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Sunday, June 04, 2006

Next Installment in the Abortion Speech (Hauerwas)

From the Pro-Life Side: When Life Begins

Against the background of the church as family, you can see that the Christian language of abortion challenges the modern tendency to isolate moral dilemmas into discrete units of behavior. If that tendency is followed, you get the questions, What is really wrong with abortion?," and "Isn't abortion a separate problem that can be settled on its own grounds? And then you get the termination-of-pregnancy language that wants to see abortion as solely a medical problem. At the same time, you get abortion framed in a legalistic way.

When many people start talking about abortion, what is the first thing they talk about? When life begins. And why do they get into the question of when life begins? Because they think that the abortion issue is determined primarily by the claims that life is sacred and that life is never to be taken. They assume that these claims let you know how it is that you ought to think about abortion.

Well, I want to know where Christians get the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference at all to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe that life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding good.

To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die early.

When you frame the abortion issue in sacredness-of-life language, you get into intractable debates about when life begins. Notice that is an issue for legalists. By that I mean the fundamental question becomes, How do you avoid doing the wrong thing?

In contrast, the Christian approach is not one of deciding when has life begun, but hoping that it has. We hope that human life has begun! We are not the kind of people that ask, Does human life start at the blastocyst stage, or at implantation? Instead, we are the kind of people that hope life has started, because we are ready to believe the at this new life will enrich our community. We believe this not because we have sentimental views about children. Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that urges us to welcome children. When that happens, it is an extraordinary testimony of faith.

From the Pro-Choice Side: When Personhood Begins

On the pro-choice side you also get the abortion issue framed in a context that is outside of a communitarian structure. On the pro-choice side you get the question about when the fetus becomes a "person," because only persons supposedly have citizenship rights. That is the issue of Roe vs. Wade.

It is odd for Christians to take this approach since we believe that we are first of all citizens of a far different kingdom than something called the United States of America. If we end up identifying persons with the ability to reason--which, I think, finally renders all of our lives deeply problematic--then we cannot tell why it is that we ought to care for the profoundly retarded. One of the most chilling aspects of the current abortion debate in the wider society is the general acceptance, even among anti-abortion people, of the legitimacy of aborting severely defective children. Where do people get that idea? Where do people get the idea that severely defective children are somehow less than God's creation? People get that idea by privileging rationality. We privilege our ability to reason. I find that unbelievable.

We must remember that as Christians we do not believe in the inherent sacredness of life or in personhood. Instead we believe that there is much worth dying for. Christians do not believe that life is a right or that we have inherent dignity. Instead we believe that life is the gift of a gracious God. That is our primary Christian language regarding abortion: life is the gift of a gracious God. As part of the giftedness of life, we believe that we ought to live in a profound awe of the other's existence, knowing in the other we find God. So abortion is a description maintained by Christians to remind us of the kind of community we must be to sustain the practice of hospitality to life. That is related to everything else that we do and believe.

Slipping Down the Slope

There is the argument that if you let abortion start occurring for the late-developed fetus, sooner or later you cannot prohibit infanticide. Here you are entering the slippery slope argument. There is a prominent well-respected philosopher in this country named H. Tristam Englehart who wrote a book called Foundations of Bioethics. In the book Englehart argues that, as far as he can see, there is absolutely no reason at all that we should not kill children up to a year and a half old, since they are not yet persons. Foundations is a text widely used in our universities today by people having to deal with all kinds of bioethical problems.

I have no doubt that bioethical problems exist. After all, today you can run into all kinds of anomalies. For example, in hospitals, on one side of the hall, doctors and nurses are working very hard to save a five hundred-gram preemie while, on the other side of the hall, they are aborting a similar preemie. There are many of these anomalies. There is no question that they are happening. You can build up a collection of such horror stories. But listen, people can get used to horror. Also, opposition to the horrible should not be the final, decisive ground on which Christians stand while tackling these kinds of issues. Instead, the issue is how we as a Christian community can live in positive affirmation of the kind of hospitality that will be a witness to the society we live in. That will open up a discourse that otherwise would be impossible.

