Chapter 7: Abortion 1

Chapter 7: Abortion 1

The Woman in the Car Park

She appeared in the preface of this book, and I owe her a fuller account.

Her name is Verena. She is twenty-six, and she is sitting in a car park with the engine off and an appointment in twenty minutes.

She is eight weeks pregnant. She found out five weeks ago. She told the father, whom she had been seeing for a year and a half and had begun to think about marrying, and he said very little at the time and then, over the following fortnight, became a different person: unreachable, then irritable, then finally explicit. He said he was not ready. He said that if she went ahead, it was her decision and her responsibility. He has not answered a message in nine days.

Her mother has early-onset Parkinson’s. Verena moved back home eighteen months ago and is the main earner in the house. Her father died when she was nineteen. Her job is decent and precarious; she is on a rolling contract that has been renewed four times and is up again in March.

She was raised in the Coptic Church, served in Sunday school for six years, and has not been to confession since February. She knows exactly what the Church teaches. She could give the teaching accurately in two sentences. That is not her problem.

Her problem is that she cannot see a version of the next five years that works, and when she tries to imagine telling her mother, or her priest, or the woman who ran the Sunday school with her, she feels something close to physical panic. She has read a great deal online in five weeks. Everything she read was written by someone who was certain and angry, and none of it was written to her.

I do not know what Verena did in the twenty minutes after that. This chapter is not going to tell you, because the moment I tell you, she stops being a person and becomes a verdict, and the whole difficulty of this subject is that this is what happens to women constantly.

What Is Actually at Issue?

Abortion is the deliberate ending of a pregnancy before the unborn child can survive independently by a procedure intended to bring that about.

That definition already requires two clarifications, both of which matter medically and legally as well as morally.

Treatment for miscarriage is not abortion. When a pregnancy has already ended and the body has not completed the process, medical or surgical management is treatment of a death that has already occurred. The same drugs and the same procedures may be involved, which has caused real confusion and, in places where the law is unclear, real harm — women have been left untreated and have become seriously ill while clinicians sought legal reassurance. There is no moral question here at all.

Procedures in which the death of the unborn child is foreseen but not intended are analysed differently, under the principle set out in Chapter 5. The ectopic pregnancy is the standard case and is addressed at length in Abortion 2.

The moral question, then, concerns the deliberate ending of a developing human life.

If everything in Chapter 6 is correct — if a distinct human being exists from conception, and if human worth does not depend on capacity, dependency, or being wanted — then a great deal follows quickly. That is the Christian argument, and it is a strong one.

But an honest chapter has to say the next thing too. There is a second person involved, and she is not an incubator. Whatever the unborn child is, it exists inside the body of a woman who has her own life, her own health, her own obligations, and her own future, and who did not consent to the pregnancy merely by existing. Any Christian argument that treats her as a container or that discusses her situation in the tone of a syllogism has failed before it starts — and a great deal of Christian argument does exactly this.

The real question of this chapter is therefore not "Is the unborn child a human being?” It is granting that it is what may be required of the woman carrying it and what may not.

The Witness of Scripture

Scripture contains no explicit legislation on abortion, and Christians who claim otherwise are on weak ground. What it contains is the framework set out in Chapter 6: God’s knowledge of persons before birth (Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 49:1); the unborn John’s response to the unborn Christ (Luke 1:41–44); the prohibition of killing the innocent; the special obligation towards the defenceless; and the treatment of children as blessing rather than burden.

The silence itself deserves a comment. The Torah legislates about an extraordinary range of matters, including many that seem trivial. Its silence about abortion is most plausibly explained by the fact that it was not a live question in that society in the way it was in the surrounding Greek and Roman world. The Jewish tradition that developed later did address it, generally treating the foetus as possessing real but not full status until birth and permitting abortion where the mother’s life is at risk, on the reasoning that she is a full life and it is not yet. That is a serious position held by a serious tradition, and Christians should know it exists rather than assuming that everyone who reads the Hebrew Scriptures reaches the Christian conclusion.

Exodus 21:22–25, the one passage that bears on it directly, was examined in Chapter 6 and is genuinely ambiguous. It should not be deployed as a proof text by either side.

Christ

Christ said nothing recorded about abortion. What is available is His pattern of attention.

He consistently placed Himself with those who had no standing: children, whom His disciples tried to keep away from Him; the sick; the poor; and repeatedly, in a way that scandalised His contemporaries, women in disgrace. The woman about to be stoned (John 8:1–11) is the closest thing in the Gospels to Verena’s position: a woman facing the consequences of a sexual situation, surrounded by men who were technically correct and who had somehow lost interest in the other party, about to be dealt with publicly.

What Christ did there is the pattern for this chapter. He did not deny that what she had done was wrong; he told her to go and sin no more. He did not permit her to be destroyed for it. And He turned the attention of the room onto the accusers, who left one by one.

Any Christian who is more interested in Verena’s guilt than in the man who has not answered a message in nine days has read that passage without understanding it.

The Early Church

Here the historical record is unusually clear, and it matters because it shows the Church taking a position against its own culture at a real cost.

