Abortion, Infanticide, and the Hubris of Technological Modernity
For anyone living under a rock (or in a blessed state of not-following-the-news, which I highly recommend), this past Friday, June 24th, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart and what would normally be the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, denying the presence of a Constitutional right to abortion and returning the issue of abortion regulation to the states.
The issue of abortion is in many ways a unique one in American politics; from its very beginning until now, it has cut across the typical lines of partisan affiliation and disrupted and forged ideological alliances almost at random. Starting out as a "Catholic issue"--one of a bevy of Eugenics-related progressive causes favored by almost every American social and religious group but bitterly opposed by Catholics--in short order it succeeded in breaking apart practically every existing political alliance that had defined American politics prior to the 1960s and forging (very unexpected) new ones. It would be difficult to overstate the potential of the present decision to alter American politics and aid in large-scale "realignment" of American coalitions, alliances, and ideologies.
I don't want to talk about any of that, though. What I instead want to talk about is what the abortion issue--and especially the terms in which it is debated--tells us about the society we live in and its underlying, broadly shared assumptions.
What is abortion?
Historically and philosophically speaking, abortion is the distinctively modern, technological replacement for the social practice of infanticide. In this, abortion can be set aside any number of modern, technological implements and practices that claim to solve age-old human problems.
Human sexuality and procreation pose any number of problems to any number of parties, individual and collective. Societies have dealt with these problems in any number of ways at different times and places. One of these--operative in different ways the scales of the individual man or woman, family, community, state, and Empire--is the problem of (depending on how exactly the problem is posed, and for whom) unwanted or excess or burdensome or defective infants.
Most societies have solved this problem--and indeed most problems related to sex and reproduction--via essentially social means. By social in this context, I mean solutions that essentially involve differentiating human persons and relationships to create specialized roles and structures with the capacity to take action in certain ways that would be impossible or very difficult for individual human persons or less-structured, less-differentiated groupings of persons. The Roman gens is one excellent example of such a social structure, as are the oikos and polis described by Aristotle, as is the Medieval Catholic model of marriage-as-sacrament resulting in the natural-nuclear-ecclesiastical family, as is the modern state.
Infanticide is not, in itself, a social structure or means, but a simple act, easily achieved by virtually anyone given the weakness and dependency of human infants. The reality is, however, that most human beings, and especially those people most directly impacted, even at times most directly harmed or burdened, by the infant (its mother, say, or its father) find it difficult if not impossible to carry out the act in isolation, by themselves, without external, social sanction and external, social aid. In practically every society that has practiced it at any wide scale, then (which is practically every society that has ever existed), infanticide has functioned as a social technique tied to social structures.
A famous and instructive example is the practice of exposure in Antiquity, as practiced by Greeks, Romans, and other Mediterranean cultures. It is easy to misunderstand this practice, which modern people tend to find almost incomprehensible, since to understand it properly requires understanding the typical social models of Antiquity. In short, the ancient Mediterranean culture relied for its extraordinary success on the development of extraordinarily effective social structures, mostly centered on a certain hierarchical model of social differentiation and collective action. In the case of the household (or clan, or family) this involved a basic differentiation between subordinate members of the community, deprived of control and guidance of the group as a whole and assigned tasks involving high degrees of specialization, and the "head of the household" as ritual center of the community and coordinator and regulator of its actions. How much actual power the head of the household wielded differed vastly depending on social and cultural and economic factors, but at least ritually and nominally, he functioned as the essential determiner of membership and coordinator of function for all other members and for the group as a whole. This social model also applied, with relevant differences, to large social and political communities, though often on a less monarchical and more democratic or oligarchic fashion.
In all this, the ancients were quite clear that such social systems relied on, as an absolute sine qua non, the ability of the head of household and the community as a whole to harness, control, and if necessary thwart both individual, personal desires and choices and natural processes. The Theogony of Hesiod is in essence a narration of how the natural process of divine procreation, and its concomitant personal and familial relationships, is ultimately brought under the control of Zeus as king of the gods. By the end of the story, Zeus has produced a divine society almost exclusively composed of his own children and close relatives and killed, eaten, castrated, or banished every other party capable of wielding the power of divine procreation to an extent capable of threatening his own position: and the community can now function stably, peacefully, and even in a fairly egalitarian fashion, at least as far as the community of gods themselves is concerned.
