Parliament walks the Way of Death
On the decriminalisation of abortion of full-term pregnancies
"There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways."
So begins the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. This little book is older than parts of the New Testament. The earliest date argued for is around the AD 60s, making it roughly contemporary with the synoptic gospels. If the standard late dating of John is correct, then it likely predates his entire corpus of gospel, letters and Revelation. But more important than its antiquity is that early fathers of the Church regarded it as the authentic teaching of the Apostles. There is little reason to suppose it not to be.
Although the Didache receives more attention for its depiction of the earliest liturgical life of the Church, it begins with spiritual and moral teaching, contrasting the Way of Life and the Way of Death.
The Way of Life begins with the Summary of the Law, which the Didache calls the "First Commandment": that one love God and love one's neighbour as oneself. This unfolds into a catena of Our Lord's exhortations on love of enemy, abstention from lust, and almsgiving.
The Way of Death, on the other hand, makes its practitioners "murderers of children, corrupters of the creatures of God, turning away from him that is in want, oppressing him that is afflicted, advocates of the wealthy, unjust judges of the poor, altogether sinful." (Didache 5:1-2)
The murder and corruption of children (that is, pederasty) are among the highest priorities to be countered in the Didache's catologue of sins. They come at the beginning of what the text calls the "Second Commandment":
"Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not corrupt boys, thou shalt not commit fornication, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not deal in magic, thou shalt do no sorcery, thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born, thou shalt not covet thy neighbours goods." (Didache 2:1)
Whatever residual horror at abortion remains in the West was not always there. It has been inculcated by two millennia of Christian culture, grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures. The pagan neighbours of the Israelites were known to sacrifice infants to their gods, Moloch the best known of these (Lev 20:4): hence the connection of murder with sorcery. The Bible's accusations are supported by archaeological evidence from Phoenician settlements, and replicated by independent non-Christian Greco-Roman historians. The Didache's resistance to abortion was therefore a direct continuation of its Israelite origins, but both Jew and Christian constituted a noteworthy minority among their peers in their outright ban on abortion and infanticide. The pagan Romans among whom the Apostles lived certainly did not share their conviction. Not only abortion, but killing when born - the exposure of disabled or unwanted babies after birth to the elements and the beasts - was common. Christians were set apart by their refusal to engage in these practices.
Two thousand years later, not only has the taboo against abortion evaporated, but calls have been made for killing when born, or “post-natal abortion.” As early as 1993, the ethicist Peter Singer said that a baby should not be considered human until a month after birth, and that there should be no moral objection to a doctor humanely killing a disabled infant within this timeframe. One might hope that enough of the vestigial Christian mind remains among westerners that they find Singer's position repulsive, but it is logically consistent with the British House of Commons' recent decision to decriminalise abortion up to full-term. As Singer said, the moment of leaving the womb is an arbitrary line by which to define whether a life is human. This is surely so. Many prematurely born children have viable lives. But the line he suggests, of 30 days after birth, is equally arbitrary.
This raises the question: in determining when a foetus becomes a human, pre- or post-birth, what line is not arbitrary? The fact that there is no scientific consensus on this matter, and arguably cannot be, with wildly differing cut-off lines in different nations, surely commends caution in defining what constitutes a human life. But the United Kingdom's Members of Parliament have thrown all such caution to the winds. By decriminalising women who abort up to full term, they have abrogated the collective responsibility of society to decide whether a full-term pregnancy is really a human. They have devolved that decision to individual women.
The questions of women's rights and healthcare around abortion are important and legitimate. The harrowing cases of rape, incest and abuse cannot be ignored. The prospect of having to go through giving birth to a baby one knows is so terribly disabled that he or she will live only a brief life of pain and suffering is one that we who have not faced might be circumspect. One should also take seriously the claim that there are certain limits to what men can legitimately say about a situation which affects women most.
