(no subject)

[fpb]

My argument against abortion has been set out in this LJ some years ago (http://fpb.livejournal.com/69029.html). As it was a response to an agnostic student of medicine, its arguments were not based on religion, although it assumes that morality as such is a common human feature. (I have also written one aimed at Catholics: http://fpb.livejournal.com/63365.html .) It is my view that the arguments for abortion are not only immoral but stupid; that they rest on bad reasoning and invalid connections, and that those who accept them inevitably end up making stupid and absurd statements. Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to go back to those essays and write a rebuttal.

I have recently got more evidence for this proposition than I already had, and at the pen, at that, of a man who is otherwise a genius: the fan writer who signs himself inverarity. (I have, of course, argued that it is perfectly possible to be a genius and stupid - http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6639.html and especially http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6828.html; but this particular genius happens to be quite bright too.) And he has calmly, confidently, without even realizing that he was saying anything in any way dubious, said an enormity that cries to heaven for vengeance.

This is the enormity: It is arrogant and selfish to have a baby when you know you are not going to be alive to bring it up.

Let us, first, make sure what kind of statement this is. This is a statement of morals. In fact, it is pretty much a statement of moral law. So, anyone who does not want, for whatever reason, to discuss a moral statement in moral terms, is out of this debate. They have nothing to the point to contribute. The point is morality; good/bad; right and wrong behaviour. I say this because discussion of morality is out of fashion, and many people are so embarrassed by it that they try to bring in materialistic approaches to its discussion - in particular, the nonsense of "evolutionary psychology". Do that if you want, but don't be surprised if I attack your arguments with the purpose of showing they are ignorant nonsense. I repeat: I regard that sort of thing as question-begging, escapist nonsense, an attempt to avoid the discussion of basics of human behaviour in their own terms - which are moral. There is a reason why both Greek and Roman philosophers built the very word for morality from their words for behaviour (ethos, mores); there is no discussion of human behaviour which is not moral in content. If you say that you don't like the way someone behaved, you say that they are behaving morally badly. If you say you do, you are giving moral approval. That is the beginning of any discussion of behaviour; anything that avoids it is escapism.

Having said that, let us move back to the concrete statement itself. Its key words are "arrogant" and "selfish". The meaning of "arrogant" is 95% moral, and to that extent negative; it does describe a way to behave, but describes it with an inevitably negative connotation to do with the way in which it hits other people (and, to some extent, deforms the person who indulges in it). There is an inner as well as an outer dimension to morality; the person who indulges in immoral behaviour deforms his/her relationship to him/herself as much as his/her relation to others. An arrogant person - a person who is proud without reason and who tends to squish and ignore others - is a person, experience will show, who has a misshapen relationship with him/herself; who is shoving the reality of him/herself away from his/her own gaze at least as much as s/he is shoving that of others. "Love thy neighbour as thyself" is not even so much a moral dictate, as a statement of fact: if your relationship with others is on the proper footing, so will your relationship with yourself be. But the more of violence, mendacity, self-deception, there is in your dealings with others, the more you will be doing it to yourself. It is a peculiarity of human beings that we can and do, each of us, treat with our own self as if it were an Other, and our relationship with ourselves is therefore similar to our relationship with others. This strange fact is at the heart of morals.

That is why, moving to the second term, the word "selfish" has a wholly moral meaning. As it means the ignoring of others - their personalities, their needs, their rights - in your dealings, so it ultimately implies a complete abrogation of your own self. Selfishness is almost synonymous with wickedness. You cannot strip it of its moral connotations; there would be next to nothing left. When you qualify anyone or any action as selfish, you are making a purely moral assessment of their reasons. It is therefore not only correct but necessary to assess any statement in which this word is used in moral terms.

