Abortion: A Theological Perspective
The decision of the United States’ Supreme Court to overturn the landmark 1973 decision on Roe vs. Wade, which ruled that the US Constitution generally protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, has reopened the painful wounds of the abortion discussion around the world. Our recent experience in Ireland, namely the despicable and abusive conduct of the Repeal the 8th referendum campaign, has left a bad taste in many people’s mouths — making it rather difficult for many who campaigned for a No vote (myself included) to engage in the present discussion without a sneering sense of schadenfreude. However, the topic of abortion, regardless of one’s own position in the debate, is too important to be reduced to a petty and deeply unkind vendetta.
As a Christian of a Catholic tradition and as a theologian, I have my own thoughts on the morality of abortion. These, in spite of the often loud rhetoric of many pro-choice activists, are complex thoughts. They are not based on a fundamentalist religious worldview, they are not absolutist. The Catholic understanding of abortion — to which I broadly subscribe — is rooted in the belief that the protection of life takes precedence over all other concerns. The destruction of innocent life, in any circumstance, is a grave matter and a matter which concerns everyone in society. Not everyone accepts this understanding or agrees with the position of the Catholic Church, and so it is incumbent on all of us to think through these issues and make our case. Airing our cases and differing opinions enriches the discussion and furnishes everyone engaged in it with a broader set of thoughts and experiences from which to come to our own informed conclusions.
Fruitful discussion must always begin by listening to what others are saying, and for the Christian this listening must be done with a faithful and sincere love for the speaker — an indiscriminate love — and a trusting acceptance that she or he is a human being made in God’s image and likeness and deserving of our love, respect, and consideration. Our listening must be active and humble; realising that this is the speaker’s truth, and that we are not, as individuals, custodians or guardians of a greater truth. It is only when we listen to others — actively, with compassion, and with humility — will we be truly equipped to hear what is really being said and so respond to it with a genuine and authentic Christian response. This should never be easy.
When we listen, we are frequently confronted with the difficulty of the Christian position. This is a conversation about life — not merely about the imagined heroic and saintly defence of the life of the unborn, but about the lives of the women and girls who are faced with the decision, about the lives and well beings of those who have terminated pregnancies, and about the lives of the families and friends of those people. The absolutism of so many pro-life positions, rigidly focusing on the the defence of the life of the unborn, is cold. It refuses to consider the lives of the others involved, and — in extreme cases — poses a threat to their lives. This is hypocritical. It is unjust, un-Christian, and wrong. This is not ‘pro-life.’ It is, as pro-choicers often correctly say, a form of abusive control weaponising the unborn against women and girls and against society.
In the days following the US Supreme Court’s decision, my friend Ellen shared with me the sad story of her mother’s abortion. Ellen was only a child at the time and struggled into adulthood to come to terms with her mother and father’s decision to end the pregnancy. Ellen described in detail the poverty her family experienced and the problems another child would cause her whole family. She may look only 21, but both Ellen and I lived through the 1980s. This was not a great time to be working class and poor. Money was tight and real sacrifices had to be made. I remember the strikes, my father’s redundancy (he was the only breadwinner in the house), the free school dinners, the hand-me-down clothes, and the general lack of … everything. Growing up in a home with lots of love and lots of nothing else was tough. I cannot even begin to imagine what another pregnancy would have meant for my mother and father in 1985 — another mouth to feed!
Ellen’s story resonated with me. It challenged me. It reminded me of the impossibility of the Catholic position on abortion — thou shalt not kill. Readers reading this will no doubt see how easy all of this seems to me. I have the privilege of being a man. I do not have children, and I appear to be speaking from an ecclesiastical ivory tower from which everything can be viewed through a clinical and academic lens; there is right and there is wrong — and somehow, as if by magic, the complexity of people’s lived realities can be made to conform to the black and white rules of the Scholastics and Fathers. The impossibility of Catholic moral teaching is that real life is never quite that simple. It is right that people like me are confronted with and challenged by these realities.
Before I begin to work through this question with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), it is essential that we lay out what it is we mean by abortion — that is, the abortion the Church condemns. It will also be necessary to formulate a memorandum of understanding; we must not dismiss one another’s truths with cruel and infantile slogans and deliberate misrepresentations.
