In the wake of another failure of the Supreme Court to reduce the evil of abortion, a gloom has settled on the pro-life movement.
Sure, as the 5-4 decision to strike down a Louisiana regulation of “abortion clinics” sinks in, there are calls to be as energetic, as passionate as before. Likewise, there’s a predictable turn away from “the institutions” and towards grassroots activism — who needs the silly Court anyways?
But prior to Monday there was a real hope placed in the Court’s newfound conservative majority. This was the justification many conflicted Christians gave for voting for Trump: “Yes, he’s reprehensible, but he’ll give us a conservative court; we’ll come closer to overturning Roe.” Trump gave us a conservative Court. His Court gave us more abortion.
It has become fashionable to blame this failure on a legal methodology that values the precedent of past cases over justice; the interpretation of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution over an actual discernment of the common good of our country. Obviously, precedent was the defense given by Roberts: “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
As has already been well pointed out, Roberts’ decision is a cherry-picking of precedent. The “Texas law” to which he refers was a recent case in which he dissented, and “overturning previous decisions had not stood in his way in other cases.” Precedent is little more than an excuse; a cry of the judge that we should not expect any judgment of him, only the management of a computer program and the decisions allowed within the scope of its code. The virtue of prudence plays no role here.
Roberts is no anomaly. In recent years we have had an acclaimed pro-life president with a majority of pro-life advocates in both houses of Congress. Conservatives have had the power they need to defund Planned Parenthood and overturn Roe for some time. It is impossible not to judge the tree by its lack of fruit and conclude that conservatives, whether by apathy or design, are determined not to disrupt abortion.
What about the killing of children makes progressives willing to advocate for it against their humanism and conservatives willing to abdicate their faculty of judgment for its sake? It is insufficient to blame Roberts’ use of precedent if something about abortion tempts intelligent people to use precedent as a technique for assuaging their conscience, just as it tempts others to use the logic of competing rights to assuage their own.
We need to confront the possibility that there is a will to maintain the structural evil of abortion that transcends party lines; ideological camps; jurisprudential methods; and even the individual conscience. Abortion is maintained by a perverse kind of piety, because abortion is a sacrament of liberalism that signifies and effects our allegiance towards the social order that we have built. Conservatives and liberals fear to strike it from our national activities, not merely because some people want to keep it, but because the end of abortion signifies the end of the world; an apocalypse; a curtain on the social order as we understand it and the end of the state as we have built it.
The abominable practice of the nations
The practice of killing children is abominable to the Lord. Its prohibition becomes a mantra in the Old Testament: “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Mo’lech” (Leviticus 18:21). It is the ultimate sign of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God and of their harlotry with the nations: “he even burned his son as an offering, according to the abominable practice of the nations” (2 Kings 16:3). Many have drawn the comparison between our abortion regime and this ancient practice, and it is easy to dismiss them as alarmists, or at least as lacking nuance. A woman suffering a crisis pregnancy who seeks an abortion is something quite different, in tenor and in fact, than a man who immolates his child to a god. But the difference, like the similarity, can be explained.
The Lord detests the practice of child-sacrifice precisely as a national sin. It is a “practice of the nations” and not merely the error of an individual. This national sin has a direct relationship to the rulers of the nations. Mo’lech, the usual recipient of child-sacrifice, comes from melek, which means “king.” This etymological link, worthless on its own, takes greater weight within the context of the Israelite argument, later leveled by Lactantius and Augustine against the Roman gods — that the gods of the nations are dead or absent human kings. The Book of Wisdom contains this argument in a concentrated form:
When men could not honor monarchs in their presence, since they lived at a distance, they imagined their appearance far away, and made a visible image of the king whom they honored, so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present...The multitude...now regarded as an object of worship the one whom shortly before they had honored as a man.
This is hardly a surprising conclusion from a nation delivered from the hand of a king who claimed the status of divinity, the Egyptian Pharaoh. But it is surprising how quickly idolatrous kingship is linked to the rite of child-sacrifice:
Afterward it was not enough for them to err about the knowledge of God, but they live in great strife due to ignorance, and they call such great evils peace. For whether they kill children in their initiations, or celebrate secret mysteries...they no longer keep themselves or their marriages pure...” (Wisdom of Solomon 14:12-31)
Obviously, man is not a god. The appearance of mortal “divinity” is, in truth, a man’s power over other men. Men subjugated to this power are deluded into seeing this power-difference as an essential difference in the person who wields it — seeing deity and superhumanity when there is only really the accumulation of wealth, property and persons.
