The Gift of Life

Opposing Abortion and the Individualistic Worldview

Since Dobbs returned the issue of abortion to the states, voters across the nation have repeatedly made their position clear: America wants abortion. All four of the state ballot initiatives seeking to enshrine abortion in state constitutions have been successful, and all three ballot initiatives seeking to limit abortion have failed. Since 2022, opposition to abortion restrictions has contributed to numerous Democratic victories, including in elections for the Virginia state house and Kentucky’s gubernatorial race.¹ A recent Pew survey indicates that these results are no fluke: 62% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases while only 36% think abortion should be illegal in most or all of the time.² Unsurprisingly, prominent members of the GOP have come to view abortion as a politically losing issue. In a bid for wider popularity, Donald Trump has reneged on his former strongly pro-life stance: in a recent post on Truth Social, he stated that “[his] Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”³ J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has assured voters that Trump would veto a federal abortion ban.⁴ In short, support for abortion is so vigorous and widespread that even “the most ‘pro-life president’” has bowed in the face of it.⁵

Why is the American public so possessive of abortion and so insistent that “reproductive freedom” is a fundamental right, a matter of justice? One major factor is a lack of knowledge. Voices on both the left and the right regularly critique the state of sex ed in America; indeed, many individuals are unaware of basic facts about pregnancy and fetal development, let alone how an abortion is performed. ⁶Unfamiliarity with the early milestones of human development—for instance, that a fetal heartbeat is detectable after only 21 days or that a fetus’s tiny fingers and toes are fully formed by week eight of pregnancy—facilitates dehumanization of the preborn.⁷ Fetuses are regularly dismissed as mere “clumps of cells” despite the fact that they are living, growing human beings with unique genetic identities—and that adult human beings are likewise “clumps of cells.” Similarly, the details of abortion procedures are under-discussed. Though abortion is perhaps today’s hottest political issue, little mind is paid to the gruesome reality of surgical abortions. In first-trimester aspiration abortions, a fetus is sucked from the womb by a powerful vacuum, and her remains are then scraped out of the uterus with a curette.⁸ In the second and third trimesters, surgical abortions entail tearing off a preborn human’s limbs, collapsing her skull, and then removing each piece of her body.⁹ Chemical abortion, though regularly touted as painless and humane, is likewise a cruel means of ending a human life: Mifepristone pills prevent nutrients from reaching the baby, who starves and dies. One to two days later, a second drug, misoprostol, triggers contractions that push the deceased fetus from the womb.¹⁰ Abortion procedures are ugly and bloody; were we more cognizant of abortion’s inherent violence, this so-called right would be far more difficult to condone.

Lack of knowledge, however, is insufficient to explain Americans’ fierce protectiveness of abortion access. While many are unaware of the realities of abortion, others deliberately ignore or attempt to sanitize its brutal purpose and methods. Complicated, abstruse, and often mystical arguments about “personhood”—a profoundly nebulous concept—seek to establish that the youngest members of the human family, simply because of their size, stage of development, and location, lack human rights.¹¹ Even those who recognize that conditioning “personhood” on one’s degree of independence or physical or mental agility would exclude many—including elderly people, individuals with handicaps, and even the temporarily comatose—from the category of “person” resort to ad hoc definitions that provide a shaky justification for human dignity and conveniently exclude the preborn.¹² Why this lack of logical consistency? Why such desperation to veil the humanity of preborn babies? Ambiguity is permissive. Americans do not want to consider the truth about abortion methods nor reach and uphold a logically consistent account of personhood and human dignity because we are unwilling to relinquish the convenience abortion affords.

In our thoroughly individualistic world, sexuality presents a dilemma. On the one hand, sex provides intense physical pleasure, which is attractive to the self-seeking individual. On the other hand, sexual intercourse is inherently social. A quick glance at human sexual organs confirms this assertion: any given human individual has only half of a reproductive system. Thus, we each require a second person to provide us with the “other half” and create a complete reproductive unit.¹³ Further, sexual activity not only intimately unites an individual with another person but opens the possibility of—indeed, is biologically ordered toward—creating a third. Deny it as we might, intercourse, whether “protected” or not, has the capacity to produce a new human life. And that life poses a significant threat to the self-seeking, monadic individual. A baby disrupts her parents’ individualistic pursuits not only by limiting their ability to walk away from each other but also by providing them with a vulnerable infant for whose existence and care they are ultimately responsible. Babies unsettle and reorder the egocentric universe; indeed, they are a small but powerful reminder that the individualistic worldview is inherently flawed. Human beings are not self-sufficient atoms whose purpose is to maximize personal pleasure and pursue individual desires. Whether we recognize it or not, we have been, from the very beginning of our lives, members of a human community. We were once babies, totally reliant on other people; as adults, we remain considerably dependent on others; and we have a duty to love and care for those who depend on us—particularly the most vulnerable. Total self-sufficiency is an illusion. Perhaps the birth of a baby is less a cataclysmic disturbance than an invitation to escape the oppressive, all-consuming orbit of the self, to grow in love for others.

