Beware when anyone has more answers than
questions or answers hard questions with easy answers. For example, let’s consider two issues: the
death penalty and abortion. I’m
generally opposed to the death penalty, as it appears to me to be a perverse
lottery that favors the execution of blacks, males, ugly and unpleasant people,
the poor, and folks who live in
Abortion is far more complex than merely
making a simplistic dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice positions. Few doctors endorse abortion as a means of
birth control and such a grave step should never be taken lightly. Doctors, perhaps for insurance reasons,
sometimes scare the daylights out of mother-to-be about the health of their
child. But doctors are sometimes wrong,
and it’s important to trust ourselves in such matters.
I’ve also met few absolutists on abortion,
especially when they have to deal with the issue personally, as in a
hypothetical in which a baby is an encephalic-- without a brain-- and the mother’s
life in danger. Someone wrote to me
saying that this “did happen to my
closest friends a couple of years ago, and even more ironically, at the time, I
was teaching an eight week course on Biblical ethics when the severity of her
condition came to light. In a nutshell,
she had four small kids at home, pregnant with her fifth, when she started
having problems. Doctors said that: a) The
baby essentially had no brain, his limbs were severely deformed, and other
internal organs where malformed beyond hope. b) Because of some uterine
problems, there was a very high chance that sometime in the ninth month she
would suffer some major hemorrhage that could prove fatal to her. They of
course, wanted to abort right away. She refused, and moreover, wanted to
carry the baby full term and have a natural childbirth. (Initially, she
actually wanted to give birth at home). For me, I saw the ethical
question in a whole new light, now that it had a face on it. The baby had
a zero percentage chance of surviving. For a staunch pro-lifer, it was a
dilemma acknowledging that the right-to-life can't always be seen as an
absolute. It didn't seem right that the mother should possibly
lose her life, and four small children lose their mother, when the baby
wasn't going to live no matter what. Fortunately, the mother decided to have a
C-section at the earliest possible time. (32 weeks or something like
that...don't exactly remember) She got through it okay. The baby lived
for three days or so.”
God gives us minds and God gives
doctors their skill. The point is not to
look for rationalizations to support our actions but rather be prepared to
acknowledge the complexity of life and that we must adapt moral principles to
achieve the most ethical ends A one-size-fit-all principle that all life from
conception on must be preserved at all costs can be immoral and even deadly, a
principle, by the way, that anti-abortionists rarely extend to embracing
military pacifism and mercy to criminals on death row. Especially immoral—and I use that word with
precision—is the view that we should simply put our faith in God’s perfect will
on all matters of health. Taken to its
logical extreme, this claim should cause us to ignore car seatbelts and
antibiotics for babies. Some sects have
taken this position, bringing misery and death to those they claim they love.