I have been asked to say something on the overturn of Roe vs. Wade. The legal consequences and precedents of the decision will be tortuously drawn out. The hurrahing and booing of the movements will be sounded. The social ramifications—from illegal abortions to a likely civil war—will be pointed out by the grim necessities of social media, which assures that anything that can be said, will be said.
It is true that, as Mr. Domencic argues, the victory currently being celebrated by Catholics is an ambivalent one. It is an originalist victory, arguing from precedents without any affirmative defense of unborn children. It is a Faustian victory, retaining the very assumptions of a sexually unhinged modernity and upholding the rote commodification of children that turns the nonsense of abortion into common sense: the defense argues that the effectiveness of contraception makes abortion unnecessary for self-fulfillment within modern American life, saying, in effect, that our violent control over nature is so seamless we may as well not kill children to achieve it.
Still (as Mr. Domencic also argues) it is good. Still the heart rejoices. The death of Roe is the death of a tyrant, and as news chimes in of states thoroughly banning abortion—however symbolically—liberation has become the feeling of this contentious, blessed summer.
Reality is more important than legality; whatever liberal oddities undergird the overturn of Roe, we are not slaves to them. The Lord humbles himself to convert whatever wickedness we are entrapped in: as the Israelite people were the kind of people who could only receive an end to child-sacrifice in the form of a tyrannical law and its punishments, perhaps Americans are the kind of people who can only liberate the unborn if it turns out that their Constitution allows them to. God willing, we will learn to liberate them because they are lovely.
It is tempting to argue that the end of Roe only signifies the end of abortion. Practically, this is true: we may very well maintain the abortion rate, albeit through a new, omnipresent, abortion pill delivery system. But no Catholic, however cynical, can scoff at a signification of the end of abortion. How beautiful are the abolitionist hymns, even when they were only hymns. How beautiful, to only signify the liberation of the victims of child-sacrifice.
I don’t think liberals understand the totality of longing and desire that produces a pro-lifer. Our signs and slogans might create the impression that we “just like babies”— which we do, we really do. But when a Catholic longs for the end of abortion, he is not simply longing for children not to be murdered, as if a people could stop doing that and still plod about, unchanged in an unchanged world. The Catholic is longing for Jerusalem. He yearns for an end to the abomination of the nations, not simply for the end of the abomination, but for an end of the abominable nation—for the dissipating of the atmospheric feeling of death and for the destruction of the lived, felt, social structures that tend us to kill, kill, kill.
For there are societies in which children may be killed, and there are societies in which they may not be killed. To move from one to another is more than a humdrum policy shift; it is a change in the very feeling and fact of the society at large. To wake up in a society in which children cannot be killed is to wake up differently. Lest we forget the obvious: we are those children who can no longer be killed.
Roe vs. Wade was (!) a spiritual reality—as everyone aghast at its undoing understands. It was more akin to a magic spell than to a law. Americans of all persuasions make a god of their Constitution, and while stripping abortion from its battery of rights does, on one level, simply leave abortion up to the States, it also de-sacralizes the practice, removing it from the pantheon. No longer can we reverence the “right to privacy” alongside those hallowed rights to free speech, to bear arms, to practice religion, et al. No longer can we imagine abortion as being vaguely enshrined Up There and intended by the Founders. The killing will have be to done with no gods to gild it.
As a magic spell, Roe v. Wade transformed every American into a survivor of an eminently possible abortion. The spell is broken, reality reveals her patient face, and we are transformed into what we always were: creatures whose value proceeds from the mere fact of our existence and not the conformity of our existence to a human ideal. This is liberation.
The social order is in fact ordered—shaped and constructed by human law, and sometimes even by positive law. But no positive law, to my mind, has so fundamentally ordered the life of the nation as Roe v. Wade; no law has so tangibly made us a certain kind of people as the one that allowed us to be killed as the result of a prenatal test, of an economic decision. No law has so thoroughly de-radicalized the American people, saying that to be American is to be able to kill others for the sake of the maintenance of whatever goods our society currently offers: we can kill to go to college, kill to have sex, kill for our careers, kill to maintain our name, prestige, class. By killing we are irrevocably bound to worship and adore the things for which we have killed. We become bound by bloodguilt, forever forced to believe in the preeminent value of the goods America offers over and against the value of life itself. We killed to go to college—fine, then we must never, ever question the value of college. We killed for individual freedom—now we must either worship at its altar, or stand convicted as murderers. Roe vs. Wade tied us to our culture and sacralized our institutions by offering, as a mystical and original right, the ability to kill our children in order to have American life, and have it to the fullest.
An end to Roe vs. Wade is an end to a certain spiritual tyranny, one that will open up creative possibilities within human life. Without legal abortion, no institution is so sacred as to merit sacrifice. Even money—whether in the guise of career, success, or one’s future—does not justify a murder, and thus even money is subordinated, in theory, to human life. And where human life is unsubordinated to the goods of this world, there is a tangible increase in freedom, however slight. Corporations can ask a lot of us, but they can no longer ask us to appreciate them and their annual goals over and against the human child. But since, I repeat, we are the child that cannot be aborted, this change in the law matters to those working for corporations right now—corporations are forced to say (and one rather hopes they might say it willingly one day) that their goals and their aspirations for profit are not the end all be all; not the stuff human life is made of; not the thing to which we can sacrifice human life; implying that they are in the service of life rather than their current pose, in which human life is in the service of the corporation and its contribution to the GDP.