Indeed, remaining fixated on ourselves inhibits true happiness and warps our view of reality. By the very fact of our existence, each of us is first and foremost a recipient. That is, our lives are a gift: an unearned, undeserved, beautiful adventure. Radical individualism, however, leads us to forget that life is wonderfully unmerited and to exchange gratitude for the mirage of complete self-sufficiency. In other words, believing that we are self-created and that our own pursuits are paramount encourages the illusion that we can and should curate every aspect of our lives. While individual power and responsibility should not be underemphasized—particularly when doing so merely excuses negligence and self-indulgence—they must not be overstated, either. Most areas of human life are either difficult to manage or completely outside of our control. This is manifestly true of sexuality. Though individuals certainly have significant control over their sexual behavior—for instance, they can decide when and with whom to engage in intercourse—most aspects of reproduction, including achieving or avoiding pregnancy, resist human attempts to plan and micromanage. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that we are divine. We did not create our bodies nor the natural law according to which they operate. Hence, we cannot alter or manipulate our reproductive organs at will without regard for their natural purposes or limitations. Abortion testifies to this reality in its very attempt to deny it. The simple fact that abortion exists indicates that, despite our wishes to the contrary, sex is ordered toward reproduction. And the intrinsic violence of abortion reveals that nature does not tolerate being ignored: attempts to flout natural law beget sorrow and suffering.

The individualistic mythos would have us believe that we are gods in machines: when our reproductive systems operate in accordance with nature rather than our personal desires, they are malfunctioning, and we have the power and right to reprogram them. This narrative is manifestly false. Our bodies are not devices to be passively manipulated or engineered in pursuit of unrestrained desire. We must accept our limitations, for we are not self-made gods. Sex is ordered toward reproduction; to believe otherwise is to live a selfish, dangerous fantasy that culminates in the violent taking of another human life. Conversely, embracing the fact that our lives, and bodies, are a gift positions us to respect the beauty of the natural order and to appreciate the unexpected twists that inevitably occur in our lives. We are not omnipotent monads: we cannot possibly control every development in our lives, nor can we avoid the interruptions and impediments that others present to our individualistic pursuits. Thank God this is so. For were the individualistic vision true, meaningful and loving relationships would be impossible. Authentic love entails humility, vulnerability, and self-sacrifice. Love requires that we heroically and gratefully embrace the fact that we are limited, for only then can we recognize that our lives and the lives of those around us are gifts.

LUCRETIA MOTT

A version of this article originally appeared in Help Wanted, the October 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. Adam Edelman, ”Election Results Point to Major GOP Liability on Abortion Heading into 2024,” NBC News, 2023.

2. Jeff Diamant et al., ”What the Data Says About Abortion in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, 2024.

3. Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher, ”Trump Tries to Refashion Himself as Supportive of Abortion Rights,” The Seattle Times, 2024.

4. “Harris vs. Trump on Abortion: Where They Stand on the Issue,” The Washington Post, 2024.

5. Ibid.

6. “What’s the State of Sex Education in the U.S.?, Planned Parenthood, 2024.

Valerie Huber, “Sex Education in America: How Yesterday’s Extremists Shaped Today’s Sex Ed,” Public Discourse, 2015.

7. “Fetal Development,” Cleveland Clinic, 2024.

8. ”What is Abortion?”, Live Action, 2022.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. See, for instance, Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide” Philosophy of Public Affairs, 1972. “The claim I wish to defend is this. An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.” 44.

12. Under Martha Nussbaum’s account of human dignity, for instance, a woman may abort her pre-viability child since that baby is totally dependent on her and does not yet possess the capability to live a fully human life. (Abortion, Dignity and a Capabilities Approach (uchicago.edu)) On the other hand, although Nussbaum recognizes that individuals with severe cognitive disabilities cannot perform many of the functions that, she argues, contribute to a fully human life, she “insist[s] that they still have these [fundamental human] capabilities, for example the right to vote and the right to own property.” Undermining this point, she continues, “Thus, a young woman with profound mental retardation has a guardian in matters of voting. If at all possible, the guardian will consult her and try as best she can to make the choice that coheres with what she knows of the young woman’s preferences. Where that is simply not knowable, however, the young woman still gets a vote and the guardian will vote for her as best she can.” (PCBE: Human Dignity and Bioethics:Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics (Chapter 14: Human Dignity and Political entitlements) (georgetown.edu)).

13. Robert George, What is Marriage?.