Men, Abortion, Sin, and Salvation

In a recent response to my essay, “Lady Edith and Abortion Rights,” my friend and colleague Marguerite Spencer has challenged both my literary character analysis of Lady Edith—from the television show Downton Abbey—and my staunchly pro-life stance against abortions committed for purely social reasons. I leave to fans of Downton the question of whether the Lady Edith character is a self-focused privileged brat or a compassionate tragic heroine (or perhaps some of both). Reasonable people certainly can differ on such matters! I also leave to readers’ judgment whether Spencer has fairly characterized my position.

In this essay, I would like to advance the discussion, first, by pointing out one area of enthusiastic agreement with Spencer, and then by highlighting one point of subtle but important disagreement. I wholeheartedly agree that men are responsible for abortion, every bit as much as—and sometimes more than—the women who abort. Indeed, in this salient observation lies an added critique of our constitutionalized abortion-rights regime. Roe v. Wade encourages male abdication, irresponsibility, and even sexual predation.

But I disagree with a paradigm that focuses chiefly on considerations of blame, guilt, responsibility, or sin with respect to abortion—that looks to the reasons, justifications, and rationalizations for having an abortion that kills an unborn child. Of course, circumstances do matter: some abortions are tragically justified by life-saving necessity, and people of good faith disagree as to how far such necessity reaches. Still, I believe that this should not be the starting point or emphasis of the inquiry.

Rather, I submit that the focus of the pro-life position should always be, insistently, on the life of the unborn living human being killed by abortion.

This guy is arguing for life from the point of view of law and practicality, discounting morality, religion, and theories of sexual permissiveness.

His female critic is arguing from a position of academic feminism, again discounting religion and sexual permissiveness and attempting to reduce the morality of killing a potential child to a pragmatic situational decision.

Both are underwater. Except for rape, abortion is about killing a child that was conceived because the mother, the father or both wanted to place sexual needs above the risk of having an unwanted child.

I think both essays are constructing their moral positions on the practical outcomes they want to see happen. The legal guy wants society to push its political football into the pro-life camp. The "feminist theologian" from Berkeley (red flag right there) wants to rationalize that the abortion-seeking woman is usually a tragic (and therefore sympathetic) figure, not a morally deficient adult faced with two equally negative consequences: accepting responsibility for her own mistakes and living with the social and financial burdens thereof, or trying to escape those consequences by killing another human being.

Further, she sees Lady Edith as tragic, rejecting the contention that she is a child of privilege whose primary motivations are selfish. She makes no mention of Edith's past attempt to seduce a local farmer right under his wife's nose, and after two other romantic disasters, knowingly dating and bedding a married man; and now attempting to disgrace her parents once again by smuggling the child onto their estate, after admitting that they would be horrified. As usual, feminism trumps even the most egregious lapses in moral judgment.

Nor can I let her scheming boyfriend off the hook. The better plan would have been for him to locate a sanatorium for his mentally ill wife in another country that allowed divorce and set up a legal trust to care for her. But then Julian Fellowes would not have been able to illustrate the contrast between yesterday's situations with today's. It will be interesting to see how he resolves this issue, now that Lady Edith has set herself up for complete disaster.

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