Abortion: Chestertonian Reflections on a Debate

In the last few decades, few aspects of the practice of medicine have been more debated than the topic of abortion. Often, the very terms used by one side of the debate differ from the terms used by the other side, to the point that clear communication is almost impossible. What is needed now is someone to clarify the terms of the debate—someone like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose brilliant, sometimes paradoxical observations were often based on careful attention to the very words people use in everyday speech.

Presented here are a number of reflections, in the spirit of Chesterton, on some of the terms central to the abortion debate:

1. Abortion

The very word “abortion” is a point not sufficiently heeded in the debate that centers on it. People speak of aborting a fetus, but a thing cannot be aborted, only a process. People abort missions, they abort computer operations, but they do not abort computers or cars.

When one aborts a pregnancy, it is like aborting any operation: it is left uncompleted and its result is avoided—and the result of pregnancy is birth. To speak of “aborting a fetus” is to confuse a thing with a process, and to confuse the interruption of a process with the very different action of destroying a thing.

 

2. Terminating a Pregnancy

Some speak of a woman’s freedom to “terminate a pregnancy”—but what woman does not want that? Every woman wishes to terminate a pregnancy—or at least for it to terminate itself. No woman wishes to be pregnant forever, like some bizarre parody of the perpetual virginity of Mary; every woman wishes her pregnancy to terminate—that is, to reach its terminus; its telos, or purposed end.

 

But the telos of pregnancy is birth; when people speak of “terminating a pregnancy,” they mean they wish to terminate a pregnancy prematurely and without a birth. From this desire springs the very accurate term abortion.

 

However, because the goal—the true goal—of an abortion is not the ending of the process but the avoidance of the product, what is really desired is not the termination of the pregnancy, but termination—perhaps one should say extermination—of that which is growing within the woman’s body, the cause and telos—the effective and final cause—of the pregnancy itself.

 

3. The Right to Choose

The real problem with the abortion debate is that at its heart lies an error of grammar. One side of this debate speaks often of the right to choose without noticing that choose is a transitive verb—that is, one cannot simply choose, but can only choose something, either this or that. The reluctance to explicitly name the particular choice in view suggests that even the proponents of this right are not as proud of the thing they seek as some of them sound.

 

One can indeed be simply free to choose, but there the phrase means freedom to make choices in general. This is the only way in which choose can be intransitive. However, in the phrase right to choose, also in the related term pro-choice, choose and choice are not general terms, but euphemisms; they allow one to simply avoid mentioning the choice in view.