Greetings, fellow Badgers. My name is Tom Jensen and I am a senior majoring in Religious Studies. As such, this column will focus on religious topics and hopefully shed some light on why certain religious groups do and think as they do. If you have a topic you would like me to cover, or if you feel I misrepresented a certain group, please feel free to contact me. Additionally, if you disagree with anything I say, let’s get a good old-fashioned newspaper debate going. Write a letter to the editor. Call me out. It will be way more exciting than watching “The Office” on Netflix, so I guarantee a response.
I thought for this first week I would come out of the gates with a hot-button issue: abortion. It is easy to drown in the sea of rhetoric that flows from both sides of the abortion debate, so I figured I would have us take a step back and look at what everyone is actually debating. Despite what you may have read on your friends’ Facebook statuses or in those very passionate Tumblr posts, the main issue is not women’s rights, the right to life or whether it is okay to kill a baby. I think most of us agree that women have the right to do whatever they would like with their bodies, that everybody has a right to live and it is obviously not okay to kill a baby. Those are generally-accepted notions. What is not generally-accepted and what we are really arguing about, is when life begins.
If life begins at conception, as the Roman Catholic Church emphatically asserts, then telling a woman she cannot have an abortion deals less with women’s rights and more with the child’s right to live. If, however, life begins much later, then banned abortions are indeed infringing on women’s rights. If a fetus qualifies as a human life, then abortion is destroying a human life. If not, it’s not. You can see how important this particular aspect of the debate is, and how the way we answer this question completely affects the rest of the discussion.
Now, situating myself on the Catholic side of the debate, I have two considerations for pro-choice advocates. The first is to consider dropping the argument that people should keep religion and politics separate. People who argue this do not understand how most religions work. It is not just an hour-long obligation on Sunday or an ancient diet plan. You see the entire world differently when you believe God created it, just as you see a fetus differently if you believe its life began at conception. Compartmentalizing religion and politics into two separate categories undermines them both, because you are essentially saying that your beliefs about the world are not important enough to shape how you think the world should be run.
What’s more, religion in politics is not always so bad. Look at one example: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the paragon of American civil rights. People laud him as a political go-getter, but seem to forget that he based his entire movement on the New Testament—specifically the Sermon on the Mount. “At the beginning of the [bus boycott] the people called on me to serve as their spokesman,” he writes in an article titled “How My Mind Has Changed.” “In accepting this responsibility my mind... was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. This principal became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”
King is blatantly religious when talking about his movement, and even references Mahatma Gandhi, another paragon of civil rights (who employed his own religious beliefs in his movement against British Colonialism). The point I am trying to make is that we should stop being so scared of religion bleeding into people’s politics. And we should understand, especially with abortion, why that bleeding happens. Take a moment and imagine that your worldview left you with the conclusion that human life started at conception, and therefore that abortion was killing hundreds of thousands of babies. Would you sit idly by and let it happen because you were afraid that you might be too religious in your politics? Be honest—probably not.
If you do not agree with the Roman Catholic Church about life beginning at conception, you are going to have to come to a concrete conclusion as to when life actually does begin. We have already covered one pole, life beginning at conception. There is also a school of thought on the other pole, which determines that life begins well after birth. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, in their Journal of Medical Ethics article “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” found no significant difference between a fetus and a newborn, stating that “both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, …[and the fact that] both are potential persons is morally irrelevant.” This conclusion led to a further conclusion that if it was alright to abort fetuses, it was equally alright to terminate newborns.
So now you are aware of both poles of the issue, from no abortions to abortions well after the pregnancy is over. Now it is up to you to do your research and come to a conclusion. I would also ask that in your debating with other people, keep in mind where they are coming from. Understand that if you are arguing with a Catholic, you are arguing with someone who believes the fetus is a human life, and therefore they are not trying to quell women’s rights or make life inconvenient for a family economically incapable of raising another child. They are trying to save lives.
Tom is a senior majoring in religious studies. Please send feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
