whose prenatal tests had revealed the condition — but nobody at these sessions seemed to think that these children were anything other than slightly different, just as worthy of love and attention and time as anyone else, and so neither did I. (The problem with executing people who are inconvenient seems obvious to people when we discuss, say, elderly people who have developed Alzheimer’s, about whom no doctor would ever think to say, “We cured your grandfather — by killing him.”)

 

Having my own children has strengthened my opposition to abortion — not least because, upon becoming a parent, you realize how much of each person is there from the moment he is born. There are, of course, environmental factors at work in raising kids, and only a fool would argue otherwise. But then there are the things you can’t explain, such as why one child has a temper and the other doesn’t, or why one likes ketchup and the other doesn’t, or why one is able to repeat music back in the key in which he heard it while the other wildly transposes it before losing the tune. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but acknowledge it we must, that, since abortion became easily accessible, we have wiped out millions upon millions of individual human beings, each with their own foibles, flaws, talents, and offerings, and that we have done so in the name of convenience, and atop an ersatz conception of what does, and does not, constitute a “right.”

 

There is a reason, I suspect, that abortion’s most vocal apologists are so reluctant to discuss the issue without resorting to bloodless euphemisms (“reproductive justice”) or attributing elaborate motives to their opponents (“hates women” / “religious extremist”), and that reason is that a blunt examination of the topic at hand should, at the very least, lead one to err on the side of caution. Over the years, I have had all manner of intricate explanations thrown in my face as to why I, a nonbeliever, might be so invested in saving the lives of human beings who, if left to their own devices, will get to experience all the beauty, heartbreak, and mystery of life. But, all told, the answer is simple: I am one.