Abortion Is a Christological, Not a Patriarchal Issue

Amanda Marcotte briefly troubled my morning with this excerpt from a piece she wrote further quoted on Pandagon this morning.

The national conversation over abortion feels like war because it isn’t about abortion per se. It’s the most important battle in the struggle over the existence of the patriarchy. The dictionary defines patriarchy as, “a form of social organization in which the father is the supreme authority in the family, clan, or tribe and descent is reckoned in the male line, with the children belonging to the father’s clan or tribe.” This explains why abortion matters more than anything else--if we believe that “life” begins at conception, then the father gets all the credit for making children, and this in turn justifies male authority over women and official “ownership” of children. If we believe that “life” begins at some other point in fetal development, then the credit for new people goes to women, and patriarchal justifications dry up.

Could it be this baldly simple? Because if Christian motivation against abortion rests on these grounds, they seem ridiculous. Why deny women credit for the production of children?

In truth, Marcotte's words forced me to look back at Tertullian's De Anima , perhaps the most fundamental inspiration for the Roman Catholic Church's teaching that life begins at conception, where I encountered at Chapter 27:

Indeed (if I run the risk of offending modesty even, in my desire to prove the truth), I cannot help asking, whether we do not, in that very heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that somewhat of our soul has gone from us? And do we not experience a faintness and prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then, must be the soul-producing seed, which arises at once from the out-drip of the soul, just as that fluid is the body-producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh. Most true are the examples of the first creation. Adam's flesh was formed of clay. Now what is clay bug an excellent moisture, whence should spring the generating fluid? From the breath of God first came the soul. But what else is the breath of God than the vapour of the spirit, whence should spring that which we breathe out through the generative fluid? Forasmuch, therefore, as these two different and separate substances, the clay and the breath, combined at the first creation in forming the individual man, they then both amalgamated and mixed their proper seminal rudiments in one, and ever afterwards communicated to the human race the normal mode of its propagation, so that even now the two substances, although diverse from each other, flow forth simultaneously in a united channel; and finding their way together into their appointed seed-plot, they fertilize with their combined vigour the human fruit out of their respective natures. And inherent in this human product is his own seed, according to the process which has been ordained for every creature endowed with the functions of generation. Accordingly from the one (primeval) man comes the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls-nature proving herself true to the commandment of God, "Be fruitful, and multiply."

Thus, while Tertullian maintains through this work as I do that the act of breathing and ensoulment are simultaneous, ensoulment for him derives from the hot flush of our fathers' orgasms in direct line from Adam. Indeed, Tertullian argues with a logic not too dissimilar than that which Marcotte intuits from Christians today.

This is heresy. For what follows such logic but the anathemas of St. Gregory Nazianzen:

If anyone should assert that Christ passed through the Virgin as through a channel but was not fashioned in her, divinely because without the help of man and humanly because by the law of conception--he, too is godless."

But while Tertullian's view is incorrect in this light, since it is necessary that Christ's humanity in both body and soul be contributed by her in unity with the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the exact mechanisms are not anything that late antiquity really was able to say much about, considering that the standard medical understanding of generation qua Tertullian is Aristotelian or Hippocratic with all sorts of assertions about hot and cold, dry and wet and a fairly male-centered view of the whole business. If Christianity had its first great philosophical stirrings post Watson and Crick, the cooperation (synergy) between the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit might have been easier to deal with or not.

And while I would like to believe that the burden of Anglican moral theology favors implantation in the uterine wall as the point of ensoulment and the convenience of holding also that this is perfectly synergistic in that the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary could breathe as one into the implanted Christ, the Pope is likely never to agree with me.

But from these kinds of issues, we see why abortion was of such great importance to the early Christians. Given the significance of unborn children in the birth narratives and thinking about the mechanics of how a child could grow in the womb as God and man, the eyes of faith only could be enlightened with the need to see a child as human at a very early stage of development beyond all contemporary knowledge and the need that children be preserved at that stage, since they, too, must be in the image of God. But these are the eyes of faith. Those outside the faith really only can see so far as Tertullian writes:

"Now, in such a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness, as the sex itself which is so intimately concerned. Give us your testimony, then, ye mothers, whether yet pregnant, or after delivery (let barren women and men keep silence),-the truth of your own nature is in question, the reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided. (Tell us, then, ) whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force other than your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire womb throbs, and the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its position? Are these movements a joy to you, and a positive removal of anxiety, as making you confident that your infant both possesses vitality and enjoys it? Or, should his restlessness cease, your first fear would be for him; and he would be aware of it within you, since he is disturbed at the novel sound; and you would crave for injurious diet, or would even loathe your food-all on his account; and then you and he, (in the closeness of your sympathy, ) would share together your common ailments-so far that with your contusions and bruises would he actually become marked,-whilst within you, and even on the selfsame parts of the body, taking to himself thus peremptorily the injuries of his mother!

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Only so far and after so long of gestation does the law of nature permit a mother really to feel a life within her. But some of us forget this. We forget that pregnancy begins as a biological disturbance more than as a clear interaction, so we can't imagine why a woman
doesn't feel guilty about an early term abortion , because if we took the extreme position that she was a murderer, it would be very strange. She is the embryo's most intimate acquaintance, yet only knows it from chemistry and remote sensing. But she just may not see. It is often a belief in God who made both the visible and invisible things that can make us see the unseen things in the very depths of our nature.

But at the level of quickening, abortion is a human rights issue, for beyond the Bible-beating and the ultrasounds (or if they ever pass away) always will lie a kick, a beating, and a leaping in the womb: a life growing toward the atmosphere. It is impossible for me to contemplate who has the right to terminate an indubitable human life. And, yes, it's so much easier to fight for this life than the life of the addict, the homeless, the stateless, and the criminal. But it is hard to fight for one of these lives without fighting for them all.