On abortion and Catholicism

 An issue that undoubtedly makes people on the left nervous when they discover about my Catholicism is abortion. Similarly, many Catholics are wary of my left-wing politics not least because of the association between being left-wing and pro-choice, an association which, incidentally, I want to support in what follows. In both cases one is vulnerable to the accusation of not really belonging, of being allied to the enemy in a vital matter. Real Catholics, runs the charge in one direction, want abortion to be illegal. Real socialists, it runs in the opposite direction, don’t align themselves with a major opponent of reproductive rights.

Perhaps out of timidity in the face of this, I’ve not said much in the past about abortion. I did write a piece criticising a London protest outside a pregnancy advice centre, not even arguing for the legality of abortion, but simply dismissing this tactic as a form of violence against women. This was met with heavy denunciation from several of my co-religionists. If I’m honest, that put me off engaging with the topic (as it was no doubt intended to). But the situation in Texas, Poland and elsewhere makes silence an unaffordable luxury. Religion, and in particular my own religion, is being appealed to in a way that damages women. It feels incumbent on those of us who want to combine religious affiliation with a commitment to human liberation to speak out.

Of course, my religious beliefs are not incidental to my commitment to human liberation, they are a source of it. So it is disorientating when the religion which inspires and sustains my concern for justice places itself on the wrong side of some issue. Quite why Catholicism is so prone to do this on abortion is an interesting question. Being ‘pro-life’ has become a central strand of Catholic identity, especially in the United States, distortingly so in my opinion. This is a recent development and seems to me to be tied up with a crisis of religious identity in the face of advancing secularisation. People feel vulnerable and a shared cause, which distinguishes them from non-believers, shores up their identity and sense of belonging.

So entrenched is the position that abortion should be illegal in many Catholic minds that anyone dissenting from the view from the inside of Catholicism is simply regarded as something other than a proper Catholic, and ignored if not excoriated. Is there any point in trying to say anything?

Making any progress here involves getting clear about what is at stake. The political issue around abortion is not about whether abortion is right or wrong. I accept the Catholic tradition’s rejection of abortion, although with the awareness that as a man I am at a distance from its implications personally. What I mean by this is that it is part of Catholic practice that we do not engage in abortion. Why this might the case is an important question, and one I’ll touch on in a bit. But it is one thing to say that something is not part of Catholic practice, to say that it is wrong even, and another thing entirely to say that it ought to be illegal. There is a distinction between morality and legality, and the refusal to recognise this underlies much ‘pro-life’ politics. This is not accidental; in the background are the ideas that women’s bodies are somehow public property and that women can’t be relied upon as moral agents, so that decisions about female reproduction are properly co-erced.

The distinction between morality and legality is more general than modern liberalism. In fact, it has a solidly traditional and Catholic advocate in Aquinas. Discussing the question whether the law ought to forbid all vice, Aquinas answers that it ought not to, and adds that human laws forbid ‘only the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained’. Not everything that is wrong, in other words, ought to be banned with the force of social coercion. But, my opponent will predictably reply, isn’t abortion exactly the kind of case in which Aquinas advocates prohibition, ‘grievous’ and ‘to the hurt of others’?

It is, in fact, rather doubtful that the ‘majority’ in our society can ‘abstain’ from abortion. To glibly suggest otherwise is to overlook the sheer number of women who have had abortions, and with them the networks and relationships they are part of. If this point is acknowledged but the retort made that we ought to change our society so that abortion isn’t so necessary for so many women then I wholeheartedly concur, but at this point we are engaged in more productive politics and no longer simply with the issue of banning abortion.

The real point of disagreement, however, is going to be ‘hurt to others’. Doesn’t abortion clearly involve hurt to another, in the form of the foetus (or ‘unborn child’ as the point is likely to be phrased) and isn’t it therefore clearly amongst those acts that might be harmed? One not insubstantial problem with this line of argument, which I suspect is the most common ‘pro-life’ case, is that it entirely ignores women. Abortion is being treated abstractly as a harm to the foetus, the context of the harm, immediate and intimate dependence on the body of another, ignored. We do not always prohibit harm to others, self-defence is a case in point. Sometimes a person is being impinged upon so much by another that we think they shouldn’t be prohibited from taking action to end the impingement. The uniquely intimate case of pregnancy is surely a favourable example: remember the issue here is not whether, in any given case, a woman ought to have an abortion, but whether she may, without social coercion. In any case, all of this is assuming that the foetus, at any given stage in gestation, is a person with the same moral status as a born human being. That this is so is central to the credo of the modern ‘pro-life’ movement, but it is not a very traditional idea. Aquinas, for example, rejected it. The child in the womb, for him, acquires a rational soul at the moment of quickening. Before that it is not the same sort of thing as you or me, which doesn’t mean that he thinks abortion is right. It’s just that it’s not wrong because it is the killing of a person, which matters for the issue of legality.

All of this discussion will seem superfluous to many on the left, and some will think I’ve been too lukewarm about the desirability of abortion in some cases. My ‘pro-life’ co-religionists will find what I’ve said inadequate to convince them. But I hope that I’ve at least hinted towards ways in which reproductive choice can be supported from a position of religious belonging. Keeping that option on the table will be important in the coming struggles over this issue.