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| “Out, damned spot!” – so saith Pontius Pilate, Lady Macbeth, you and me. |
I was quite serious in my last post when I wrote that the (unspoken) logic behind abortion is not
“An unborn baby is not a person and therefore has no rights“,
but rather,
“An unborn baby is certainly a person, but no person has any rights, since human beings have no intrinsic value.”
This fits a basic principle of life: if you look at what people do and ignore what they say, you’re usually better off.
For example, and speaking in general, the ugliness in church art, music and architecture that we see all around us is simply an indication that people don’t believe any more. If we believed, if we took it seriously, we would not build such monuments to Unreality and dedicate them to the most Real thing there is. Our communion hymns would not be so dreadful, if we really and truly thought we were in the presence of the most awesome and ineffable source of all existence. Our lives would not be so bland if we for one moment believed Christ was God Himself, living and dying for our sake.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” Our Lord told us, which is why we really can tell what a person believes if we “stop, look, and don’t listen” – if we pay attention to what they do and not what they say. We can indeed know them by their fruits. That is the standard, as Scripture tells us …
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 7:21)
“The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead. And all were judged according to their deeds.” – (Rev. 20:13)
“God will render to each one according to his deeds” – (Rom. 2:6)
What matters is what we do, not what we say.
Because the problem is that if you ask people why they do the awful things they do – abort babies, steal money, kill people, commit adultery – they will always – always – have an excuse, and they will always – always – point to their pristine and unassailable motives.
We all have the best intentions. And yet we all deliberately sin over and over again.
And we all wash our hands of the consequences that spring from those good intentions.
Like Pilate, we all renounce the sin as we commit it – for even Pilate had the very best of intentions.
Personally, I see the justification for abortion in the fact that contemporary humanism makes a human being the pinnacle of reality – beholden and inferior to none. This creates a profound and subtle form of egoism: there may be a God, but not one to whom I must conform my life and my actions.
In this context, a humanist is prepared to be decent, generous, self-sacrificing even, INSOFAR as it suits him (one can get a kick out of doing noble deeds). The moment he is seriously inconvenienced then he is justified in doing anything to remove the inconvenience. An unplanned baby is a serious inconvenience. For a humanist his few decades of life is all he has got, and he is not prepared – thanks to an accident of nature – to bend it to the needs of another.
For a humanist the supreme human attribute is personal freedom – the faculty of doing whatever one wants provided one does not directly harm or trouble others. Those who do are criminals and one is justified in doing whatever is necessary to stop them inconveniencing those around them. An unborn and unwanted baby fits into this category. He is an inconvenience, a little criminal troubling the life of the noble individual, who is justified in stopping the threat to his personal freedom in the only way possible, by aborting him.
This is what underlies the thinking of the pro-choice lobby.