The standard argument against abortion relies upon the language of \u201crights\u201d: All human beings have a \u201cright to life,\u201d the unborn is a human being, thus, the unborn have a \u201cright to life.\u201d\u00a0 For at least two reasons, this argument fails to perform the task to which it has been assigned.<\/p>\n
First, the notion of \u201crights\u201d that are supposed to be universally distributed throughout the human species is dubious. More than a few thinkers, including Christian thinkers at that, have seconded Jeremy Bentham\u2019s sentiment that the idea of \u201cnatural rights\u201d is \u201cnonsense on stilts.\u201d\u00a0 There can be no question that, its truth or cogency aside, the doctrine of \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201chuman rights\u201d has kept its defenders busy with no small supply of problems with which to grapple.<\/p>\n
Second, even on the assumption of the truth of this argument\u2019s premises, the conclusion simply does not <\/em>follow.\u00a0 The knowledge that so-and-so is a human being with a \u201cright to life\u201d is, by itself, insufficient to proscribe any action <\/em>short of \u201cunjustified killing.\u201d\u00a0 Yet whether abortion is unjustified killing is precisely the question that needs to be settled; it can\u2019t be supposed or else the argument is reduced to an exercise in question-begging.<\/p>\n Abortion is <\/em>an evil, we can be sure of that, but we needn\u2019t avail ourselves of the abstract universalism of the rights theorist to realize this fact.\u00a0 There are reasons much closer to home that convict us of the wrongness of abortion while at once exposing the superfluity of rights reasoning.\u00a0<\/p>\n I am far from denying that there are cross-cultural and trans-historical principles of morality that can be abstracted from those points at which the world\u2019s moral traditions intersect; but the only moral education worth speaking of, the education whereby virtue and duty are not taught, but imparted, is always a particular <\/em>affair. Morality requires, not the impartiality demanded of the doctrine of \u201chuman rights,\u201d but a partiality without which the relationships constitutive of the moral life would be impossible.\u00a0 The moral experience is concrete, not abstract, and while morality is an intelligent engagement, it is not an exercise in \u201cnaked Reason,\u201d but a matter of habit and feeling\u2014or \u201cprejudice,\u201d as Burke put it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, the parent-child relationship is the most durable of all human relationships, the one relationship least susceptible to the contingencies that all too often threaten to ruin every other.\u00a0 There is a bond between parent and child that, especially on the parent\u2019s part, isn\u2019t so much acquired as it is spontaneous\u2014or at least this is what it feels like.\u00a0 I recall that when my wife and I were expecting our son, a receptionist at the office of my wife\u2019s doctor told us: \u201cYou will be amazed at how much love you will instantly feel for that baby who you don\u2019t even know!\u201d And she was right. It is not for nothing that the dominant metaphor for God\u2019s love for humanity is parental love.<\/p>\n In fact, this love of parent for child begins before <\/em>the former even meets the latter.\u00a0 This explains why miscarriages are experienced as tragedies.\u00a0 Notice, when a woman miscarries, no one so much as thinks to lament that God, nature, or circumstances conspired to \u201cterminate the pregnancy\u201d; neither is she consoled for having lost \u201cthe fetus.\u201d\u00a0 Her situation is perceived, by herself and others, as tragic, because she lost \u201cthe baby.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n To permit the ontological standing of this prenatal being to depend on the desires and attachments of the parent is not only incoherent, it is morally repugnant.\u00a0 But in allowing for elective abortion, we accommodate just such an arrangement.\u00a0 This type of abortion is worse than the government-mandated abortion of, say, China; at least in China it is strangers who order the deaths of the unborn.\u00a0 We, on the other hand, sanction the morally inconceivable in allowing, not faceless bureaucrats, but mothers<\/em> to visit lethal violence upon the very wombs that nature itself designed for sheltering and nourishing the tiny, powerless lives growing within them.<\/p>\n Neither war nor the death penalty nor euthanasia promise to eviscerate a peoples\u2019 sense of the sanctity of human life like abortion, for abortion alone is an immediate assault against the one human love that strikes us as being, not an acquisition, but a dispensation of nature. \u00a0The one fine line between civilization and barbarism is the parent: it is through the love, care, and education provided by the parent that the child is civilized.\u00a0 There is, then, no surer way to facilitate the decline of civilization itself than to not only permit parents to destroy their children, but to do all that can be done to convince them that this is one of their \u201chuman rights.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The standard argument against abortion relies upon the language of \u201crights\u201d: All human beings have a \u201cright to life,\u201d the unborn is a human being, thus, the unborn have a \u201cright to life.\u201d\u00a0 For at least two reasons, this argument fails to perform the task to which it has been assigned. First, the notion of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n