Abortion is largely a problem of the imagination.

That is not to say, of course, that it is an imaginary problem. (That is what pro-abortion people would say.) In fact, in all of human history, more human beings have been killed before birth than after. Abortionists have killed most of these human beings in the last 50 years, and most of them have done so in China and India.¹ We are talking of hundreds of millions of lives, and currently about 74 million a year worldwide. U.S. abortions are about two percent of the annual total.

The 20th century saw the application of technology to killing on a scale never before known. The Turks used railroads to conduct the Armenian genocide. Hitler learned from them and added the furnaces of the death camps. The air forces of the Second World War saw the effectiveness of carpet-bombing cities and exploited it. In 1945, U.S. Air Force planes dropped atom bombs on two Japanese cities and instantly incinerated about 120,000 people. In 1927, the Russian abortionist S. G. Bykov developed a Scottish invention of suction curettage as a means of abortion, and the vacuum technique soon became dominant everywhere.² While chemical abortion is superseding it today, suction curettage is still the second-most-common method, taking its place alongside all the other technical developments in mass killing of the last century.

So there is nothing imaginary about abortion. The other side, however, would maintain that there is: that the “products of conception” in the earliest stages of development are only imagined to be human. We have, they say, only a clump of cells, and the half-educated among them will say it is an “undifferentiated” clump of cells. The reality is that differentiation begins immediately—from conception—and continues for weeks. Sex is already determined. At implantation (about 3 to 5 days after conception), there are inner cells that will become recognizably the child’s body, and outer cells that will become the placenta. Oxford scientists tell us that a very rudimentary human heart begins beating around 16 days after conception.³

The problem with the imagination is that it cannot always be trusted. It is true that, later in pregnancy, the child looks so much like a newborn that almost everyone recoils in horror at the thought of his or her killing. Early on, however, many have no problem with abortion, because they do not recognize another one of us in the blastocyst or the zygote.

As a logical matter, it is fairly simple: There is no point in human development after conception at which one can say that something not fully human is now fully human without arbitrariness. That which is in the womb is clearly not an organ of the woman’s body, or an excrescence of that body, or anything else less than another individual human being. The continuum of development does not provide any sharp demarcation points that killing would ethically require. Where would we draw a line? Heart beating at 16 days? Brain waves at 20 weeks, or individuated brain waves at 28 weeks?

What about very early on? The infamous 1984 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology (the “Warnock Report”) proposed that 14 days after conception should be the “cut-off point,” beyond which experimentation on embryos would be forbidden. In one of the papers summarizing the committee’s discussion, we read, “Although supporters of this [pragmatic] approach often suggest a cut-off point after which no experiments [on embryos] should be permitted, these points tend to derive from practicalities such as the length of time an embryo can, in the present state of knowledge, be sustained in vitro, rather than on any view as to a qualitative difference in the embryo before and after the chosen point.”⁴ In other words, the line was biologically arbitrary. Letters written to the committee in opposition to IVF, surrogacy, and embryo experiments outnumbered those in favor of IVF by a ratio of over fifty to one. Seven of the sixteen committee members dissented from the final report’s approval of experimentation on embryos.

This line of thought, of whether we have an “unformed” potential human being or a “formed” actual individual in the womb, goes back very far. Aristotle thought that the embryo went through stages of ensoulment (the vegetative, the animal, and the human). So males were fully ensouled at 40 days after conception (as male genitalia were visible at that point in miscarried males) and females were ensouled at 90 days. Where this line of thought was taken up in the early Church, and it was in some quarters, it never authorized abortion, which was rejected entirely.

Conception was recognized in the early Church as the beginning of human life, and the celebration of the conceptions of the Son of God, of the Theotokos (God-Bearer), and of St. John the Baptist underlined this recognition liturgically. (There could be no partially human incarnation: God the Son became a man at conception.) It is the imagination that fails to see the very young, individual human being as one of us, especially when some action is under consideration, like abortion. St. Basil of Caesarea saw how arbitrary the distinction was between “formed” and “unformed,” writing in one of his letters, “The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice [i.e., hairsplitting] enquiry as to its being formed or unformed.”⁵

Pro-abortion people cannot or will not see the humanity of the unborn, so they focus on the supposed “clump of cells” in early pregnancy, rather than on the child, say, halfway through. The truth is, however, that all of us face a challenge in recognizing, imaginatively, the newly conceived human being as one of us. We pro-life people ourselves grieve a later miscarriage more deeply than an early one. We are more outraged at an abortion in which the child is dismembered late in term than we are at an early chemical abortion. When it comes to the child early in pregnancy, the imagination needs to be informed with facts, and the heart must follow.

