I was reading
today the Catholic Pope’s 2016 Amoris Laetitia, or “The Joy of Love”, his
post-Synodal apostolic exhortation (you can find it here). Boy, what a phrase
that is. I will call him “Pope” for short, although I think in the movies they
generally prefer to call their ministers the more familiar (indeed jocular) “Padre”.
This Pope, an Argentinian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio (and this rolls off the
tongue so well) took his papal name as Francis, after an Italian saint, Francis
of Assissi (1181 to1226), whose back story is rather gruesomely one in which he
received, perhaps miraculously, the wounds that the Christ endured at his
death. Anyway, Francis, as far as appears to me, seems to doing a wonderful
job, and in some ways the world has taken respectful, even admiring attention.
And I have found his exhortatory letter to be quite well written, and I mean
this exceedingly well. Of course, it tends to take the conservative view of
things, but I think, sensitively, and intelligently. And simply, to be sure. So,
for instance, he respects a relationship which is stable and well-meaning (my
own words), but he thinks that a family must be centred on one which is able to
“transmit” life. Of course, I would think that this does not go quite far
enough in terms of even-handed treatment of the topic, but I will accept that for
him the conversation has not yet been shuttered off.
I pause here
to acknowledge that there are inherently some differences in what the average
Catholic is said to believe and what the average Christian, or in my case, a (flakily)
self-professed liberal Methodist (a neo-Wesleyan, if you like) might be said to
believe. However for my purposes I think that one who accepts the Christ
belongs properly to this wide concept of what a “believer” is and so I think
that sufficiently disposes of this for now.
Exploring many
facets of a life modelled on Christ, one of the things Francis wrote on
concerned abortion. Without mincing words, the Catholic church is quite
well-known for its stance against permitting contraceptives, and of course the darker
corollary of permitted abortion. In this vein, Francis follows:
“Here I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being. The family protects human life in all its stages, including its last. …”
I think this
is inherently an undeniably valid argument. But on the other hand stands an
equally valid argument, and I will put it simply as this: No woman (or man) should
be forced to do something which she/he does not wish to do, within reason. Of
course, the fundamental premises of either point of view devolve entirely (if not
under duress) from the deepest beliefs one holds: if one believes in a
benevolent monotheistic figure, one might believe that any little human being (no
matter the circumstances of his conception) is equally created and/or equally to
be treated as any other; conversely, one might instead believe that there are
certain circumstances in which no one could possibly expect (and here I sigh
mightily in writing) a little human being to be given the benefits of physiological
independence (a deeper sigh follows). You know, when I think about it, if one takes
the strong Christian view that we are all born in sin, the former argument (of
equal creation) takes on truly formidable strength.
Of course,
there are also the thorny issues: what if the life of the mother is at stake? (sigh)
what if the child is in a bad way? (sigh) what if the poor woman was forcibly
taken? (deep sigh) Well, no one knows. These are awful, awful questions. You
know, it could come down to anyone, and the answer could differ depending on
the circumstances. And then there are further considerations for after the birth
of the child. It seems to me that taken on the whole these are (and must be) deeply
personal choices, and it matters a lot how one is involved in that choice. Even
abstract questions become cornered into realist concerns: what is human
dignity? can one’s posited understanding of human dignity survive one’s choice whether
to abort or not? It is daunting, an impossible task.
Somewhere
down the line, it’s inevitable: the choice will haunt a person. And you know,
the line that separates what it is to “murder” and to “kill” is not really a
clear, black one – one need only compare the categorisations in sections 299
and 300 of the Penal Code (and all the exceptions!). Take again an argument which
could flow from natural law: in certain circumstances, even animals eat their
young. Or look at it again in this way: if you had a computer which could, if
given certain data about one’s circumstances at birth, simulate the life that
person would have, life to death, and if you ran that simulation ten thousand
times and out of all those, six thousand five hundred and eighteen tended on
balance to be rough (including that person’s indirect effects, e.g. further children)
wouldn’t there be some argument that, you know, not living might be
predictively better? Like you know, if someone from the future could go back
and have Hitler aborted, wouldn’t that be grand? Boy, oh boy.
In the end, I’ll
say this: I think it’s OK for a woman to select abortion, but I sure hope she
thinks about it (obviously, she’d also have to deal with all the general
biological instincts at self- and child-preservation). So I don’t agree that a
blanket view either way could ultimately be right (with full apologies to all).
My admiration
and gratitude, Jorge, Pope Francis. Salut.
