Abortion as a Blood Sport: How Did We as a Civilization Become So Morally Numb?

Abortion as a Blood Sport:

How did we as a civilization become so morally numb?

During a recent episode of her Miss Me? podcast, Lily Allen, the popstar singer known for her hit single “Smile,” admitted that she had had so many abortions, she could not remember the exact number, as she just kept getting pregnant all the time.

“Abortions. I’ve had a few, but then again, I can’t remember exactly how many,” Allen sang to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s classic, “My Way.” She later added that she believed she’d had four or five abortions.

There has been a spate of celebrities lately celebrating their abortions in a crudely vulgar and cavalier manner. How did we, as a civilization, arrive at the point where a woman could take a Sinatra song and, in a pathologically narcissistic and homicidal spirit, use it as a vehicle to boast about the killing of her four or five unborn children? How did we as a civilization become so morally numb and psychologically insensitive that we see her behavior as nothing more than a jocular exercise in free speech? How and when did our ethical sensibilities become so calcified that we celebrate abortion as a blood sport, a victory for women to use their bodies in any manner they choose without any overarching moral principle to regulate or guide those choices?

One could attempt to function like an indiscriminate wholesaler in the realm of diagnostics here by pointing to the moral relativism of our culture, the rampant nihilism that is constitutive of our civilization, and the erosion of objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. But these arbitrating referents might be too broad. It might be more helpful to look directly at the explicit premises that undergird the abortion movement, and, more specifically, the foundational premises that guide the thinking of women who defend their right to abortion.

I contend that it is sloppy and nefarious ideas that got us into this state of affairs, where celebrating abortion and, as seems to be the case with Allen (pictured above left), allegedly using it as a form of birth control, came to be regarded as a virtue. It is only moral principles and rigorous reasoning that will pave a way for us to understand why life, regardless of when it begins, is a non-negotiable, sanctified phenomenon. It is, I shall argue, an indubitable moral axiom.

We begin with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson argues that even if we grant that a fetus is a person with a right to life, this does not automatically make abortion morally impermissible. She believes that the right to life does not entail the right to use someone else’s body to sustain that life.

To amplify this point, she employs a particular thought experiment known as the violinist analogy. It goes as follows: imagine that you are involuntarily, surgically connected to a famous unconscious violinist who needs your body to survive because he suffers from a fatal kidney ailment, and you have the correct blood type to save him. Without your consent, the Society of Music Lovers has connected his circulatory system to yours. If you unplug yours, he will die. If you remain connected, he will recover in nine months. Thomas argues that although the violinist has a right to survive, he does not have the right to use your body against your will. Therefore, unplugging yourself, although it will result in his death, is morally permissible because his right to life does not supersede your right to bodily autonomy.

The analogy is used to argue that a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body can justify abortion even if the fetus is considered a person with a right to life. Abortion can be permissible because it is not a violation of the fetus’s right to life but a refusal to allow the fetus the use of the woman’s body, to which the fetus has no intrinsic right.

Before I begin to assail Thomson’s argument logically, a statement on her methodology is necessary. It is grossly improper in moral philosophy or in any form of reasoning involving ethics to hypothesize a scenario so far-fetched that one is never likely to encounter it in reality. To attempt to secure a moral principle from science-fiction scenarios is more than implausible; it is immoral. Moral principles are based not only on what is plausible but, more importantly, on what is factual and rooted in objective reality – i.e., that which corresponds to concrete referents in real life. --->READ MORE HERE

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