The order and the peace of the nations, understood as peoples subservient to god-kings, is maintained by the extension and accumulation of power of the strong over the weak. This is the peace of slavery that the Israelites longed for when they looked back fondly on Egypt; it is the peace granted by nations that Christ distinguished from the kind of peace that He brings. He argues that “the kings of the Gentiles (ethnōn, nations) exercise lordship over them; and those with authority over them are called benefactors.” The nations are described as those who accept an (apparently evil) kind of lordship over themselves in order that they might have “benefactors” — those who bring them good gifts. Christ commands that his followers form an alternative social order: “But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves” (Luke 22:24-28). The nations embody no paradox. Their weakest are the least important and their leaders are the ones who do not serve.
It makes sense that the Book of Wisdom lists the destruction of marriage as one of the chief ills of this kind of social order. The family is a kind of social order that naturally resists the idolatrous social order of the nations. Within the family, a good leader is the one whose power is particularly for the weak. A mother who does not use her power and her strength to serve her child in his weakness and inability is simply a bad mother. A father who seeks to totalize his power over the weak, appearing as divine to the subjected eyes of his children, is an abusive father. This is why Christ’s revelation of God as Father is a definitive revelation of the true God, over and against the human image of divinity, which is really only power as seen by the subjected.
The killing of a child is not merely a strange rite. It is the destruction of the revolutionary logic of the family. Within the family, peace is attained and order is preserved by service to the weak. The family is evidence, then, that the attainment of order by the domination of the weak is unnecessary; that all the machinations of the god-kings could be replaced with love. Child sacrifice is a structural suppression of this alternative source of order. It inserts the “practice of the nations” into the relationship of the mother and her child; into the precise point at which the national order is most thoroughly revealed as weak, silly and posturing. The paradigm of love is replaced with the paradigm of power.
This act is truly national. In killing one child for the god, parents make it true that all their children are under his power and that their parenthood is merely an extension of his kingship. Every living person in a child-sacrificing society becomes, logically, a person not sacrificed to the national god. But this means that the fact of living, life itself, becomes a “right” granted and conditioned by the power which demands the sacrifice. The fact that child-sacrifice in the Old Testament is not some Satanic act here or there, but a steady, regulated, national practice, makes sense. It is the sacramental re-commitment and re-absorption of each family into the nation; it is the technique of replacing an order of love with an order of fear and violence in order that the powerful may remain powerful; it is a source of peace, insofar as any rival social order, so obviously present in every family, is ripped from the womb.
Abortion as sacrament of liberalism
Liberalism is a true philosophy of the nations. Its founding presupposition is that men are individuals, rather than social; that politics is a contentious negotiation of the desires of one’s own individual will over and against the individual will of another; that the world is a field of scarce resources destined to belong to individuals as their private property; that human nature is to pursue one’s own self-interest; that State power is the ability to restrain others’ violence by the threat of one’s own violence, which is viewed, as a result, as the only legitimate violence within a society.
The family is a revelation of the profound limitations of liberalism. The idea that a father and his daughter are two individuals in competition is silly. The idea that the goods between a husband and wife are pieces of private property negotiated between them is simply to understand marriage as a prolonged divorce, which is stupid. The idea that a mother maximizes her self-interest in giving birth is laughable. And it would be obscene to believe that the punishment, discipline, and policing that occurs between grandparents, aunts, uncles and the various children of the family is, in fact, a participation in the legitimate violence of the State.
This is the reason that the family is viewed with suspicion and anxiety by liberals. It is the evidence that liberalism is contingent, limited, and even weak. We may view the world as riddled with scarcity, but then again we may not. We may view community as conglomerates of self-interested individuals, but we may also view them as coherent social wholes, united in love, and established in a peace that depends upon the virtue of its members and the continued gift of the strong towards the weak. The family is the persistent evidence that another social order is possible, and so the family is the object of liberalism’s most aggressive tactics of re-education — an immense hodgepodge of legal fictions, technologies, and narratives which aim at re-describing family life as a merely biologically necessary incubation period for “real life” as a rights-bearing individual.