This excursis is necessary for understanding how infanticide functioned in the ancient world, and also how it functions in many other cultures. Membership in the community, even in the family, is neither a natural reality or a guaranteed right; rather, it is a ritual and social act that must be performed by the head of the community. To take one paradigmatic example, upon birth, a Roman woman was expected to relinquish her infant to the head of household (who might be her husband or father, but was more likely to be her father-in-law, grandfather-in-law, uncle-in-law, etc), who would then determine whether or not the child was to be accepted in the community or not. If the child was rejected from the community, then he would be "exposed"--that is, ejected from the community and left to die.
The intelligence of this procedure should be obvious. Qua father and especially mother, individual Romans, as we would expect, found it difficult and burdensome to first beget a child, carry it to term, give birth to it, see its face and emotionally and hormonally bond with it, and then personally kill it. Qua member of a properly socially-differentiated community, however, the situation was quite different. The decision as to whether the child lives or dies is made in a ritualized, socialized context by the head of the household, the member of the community tasked with the regulation and good of that community as a whole, and thus at least nominally from a place of impartiality. The head of the household nonetheless obtains, or can be assumed to have, the nominal consent and acquiescence of all the members of the community, including the child's parents. The decision on the child's life or death be made based on any number of factors, from the qualities or defects of the individual child to the resource-needs of the family to the particular emotional wants and desires of any of its members; and once made, the actual exposure is carried out by another differentiated member of the household, probably a slave with no emotional or personal connection with any of the parties. The actual death of the child is a mere corollary to the essential question of its membership or non-membership in the community, as determined by its ritual head. The child may be eaten by wolves, or die of starvation, or (as apparently was common in urban environments) be picked up and raised by other parties for slave labor or prostitution. Either way, in the ritual and moral language of antiquity, no blood-guilt accrues to the community or its members.
This practice is described above in terms of the individual family or clan, but it could also be used, in very similar form, by larger, non-familial groups, cities, nations, even Empires. Most Greek polises exercised a high degree of regulation over birth, procreation, and membership in their communities; and the most famous society of Antiquity, Sparta, made extensive, systematic use of infanticide to achieve these communal ends, to very great effect.
Compare this to the modern practice of abortion. It is notoriously difficult, as a matter of philosophical ethics, to strongly distinguish the two practices; it is even more difficult, indeed impossible, to strongly distinguish the two practices in terms of means and ends. The problem they purport to solve is the same, as is the basic means. Over the past half-century, it has been possible to observe any number of global societies transitioning from the use of infanticide to the use of abortion, without changing the basic social function of the practice or their concept of the problem and its solution. Indian and Chinese families used and use infanticide to weed out excess female children that would pose a financial burden via dowry and similar practices; now they use abortion for precisely the same purpose.
Where the difference comes in, especially as practiced in the West, is in the essentially technological nature and perception of the act of abortion. Pro-abortion rhetoric is and always has been fascinating from a philosophical and moral perspective; and at the heart of it is a certain, distinctive idea of technology as a, indeed the, solution to individual and social problems.
If the ancient social solution described above centers on a head of community making a ritualized communal decision for the good of the overall group, the technological solution (at least in the minds of modern Americans) involves an individual making a choice empowered by a technological implement overseen and sanctioned by technological experts.
Attempts to defend abortion ethically from an abstract philosophical perspective are interesting, but not generally very successful, for the simple reason that, however brilliant their exponents, all such arguments are in form and essence highly-tailored moral-exception arguments. Moral exception arguments are notoriously difficult to tailor narrowly enough to apply to only the desired exception and not any others: so naturally the principal philosophical arguments for abortion (autonomy! intelligence!) would apply just as naturally to killing infants, the mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, and/or (in one famous example) any number of famous violinists who happen to be tethered to you. Pro-life arguments emerge much more clearly from the universalizing, ethical concerns of ancient philosophical and religious tradition, and are far easier to put in tight, common-sense terms.
The enormous power of abortion as a social and communal practice, however, and the enormous amount of emotion invested in it, do not come from such abstract considerations, but from immensely-powerful pragmatic and emotional factors present in every society throughout history, for every person, and amplified by modern belief in technology. The most common rhetoric in favor of abortion thus naturally (and wisely) focuses on these factors, and avoids abstract, metaphysical, universalizing ethical reasoning as much as possible. In this, it is not only far more honest, but also far more effective. It is for this reason above all that I choose to focus on pragmatic moral reasoning and social structure in this essay.
