During the recent American presidential campaign, the defeated presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, attacked the views of her opponent, former president Donald Trump, by declaring that 'he believes that women should not have agency over their bodies.'
I found this claim really surprising because of the extent of what Harris seemed to be claiming. Agency means the ability to act, and so denying someone agency over their bodies means reducing them to a state of complete paralysis in which they are incapable to making their bodies do anything at all. As we all know, Trump is quite capable of saying some completely outlandish things, but I was not aware that even he had expressed the idea that all women should be subject to total paralysis and the Harris campaign did not subsequently produce any evidence that he had in fact done so.
The truth, of course, is that Harris was not making the claim that her words suggested she was making. What she was actually trying to say was that Donald Trump believed in outlawing abortion.
This claim was itself misleading, as he had not in fact given his support to an abortion ban, but has argued that this is a matter for the people of each of the states to decide. What interests me from the standpoint of Christian ethics, however, is the way in which Harris' misleading claim about Donald Trump's position reflects the belief that is often appealed to by supporters of abortion that women should have absolute freedom to decide what to do with their bodies and therefore a right to decide to have an abortion.
This belief seems to me to be wrong on two grounds.
The first reason is that I think it is wrong to argue that any human beings, whether men or women, should have absolute freedom to decide what to do with their bodies.
This is a belief that in fact nobody actually holds, even if notionally they subscribe to an absolutist view of human bodily autonomy. At some stage they will say of some action by someone else that he or she should not have done that, or that he or she should not be allowed to do that.
Given that all human actions involve the use of a person's body, this means that what they are really saying when they object to what someone is doing is that human bodily autonomy should not be seen as absolute. There should be limits to how people exercise the agency have over their bodies. For example, even the most ardent libertarian feminist will argue that rape and all other forms of sexual violence against women should be completely prohibited and that men who use their bodies to perform acts of sexual violence should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
From a Christian perspective they are completely right to argue in this way. However, their argument is incompatible with the view that human beings should be free to do they want with their own bodies. Clearly, they don't really believe that.
Furthermore, from a Christian viewpoint they shouldn't really believe that. This is because as the Anglican theologian John Webster notes, what underlies a belief in complete autonomy of the use of our bodies is a belief in the absolute primacy of the human will. As he puts it, according to this belief:
"Being human is not a matter of having a certain nature or being placed in an ordered reality of which I am not the originator; rather, the distinguishing feature of humankind is, that last resort, the will. The agent is characterised, above all, not as a sort of substance but as enacted intention. The subject is agent, and in her action is demonstrated her capacity for the self-determination which is freedom: in free action, the human subject is self-positing."
As Webster goes on to say, in this modern view of freedom, freedom is portrayed:
"... as an opposing of the self to forces which seek to inhibit, contain or envelop the self and rob it of its authenticity, its self-constituted and self-legislated identity. The dynamic of freedom is thus one of acting against a countervailing force, whether that force be nature, custom, law, society or God."
To quote Jonathan Grant, according to this modern view: "The worst thing we can do is to conform to some moral code that is imposed on us from outside – by society, our parents, the church, or whoever else. It is deemed to be self-evident that such imposition would undermine our unique identity."
From a Christian viewpoint this insistence on the necessity for human beings to exercise complete moral autonomy ignores one simple critical fact, which is that however much we want to ignore or deny the fact, as human beings we all exist in relation to God.
In the words of the Psalmist, "It is he who has made us and not we ourselves" (Psalm 100:3). We are not our own creators by the acts of our own will. We only exist as creatures held in being by the Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and as such we are inescapably in relationship with him. We can no more avoid the fact that we have a relationship with God as his human creatures that we can avoid the fact that as human beings we need air and water to stay alive.
To quote Webster again, what follows from the fact that we are God's creatures, made by him to live in a particular way is that:
"....we need to lay aside the assumption around which so much of our economic, political and sexual identity is organized, namely the assumption that freedom is autonomy. Freedom, is, rather, that capacity to realize what one is. What we are is reconciled creatures, those set free for true humanness by the work of the Triune God. To be set free is not to exercise the false freedom to invent myself by my actions, nor to be creator, reconciler and perfecter to myself. Nor is it mere unrestricted will. It is, rather, to be what I have been made to be, to fulfil my vocation as a creature of God, and so (and only so) to exist in authenticity."
If we ask what it means to fulfil our created vocation as God's creatures there is a basic two-fold answer given by Jesus. We are called to love God with all our heart, our mind and our strength, and we are called to love our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12:28-34). These two commands go together because loving our neighbours as ourselves means participating in the work of God by enabling them to flourish as God's creatures in the way God intends for them.
This brings us to the second reason why I think it is wrong to argue that human freedom means the right to abort unborn children. This reason is because the unborn child is not part of a woman's body. Both natural reason and Scripture tell us otherwise.
As Sean Doherty notes, natural reason tells us that:
".... our lives as people begin when our physical life begins – that is, at the moment of fertilisation. Fertilisation is when a new life begins physically. A fertilised egg is not a part of the mother or the father in the way that the sperm or the egg were – something new has begun. No new beginning takes place after this: all that ensues is the natural development of the new life which has already begun. Significant milestones such as the emergence of the primitive streak, organ development, quickening, viability and birth are clearly developments towards maturity, not the beginning from scratch of something new."
This testimony of natural reason is then underlined by the testimony of Scripture. We see this n Psalm 139: 13-16 where the Psalmist declares that from the moment of conception he was a person (an 'I') existing in relationship with God:
"For thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well;
my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
in thy book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them."
What follows from the fact that every human being is thus a person from the moment of conception is that every unborn child is our neighbour whom we are called to love by enabling them to flourish in the way God intends all his human creatures to flourish.
To put the same point negatively, because every unborn child is our neighbour they are the subject of the sixth commandment, 'You shall not kill' (Exodus 20:13). This commandment forbids us from misusing our capacity for free bodily action by taking the life of any other human being except as an act of judgement upon very serious wrongdoing. What follows from this is that we cannot rightly take the life of an unborn child since they are by reason of their stage of life necessarily incapable of wrongdoing of any kind.
If we say that it is right to exercise the agency we have over our bodies to take the life of an unborn child then we are either being radically inconsistent or we have to hold that we have the right to kill other people simply because we want to, a position which as far as I know no serious moralist has ever held and which the Christian faith totally rejects as incompatible with the sixth commandment and God's call to love our neighbours on which it is based.
The only circumstance in which it can plausibly be argued that it would be right to take the life of an unborn child would be in very rare circumstances in which the 'doctrine of double effect' comes into play.
This doctrine applies in circumstances where a morally good action has an effect which causes unintended harm. For example, if a mother has aggressive uterine cancer it could be the case that the only way to save her life would be to remove her uterus. This would mean that her unborn child would die, but that child would have died anyway if the mother had been killed by the effects of the cancer. In this situation both lives cannot be saved and the moral good intended is to save one life rather than none, with the death of the unborn child being the undesired consequence of that decision.
In such circumstances using bodily agency in a way that results in the death of an unborn child can be justified as a form of love for neighbour (the neighbour being the woman whose life is saved) but, to repeat, such situations are, thankfully, very rare and they do not negate the normal moral judgement that, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every human being to life."