Pro-abortion and pro-life people see the early development of the child, but come to different conclusions about its significance. We have a parallel in the human response to our smallness in the grand sweep of things. Some who look at the stars are led to think that human beings are tragic figures. The universe is so big and so incomprehensible, so filled with billions of galaxies—how can we matter, finally, even to ourselves? H. G. Wells, author of the book The Time Machine, was such a one. He thought that human beings evolved out of the muck, heroically overcame tremendous odds, and reached a peak of culture in the late 19th century. He portrayed our species, however, as a tragic hero who would eventually disappear as the sun burned out, in a universe empty of meaning.

The Psalmist, of course, comes to the opposite conclusion, expostulating:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God,

and dost crown him with glory and honor (Psalm 8:3–4).

The same data—different imagined futures.⁶

We all know women who delight in the changes their bodies are going through during pregnancy, are fascinated to see photos of the development of limb buds, fingers and toes, and are moved to see their children on the ultrasound screens, the hearts thumping away at 110 beats per minute. The child is a gift to them.

You may also have seen the photo of the young women holding signs describing the unborn child as a “parasite” or a “leech.”⁷ There is a small school of thought (associated with an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson) that views the child as an intruder, a freeloader, imposing his or her burdensome demands unilaterally on the woman.⁸ If you saw Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction horror movie Alien, you may remember the sequence in which the Executive Officer, John Hurt as Kane, is overtaken bodily by the creature, seemingly recovers, and then is taken ill. He lies on his back on a table surrounded by colleagues, when a small reptilian entity rips its way out of the man’s mid-section. (This was brilliantly parodied in Mel Brooks’s 1987 film Spaceballs, incidentally.) It struck me then that this was close to the way that pro-abortion supporters view pregnancy: The child is not just an adversary, an enemy, but unrecognizable, a monster.⁹

The same data—different imaginations.

The story of our beginnings as individuals can be read two ways. The story of the beginning of the world can be read several ways, too. The Bible alludes to a different creation story than it presents in Genesis 1. This other story is of a cosmic battle against a female monster, a dragon, Tiamat. The language of “without form and void” in Genesis 1 is etymologically connected to the chaos monster of the Babylonian story, the Enuma Elish, as is the term “the deep” (tehōm) over which the Spirit of God broods. The dragon is a figure of evil who sums up our deepest fears—chaos, the revolt against God and goodness, the triumph of disorder. The dragon-slaying of the Enuma Elish re-appears in the story of St. George and the dragon, in the Sleeping Beauty story, and even in the 1986 sequel Aliens (in which the Sigourney Weaver character, a female St. George, calls the monster “you bitch”). After acknowledging this other story, however, the Bible gives no credence to the idea that the world was created through cosmic battle. Instead, God simply speaks, like a king—“Let there be light!”—and it is done. Similarly, there is no monster in the womb, no threat to our existence, but another one of us, an “image of the image of God.”

Let’s consider further the child as “parasite.” The early Church Fathers were divided over whether God created matter before he created the world— this would be the mysterious “deep,” the “without form and void,” over which the Spirit of God “brooded.” Some said He did, some not. In Aristotle, anything without form does not “exist,” which in its root meaning is “to stand out.” (Not surprisingly, Christian theologians will say that God, the source of anything that exists, is Himself beyond existence; he is not just the greatest Being at the top of the Great Chain of Being.) In the philosophical tradition, matter without form does not “exist” in the world either: It is the idea of body without soul; the idea of potentiality without actuality. Though it can be conceived, perhaps, as the absence of everything, in a kind of via negativa, it is only “nothing.”