Examine, then, the act of abortion as imagined and proclaimed by the prevailing social and political and rhetorical arguments for the practice. A woman becomes pregnant; she then, alone, (and absolutely not subject to coercion or pressure from boyfriends, parents, and/or corporate employers) is liberated and empowered through the aid of technical experts, who provide her with technical information to make her own decision, which then emerges as a pure, unmitigated act of choice and freedom sanctioned as being in her own and society's interests according to those same technical experts. She then receives the gentle, purely technical help of these same technical experts (who absolutely do not, could not wield any coercive pressure or be influenced by their own social standing or financial profit), who provide medical care for her by rendering her unconscious and performing a procedure on her, the precise details of which are best left to them and other technical experts. When she wakes up, the fetus (it is important to use the proper technical terminology) has ceased to exist, the pregnancy has been terminated, etc, etc, and she can go on with her life as though nothing happened.
Above all else, the two stories narrated above share one, enormous thing in common: they are not true. They are, in fact, social mythology, used to cover much uglier, much messier realities.
The perfect, ritualized act of exposure, carried out by the venerable patriarch in the impartial interests of the community with the grateful concurrence of all involved, is no more real than the perfect, ritualized act of abortion, carried out by the badass empowered woman unswayed by external pressure in her own impartial interests thanks to the purely liberating aid and sanction of technical experts.
Still, mythology is in many cases far more useful than grim reality, especially for understanding how societies operate on large scales.
The analogies and differences between the two cases described above are important, indeed crucial, inasmuch as they illuminate the dirty little secret of modernity: that our enormous belief in technological solutions is not the result merely of sober judgment of effectiveness, but rather the result of a moralistic belief in the necessity and goodness of such solutions and a strong preference for such solutions over all rivals.
Put simply, we like the story of the individual choosing in absolute freedom to make use of a technological implement overseen and sanctioned by technical experts. We like the kind of subject it describes, the kind of subject that (if we are honest) we all see ourselves as or at least aspire to become. We view the burdens imposed by social structures and solutions, burdens on individual desire and emotion, with absolute horror, while we at the same time view the burdens imposed by technology on anonymous workers and technicians and family and friends and strangers and society as necessary, noble, praiseworthy sacrifices for the good and freedom of all. We like this story and this kind of subject so much that we are willing, usually to ignore all contrary evidence as to the actual nature of the process involved and its actual effectiveness in resolving relevant problems or achieving relevant ends.
Modern people, especially modern Americans, have an almost infinite confidence in technology. The mere assurance that a technological implement or practice exists for a particular problem is, in most cases, sufficient for belief that that problem has been solved. Problems that in actuality of fact are not technological or cannot be solved by technological solutions are interpreted and implemented as though they were, usually to disastrous effect. Technical experts whose livelihoods and interests are deeply implicated in the use and popularity of the technical processes they oversee are treated, bizarrely, as impartial judges, quasi-priestly representatives or objective non-moral appendages of the glorified, god-like machine.
The number of cases to which this general factor applies are essentially infinite. One that has been driven home to me very profoundly over the past years is the matter of welfare and the "social safety net." When I began getting to know people experiencing poverty and homelessness, I was absolutely astounded to discover that, in actuality of fact, America does not have a social safety net. On paper, America has any number of technical systems designed to ensure that people do not reach certain levels of indigence; in reality, these systems are administered socially in such a way that they do not, and indeed cannot, actually prevent people from falling into absolute poverty and homelessness. Someone reliably employed and securely able to make a certain amount of money can, if they are patient enough, eventually gain a certain amount of supplementary income, benefits, and such; someone stuck with a sudden bill or in danger of being evicted can no more appeal to the American welfare system to save them than to Caesar. What I discovered instead was that the only functioning safety net in America was in fact family and community. People who can move in with their parents will not end up homeless; people who can get supplementary income, food, and clothing from their local community or their extended family or their church will not starve. People who are on their own, though, with only the American state to turn to, will fall into the abyss.
Upon reflection, this in no way and to no degree should be a surprise: because poverty relief and support is, by nature and by absolute necessity, a social problem amenable that can only be solved socially. A working modern welfare system certainly involves technological means, but is primarily a social structure whereby resources are gathered, administered, and distributed by differentiated subordinates acting in the name of and in the interests of the community. On a global level, welfare systems work best in societies that are otherwise highly communal and social, where workers see themselves as operating for the good of valued neighbors and venerable community. In America, where reliance is primarily on technological systems and belief in individualism is so pervasive as to be a kind of religion, they predictably function very badly indeed.
