Removing the Guardrails

Over at Thought Sifter my friend Mike writes about the recent referendum in Ireland in which a substantial plurality of Irish voted to rescind the constitutional provision which bans abortion in Ireland. He has some interesting things to say about the reasoning behind the pro-choice movement both there and here.

He writes:

The philosophical debate of abortion hinges on the question of when the life which grows in a woman’s womb actually becomes a child and thus acquires human rights. Even if someone rejects the idea proposed by the American founding fathers that people don't “acquire” rights but are “endowed by their Creator” with inalienable rights, it is an irrefutable fact that no one has the ability to discern when the magic moment occurs in the womb when fetal flesh becomes a human being.

So, In the most plain, unembellished language, the right to an abortion is the right of a woman to make a gamble by which she either kills her own child as it grows in her womb or kills a lump of flesh which will soon be her child....

But the right to gamble on killing that which is a baby or soon-to-be baby has all the characteristics of a zealous campaign for justice: shouting protesters, picket signs, demonization of opponents, etc. The part that’s hard on the brain is that the movement is often framed as a fight against oppression, as if to say, “Those heartless, iron-fisted traditionalists aren’t gonna tell me I can’t kill my baby! Nobody’s going to punish me with parenthood just because I had sex!”

Up until this point in history, the ones who kill babies and fight those who want to save them have been thought of as oppressors. How is this no longer the case?

Mike's question is rhetorical, but there's an answer to it even so. It's no longer the case because the supreme value in contemporary society is personal autonomy, particularly in matters related to one's sexual conduct. We've demanded that the guardrails that keep society from careening over the cliff - traditional custom, morality and religion - be removed from the highway's shoulders so that we can be free to go wherever we want.

This is liberating, we're told, it allows us to be free, to be "who I am."

It's seductive, to be sure, but where there are no guardrails, there's no backstop for human recklessness. The end result is often death - not necessarily physical death, though that's common enough, but spiritual, emotional, psychological death. Absolute autonomy ultimately spawns a degenerate culture of morbidity. At least it seems to have done so in the U.S. where our entertainment is filled with themes of death and horror, our laws seem to be moving ineluctably toward broadening the circumstances, both at the beginning and at the end of life, under which life can be terminated, and we're becoming inured to the almost daily news reports of murder and mayhem in our cities and schools.

But we're happier, aren't we? Isn't life more fulfilling when we can do away with all those priggish rules about sex and the value of human life and create our own rules? Well, if we werehappier psychiatry and counseling wouldn't be such popular majors among college students looking for a career.

When players in a game can throw out the rule book and make up their own rules as they go along, the game soon falls apart. Likewise with a society or culture which insists on throwing out whatever traditional rules infringe on personal autonomy. The social fabric frays and individual lives come undone.

Personal autonomy has become an ersatz religion for many otherwise non-religious secularists of our time, and abortion has become something of a sacrament, one of several, by which devotion to the spirit of the age is expressed. That's the way it is, but it's not making us healthier as a culture or happier as individuals. In fact, the opposite seems to be very much the case.

Read more of Mike's thoughts at his blog Thought Sifter.