Yet in its amorphous character, nothing paradoxically has power. For Augustine, wrestling with the question of how evil could arise in a world created good by a good God, evil is possible because created beings “are subject to change, because they were made not out of his [God’s] being but out of nothing.”10 “To this highest existence [God], from which all things derive their existence, the only contrary nature is the non-existent.”¹¹ (This is a slip of the pen: How can the non-existent have or be a nature?) Evil, like silence or darkness, is known only by absence: “The ‘ideas’ presented to the intellect are observed by our mind in understanding them. And yet when these ‘ideas’ are absent, the mind acquires knowledge by not-knowing. For ‘who can observe things that are lacking.’”¹²

So in the Western theological, philosophical, and artistic tradition, the moral and ontological or existential ambiguity of Nothing/Matter keeps reappearing.¹³ The most famous discussion in the last century was that initiated by Martin Heidegger, with whom the expression “the Nihil that negates” is associated.¹⁴ (The 1979 German book¹⁵ and the film based on it, The NeverEnding Story,¹⁶ imaginatively borrow “The Nothing” from Heidegger, a cloud which moves, miasma-like, over the terrain, destroying all.) One thinks, too, of Nietszche, who famously said, “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”¹⁷ The greatest Protestant theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, wrote of evil under the heading, “The Fall of the Shadow of Nothingness.”¹⁸ The formless, that which in some sense does not exist, is the source of our dread.

How is this connected with abortion? In our imaginations, the lower we go down the phylogenetic scale, the Great Chain of Being, the closer we get to the ontologically and morally ambiguous matter/nothing. (Think of how people dreaded the unseeable coronavirus, and death.) We associate evil with the unformed, the nothing, the mutable, monstrous blob, the small and insect-like. Some of us have pet mice, but who has pet beetles? I submit that many on the other side view the developing child not with scientific curiosity or wonder—no Psalm 139 for them—but as evil, and “nothing,” in its relatively unformed character. One young woman at a pregnancy medical center saw her developing unborn child on the ultrasound screen and F-bombed away with anger at top volume. (She went on to have her baby, happily, and deny that she ever really thought about abortion.)

It is hard to know which comes first: Does a poisoned, fearful imagination deform morality, or does an ill will poison the imagination with exculpatory false fears? In any case, what we have here is de-personalization. We know about deliberate depersonalization from the recent past. The Nazis published millions of copies of a work titled The Sub-Human.¹⁹ Among other things, it characterized the Jew as resembling others, but with a different brain and so forth. With the pro-abortion lobby we see the same deliberate depersonalization, as in the euphemistic phrase “products of conception,” which has been replaced recently with the equally obscuring term “the pregnancy.” Even the use of the technical term foetus can play a role in this depersonalization. All things being equal, if someone uses the term, he should refer to the mother not as the woman, but as the equally technical and distancing term gravida. We know why that rarely happens.

Some people who see pictures of the developing child early in life have the scales drop from their eyes. One woman professor at the liberal Protestant Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University decades ago saw a photo of the feet of a 10-week-old child and was immediately “converted.” (From what I have seen, most academics who “get it” don’t have the courage to say so, unfortunately.) My own “enlightenment” was similar to hers: It was pictures that did it. Others are persuaded by the logical argument I gave above about the continuity of identity from conception, and their hearts follow their heads. Our imaginations can’t be trusted entirely, but we imagine things, whether we like it or not. We will fill them with one thing or another, despite ourselves. In the catholic traditions, our icons or statues fill our imaginations with holy people and holy stories. The things we see and the stories we hear in church and read in the Bible lead us to praise and thanksgiving; they have a doxological and eucharistic end. The Psalmist was overcome by the evils of his day, and the lack of divine judgment, until he went into the sanctuary.

But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,

until I went into the sanctuary of God

. . .

When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,

I was stupid and ignorant,

I was like a beast toward thee.

Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my right hand.

Thou dost guide me with thy counsel,

and afterward thou wilt receive me to glory (Psalm 73:16-17, 21–24).

Worship can change how we think about everything. In the words of the Orthodox liturgy, the “Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,” can change beasts into men and women.

Sometimes the moral imagination is formed and informed by action. When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” He responded with the story of the “Good Samaritan,” as we know.²⁰ There is a “moral” that can be derived from that story, beyond the virtue of helping somebody in need: It was the despised Samaritan who did what God approved, and whom we are to imitate. So my neighbor is my traditional enemy, or as current fashion has it, “the Other.” What is interesting for us is that the Lord Jesus Christ did not answer the question. In place of the abstract, theoretical “Who is my neighbor?” he asked his interlocutor in turn, “Which of these . . . proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

We have learned that people who are not yet “pro-life” in their thinking, but do something supportive for a pro-life cause, will bring their thinking on abortion into line with what they have done. Our thinking about abortion can be informed by moral action.