Abortion is an act that decisively realizes liberalism within the family. It is not necessary that a child actually be killed. To even consider the child as a licitly kill-able being means that the family is always constituted as a whim of the powerful — of the parents within their rights. That a woman “chooses” to truly love her child does not challenge this mechanism because her love is construed as private and voluntaristic and so as politically meaningless, even if it is, in fact, real love. To say, in one breath, “I love you” and “it would have been permissible for me to kill you at an earlier stage” is simply to re-describe love as subordinate to power: “Insofar as I didn’t exercise my power to kill you, I can love you.” This is how abortion, like child-sacrifice before it, allows for the obviously irrepressible love of parents for their children without challenging the power of the sovereign. All love becomes State-allowed love. All living people become survivors of a self-interested violence that is always being managed by the State.
The possibility of abortion nullifies the Christian inversion of power, in which all strength and capacity for choice is for the weak. It re-asserts a pagan power structure in which power is for-itself, contained, divinized, and constituted by self-interest. This is a general description of what is always the case in any regime of child-sacrifice. Because liberalism is a Christian heresy, it coats this deification of power with a Christian gloss. It does this by describing a world in which violence, competition, lovelessness, and atomization are not real choices that we may or may not make (and thus sins incurring guilt) but the nature of reality itself (and thus something which we are not responsible for). Because we are haunted by Christianity, in order to justify removing oneself from the order of love, in which power is for the weak, it is necessary that the child be re-described as an individual in competition with other individuals; that the mother’s body be re-articulated as a piece of private property; that the child be understood as a violator of the property rights guaranteed by the power of the State; that things like bodies, time, and happiness are construed as scarce resources which can only be owned to the detriment of another, never shared to the perfection of both.
These liberal assertions are not true. Like the divinity of the god-kings, they are the fictions necessary to transform an unacceptable act of violence into a “legitimate” one. They allow an act of murder to be construed as a sacrifice for the highest goods that liberal societies purport to offer the atomized individual: freedom, power, money, safety, security, and all the other goods that bosses, boyfriends and state propagandists utilize to make sacrificing the order of love to the order of power worth it.
Abortion, then, has the immense capacity to “make liberalism true” because, to justify the act of abortion, it is necessary to think like a liberal. The governmental maintenance of abortion is simultaneously the maintenance of the habits and presuppositions of liberalism in the souls of the governed. It is a powerful technique, because conversion out of liberalism is always also a revelation of the true horror of abortion — of unmasked violence by the strong against the weak — which our post-Christian society is still too Christian to face. The personal and social shame that would follow upon seeing our abortion regime without a liberal lens is a gun in the back that keeps liberalism limping forward. Alongside the families of the ancient world, we must look at liberalism, our state, our market, and the goods they offer us, saying: “We killed our children for this.” Admitting that our liberal order is not worth it becomes a terrifying prospect. Through the threat of unimaginable shame, abortion ensures that we will find it repellent and impossible to imagine a social order in which violence is unnecessary, in which true peace begins with the family and emanates out to the highest institutions of society — in which we never had to kill anyone. This is why we traffic in abortion as a kind of tragic necessity; we kill children mercifully; offering them up in order to preserve liberal goods that a liberal God would have us preserve. God’s words to the Israelites, then, are damning for us. He is not simply offended by our acts — he is innocent of them, and does not recognize himself in our social order: “They have built altars for Baal in order to burn their children in the fire as sacrifices. I never commanded them to do this; it never even entered my mind” (Jeremiah 19:5).
This is, in part, why the pro-life movement has struggled: it often takes the arguments against abortion on liberal terms. This conservative movement pitted one right against another — the right of the mother to protect her (privately owned) body versus the right of the (unavailable) child to live its life. The former is more competitive, violent, and holistic in its individuality; it emboldened personal sovereignty more fully and thus fulfilled the liberal logic more soundly. And so the child loses.
No hope in the courts
The Supreme Court is a liberal institution. Structurally speaking, its “judgments” are not related to universal precepts of justice. Its judgments are limited to maintaining a positivist legal order, an order which has its source in State power, the sovereign. This is simply what it means to say things like, “the role of the Court is to interpret the Constitution” or to decide a question of justice on the basis of precedence — the Court interprets the application of human law that it is given. It does not judge whether those laws are just. Its task is to tweak and adjust this mechanism that it might more perfectly express the sovereign will within shifting historical circumstances.