In America, too, one can witness any number of non-profit organizations, philanthropists, and would-be technological experts who suck up huge amounts of money and press attention in the pursuit of childishly naive technological solutions to poverty--ranging from "tiny houses" to "waste recycling" to "coding camps"--that manifestly do nothing at all. There is hardly a field of American life, from business to government to religion to academia, where one cannot witness technological solutions being touted to solve problems that they at best cannot solve alone and at worst actively exacerbate, overseen and promoted by corrupt, self-interested technological experts. Put broadly, in terms of over-reliance on technological solutions and waste of resources on technological experts, this perhaps the systemic problem of contemporary American society.
To take an example closer to the abortion debate, I have been frequently annoyed by the provably false, social-media-driven claim that without legal abortion women will still get abortions in just as large numbers but will do so less safely to the extent that they will die in large numbers thanks to "back-alley abortions." This is demonstrably false, but rests ultimately on the kind of technological mythology discussed above.
Abortion, no less than infanticide, is ultimately a social practice. It is not a decision made in isolation by women, nor is it carried out in isolation. Indeed, as a complex technological practice, abortion in fact requires far more specialized and differentiated social structures and personnel than the analogous practice of infanticide. All of this is well borne out by existing data. The abortion rate more than doubled during the decade after Roe v Wade, and even fairly modest restrictions on abortion, such as waiting-periods, ultrasound laws, regulation of clinics, have almost certainly led to significant decreases in abortion rates in recent years, as have pro-life efforts such as sidewalk counseling, crisis pregnancy centers, and the like. The clinical, expert, legally-sanctioned, shielded social process of abortion that has been developed is as crucial to the actual practice of abortion as the ritualized patriarchal process of exposure was to infanticide in the ancient world. Anything that disrupts that process will in fact reduce incidences of abortion.
Likewise, the assumption that in the absence of legal abortion women will turn in large numbers to dangerous medical procedures that they have been taught to regard as death-traps also makes a mockery of both technical and social knowledge. Abortion is a thoroughly technologized procedure, carried out exclusively by technical experts: and this was true well before Roe v Wade. Essentially all illegal abortions in the decade before Roe v Wade were in fact surgical procedures carried out by licensed medical experts, operating illegally in the interests of political belief and/or personal profit. In this picture, the most significant developments were the widespread use of penicillin following WW2 and the finessing and development of the actual techniques of surgical abortion: over the decades preceding Roe v Wade, these factors led to a massive drop in illegal-abortion-related deaths to the point of statistical insignificance. Even Planned Parenthood representatives and pro-choice advocates have admitted they have no serious concerns for the return of back-alley deaths from abortion.
The primary valid "women's health" concern in regards to the banning of abortion is not this, but the simple problem of medical complications from pregnancy itself. America has by far the worst rates of pregnancy and birth complications and infant and maternal death of any developed nation: though this differs enormously, and depends on, underlying factors such as access to medical care, quality of medical care, use of interventions and procedures, poverty, racial disparities, general health, prevalence of disease, use of alcohol and drugs, and so forth. All this means that, abstracting from these vast differences and applied to an imaginary statistically-average American woman, having an abortion is significantly safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. And it is this highly-technological and technologized argument, made "impartially" by technical experts that is used to argue for the necessity of abortion for women's health. Given that the decision to get pregnant and/or get an abortion does not, as yet, rest with medical providers, and given that these decisions are rarely made, and rarely can be made, with the sole or primary goal of maximizing personal health, it is clear that abortion is not a solution to the problem of infant and maternal mortality.
Most basically, then, the abortion issue asks us to decide what, precisely, the problems we want to solve actually are, and whether the means we have selected to solve those problems actually work. I am not anti-technology any more than I am anti-society: there are certainly goals that are best achieved through primarily technological means, when not employed to the exclusion of other factors. To take one obvious example, the design and manufacture of effective military hardware is obviously principally a technological problem, as is the problem of curing a particular infectious disease. As COVID has taught us, though, even in such technological realms as disease control and transmission social factors and methods are ignored to everyone's peril.