There are about 2,700 pregnancy help organizations in the U.S., most of them run by Evangelical Protestants. Women get information, free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, the facts on pregnancy and abortion, and practical and material help with becoming mothers. (Incidentally, it is quite common for women, when they see their children on the ultrasound screen, to say, “I had no idea.” They are surprised at how developed their children are, even at 6 weeks. About 80 percent choose life.) The counseling the women get informs their thinking about pregnancy and abortion with morality, obviously. They also are helped to imagine being mothers of these children. They give these centers the highest satisfaction ratings. They are deeply grateful for the help they received in having their children, rather than aborting them.

A 2018 poll of religious groups showed that 57 percent of U.S. adults thought that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.²¹ The percentages of most Christians were below this: For example, 48 percent of Roman Catholics held this view, while 30 percent of those belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention did. For people who, officially at any rate, believe that God became a man in the womb of the Virgin, the figures are disturbing. These are the young lawyer who asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” The matter is academic, but serious, and they are happy to give their opinion.

Some people can’t see their neighbor in the zygote. They know the issue is “serious,” but they have not become informed about it, nor thought much about it. They have bought the “blob-of-tissue” claim. They also imagine that the woman is simply pitiable, and see abortion as a necessary solution to an unfortunate, pathetic situation.

If they become actively involved in helping women actually facing an unexpected pregnancy, their imagination can be informed with concrete reality. Most women thinking about abortion feel they have no choice. In a 2018 survey, over 70 percent felt pressured to have an abortion, often by their partner.²² In 2020 over 60 percent were mothers of another child or children; over 40 percent had had at least one abortion before.²³ The stories are as varied as the people. Trouble in relationships and financial anxieties are the commonest reasons abortion is pursued. A woman in a situation like this views abortion as the least bad option. Often she has nobody who will come alongside her, to help her see—to imagine—a way forward that is right and good, with no regrets, no matter how difficult. The people at the pregnancy centers do this.

So how might we “prove neighbor” to the mother and the child?

• Read stories of women who were faced with an unexpected pregnancy. You can find them on the Heartbeat International website, at https:// www.heartbeatinternational.org/lives-saved. If you are clergy, share them in your parish bulletin.

• Add a regular petition for women facing a crisis pregnancy to a litany in the Mass, Divine Liturgy, or prayers of the people.

• Get to know a local pregnancy help organization. Take groups from your church there for a tour.

• Educate your parish gradually over time. Invite the executive director from a pregnancy help center to speak at your coffee hour or other parish event.

• Support the local pregnancy help organization materially or financially. (They usually are happy to receive new children’s clothes, diapers, etc.)

• Volunteer or encourage others to volunteer at a center.

• Create a church resource center for women in your community who need diapers, baby clothes, baby food, car seats, and so forth.

• Create a support group for young moms, especially single moms in the community, and involve volunteer moms from your parish to help one-on-one.

Abortion is largely a problem of the imagination. Not everyone sees instantly the reality that children in the womb are our neighbors too, made in the image of God. A woman can’t imagine that there is a way forward if she has this baby. We can all see women in need, however. We can help her see that God cares for her and her baby, and that there is a way forward. By using your imagination, you may be able to help fellow Christians prove neighbor to both the moms and the babies.

 

NOTES

 

1. Abortion numbers in China and India dwarf those elsewhere, and the total number of abortions since the 1960s dwarfs deaths from wars (and all other homicides) from the dawn of history. A summing of deaths of combatants (“geometric mean estimates”) in all recorded wars renders 347 million (“List of Anthropogenic Disasters by Death Toll”—Table from “Wars and Armed Conflicts,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll, accessed 11/18/2023). In 2013, the Financial Times reported that “Chinese doctors have performed more than 330m abortions since the government implemented a controversial family planning policy 40 years ago.” See Simon Rabinovitch, “Data reveal scale of China abortions,” March 15, 2013. One source (http://www.numberofabortions.com) gives a credible total number of abortions worldwide since 1980 as over 1,715,000,000.

2. “Vacuum Aspiration,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_aspiration, accessed 11/18/2023.

3. “First of our three billion heartbeats is sooner than we thought,” University of Oxford, October 11, 2016 (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-10-11-first-our-three-billion-heartbeats-sooner-wethought).

4. Sarah Franklin, “Developmental Landmarks and the Warnock Report: A Sociological Account of Biological Translation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61:4, October 2019, pp. 743–773 (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-societyand-history/article/developmental-landmarks-and-the-warnock-report-a-sociological-account-of-biological-translation/BECB621515E38762B6DFFAF0BDAB0624; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0010417519000252).