Christians who decry the Supreme Court when it reaches this or that unjust decision are right to lament the lack of justice in their land, but they are wrong to imagine some kind of corruption within an otherwise good institution. The Supreme Court, by its own description, is entirely relative to the law that it receives from the sovereign will, expressed in the Constitution as interpreted by the elite. If the Constitution, as constructed by the political power most broadly understood, declared a right to slavery, the Supreme Court would maintain that practice until the sovereign power, understood here in a Schmittean sense, declared otherwise.
True judgment is the act of measuring the particular against the universal — the particular act of abortion against the universal precept of justice that murder is evil. To rule in this manner would not simply be an odd, out-of-character thing for the Supreme Court to do. It would be a suicidal thing to do, or, what is the same, it would mean the conversion of the Supreme Court from a proceduralist program for the emanation of the temporal sovereign will into a spiritual power which actually judges temporal power in reference to universal precepts of justice, which are contemplated in and through the Church. It would mean an actual independence of the judicial branch from the machinations of power for its own sake. It would mean the end of liberalism.
Instead, our judges have become the priests of our idolatrous temples, serving the gods of state and market. They do not judge on child-murder, they convey to the people the will of the gods with regards to child-sacrifice. When St. Paul advised that Christians do not take their conflicts to civil courts, he expressed it in this manner: “When one of you has a grievance against another does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?” (1 Corinthians 6:1) Even while the courts may be prudentially used, to have hope in a structurally unrighteous technique of political sovereignty is foolish.
Hope in Christ
In the order proposed by Christ, power is inverted. The weakest have a claim of justice on the strong. The good leader sacrifices himself for children, the elderly, and the sick. Strength, capacity, ability, and wealth are all orientated downwards, towards the weak, and distribution replaces accumulation. Such inverted power can only be the fruit of love. To say that the weak have a real claim upon the powerful is to say that the weak have strength, but this strength is predicated on the love of the powerful for the powerless. Power emerges from below only through the real love of the powerful from above.
The paradigm of such relations is the infant’s pitiful and hapless dependence on its mother, a dependence so complete that it cannot even ask for what it needs or offer gratitude in return. The good mother gives so completely that the child doesn’t even know how to distinguish between itself and her. This relationship reveals the logic of love at its most pure, but all relationships in the peace proposed by Christ take on this same fundamental form.
Any discussion of rights, of debts, of duties is incapable of describing such peace because love is not derived from or even related to these concepts but is rather categorically distinct, is rather a wholly other source of relation. Such love is prior to any regime of power and emerges not from sovereignty but from far below it, from within the smallest encounter of the most profoundly personal nature. A sovereign, if he is to be sovereign, must insist that the peace of love is just another version of the peace of domination that he offers. If he doesn’t do so, his power is revealed to be incomplete, provisional, imperfect, unessential; in other words, weak. Were this to happen, the absoluteness of the regime as a whole, involving everything from police action to property rights, would be undermined, because the peace of love doesn’t need any of those things. If love is really possible, then all of liberalism is brought into question.
Christian opposition to abortion is both a part and vanguard of the Church’s broader social mission, as made especially present in the vocation of the laity — to sanctify the social order by destroying all structures of sin that would divinize men over their neighbors, and to replace the peace of the nations with the peace of Christ, who gives us the grace to re-orientate all power towards the service of the weak, transforming a pagan world into a dynamic hierarchy of service. Within this vocation, it is clear that to be “pro-life” cannot be to advocate for a policy recommendation within liberalism. It is more, even, than a demand that justice be enacted by presidents, congresses and courts. It is an overturning of liberalism as such in and through a radical undermining of its violent, foundational premises. This means that the pro-life movement is not accidentally related to the Catholic Church, as if the pro-life movement is something that happens to attract more Catholics than others. It is the Catholic Church, reasserting her social teaching against the heresy of liberalism and the resurgent paganism that it invites. This should give us infinitely more hope and enthusiasm for the abolition of abortion in our land than the prospect of another round of conservative judges.