Abortion and the exposure of unwanted infants were legal, common, and unremarkable in the Greco-Roman world. Infant exposure in particular was a normal method of family limitation, and it was applied disproportionately to girls and to infants with visible abnormalities.

Against this, the Christian witness is uniform from the earliest documents:

• The Didache lists the prohibition of abortion and of killing a newborn alongside murder, theft, and adultery.
• The Epistle of Barnabas repeats it in almost identical terms.
• Athenagoras, answering the accusation that Christians committed murder in their rites, replied that people who regard the destruction of the unborn as killing and refuse to practise it can hardly be murderers.
• Tertullian argued that to prevent a birth is an anticipated homicide and that it makes no difference whether one destroys a life already born or one on its way.
• St Basil the Great, in his canonical letters, refused the distinction between a “formed” and “unformed” foetus which some ancient authorities used to grade the offence and classified the act as homicide — yet in the same canon he set a fixed term of penance rather than permanent exclusion and remarked on the wretchedness of the woman’s situation.
• The Council of Ancyra in 314 addressed the discipline for women who had procured abortions and — this is the point usually omitted — reduced the previous penalty, replacing lifelong exclusion from communion with a defined term, explicitly describing this as a more merciful arrangement.
• The Council of Elvira in the early fourth century legislated on it more severely.

Two observations that Christians on both sides of the modern debate tend to skip.

First, the early Church’s position was countercultural and costly, and it was bound up with the same impulse that led Christians to collect exposed infants off rubbish heaps and raise them. It was not a rule handed down from a position of power; it was a minority community refusing a normal practice and then absorbing the consequences by taking in the children.

Second, from the beginning the Church distinguished the act from the person, as Basil and Ancyra both show. The pattern — unyielding about the act, merciful towards the woman — is present from the fourth century, and any modern Christian who has only the first half has less of the tradition than they think.

The Coptic Orthodox Understanding

The Coptic Orthodox Church teaches that human life begins at conception and that deliberate abortion is the taking of innocent human life and is gravely sinful. This is settled teaching, not a matter on which the Church has left the faithful to their own judgement.

Alongside this the Church holds, and its pastoral practice reflects:

• that a woman who has had an abortion is to be received in confession, absolved, and restored, and that the sin is not of a different order from other grave sins in respect of God’s willingness to forgive it;
• that the father, and anyone who pressured or arranged it, bears responsibility, sometimes greater than hers;
• that medical intervention to save the mother’s life where the child cannot be saved falls into a different moral category, analysed in Abortion 2;
• and that the Church has obligations to pregnant women in difficulty which it has not always met.

Two things the Coptic tradition brings are worth naming.

The Incarnation from conception, discussed in Chapter 6, is the strongest theological argument the tradition possesses on this question. The Church that fought at Ephesus for the title Theotokos is committed, at the centre of its Christology, to the proposition that the Word of God was united to a human nature from the moment of conception. A Coptic Christian who holds that an eight-week embryo is nothing is in tension with the Creed.

The Church’s own history of protecting the discarded. Egyptian Christianity has a long memory of being the community that took in what the wider society threw away. That is the register in which this teaching belongs, and it is a very different register from political campaigning.

For any actual medical situation — an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition, a diagnosis of severe abnormality — a woman should speak to her father of confession and, where the question is urgent, her bishop, alongside her doctors. Published English-language guidance from the Coptic Church on specific clinical situations is limited, and the responsible thing for a book to do is to give the principles and direct the reader to a person.

Other Christian Views

Roman Catholicism holds the most fully articulated position: direct abortion is always gravely wrong, from conception, without exception, and this is taught with the highest authority. Catholic moral theology has done the most detailed work on the difficult cases, including double-effect analysis of ectopic pregnancy and of medical treatment in pregnancy.

Eastern Orthodoxy teaches essentially the same, generally with less systematic casuistry and more emphasis on oikonomia in application. Orthodox statements typically permit intervention where the mother’s life is genuinely at stake and are often less restrictive than Catholic analysis about which technique may be used.

Protestant Christianity is divided, and the division is real rather than a matter of some Protestants being unserious.

Conservative evangelical and confessional Protestants generally hold a position close to the Catholic and Orthodox one, arguing from the same scriptural material.

Mainline Protestant bodies have often taken positions permitting abortion in a range of circumstances — risk to the mother’s physical or mental health, serious fetal abnormality, rape and incest — while describing abortion as a moral tragedy rather than a neutral procedure. Their reasoning generally holds that the unborn child has real but developing moral status, that the woman’s circumstances carry genuine moral weight, and that the decision belongs to her conscience before God rather than to the state.

Some Protestant thinkers argue that the question is not settled by Scripture, that the Church therefore has no warrant to bind consciences, and that the most Christian response is support rather than prohibition.

Historically, it is worth knowing that Protestant opinion in the English-speaking world was more varied in the mid-twentieth century than it later became, and that the strong alignment of evangelical Protestantism with the pro-life movement developed substantially in the 1970s and 80s. This is a matter of historical record and it does not settle whether the position is right.

