Before I went to Sarah Lawrence College, I attended Trinity College in Washington, D.C., an excellent school that set me on the path of cultural writing. Among my professors was a contrary sort who taught philosophy. He was married to a well-known feminist, but despite this — or perhaps because of it — he liked to confound his logic class in this women’s college by proclaiming women were illogical and that no one would ace or even pass the course unless he graded on a curve. (I used to sit there, praying, “Please let him grade on a curve. Please let him grade on a curve.”)
The professor bewitched, bothered and bewildered the diverse class, which included everyone from Irish nuns to the daughters of Iranian diplomats — with Aristotelean syllogisms and thought experiments like the following.:
Say New York City is under threat of annihilation, and the only thing that will save it is the sacrifice of one man. Do you sacrifice the one man? The answer, which thrust the class into paroxysms of frustration, outrage and utter revolt, is that you can’t. Each life, our professor said, is worth the same as any other. — or millions of others. Life cannot be quantified. As Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is said to have observed — although he may not have meant it the way my professor did — “One man’s death is a tragedy. Twenty million (the number of Russian who died in World War II) is a statistic.”
I thought about all this when I read Ross Douthat’s New York TImes column on American bishops’ threatening to withhold Holy Communion from Roman Catholic politicians who are pro-choice, like President Joe Biden. It included this:
“The legal regime favored by Democrats has permitted tens of millions of abortions since Roe v. Wade was handed down; no Republican failure to spend enough on health care or education has that kind of directly lethal consequence. This includes even Republican support for the death penalty, where the church’s position has evolved toward abolitionism: A handful of executions of people found guilty of serious crimes (there were 17 executions in the United States in 2020) is not commensurate with hundreds of thousands of abortions.”
But then, see my professor. If life cannot be quantified, then you cannot weigh those 17 criminal lives in the balance against all those aborted babies and find the executed wanting. If life is precious and begins at conception as Roman Catholicism holds, then you can’t be against abortion but for the death penalty any more than you can be for choice that includes abortion but against the death penalty.
Moreover, you can’t require someone to sacrifice his life for all. Someone may choose to do so, as in the case of Jesus, or a soldier who falls on a grenade to save his unit. But you cannot demand such a sacrifice. So going back to our thought experiment, we’d be forced to conclude that New York City would have to defend itself as best it could.
Abortion is, of course, no thought experiment. It requires a real definition of when life begins, a definition that has varied from minds as great as those of Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The church believes that life begins at conception. I have no truck with that, and if the church wants to excommunicate everyone from Biden to New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo, so be it.
What I do have a problem with is a male-dominated church that seeks to control women’s reproductive rights, denying them contraception, and that has no compassion or sense of honor toward kids once they shoot out of the womb.
The truth is there is no way to square the circle that is this issue. Better to air on the side of caution and forgo abortion. But in order to do that we need accessibility to effective birth control.
People aren’t going to give up sex. Women have a right to their autonomy. Abortion should be only a last resort. The answer is safe, effective birth control.
I think we can all see the logic in that.