Abortion and Violence

Family Violence: Of Course It's OK

A recent Auckland University study, according to a report in the NZ Herald, found that there was a clear link between domestic violence and abortion—at least according to the lead author, Janet Fanslow. Of those women who had suffered domestic violence, twenty-one percent had had an abortion. There also appears to be a higher rate of miscarriages amongst women who have suffered domestic violence. However, domestic violence is also associated with higher rates of drinking, smoking, and unwanted pregnancies.

Now you always have to be very very careful, if not more than a little sceptical, about social surveys that trumpet linkages and causation. The mere appearance of two factors does not establish causality.

Fanslow and others are implying that there their data suggest a causal relationship between domestic violence and abortion—that is, domestic violence causes women to have abortions. Dr Fanslow is quoted as follows: “Women currently experiencing intimate partner violence, or with a history of violent relationships, may feel less prepared (emotionally, socially, or financially) to care for a child. This may contribute to their decision to terminate a pregnancy.”

To her credit, Fanslow puts this forward as a suggestion, not a fact. It is supposition, after all. In the end, who would know why violence and abortion occur in higher frequency together? For starters, it may be that the causality works in reverse: abortions lead to higher family violence. Statistical surveys on their own will never be able to establish causality beyond doubt.

However, philosophically we can explain how family violence and abortion occur together--as well as higher rates of drinking and smoking. Abortion always involves the expression and acting out of moral beliefs. This is inescapable. The following clusters of beliefs, or belief system, always flutter around the act of aborting—which is to say, the act of dismembering—a child:

1. The child is not a human being. The intellectual, moral, and social contortions Unbelievers go through to arrive at this position are legend. The rationalistic categorisations attempting to discriminate between being and non-being are at the same time phantasmagoric and stupid. Unbelievers intone about potentiality versus actuality; dependence versus self-actualisation; clusters of cells versus personhood; trimesters; viability versus non-viability—and on and on it goes. The intent is clear: Unbelievers are seeking for some rationalistic ground to determine when a human being is, or is not, a human being. And the ground keeps changing. The debates keep raging. But one thing is beyond debate in the realms of Unbelief: the unborn child is definitely not a human being; all that is lacking is a credible, authoritative ground upon which to rest the assertion.

2. Man has a right to determine for himself what is human and what is not. All people involved in the abortion trade, and all who have had abortions, have adopted a religion which asserts that Man is the determiner of life and the decider of what constitutes human life.

3. The rights of the individual carry the highest ethical weight and moral suasion. When there is any conflict of rights, it is the individual who is sovereign. So, in the matter of abortion, a woman has a right to her own body. This right is sufficiently sovereign that it justifies the killing of the unborn child. This asserted right over one's own body means that a woman can exercise choice with respect to her children—she can choose to have them terminated or to continue their existence. Her sovereignty over herself is so fundamental that she holds the power of life and death over her unborn child.

The application (or not) of violence is how the choice is expressed. Of course, rights are not restricted to members of the female sex. Men too have rights—and they also are entitled to press for and insist upon an abortion when the unborn child, once born, is going to damage or restrict or displeasure the man. The “rights” doctrine at the very least entitles the man to leave and desert the woman if she wishes the pregnancy to continue and he does not. (While we are not aware of any actual case law, it would seem there is a good case for the father to argue successfully in current Athenian law that they have no subsequent financial obligation to the child if the mother bore the baby against the father's wishes, and that the father insisted upon the aborting of the child, government agencies notwithstanding.)

4. Human rights can be defended and asserted by violent acts.

These four ethical principles underlie all abortions. For many they may not be consciously held; however, they are definitely at play in all abortions. When a woman seeking an abortion looks to the medical establishment and the state to carry out her wishes, all the advice and counseling she receives, all the medical input, will subtly and overtly trade in and propound these three key ethical principles.

The problem lies here: these four ethical principles, intrinsic and essential to every act of abortion, have far wider application and ramifications than abortion only. They are universal principles, with universal application to all human activity. Thus, the act of abortion links together the doctrine of sovereign individual rights, on the one hand, and the defence of those rights by violence, on the other.

The assertion of sovereign individual rights over against another human being, sanctioned by violence and brute force can be equally applicable to all domestic relations—and so it proves to be. If I can kill a child because having it displeases me, I can surely hit, abuse, scorn, or spit at a “partner” or any of my born children when they act in a way that displeases me. I have a sovereign right to treat them as in-human or sub-human, since in the final analysis, I, as the sovereign individual, determine what is, and what is not, human. The ethical continuum with the act of abortion is close, direct, and tight.

Now, we are not arguing infallible causality between the act of having an abortion and the subsequent outworking of family violence—as if the abortion causes all subsequent family violence—although this may indeed true in many cases. What we are arguing instead is that abortion is a particular act of familial violence which draws upon the same four ethical principles as all other incidents of family violence. Moreover, these principles are intrinsic to Unbelief; they are essential to the very constitution of modern Athens.

This explains why Athens's bridling at family violence, the “It's not OK” propaganda campaign, and the increased zealousness of the police against domestic violence lack any moral force or traction whatsoever. It explains why such campaigns and police actions will never work. Everybody in Athens knows that it is just politically correct window dressing, unable to be taken seriously—they are just ashamed to say it out loud. Everybody knows that of course family violence is OK. If killing an unwanted unborn child—the ultimate act of family violence—is not only OK, but morally laudable, in the name of a right to one's own body, then hitting out at disagreeable child or “partner” when one's individual preferences and rights are threatened has to be equally “OK!”. The greater act of violence has to justify the lesser.

Within the grotesque and distorted moral myopia of Athens people are asked to believe that violently killing an unborn child is not only OK, but it is one of the highest standards of human dignity and freedom. At the same time (and almost in the same breath) they are told that bashing a child or a “partner” is not OK. Yeah, right! You have to be kidding. As long as Athens holds to the four core ethical beliefs which are used to justify abortion, any Athenian argument against lesser family violence has no moral or ethical merit whatsoever.

So, to Unbelievers, we say this: every year there are over 18,000 officially sanctioned and encouraged acts of ultimate familial violence of the worse kind in this country. Don't even try for one moment to suggest that you are serious when you propagandize that, with respect to family violence, “It's not OK.” Your actions speak much louder than your words.

Of course it's OK. Stop spouting such hypocritical dishonest priggish cant. Your corrupt morality and your bent ethical principles are writ far too large for you to be taken seriously.