My thesis is that inverarity's statement is an enormity, that it reverses moral law, and that it is the tainted result of a diseased moral culture. There are many ways in which I might approach this, but reality itself just provided me an excellent one: reductio ad absurdum, which, as I assume everyone knows, means showing what the proposition would mean if it were taken to its logical extreme. I don't have to invent anything:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07091405.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08050108.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121402.html
I know at least half a dozen other such cases. They happen regularly. And according to inverarity, these women are showing the extreme of selfish arrogance. After all, if they knew that either their lives or their children's were lost - that is, that if they let the child live they would violate inverarity's moral law - that it is "selfish and arrogant" to give birth to a child you know you are not going to be able to bring up. They were condemning their child to what seems to him a horrible, motherless life.

I want to underline that there is no stretching or misrepresentation here. These cases fall fully within inverarity's parameters. A woman KNOWS - knows for certain - that she is going to give birth to a child she will not be able to bring up. What is more, it is highly likely that if she aborts the child, she will be cured and perhaps be able to have, or at the least adopt, other children. But if she dies, the child will be motherless. What, in this, does not adhere to inverarity's formula? Nothing, obviously. One of these women was a doctor herself - even better able than the rest to judge the danger or certainty of death if she did not abort her child. No decision can have been more conscious; and being particularly conscious, she must have been, in inverarity's view, particularly guilty.

Now there is a sentence that is burned in letters of fire across the conscience of Western man, a sentence that even the most hardened priest-baiter, the most obstinate atheist, the most committed libertine, will recognize as being as close to the pinnacle of morality as language can get. And the sentence is: GREATER LOVE HAS NO MAN THAN THIS, TO GIVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS FRIENDS. Nobody could possibly deny its moral value. But if we take inverarity's own moral dictate seriously, then we have to reply: Greater love hath no woman than this, to lay down her children for her life. At which point I would suppose that some of us at least might start to see a problem.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I did nothing of the kind. I invited any third person who wanted to take part in the debate to consider that I rejected their premises and that if they did, their premises would be under attack.

Your whole argument is based on the notion that children are only to be conceived if you are certain that you have twenty years to give them; which is dependent on the notion of a "planned" pregnancy; which is the ideological underpinning of abortion. Indeed, there is a clear parallel between, one:
A child should not be conceived or allowed to be born unless we are certain that it is wished-for and loved;
and, two:
Nobody should conceive a child they know they will be unable to bring up.
It is all too evident that the one is the obverse of the other, as much dependent on the other as a footprint on the foot that made it. So if you refuse to argue abortion, you refuse to argue the underpinning and the intellectual matrix of your argument. Incidentally, what kind of maniac assumes in advance that they will have twenty untroubled years to dedicate to their progeny? Apart that I know of cases where women got pregnant AFTER they had heard the death sentence (the three cases I published were picked at random; as I said, I know of several more), anyone who is not living in the clouds knows that anything from divorce to mental illness to death can separate mother and children at any time. To make a moral demand, as you do, that a woman should know that she will be around to bring the child up, means to brand most women with immorality and selfishness.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Nobody can rely on certainty. That's a foolish straw man you're trying to hang on me.

Let me restate my position as clearly as possible:

I think it is selfish to make the choice to conceive a child unless you have a reasonable expectation that you will be able to care for it.

(And no, I'm not going to debate every possible surrogacy case or other exceptional circumstance you can think of. Just assume that yes, I can conceive of exceptions. But "I'm going to die in seven years, so I'll get pregnant to have a child to leave behind"? There's no way that I don't see that as selfish.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Ah, but your statement demands it. And since you refused to see anything weird about your statement, I am going to nail you to it. That is what you said; if you now tell me that it is not what you meant, you should not have treated me as if I had fallen off a tree in the first place. Not that I have to. You gain nothing by modifying your claim to reasonable expectation; it still excludes all my cases. Every one of these women had a reasonable expectation that she would be dead before her child's first year. So you threw your original claim out, and still did not answer mine. You will have to do better.

As for the "selfishness" of giving birth to a child you will not see grow, see my answer to anthonyjfuchs.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Does the word conceive have a different meaning for you?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It means: the beginning of life - in this case, human life.