If the problem to be solved by abortion and infanticide amounts solely, in our estimation, to the the existence of unwanted pregnancies, conceived solely in the medical-technical sense without reference to even the potential existence of human life or human persons, then abortion is a reasonable technological and social solution, albeit one whose effectiveness, like most technological solutions in American life, has been vastly exaggerated and fetishized to the serious detriment of actual effectiveness. Such technological solutions follow a predictable political path: the more clear it becomes that the technological solution does not in fact solve the problem, the more the worshipers double down and blame their benighted, "Medieval" opponents for somehow gumming up the works and preventing the pure, blessed technology from bringing about the Earthly Paradise it so obviously would otherwise.
If, however, the problem is conceived more broadly as encompassing all those economic and social and familial conditions and problems that lead people, very non-ideally, to first conceive and then terminate what they have conceived, abortion is obviously not a solution, but at best a minor palliative. If the problem is women's health in general and the health of pregnant women and their infants in particular, then abortion is mostly besides the point except in a vague statistical sense. If the problem as we conceive it is human sexuality, or human procreation, or human family life more broadly, then of course abortion is not only in practice and theory not a solution at all, but actually an exacerbating factor: the decades after Roe v Wade featured a vast increase in pregnancies that was almost certainly directly caused by the widespread availability of abortion.
If the problem, though, is in fact, as the ancients posed it, far more honestly, in their own practices, the more basic one of unwanted people, excess people, defective people, people whose membership in the community poses serious detriments to individual and communal self-interest...well, abortion as it has actually existed as a social practice in American society for the last fifty years has been in part a massive success, in that it has reduced the incidence of such people massively, including all-but-eliminating people with Down Syndrome and other genetic issues, but in some measure a failure in its inability to be generally-accepted and so operate reliably and painlessly in the interests of social stability.
In Antiquity, there existed traditions of critique for the prevailing hierarchical social model. One, broadly speaking, was philosophy, which insisted on metaphysical transcendence even to the detriment of communal structure and loyalty, as well as on the dictates of nature, understood as a set of moral ends imposing rational demands on all parties in a way transcending self-interest or even communal interest. Another closely-related tradition was Christianity, which combined belief in metaphysical transcendence and nature-as-rational-guide with belief in an immediate divine presence embodied in divine community and divine law and a unique conception of persons as interrelated, interdependent, and irreplaceable. Both traditions, not coincidentally, generally opposed infanticide, with Christianity being particularly noteworthy, though not irrational given its commitments, in its absolute opposition to infanticide, abortion, and all related practices.
If, as I firmly believe, these traditions are broadly correct in their understanding and framing of the problem ostensibly solved by abortion and infanticide, if the problem is how society and individuals can, practically and freely and even under extreme duress and even in the face of extreme harm to self-interest and group-interest alike, succeed in following the demands of abstract morality, rational, teleological nature, and the universal divine command to recognize human dignity and receive human persons with love, then it is absolutely the case that abortion and infanticide are not and never can be reasonable means. If we wish to create a society that genuinely and responsibly cares for all of its members according to reasonable, universal definitions of human dignity and natural law, we will have to change a great deal about our society indeed in terms of its essential ends and how it understands its own problems; and we will have to consider very carefully what means we use to get there. In that struggle, the practice and sanction of abortion is always and everywhere an enemy: and Christians and other believers in ethical and moral truth and natural law who nonetheless worship abortion and other immoral technological means just like their neighbors are the greatest obstacles to social progress in existence.
I said above that abortion is difficult to defend on abstract, ethical grounds. On more immediate, pragmatic, emotive grounds, especially to people in desperate situations or under psychological stress, its allure is powerful indeed. The greatest problem with the "technological mindset" is essentially the same as the greatest problem with the "social mindset" of antiquity: which is that in its desperate rush to use the same means for every end, to pretend that it has solved problems that it manifestly has not, it causes us to forget the essential moral and communal struggle of the world, where the problem is always how social and moral principles can actually be applied and lived out in the general chaos of human life.
Indeed, the greatest shock to most contemporary Americans, the thing they refuse to accept, often, even to the point of obvious madness, and consequently the most frequent and systemic obstacle to real social progress, is simply that modern society has not and cannot simply and easily resolve every age-old problem of human life and society via technological means. Recourse will be had to the most extreme apocalyptic and conspiratorial means, blaming the cosmos and God and the Devil and the Republican Party and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall-Street and Fundamentalists and Catholics and Russians and the Deep State for preventing the easy success of one's favored magical-technical means, before any recognition that a given problem is not amenable to an immediate technological solution.
This is the true hubris of technological modernity, and it does not want for Nemeses in the present day.
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