"Do you believe that?"

[fpb]

jennilee, after reading the article about abortion and eugenics I posted yesterday, astonishes me by asking whether I "really believe" that eugenics is on the march, and that the shadow of Nazism is falling thicker and blacker every day on a civilization that boasts of its deafeat. Well, my friend, do you for a minute imagine that if I did not think it was a serious matter, I would have given it so much space in my blog? On an issue where I know I am in the minority and in danger of making myself even more unpopular with the local PC crowd than I already am? A strange question.

It has long been my view that abortion, apart from the central and obvious matter of being an assault on human life, has two other atrocious features, both catastrophic for individuals and society: the eugenistic one, with its corollary of an implicit demand that parents should get the kind of children they want, and the withdrawal from responsibility, by which a mother decides to murder the baby in her womb exactly because she knows that she will not dare to look on it in its face once it is born, and get rid of it. (A third disastrous corollary, the destruction of the meaning of marriage, has been recently brought to my attention by theological reflection in the Church. But it is something on which I, personally, have done too little thinking yet to have an opinion worth giving.)

Because I tend to pay more attention to individual responsibility and intellectual honesty, I have tended, when I discussed these matters (which is not often, because I do not like to expose myself to the hatred and prejudice that go with them), to stress the second of the two. That does not, however, mean that I did not object to the first. Being involved in the disabled rights movement, I am all too conscious of the potential for quiet extermination of the unfit; indeed, I have used it as an argument against abortion in debate with homosexual friends - do you not realize that if the "gay gene" is ever discovered, you lot will simply be aborted out of existence?

Abortion is a poison that reaches into all features of social relations. As bad as the extermination of the unfit - horribly shown in the anecdote of the ten-year-old spina bifida child told to his face that he should have been aborted - is the perversion of the relationship of parents and children. Believe me, I am not romantic about the family. I have seen things happen that many of you will pray never to experience in their lives; I know everything of the meaning of the word "child abuse". Everything. But if the family has any ethical foundation at all, any fixed point on which to root itself, and from which its abuses can be rightly criticized and corrected, it is this: the parents open themselves, unconditionally, to any chance that childbirth might send their way; they love the child before it is born, and whatever it turns out to be. It is based on that original commitment, as risky as any love, as open as any love, that the child owes its parents a debt greater than to any other entity (except perhaps, as Socrates argued, to the nation of which the parents are themselves a part). It is not just because the father and mother gave you life, but because they accepted whatever it was that you were even before you were, that you owe them what most cultures regard as the highest duty on Earth.

Now consider the opportunities opened by pre-natal scanning and IVF. The parents are afforded the possibility of controlling in advance several features of their child. They become, in effect, arbiters of the child's nature. What kind of relationship is that, from the start, going to create? One in which those features of paternal and maternal feelings which are notoriously the worst will have full play. The father will want to produce a child that succeeds at whatever it is that he failed, one who repairs whatever failures he had in the world; the mother will want an idealized extension of herself, prettier, more accomplished, but made in the mould of her will. And what will the child feel, knowing that it has been created, not as itself, but as the tool of the will of others? The whole parent-child relationship is not only vitiated, it is destroyed; for in the heart of the authority of parent over child there is, there has to be, the certainty that the child is its own person, and that parents exert their authority not for their own satisfaction, but for its own good. That, after all, is the slogan that every parent has repeated every time that they had to impose something difficult of unpleasant or inflict a punishment: "this is for your own good".

This is not just a possibility, this is a fact. It is happening now. The ties between parents and children are being broken. There is a suspicion around (watch the horror and science fiction products of our entertainment industry) that we are all being created for the benefit and the entertainment of others; and a corresponding exaggerated obsession with individual indendence, that sees in every claim of responsibility some sort of State plot to manipulate us. Look at our relationships with each other and with the society we live in, and tell me that we do not regard it, not as a mother, but as an evil stepmother. This has abortion done.

Comments

People are no damned good

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I've seen friends bring a terminally ill baby into the world, and I've seen others who had one aborted "before they could see it's face" and I honestly can't say one choice looked less painful than the other. The baby is alive in their parents' hearts before it is ever born, no matter how long they think it will live.

I can't see how inserting any other people into the family equation (except the poor doctor who delivers the news) is needed. Everyone seems to know best, and feel free to scream it, and parents of sick and dead children deserve more sympathy than lecturing.

So that's my political stand - strangers should stay out of it. It is far too personal a tragedy to invite "policymakers".

Re: People are no damned good

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The same argument might be made for murder. I am sorry, but this is plain sentimentality.