Where does this leave the reader? With a genuine disagreement among Christians about the exceptions and about the law, and with a very wide agreement about two things: that abortion is not morally trivial, and that a Church which opposes it while doing nothing for pregnant women in difficulty has forfeited the right to be heard.

The Arguments

This section presents the case against abortion and the strongest arguments on the other side. I hold the Church’s position. I am not going to defend it by misrepresenting its opponents, which is both dishonest and useless, since anyone who has actually read the other side will simply stop trusting the book.

The core argument against

Stated formally:

1. It is gravely wrong intentionally to kill an innocent human being.
2. The unborn child is an innocent human being.
3. Therefore it is gravely wrong intentionally to kill an unborn child.

Premise 1 is accepted by nearly everyone. Premise 2 is where the argument is contested, and Chapter 6 gave the case: from fertilisation there exists a distinct living organism of our species, self-directing in its development, and no subsequent point marks a change of kind rather than of degree.

The supporting argument is that every alternative criterion for moral status — sentience, viability, brain activity, birth — either draws a line that is arbitrary, or admits of degrees, or would exclude human beings we all agree must be included. Viability is the clearest case: it is a fact about local medical technology, and a criterion that makes a child’s right to exist depend on the equipment available in the nearest hospital is not a moral criterion at all.

The argument from bodily autonomy

The most important philosophical argument on the other side, and it must be stated properly.

In 1971 the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson published an argument that changed the shape of the debate. She granted, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person with a full right to life — conceding the pro-life movement’s central claim — and then argued that the conclusion still does not follow.

Her thought experiment: you wake up in hospital connected to a famous unconscious violinist. The Society of Music Lovers, discovering that you alone have the right blood type, has plugged his circulatory system into yours. If you unplug him he dies. If you remain connected for nine months, he recovers. You did not consent to any of this.

Thomson’s claim is that you would be generous to stay, and that you are not obliged to. The violinist’s right to life does not include a right to the use of your body. And if that is right, then even granting full personhood to the unborn child, it does not automatically follow that a woman is obliged to sustain it with her own body.

The argument has been debated for fifty years. The main responses:

Responsibility. In most pregnancies, unlike the violinist case, the woman’s own voluntary act contributed to the situation. If you knowingly do something that may bring a dependent person into existence, you may incur obligations you did not specifically intend. Thomson anticipated this and offered further cases designed to meet it.

The parent-child relation. Parents have obligations to their children that are not grounded in consent and cannot be terminated by withdrawing it. A father cannot escape child support by pointing out that he did not agree to it. If the unborn child is your child, the violinist analogy — a stranger imposed on you by third parties — misdescribes the relationship.

Killing versus unplugging. Unplugging the violinist lets him die of his own condition. Most abortion procedures are not the withdrawal of assistance but acts directed at the child. This is a real disanalogy, though it does not apply equally to every case or every method.

Thomson’s own limits. She did not conclude that abortion is permissible in all circumstances, and she explicitly regarded some reasons as indecent even where the act was within a woman’s rights. This is often forgotten by those who cite her.

My own assessment: the argument fails as a general justification, chiefly because of the parent-child point, and it succeeds in showing that the case is not as simple as the three-premise syllogism suggests. Its force is greatest in the case of rape, taken up in Abortion 2.

The argument from consequences

Restrictions on abortion do not eliminate abortion; they change who gets one safely. Women with money travel. Women without money do not. Where abortion is illegal and unsafe, women are injured and die, and the World Health Organization has repeatedly estimated deaths from unsafe abortion in the tens of thousands annually worldwide, with far larger numbers of serious complications. Estimates in this field are difficult to construct and are contested, and the direction of the finding is not seriously disputed.

This is a genuine moral consideration and Christians who wave it away are not being serious. The response is that it is an argument about law and enforcement, not about whether the act is wrong, and that the same structure of argument would apply to other things nobody proposes to legalise on those grounds. But the answer to “women will die” cannot be a debating point. It has to be a programme.

The argument from pluralism

In a society where citizens hold incompatible views about when a human life begins, should the state enforce one of them? The argument is that the metaphysical question is genuinely contested, that reasonable people differ, and that the law should therefore leave it to individual conscience.

The Christian response is that the law routinely settles contested moral questions — it does so about slavery, about child labour, about who counts as a person — and that a society cannot be neutral on the question of who is protected. Neutrality is itself an answer.

But the pluralism argument deserves more respect than it usually gets from Christians, because it raises the genuine question of what a Christian may legitimately seek to require of a society that does not share their premises. Chapter 30 addresses this.

The argument from consistency

The sharpest charge, and the one Christians should feel most.

It runs: the movement that campaigns most loudly against abortion often shows the least interest in the conditions that make women seek one. It has frequently opposed contraception, sex education, paid parental leave, subsidised childcare, and support for disabled children, while treating the moment of birth as the point at which its obligations end. It has often been more energetic about legislation than about the practical needs of pregnant women. And it has sometimes treated women themselves with contempt.

Where this charge is true, it is devastating, and it is true often enough to have done enormous damage to the credibility of the Christian position. A Church that believes the unborn child is a neighbour must believe the same about the woman and about the child at three, and must be able to point at what it actually does.