However, it takes a man to make a baby, and men need to exercise responsibility, which includes speaking responsibly to this issue. Nor are children the exclusive provenance of women. If men are not invested enough in their children's lives, they should be more so, not less. If men were more responsible, there would be fewer demands for abortion. Statistics suggesting that sex-selective abortions may have stopped the birth of 23 million girls in India and China also suggest that the practice is not straightforwardly good news for women. Surely, many of these are instigated by men. Doctors warn that further relaxation of abortion laws in Britain will give men, especially those from ethnic minorities which prize sons, greater leeway to control the women in their households.
But fundamentally, if one still believes that human life is of intrinsic value, all these questions are downstream of the first, which is universal, and belongs to neither sex alone. Namely, what constitutes a human life?
If one holds that a foetus becomes human at some point after conception, one must draw a line somewhere. At full term, one cannot seriously concede that we are talking about an impersonal "bundle of cells." Even Peter Singer has his limits. He would not condone post-natal abortion for a one-year-old, seven-year-old, or forty-year-old. At some point, the argument for abortion segues into euthanasia. This depends on the matter of free will, though again, defining the moment at which one becomes or ceases to be a rational agent is one of the key problems that proponents of euthanasia face when it comes to drafting legislation. St Thomas Aquinas considered 7 the age of reason: might Singer not advocate for abortion up to that age? In a day where a parliament has pronounced suddenly that an infant's inalienable right to life begins only at birth, even this question, extreme though it may seem, is not idle. Parliament has drawn one line. What other ones might they draw?
Nothing, however, suggests that the question is answerable on the terms of secular modernity. Parliament's option for the Way of Death is incoherent, immoral and intolerable. Into this chaos, the Church should speak. Invective will achieve little. But the secular society which is always so quick to point out the very real faults of the Church now needs a taste of its own medicine. If the world wants to ask us hard questions, it should allow the Church to return the compliment and hold it to account.
Pope Benedict identified two main streams to the Enlightenment. One is the radical libertinism of Rousseau and de Sade, which led to the murderous excesses of the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism. The other is the broadly Anglo-Saxon commitment to the inviolable dignity and rights of the human. This latter stream flows down a channel hewn by the Christian teaching that all humans are made in the image of God. Chip away at those banks, and the water will cascade uselessly over the edges. When political rivals, notably China, insist that human rights are a collective fiction imposed by the West, to which they need pay no regard, they are simply pointing out that the Christian shape of Western civilisation has been eroded. The West's claim to the universality of human rights, even that humans have a basic right to live, is relativised away, so that it is just one claim among many, disposable at will. China’s point is valid. A secularist defence of human rights can be mounted only on the basis of mutual agreement. Disagreement is rewarded with the threat of economic or military force. The whole framework collapses into an arbitrary offer made hard to refuse. Without the image of God, the claim that all humans have an intrinsic right to live is as baseless as the claim that all humans are born equal. No amount of eugenic or social tampering can change the fact that equality before God is the only real equality we have.
Last Tuesday's vote is about more than decriminalising the indiscriminate abortion of late-term, viable babies. It is the removal of one of the final Christian figleaves from the naked paganism of modern Britain, and one more step along the Way of Death. It is the inevitable corollary of pretending to uphold human rights while forgetting about God. It aids the powerful, because adults are always more powerful than children, and it will aid powerful men in their abuse of women. It makes fornication and sexual irresponsibility even easier. And so it leads us away from the cleaner, Christian humanist stream of the Enlightenment into the noisome effluence of Rousseavian relativism, Sadistic narcissism, Fabian eugenicism, and the modernist horror of a world where the value of human life is subordinated to economic decisions facilitated by a technocratic state.
The bishops in the House of Lords now have a hard task before them. They will need to remain duly compassionate towards those women who have to make difficult decisions about their pregnancies. But they will also need the courage to defend the lives of the nearly born, to call for the due chastisement of those who end them unjustly, and to uphold the Apostolic teaching of the Way of Life.