Now I know that you probably feel a bit frustrated by this theological approach to abortion--especially when you are trying to deal with concrete, pastoral problems, as well as the political problems that we confront in this society. In some ways what I am asking you to think about regarding abortion and the church is a little like what the Quakers had to go through regarding slavery. Some of the early abolitionists, as you know, were Quakers. Then somebody pointed out to them, there are a lot of slaveholding Friends." So the Quakers had to turn around and say, "Yes, that's right." Then they had to start trying to discipline their own ranks, and, as a result, they ended up creating a bunch of Anglicans in Philadelphia.

One of the reasons why the church's position about abortion has not been authentic is because the church has not lived and witnessed as a community in a way that challenges the fundamental secular presuppositions of both the pro-life side and the pro-choice side. We are going to have to become that kind of community if our witness is to have the kind of integrity that it must.

[Note: One final section follows this one...]

5 Comments:

Blogger Sandi said...

Again, I find this bizarre and opaque. Was this a speech or written work product? I hope it was the former, because if not he is a very poor writer. No discernable structure, no flow, etc.

And the whole idea of Christianity being about dying early and loving it is just morbid beyond all belief. The only thing he had to say that I remotely agreed with was that having a child is an act of faith and hope because of all the rotten things that go on in the world. That is true.

I also strongly disagree with his broad-brush characterization of pro-choice folks as making the argument that a fetus is not a person and thus should not have rights. And his characterization of rights as a general matter seems overly critical ... I think that if there was a move to ban Methodism or whatever, he'd think that rights were pretty important.

Although he has helped me refine my thoughts on the issue, and that will be the subject of my next post.

8:31 AM  
Blogger Sandi said...

Oops, it said speech in the title. I was clearly not paying attention.

8:31 AM  
Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

I'm looking forward to your next post, Sandi!

As I've said before, I have a hard time following Hauerwas. And yet, he reminds me a little of one of those disorganized brilliant mad scientists whom in the midst of his madness discovers something amazing every once in a while.

After re-reading this several times (again), I think I can summarize his arguments in this segment - made to Christians again - in three areas:

#1: Arguing over "when life begins" isn't a worthwhile debate to Christians.

#2: Arguing over the legal rights of an unborn child isn't a worthwhile debate for Christians to enter into either.

#3: So the (Christian) counter-position of, "well, if you don't talk about these things, next thing you know they'll be killing babies after they're born" - that isn't a worthwhile argument either.

In other words, I read this section to simply be debunking several of the normal modes of discussion.

Bottom line: I read Hauerwas to be saying, from a Christian perspective, "Pro-life? What does that mean? Pro-choice? What does that mean?"

And with his emphasis on hospitality, I think he's getting around to saying that Christians should withdraw from the political debates on this subject altogether and focus energies on welcoming vulnerable people into its midst.

12:42 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

This installment didn't do anything for me, either. I think Sandi hit the nail on the head: bizarre and opaque. It reads almost like a bad parody of Hauerwas, full of false dichotomies (e.g., either life is sacred or there are things worth dying for) and blatant counterfactuals (e.g., Christians don't have a sentimental view of their children).

And then there's this beaut':

Christians do not believe that life is a right or that we have inherent dignity. Instead we believe that life is the gift of a gracious God. . . As part of the giftedness of life, we believe that we ought to live in a profound awe of the other's existence, knowing in the other we find God.

So we live in "profound awe" of people because we know that we find God in them, but yet they have no inherent dignity? That's moronic. If God's inhering in a thing (person) doesn't give that thing (person) inherent dignity, what would?

As for the debate about when life begins, Christians should avoid it not because they believe in hospitality rather than the sacredness of life -- another false dichotomy. They should avoid it because it's nonsense. There is no point in the reproductive cycle at which life begins. A living male provides living spermatozoans to a living female, whose living oocyte is fertilized by one of those living sperm, tripping a series of cell divisions, specializations, and movements that result in a living offspring. Life is present throughout; it is a precondition of every step along the way. It doesn't begin.

Somehow, after all his illogic, he fetches up at the point of saying the church has allowed itself to be co-opted by secular forces; a point I agree with, but which has no logical connection to his preceding argument.

He definitely got one thing right, though:

Now I know that you probably feel a bit frustrated

10:31 AM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

9:36 AM  

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