Abortion is any intervention on the part of a medical professional or others that destroys the life of the unborn child in utero. Readers may have problems with the language of ‘unborn’ and ‘child’ in this instance; preferring less emotive terms, and this I accept and understand. However, the life of the unborn child is integral to the Christian understanding of pregnancy and bioethics — this is a human child, it is alive, and it is unborn. This is part of my truth and an essential part of the Catholic Christian tradition. It is not my intention for this language to cause pain. I am not using this language as a weapon.
Having said that abortion is any intervention on the part of a medical professional or others that destroys the life of the unborn child in utero, not all ‘abortions’ are considered abortions by the Catholic Church. This may come as a surprise to some readers. The Catholic position is not an absolutist position — but its position is absolute. Catholic theology and bioethics put the saving of human life first, and in cases where the life of the mother is at stake the Church supports medical therapeutic intervention directed towards the saving of the mother’s life even when this indirectly results in the death of the unborn. It is not the teaching of the Catholic Church that a mother must die in order to continue with a dangerous pregnancy — neither is this my position. This, in the understanding of the Church, is not an abortion.
The misrepresentation of this has frequently been used against Catholics in an effort to present them and the Catholic Church as enemies of women. The death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital was one marked example of this tactic. Nothing in Catholic moral teaching forbade the medical practitioners in Galway University Hospital acting to save her life — even at the cost of her unborn child. Neither was it the case that saving her life would have broken the law in Ireland as it then was. Savita’s death was unnecessary and tragic. Yet, this did not stop many Repeal campaigners instrumentalising her death against Catholics and pro-life activists in the 2018 Irish referendum. This was an extremely painful experience — and no less for Savita’s family and loved ones.
Abortion, as the Catholic tradition understands it, is the deliberate destruction of an innocent and unborn human life when there is no threat to the life and well being of the mother. This can be read in an absolute sense:
Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2271
And we now need to return to the question of language. Naturally, many reading this will struggle with the language of ‘moral evil’ and ‘sin.’ It is important to stress that the commission of a moral evil does not make a person ‘evil.’ This statement is a description of the act, not of the person who commits the act. Moral law, as distinguished from natural law, is the nomos or ethics of human community, and a moral evil is an action that violates this moral code. All human societies have moral codes. In the vast majority of societies, the taking of an innocent human life is wrong (thou shalt not kill) — that is, it is considered a moral evil. Christians, from the birth of the Christian faith in the first century, have held that the unborn child is an innocent human life. ‘This teaching has not changed,’ says the Catechism, ‘and remains unchangeable.’
It is a sin to wilfully violate moral law. It is a grave sin to destroy innocent human life — meaning, that a sin of this seriousness has the potential to eternally separate someone from God — abortion is, in the strictest sense, a potentially damnable sin. Weighty stuff. So serious was the offence of abortion that until 2016 absolution — the Church’s mediation of God’s forgiveness — was reserved to the bishop and came with no small number of conditions.
Here’s where I break from the script. ‘Sin’ is an extremely problematic term and is more often than not unhelpful in a discussion about something as traumatic, personal, and confusing as abortion. Sin has conditions; we have to know what we are doing is sinful, we have to know its consequences, and we have to do it wilfully. This makes becoming a sinner quite a difficult task — perhaps even impossible. Then we have the species of sin that can damn a person to hell! Immediately this is met with the single most important tenet of Christian faith: God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). How can the God of the Christians, who is in herself the fount and essence of limitless, unconditional, and indiscriminate love, suffer one of her children to be separated from her for even a fraction of a second? The Church has said a great deal over the centuries about hell and damnation — but it has never said that anyone has ever gone there.
We can speak about sin only in the abstract; which is to say we can describe what sin is, but we cannot talk about ‘the sinner’ other than in self-reflection. I am the sinner because I know I am a sinner. I know I have wilfully violated moral law — knowingly and selfishly. Whether or not you are a sinner is between you and your own informed conscience (which is the infallible voice of God). Abortion is, as the Church teaches, a moral evil and a grave sin, but this does not mean and cannot mean that the person who procures it or the people who perform it are evil or that they have necessarily separated themselves eternally from God. Only the act can properly be described as evil and sinful — and all people commit evil and sinful acts; a reality of the human condition which is met always and everywhere with the God who is love and with her infinite mercy.
