Of the hotly contested political battles of our time, none is fraught with more accusations of moral turpitude and self-imagined righteousness than that over abortion — over the question of a woman's right to regulate her own reproductive self.
In the United States, it's unusually Judeo-Christianly inspired and frequently evangelical or fundamentalist believers who lead the charge to protect the vanguard of human life, to explain the sacredness that defines a woman's womb.
I am deeply appreciative and respectful of the many learned and wise teachings that underlie these religious traditions. I hesitate when they support an unflinching faith, a faith that is unable to understand the vast varieties of human experience, past and present alike. The Bible's sacredness, I strongly believe, derives as much if not more from its varied endurance, transmission and interpretation, than from any timeless or divine character.
I am deeply concerned about the way antiabortion visions of the world distract us from the innumerable and pressing moral and ethical challenges of our contemporary world. Avoidance of choice — the unwillingness to recognize the moral relevance of having the option of abortion — distorts the present and denies the past.
Many antiabortion proponents feel strongly about banning contraception, not least of them the Catholic Church. A quick picture of pre-contraceptive life is useful, say 16th-century England: Women who reached childbearing age spent a quarter to a third of their lives being pregnant; the rest was dominated by childrearing. People lived in houses with dirt floors and children began working where they were around seven or eight. And this isn't to mention the shortness of life, ever-present disease and recurring famine.
Today's world is extraordinarily different, with tremendously different problems. It is an environmental — and I would argue moral and ethical — impossibility to sustain our current way of living without the free regulation of human reproduction, unless we want to preserve modernity and consumer capitalism for only the tiniest fraction of humanity and leave the rest to suffer as they will or further speedup the environment's own immanent climatic response to our way of life.
Advances in medical care and changing expectations for the nature and duration of life raise extremely difficult questions about its end course. Today's 20-40-somethings confront a huge population of aging and inform parents and grandparents that has just barely been evidenced by debates over social security and health insurance. How will we care for these loved ones?
We also live in a world of tremendous possibility. I do not believe in progress, but rather a view that changing social configurations can bring with them opportunity and innovation. The baseline of human comfort and pleasure can be broadened equitably to include the most people possible. This may indeed have devastating risks, which is what I think the abortion rights advocates actually fear. But I believe them to be risks worth taking.
I don't believe in some sort of libertarian anarchy that includes the smashing of alters and the exploitation and prostitution of our own minds and bodies or those of others.
I have faith in human creativity, from sexual expression to the arts and sciences. Choice brings with it amazingly worthwhile and fulfilling ways for experiencing the universe, local and distant, seen and imagined. It should be open and available to everybody. And, the Bible may indeed offer compelling insights and important suggestions for how to navigate today's challenges.
Our world requires difficult decisions and genuinely novel thinking. Only our ability to make choices, especially the most fundamental choices about our own bodies, can guide the way. It offers us a necessary understanding of what life has to offer and how we live together in an inter-subjective world.
The abortion-rights movement has been slow to stake its moral claim. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just signifies how much work has been done in even bringing this conversation to the table. Now that we're here, we're surely going to make our voice heard. Our message is the most relevant, accepted and important perspective for confronting the problems we all face as we live together in the 21st century. We can only hope that the next hundred years will be marred by less horror, evil and devastation than the last.
And that's exactly it. Abortion rights advocacy isn't an abortive future at all: It's one of opportunity, hope and, yes, faith — faith in the power of humanity to make choices. In adopting a rigid and anachronistic sense of morality and social reality, the antiabortion movement has limited the possibilities of human existence and made faith into a dangerous, devastating and destructive force. It's antiabortion who has thrown the baby out with the bath water. Christopher Moses is a graduate student in the history department and a member of Princeton Pro-Choice Vox. He may be reached at cmoses@princeton.edu.
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