That Amazon will spend $4,000 on every employee to get an abortion, as abortion access shrinks, signifies their awareness of this coming spiritual shift—the panic of the priests as the temple is threatened. For as long as abortion is a possibility, Amazon is a possible deity, the proper object of human sacrifice—that humdrum act in which one evaluates the life within the womb against the ability to work and succeed for Amazon, and deems the latter a justification for killing the former, rather than the former a justification for killing the latter.
Let the priests panic. A new world can blossom if we water it. To “merely signify” the end of any regime of child sacrifice it to merely signify a life in which people are loved because they are good in themselves, and not because they successfully fit into the manufactured values of their society. It is to move from that horror in which our neighbors only survive because they are “wanted children” to that peace in which our neighbors are alive because they are the priceless gift of God.
Liberals bite their nails over the balkanization of American life; of the growing polarization of politics; of the fact that, with the death of Roe, the Midwest and the South will become so unlike the Northeast and the West as to become unrecognizable. But “polarization” is a scam: it’s only ever a fretting over the fact that Alabama is becoming more like Alabama, never that New York City has deepened in its New York City-ness. We are allowed to mourn our lost unity—so long as it is the unity that allowed one man to help his daughter kill her child, another man to reject it as murder, and both to remain friends. Those who complain that the Supreme Court has further “polarized” our nation are simply saying, in so many words, that they would prefer the murder of infants not to matter again. Those who, with serious faces, call for the healing of our Deeply Divided Country would not be assuaged by the most obvious solution to division: a unified, nationwide ban on abortion.
But for those who would like to wake up in a society which is not reduced to its “wanted” population by the government-sanctioned and eminently possible murder of its “unwanted” children—for us, balkanization is a blessing, and “polarization” an unnecessarily dirty word to describe a pure and obvious method of sanctifying the earth. The death of Roe vs. Wade liberates us to create societies of people not governed by the threat of death; whole states, even, whose children and adults are not wanted but loved; not chosen by man but created by God. And wherever this becomes the feeling of a neighborhood; wherever one is surrounded by a given people, and not a chosen people; wherever one’s own existence is culturally, legally, and politically loved as a surprise, rather than as a selection; here, we should expect new fruits of tolerance and peace. Indeed, what capacities for understanding and acceptance and patience should we not expect, if our very existence becomes a sign, not of being deemed acceptable, but of being loved beyond all human deeming?
Roe vs. Wade meant that, whatever one’s opinion on abortion, part of belonging to the overall American project was the ability to drop that opinion for the opposite one. Even Catholic opposition to abortion could be neutered within this frame: the Catholic is simply the one who “chooses life” where life remains an option and a possible object of choice, rather than a gift that transcends all choosing. Here, a mother makes the difficult choice of getting a fourth abortion; there, a mother accepts her fourth child as a difficult gift from God; both exercise their constitutionally enshrined right to privacy; both are united by their right to choose.
This means that even a Catholic existence in America is governed by the fear of violence; by the existential fact that one is alive precisely because one measured up to a human standard and so merited the withholding of a legally possible and culturally approved knife. Marvelous, that there are women who choose life by virtue of holding a quaint, private standard in which God gives them their children and abortion is murder. Marvelous—but the baby is still saved by the power of their private conviction which motivates the mother to withhold a genuinely obtained right to kill it. As far as the State is concerned, she may just as well have exercised her right to choose life out of her private conviction that the government needs more receptionists: you do you, baby. With Roe v. Wade gone, this illusory relativizing of the pro-life position is over. No longer will we “choose life” as an exercise of a more fundamental power over life and death assured to us by the State, and so always subordinated to its logic. We will not “choose” life at all, except in the sense of accepting people as gifts that exceed all silly attempts at control. The possibility of abortion will always remain, but precisely in the same way that the possibility of sin always remains—not as a theoretically accessible right, but as an evil. Within these polarized, balkanized, pro-life states, one may love people or commit a crime against man, God, and nature. This is not a neutral choice between options—this is the whole drama of human freedom. Let the pro-choice states imagine they have escaped it.
I used to wonder why it is so easy to sell out to the major structures of society, even when one is raised with apparently opposed convictions. But if all American life is allowed life; if all being-here is de facto the survival of a threat of capital punishment, to be administered if the child should not find itself individually wanted and accruing to his parent’s individual fulfilment—then it rather makes sense. Within an abortion regime, one’s very existence is evidence that one has been approved by another human being. Should it be any surprise that we seek approval with such a passion? We were not killed because we fit. Should it be any surprise that “not fitting” constitutes such a crisis?
Yes, abortion sanctifies our social institutions, but not merely for the mother who may kill her child in order to reap their benefits. The child is stripped of any irreducible value beyond all choosing, and is born—if he is born—unduly frightened by the world, which decided to let him live, and which may, after all, decide otherwise. Abortion inaugurates a lingering fear of death, and as a rule, people who fear death conform for the sake of security. Abortion is a sacrament of commitment to our existing society: it is a pill administered to stir in us a fear of ever changing it.
The Free States will feel different. It will take a while. The softening of their character will be slowed by the omnipresence of the global abortion regime, which makes a mockery of a pro-life polity by transporting its people to Slave States or shipping pills to their doors, maintaining the possibility of viewing life as an “option”—though no longer a sacred and constitutional one. But the Free States will eventually feel free. This will be a little alarming at first: the Free States will be structurally and socially open to genuine diversity and surprise, their citizens having been habituated, from birth, towards the gracious acceptance of difference and difficulty rather than the killing of it. What institutions they will build and enjoy will be unhampered by the fear of death, which renders all things anticipatable. The people of Free States will act and speak differently. They will be raised as gifts from God, raised to recognize in their neighbors a dignity and beauty concomitant with their very being; raised to equate human life with a givenness that renders it unkillable; raised as fearless children, all. It will be good, very good, to live in a Free State.