It is not uncommon for those who favour the legal protection of abortion rights to dispute the label that their opponents have chosen for themselves. “Pro-life”, they say, is disingenuous; everyone is pro-life at some base level, but by making the pro-life label their own, the anti-abortionists are implying that pro-abortionists are anti-life by opposition. A cheap trick, I hear. Empty grandstanding, a propagandist rhetorical trick aimed at framing the debate. I think that this belies a fundamental lack of understanding.
The pro-rights view differs, of course, from one group to the next. Broadly speaking, however, most pro-rights groups are “pro-life”, at least to an extent; but any situation in which abortion is a possibility is bound to be much more complex, nuanced and delicate than such a broad-blanket term can possibly hope to encompass. Many proponents of this view think that the term “pro-life” seeks to remove that distinction. In fact, it simply refers to a difference in priority. Anti-abortionists are not unaware of this argument, they just don’t agree with it. They feel that the essential sanctity of life is greater than any confounding nuance or mitigating factor. The term “pro-life” has stuck because it does effectively describe the philosophical basis from which anti-abortionists are working. By arguing strongly against the label “pro-life”, the pro-rightsists are indulging in a little moral hypocrisy; this is possibly not the saddest thing, nor the most surprising, in this most vexed of culture wars, but still disappointingly intellectually dishonest.
The idea of the sanctity of life can be attacked rationally, if one tries. It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the fetishisation of life is not new; human culture has accepted it as a predicate almost from the get-go. The western view of life is older than Hobbes, but was best described in his Leviathan, where he said that ‘natural law’ forbids one from doing anything “that [...] is destructive of his life, or takes away his means of preserving the same.”
Religion is a natural disseminator of life-fetishism. Judaism and the faiths that it fathered are untiring in their promotion of the “divine spark” argument. Genesis 9:5 (“And surely the blood of your lives will I require”) is taken as the basis of much Talmudic law on subjects regarding the taking of life; if our lives belong to God, then it is of course immoral for us to do with them as we will. Christianity has the interesting distinction of being the only religion to overtly depict the act of suicide in its holy book; in fact, their were no less than seven suicides in the bible, and a early, heretic, sect of Christianity even believed that martyrdom, and thus Heaven, was only attainable through suicide. It wasn’t until the sixth century AD that St Augustine justified the act of suicide as a sin, based on the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”.) This is now an accepted orthodoxy, and has informed debates over the sanctity of life ever since, even though the Catholic Church is currently more progressive – the catechism currently states that “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide”; and goes on to say “We should not despair for the eternal salvation of those who have taken their own lives… God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.”
Islam is the only religion to explicitly forbid suicide, both in the Qu’ran (“And do not kill yourself, surely Allah is most merciful unto you”, 4:29) and in hadith (“He who commits suicide to himself by throttling will continue throttling in hellfire”). Islam was, of course, strongly influenced by eastern religion as well as the Abrahamic tradition. The Buddhist faith, of course, is possibly the most pacifistic of the major religions, and largely for life-fetishising reasons: one of the first things that the Buddhist is taught is to refrain from the destruction of life. Hinduism is massively diverse, but generally speaking, dharma is thought to protect the sanctity of life. Shinto is perhaps the most equivocal religion on the subject of life, but still it still states that the purpose of life is to live, and calls death “pollution”.
GK Chesterton may seem to have vocalised the Christian orthodoxy on the subject when he called suicide “the absolute and ultimate evil” can equated the act of suicide to “destroying the world”, but a different reading could see this as more of a paean to experience; he describes it as a “refusal to take an interest in existence”, exposing his disgust as more earthly than ecumenical. This is not an uncommon line of secular argument. Camus and Sartre both argued that life should be embraced in all of its absurd glory; Kant, and his deontologist successors, took the religion out of Calvinist and Descartean arguments on Divine Right, arguing that good acts are good without qualification; but they kept many of the assumptions that underpinned religious teachings on life. Kant described suicide as “[an] action [inconsistent] with the idea of humanity as an end in itself.”
But Kant’s arguments are interesting, as they serve to expose the thought processes that lead to these arguments being woven into the fabric of religion. The idea of “humanity as an end in itself” is no different from humanity in God’s service or humanity in the pursuit of karma. The polytheistic mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia were rather more mute on moral sermonising than their monotheistic successors; the issue of the sanctity of life first achieved prominence in the west with Judaism, possibly adopted from Hinduism but equally possibly adopted independently. But the idea of humanity as a tool of humanity is much older. A legend from ancient Sumer says “We Gods live as Gods; you men live as men;” legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh place a heavy emphasis on immortality as a virtuous aim.
So if the sanctity of life can be reduced to Kant’s ideal of humanity as an objective end, then it becomes vulnerable to all sorts of attack. What if humanity is not an end, but ameans to an end? Epicurean living defines life as a vehicle, with which one can seek modest pleasures, attain freedom of fear through knowledge and companionship, and be temperate. The Epicurean goal was to pursue quasi-ascetic, moderate consumption in order to gain freedom from appetites and desires, until one gracefully reaches death – “because death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation.” The Cynics treated death as part of living according to nature; even suicide was regarded as a natural facet of the human condition; Marcus Aureleus considered suicide not just acceptable, but a perfectly ethical and necessary action in some respects. Hugh Arthur Clough wrote “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive”; David Hume wrote that suicide was no more sacrilegious than saving the life of someone whose death would be otherwise inevitable, as either way, the only agency that potentially interferes with God’s will is yourself.
All of which is attacking the point in rather a circular fashion. What I have not done is to present an argument by which it is morally acceptable to kill, either by abortion, euthanasia, or murder; those arguments are being, and will continue to be, thrashed out elsewhere. All that I have sought to do is to look at one specific argument which crops up with alarming regularity, and argument that I find specious: the idea that life has some intrinsic moral worth that must trump all other considerations. Different situations have different criteria for judgement, but a life, if it has any value at all, has a value that is defined only by its possessor.
People who fetishise life will sacrifice all sorts of freedoms, experiences and opportunities in the defence of their intangible essence, but this is a trap; because if life is the pursuit of humanity then that means accepting humanity in its fullest extent.