In light of the pitiful state of the present discussion on abortion, we need a memorandum of understanding. No woman can speak on behalf of all women. No one who advocates abortion as a right — a human right (which it is not) or a constitutional right (which, in the US, it once was) — can speak for everyone arguing for the ‘right to choose.’ Equally, I cannot speak for the Catholic tradition of the Christian faith, I cannot speak for all Christians or for all pro-lifers. I can only speak for myself and from my own understanding of my own faith and tradition. For the entirety of the Repeal the 8th referendum campaign, I — along with every other No campaigner — was subjected to an unrelenting assault. Catholics were publicly labelled ‘paedophiles’ and ‘child molesters.’ A stencilled image of an evil looking priest in cassock dragging a little girl away was spray painted in front of my home. My fellow citizens went to extraordinary lengths to silence me and anyone who opposed them — cynically using the failure of the Church to address the sex abuse scandal as a means to ensure they had no opposition in their campaign. This was bullying and it was tyranny.
I am a Christian of a Catholic tradition. I am not the pope and I do not speak for the Catholic Church or for the Christian faith. At no point was I responsible for the evils committed by certain priests and religious on children and other vulnerable people, and I certainly had no part in the Church hierarchy’s atrocious failure to act rightly and justly. This was wrong and it will remain an ugly stain on the history of the Church for a very long time — and rightly so, but this was not my fault. I hold my faith in sincerity and in good conscience, and I make it my business to inform my faith and engage in the world as an equal inheritor of the world. If we are to have any meaningful dialogue about an issue as important as abortion then we must do that recognising one another’s individuality and that all of us have a right — and a duty — to contribute to the common wealth of our shared society. This is the memorandum of understanding I seek for all of us.
Now, at length, we can get to the hardest part of this essay — the promised reflection on Ellen’s story. Behind every abortion there is a story, and many of these are heartrending and awful tales of suffering and poverty and desperation. There are women who have abortions because they feel a child would get in the way of their lives and careers. There are women and girls who terminate their pregnancies as a last-resort option, as a form of birth control. These examples are often trotted out by pro-life campaigners in order to demonise all women who have had abortions and to guilt those considering abortion into reconsidering their decisions. But something tells me there are more stories just like Ellen’s; stories about women and men — often women alone — struggling to feed the families they have in a world where money refuses to grow on trees. These are real stories and they are real hardships. Then there are women and girls who have become pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse — victims in the most awful way. That it troubles my conscience to preach to these people tells me that it is wrong to preach to them.
At times like this we must remember that Christ commanded us not to judge. Once upon a time, a Jesuit friend of mine set out a hypothetical for me to consider: ‘Would you accompany a woman to an abortion clinic,’ he asked. ‘Would you hold her hand throughout the procedure, all the while letting her know by your presence that there are options and that you will support her no matter her decision?’ It’s not a thought many pro-life people are comfortable with — let alone religious Catholics. ‘If you are not able to do this,’ he concluded, ‘you are not prepared to do as Jesus would have done.’ We cannot judge — we cannot condemn people for doing what they truly believe to be the right thing (even when we believe it to be wrong), and we cannot judge — condemning others to eternal damnation — because this class of judgement, on deeper reflection, is a denial of the true nature of God. God alone is the judge because only God is capable of judgement mixed with boundless love and infinite mercy. Who am I to judge?
Do I believe Ellen’s mother’s abortion was a moral evil and a sin? Yes. Without equivocation or moral reservation, Ellen’s mum’s abortion — the destruction of the life inside her — was an eternally damnable moral evil and a grave sin; a crime against God and love. Would I have walked with her into the clinic? Yes I would have. Would I have held her hand and supported her? Yes, yes I would have. Would I have surrendered all judgement and condemnation? Yes, and without question. And does this moral evil and sin make her an evil sinner? Absolutely not. It makes her human. As Ellen explained, this was — like so many abortion stories — a Sophie’s Choice, she was faced with two evils — neither of which were of her making; the evil of terminating a viable pregnancy and the evil of making her other children suffer the burden of another child they could not afford.
Like the victim of a sexual assault, it reads to me like Ellen’s mother had this evil imposed on her — not by a violent man, but by economic realities which amount to crimes against humanity. In the beginning God — in her boundless love — created the heavens and the earth. She made women and men in her glorious image, made them walk tall where angels tremble, and provided them with all the bounty of the earth to be for them food and sustenance. The disgrace of the Fall is that we have fashioned a world of darkness in which babies must be sacrificed to the gods of artificial economic necessity. I will judge that. To hell with it.