5. Letter 188, “To Amphilochius, concerning the Canons,” https://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/3202188.htm

6. I am indebted to C. S. Lewis for the observation of the contrast here, though I don’t recall where he draws it.

7. If one conceives of the relation from the start as adversarial, this governs perception: “The author proposed the hypothesis that in the case of mammals, ‘the fetus is essentially harmful to the mother,’ and that the parasitic fetus grows by skillfully evading the mother’s foreign body exclusion mechanism” (Yoshihiko Araki, “Embryos, cancers, and parasites: Potential applications to the study of reproductive biology in view of their similarity as biological phenomena,” in Reproductive Medicine and Biology, 2022 Feb 11;21 (1): e12447 [doi:10.1002/rmb2.12447. eCollection 2022 Jan-Dec.]).

8. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1971, 1 (1): 47–66, ISSN 1088-4963, JSTOR 2265091.

9. The symbolism of pregnancy and the monstrous in Alien has been explored by Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge), 1993.

10. The City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1972), Book XII, Chapter 1, p. 472 (emphasis added).

11. Ibid., Chapter 2, p. 473.

12. Ibid., Chapter 7, p. 480.

13. Anselm’s interlocutor in The Fall of the Devil asks the question, “What it is that we dread when we hear the name ‘evil,’ and (since evil is nothing) what causes the works which injustice . . . seems to cause” (Chapter 26). Pursuing the question of the source of evil, Anselm makes a tacit admission of evil’s irrationality or surd-like character: The Devil chose evil “only because he willed [it]. For this willing had no other cause (causa) by which in any respect to be driven or drawn; rather, it was an efficient cause of itself—if this can be said—and its own effect” (Chapter 27; cf. the existential encounter with the mystery of evil in Romans 7:22ff.).

14. “No-thing—what can it be for science except a horror and a phantasm?” (“Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?: Getting to the Bottom of Metaphysics’ (1949)” in a collection of Heidegger’s writings entitled “(1) What Is Metaphysics? (1929) (2); Postscript to What Is Metaphysics? (1949 [1943]) (3) Introduction to What Is Metaphysics?: Getting to the Bottom of Metaphysics (1949),” translated by Miles Groth (https://wagner.edu/psychology/files/2013/01/Heidegger-What-Is-Metaphysics-Translation-GROTH.pdf), p. 37. There is a structural parallel between Augustine’s and Anselm’s treatment of the mystery of the defect of the will, and Heidegger’s treatment of the mystery of “nothing”: “For one last time now the objections of our intellect would call a halt to our search, the legitimacy of which can be demonstrated only through a fundamental experience . . . of no-thing”; “Dread reveals no-thing”; “That existence is pervaded by nihilating behavior attests to the permanent and indeed obscured manifestness of no-thing that dread originally discloses” (ibid., pp. 41, 44, 53; ellipses represent the original German term). Thus this mysterious nothing comes back to haunt us.

15. Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte (Thienemann Verlag, 1979).

16. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, 1984.

17. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Aphorism 146.

18. Church Dogmatics, III/3.

19. “Der Untermensch,” or “The Sub-Human,” was a 50-page pamphlet published in 1942, portraying the Russians (who were understood largely as under the sway of “Judeo-Bolshevism”) as less than fully human. About 3,861,000 copies were printed in German, and it was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech and seven other languages (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Untermensch).

20. Luke 10:25–37.

21. David Masci, “American religious groups vary widely in their views of abortion,” Pew Research Center, January 22, 2018; https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religiousgroups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/

22. Jonathan Abbamonte, “Many American Women Have Felt Pressured into Abortions, Study Finds,” Population Research Institute, January 24, 2018, https://www.pop.org/many-american-women-feltpressured-abortions-study-finds/

23. CDC, “Abortion Surveillance – United States, 2020,” Surveillance Summaries, November 25, 2022, 71(10);1–27; Tables 8 and 9, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/ss/ss7110a1.htm#T8_down

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Original Bio:

Chris Humphrey has a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies. In 2009 he co-founded the pro-life organization Vision for Life (visionforlifeusa. org), and previously has served as a pastor, a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital, and a knowledge management analyst with Health Canada. He currently runs a photography business and edits a church magazine. He and his wife, New Testament scholar Edith M. Humphrey, have three daughters and 23 rambunctious grandchildren.