N. T. Wright and the Abortion Debate

On June 1 the Right Reverend N. T. Wright was answering some questions on his Ask N.T. Wright Anything podcast.  Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and a widely-published and very popular scholar.  I own his brilliant (and hefty) two-volume Paul and the Faithfulness of God as well as his (also hefty) The Resurrection of the Son of God and The Day the Revolution Began and find immense profit from his many insights.  Also wonderful are his commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans and on the Epistle to the Galatians.  In short, I, like many others, am a fan.

       I was therefore all the more distressed by his June 1 podcast.  The first question answered was from a woman in Germany, Sarah Moser by name, who had problems with the notion that abortion was murderous by definition.  The woman wrote in that although she had heard the arguments against abortion many times, “it somehow doesn’t feel intuitive to me”.  Why, she plaintively asked, is it murder “especially at an early stage of pregnancy when the fetus is not even formed, the heart is not beating yet, etc.”  

After the question was read even before Bishop Wright began his answer I wanted to leap into the fray and challenge her science: many women first suspect that they are pregnant after they first skip their monthly period (say after six weeks) and by that time the fetus is being formed and there is a heartbeat.  But even apart from this, biological science still affirms that the organism is alive from the moment of conception and is fully human—not fully formed, but fully human.  Whether or not this “feels intuitive” or not is irrelevant to that scientific fact.  I suspect that Sarah’s feelings are dictated not by science but by secular and political sloganeering.  Anyway, I was looking forward to hearing Bishop Wright’s infusion of Christian sanity into this modern debate.

That is why I was all the more distressed at the podcast, for the good Bishop did not inject the needed sanity in terms of science or theology.  In fact, regarding the science, he openly admitted that he was not qualified to pronounce on at what point the fetus becomes a viable human being that should be cherished.  That is why, he said, that when abortions were to be performed, they should be done “as soon as possible”, thereby side-stepping entirely the issue of human life beginning at conception. 

To be fair, Bishop Wright acknowledged that though in the ancient world abortion and infanticide by exposure were common “the early Judeans [i.e. Jews] didn’t do that and the early Christians didn’t do that” and in fact they “wouldn’t have anything to do with it” and that this refusal “shows us the way” so that “in principle this is not something we should welcome…or collude with”.  But then he went on to say that “at the same time there may be certain exceptions of which severe deformity might be one and of which certainly rape and incest would be others”.   

It would be unfair to characterize Bishop Wright as “pro-abortion”, but in this case the episcopal trumpet sounded a tragically unclear note (see 1 Corinthians 14:8).  One should also add that the number of pregnancies resulting from rape or incest are fairly small, despite the frequency with which they are cited as exceptional reasons for abortion.  One might also add that violence against the raped woman hardly justifies further and greater violence toward to child within her.

But though Bishop Wright is not “pro-abortion” he may still rightly be described as “pro-choice” (and perhaps a bit muddled) for he acknowledges that a woman may legitimately choose to kill the unborn within her under certain circumstances, such as the possibility of deformity or in cases of rape or incest.  I suggest that such circumstances are irrelevant to the morality of the act for morality declares that it is murderous to kill innocent human life. Whether that life is ten days old or eight months old does not affect the humanity of the life—or its right to live. As that great theologian Dr. Seuss once wrote in his opus Horton Hears a Who, “A person’s a person no matter how small”. The central issue here is the scientific fact that life begins at conception and that the life within a human mother is human life.  And if innocent human should not at all costs be protected then we are on a slippery slope indeed.

For me the whole tempest stirred up by Bishop’s Wright’s comments is interesting because it highlights the difference between the Anglican (i.e. Protestant) world inhabited by such a wonderful and devout scholar and the world inhabited by the Orthodox.  Bishop Wright, though freely acknowledging that “the early Christians wouldn’t have anything to do with” abortion, did not regard this as definitive for Christians today.  Their example might “show us the way”, but this way is, at the end of the day, conditioned by strictly secular arguments (such as the state of fetal development) and of course by whether or not it “feels intuitive”.  The host of the show summarized the issue as “not black and white”.  But it was certainly black and white for the early Christians as it is today for the fetus—or rather in the case of the latter, just black, since the end result for it is its “termination”.

(Permit me here to note the euphemism and to observe that it is always a bad sign when such euphemisms are used.  The trick is an old one:  those chosen to be gassed at Auschwitz were not chosen to be murdered, but chosen for “special treatment”.  Abortionists do not “murder the unborn”; they “terminate pregnancies”.)

The issue, for me at least, is the authority of ancient Christian witness.  For Protestants like Bishop Wright this witness carries some weight but it is not determinative.  For the Orthodox the praxis of “early Christians” witnesses to the underlying apostolic Tradition which is determinative.  This Tradition, which admittedly knew less science than we do, still proclaimed that human life begins in the womb (or as we would say, “at conception”) so that to destroy life in the womb is murder. Secular people (such as those on the political “left”) might try to muddy the waters by talk of the “viability” of the fetus or rare cases of pregnancy through rape or incest, but the truth remains that human life begins in the womb at conception so that abortion equals the killing of an innocent human life. 

In very rare cases such as ectopic pregnancies where the fetus implants in the fallopian tube and not the womb, abortion may be allowable. This is, of course, the exception that proves the rule, for in such cases death is already present but even here we still acknowledge that we are killing a human life to save another human life.  The lesson?—unless abortion will prevent the death of the mother such an act is immoral and murderous. 

This is where the current debate about abortion leaves us.  For the Orthodox who regard apostolic Tradition as authoritative the praxis of “the early Christians” witnesses to this Tradition.  Bishop Wright, an Anglican working within modern Anglicanism, does not so regard apostolic Tradition in this way.  This accounts for the divergence between his views about abortion and ours.

We should end on a note of sensitivity and love.  Bishop Wright regards abortion under those exceptional circumstances as something to be done with sadness, as the lesser of two evils.  We must not let the heat generated by the abortion debate cause us to demonize the good Bishop and lump him in together with Planned Parenthood.  What is needed is more calm and civil discussion—perhaps over a good cup of English tea. 

And we must also take care not to demonize those women who have procured abortions, for they are often pressured into it by others and afterward cry silent tears when no one can see them. We indeed need to respond to those on the “pro-choice” left.  But first of all we need to pray.