Abortion is a Form of Murder: Let the Violinist Come unto Me

robably the most unpopular aspect of the Catholic Church's social teaching today is what she has to say about sex and procreation.  Contraception we can leave for later, but Abortion is the travesty I'd like to discuss today.  The proponents of atheism and more "liberal" religion often paint the Church and her allies as being fanatical because of their tyrannic control over the bodies of pregnant women.  Their body, their choice.  If you don't like Abortions, don't have one.

What this simplistic argument fails to address is that a human life is being terminated in the act of an abortion.  Biological science is on our (the pro-life) side here.*

Many Abortionists argue this is not
significantly different than a tumor.

But lately, the arguments have more frequently gone in a somewhat different direction.  The trendy tactic is to concede (for the sake of argument at least) that this is a human being and yet to argue that in an analogous situation, we would do the same thing and kill the person dependent upon us.  Enter Judith Thomson's 1971 paper, A Defense of Abortion, starring the sickly violinist.  (Yeah, it's forty years old, I know, but the argument is becoming more mainstream now as science is proving the pro-choicers for the specious reasoners many of them are).

The article can be found here and its gist is summarized here.

Fifty Shades of Non Sequitur

Now, to do my own summary, if a sickly violinist needed to be hooked up to me for nine months via tubes and such into our bloodstreams to survive, putting me into practical bondage, I'd let him, assuming we and my family weren't going to starve in the process.  As even Peter Singer (a truly wacky and hypocritical philosopher who is pro-choice) agrees, the right thing to do is to stay hooked up to the violinist.  It does not make me a good Samaritan to do so in the sense of exceeding what is morally required of me.  Rather it makes me a Good Samaritan in the sense of doing what is right.

Consider my own little thought experiment.  In a similarly coerced way as the violinist was hooked up to me, I and a friend of mine have been spirited off to two rooms adjacent to each other.  In one, I have a gun and a baby, and if I shoot the baby, I may leave.  Otherwise I'll be stuck there for the next nine months, kept alive in captivity with the baby.  In the other room, the baby has a mechanical device around/on/in him (whatever you like) that will kill him if triggered, and that will trigger if my friend walks out the exit door in the room, which he may do, or else spend the next nine months, being kept alive in captivity with his baby.  First of all, I say it is self-evident there is no practical moral difference between my situation and my friend's.  Second, once we admit that fetuses are humans, there is no difference between our moral predicament and that of the mother who wants to abort, i.e. intentionally killing the innocent human being for your own convenience is always wrong, self-evidently.

WWII: An allied soldier bandaging a German.

Now, regarding the legalization of abortion, the opposition will say that this is me pushing my moral values upon others, in that it is supposedly un-American to ask people to give up their freedoms and risk their lives for the sake of others.  But this is also manifestly untrue.  In wartime we ask Americans to do their duty for their country and serve in the Army, which in a way is even more extreme, since I'm putting my entire life at risk in that situation for people I've never met.  We make sacrifices for society and our freedoms are always accompanied by obligations.  Society relies upon the continued birth of new children to make up the new generation.  By aborting them away, we do damage to our civilization, sacrificing the adult lives of the future for increased comfort today.  The modern healthcare and social security crises are in part due to the fact that the baby boomers failed to reproduce themselves, so that now there are not enough able bodies or production to take care of their needs.  Children are as much a societal asset as soldiers are and more so.  It is perfectly justified for the government to protect this interest by asking women not to kill their unborn children already in their wombs.  Observation of the world and reason take us to the same conclusion that theologians come to morally:  abortion (like other kinds of murder), while momentarily convenient for individuals who do it, is ultimately deeply detrimental to society.

I really hope they don't kill her off despite the
narratorial signs of impending catharsis!

Okay, this part is for the Christians in the room.  Although we in America are wealthy and prosperous, partly because of moral relativism and modern alienation from our neighbors we are tempted to doubt that life is worth living and fighting for.  More than ever before, there is hope for the future of our race and the opportunity for happiness even for the poor among us (and it would be possible even in a zombie apocalypse for fellow The Walking Dead fans).  Those of us who are Christians can trust that God has a plan even for those without an earthly father and that death is not the solution today any more than it was the solution in Hitler's Germany 80 years ago, or in Herod's Bethlehem 2,016 years ago.   "Be it to me according to your word," spoke Mary the mother of God the Son.  Despite her poverty and the dishonor she chose to follow God's will for her life and to sacrifice her life to God.  We must follow her holy and unblemished example.

Paulo de Matteis' "The Annunciation" (1712, C.E.)

A different but capable refutation of Thomson's argument can be found here in which important differences between the bizarre scenario of the violinist and the universal situation of fetus and mother are discussed.  While I disagree with him that the violinist deserves protection as well despite the unnaturalness of his predicament, his thoughts also have merit in making clear how intuitive should be the conclusion that mothers should not kill the fetuses inside their wombs while any other leads to logical absurdities.

*The equivocation of a living, growing embryo with, say, a living, growing cancerous tumor that we would extract without hesitating ignores the biological fact that tumors do not develop into adult humans and as such a definite separation can be made so we can say, "This is a living human, and that is not."  But we cannot easily make this distinction with aborted embryos, unless we base it upon their location inside or outside of the womb, which makes little sense.  I do not lose my right to life depending on where I am (although I might be more likely to have my life unjustly taken in, say, Papua New Guinea, than in my study in Orlando, FL).  No, we need something more definite than that, and conception is the obvious place.  Beforehand, it was two gametes, immensely improbable to be joined together.  Now it is one genetically distinct individual, relatively likely and capable of maturing into an adult human given only nutrients and time.