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Lot, his daughters and the abortion debate

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 25 November 2004


Abortion is about how a community cares for its children, how a community is open to the new life that a child inevitably brings to us. While we worry about the fate of a few fetal cells in a test tube fertilised in a laboratory, we destroy healthy fetuses that have been created by two people coming together in love. The few cells in the test tube have no social context and no future unless they are successfully implanted in a uterus. They are not the same thing at all as the fetus that makes its mother sick and her breasts sore, that has a father hopefully interested and grandparents mostly very interested. To equate the two is to succumb to scientific reductionism.

Biblical narratives often revolve around the child who becomes the driving force of history. That is why the genealogies crop up so often - they enumerate the history of births and so also the history of the nation. Israel was not like the other nations that practiced child sacrifice. They lived in hope of the blessed child. To kill a child before birth would have been the worse blasphemy, because it cut off the promise of God. Jesus was the unexpected one who arrived, without the preparation of marriage, into a family in which the father had determined to put the mother aside. His situation was less than ideal so perhaps it would have been “responsible” to abort him? 

New technology gives us increasing control over our lives. Reliable contraception has inaugurated the “post pill paradise” in which the unmarried may sport themselves as they may, and the married can avoid a child a year until menopause halts the flow. Medically safe abortion - and that includes the morning after pill - has further increased the control we have over our lives. These new freedoms have almost universally been welcomed by libertarians, who respond to any question about them with “why not?”. The ability to choose our desired life has brought about the sexual revolution among the unmarried, the absurdity of the chosen childless marriage, later and later family starts (in order that all of the material paraphernalia of modern life has been installed) and abortion on demand.

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The danger here is that we move towards idealised forms of life that are disconnected from our true natures as revealed by the gospel. The more our lives become manufactured by desire, the more shallow and estranged they become. The protest of the church, when it is brave enough, is not mere conservative spoil-sportsmanship but springs from insight into our deepest nature that is in danger of being left behind.

Many will, no doubt, dismiss these opinions by attacking the authority of obscure biblical narratives. They will prefer arguments about abortion from the newly invented field of medical ethics shaped on the notion of rights. But it is the power of biblical narrative, shaped over generations of experience, that rightly tell us the truth about humanity.

As a friend recently wrote, the nature of the gospel is to do with what constitutes reality. In modernity we have been taught that the nature of things may be found without reference to history, and is available to us through reason alone. But medical ethics, which relies on this method, is helpless when we are confronted by the unhappy dilemmas of the abortion debate. We need a deeper source of wisdom than the utilitarian and the opposition of one set of rights against another. That is why the abortion debate must become theological if we are to see any progress beyond entrenched ideological positions.

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Article edited by Jill McGavin.
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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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