A good friend of mine has been in a committed gay relationship for almost 16 years. I called to catch up a while back and he told me he and his partner were trying to adopt. My reaction was ?Why?? We got together a few days later, and I kept pushing the issue. Why would you want to go through the heartache and frustration of parenting at this stage of your life? It made no sense to me. I pushed a little too hard, and got a good amount of push-back. And rightly so. This was a serious and important decision they had made and my negativity was unfair and insensitive.
Part of my hostility to the idea was based on my ambivalence about being a parent myself. There is an existential quality to parent-child relationships. Something besides your genetics gets passed along to your children?a good chunk of your identity is necessarily sacrificed for the cause. From an evolutionary standpoint, you could say once you?ve successfully reproduced, you?re kind of an extra in the drama of life. Of course human children take a hell of a long time to grow up, so it stretches the whole process out interminably.
The existential phenomenon of connection with a child is utterly profound. Once that connection has occurred, it is not easily?relinquished. Over time and separation, it weakens, I?m sure. But it never goes away completely.
I don?t think about abortion very much. I have never had occasion to participate in a decision so difficult, and not being a woman, would have only a peripheral part in it. When my first child was conceived, we certainly didn?t consider aborting it. (I say ?it? because that?s what ?it? was for the first 18 weeks??it? is now a beautiful 14 year old girl). I was over thirty, and optimistic about the future. ?I didn?t suffer much anxiety about the prospect of being a parent at that point. After a difficult pregnancy, and a premature birth, the doctors informed us that it was unlikely we would have any more children. No worries. One was enough. Eight years later, a surprise pregnancy. The timing was bad, and I admit I was relieved a bit when that pregnancy ended in miscarriage. But surprise again; just three months after that, we discovered my wife was pregnant again. Another difficult pregnancy, under terrible family conditions. (I was away from home for business much of the first five months of the pregnancy). But, luckily, the baby was born healthy, if six weeks premature.
Despite whatever philosophical doubts I may have about the abstract question of existence vs. non-existence, the connection and affection I have for my two daughters is unaffected. It is possible to reflect on these matters and still be completely engaged with, and devoted to, the objects of our reflection.
As to the question of abortion, I have no interest in the rhetorical vomit that has been spewed on this subject over the past forty years. I have been on both sides of the issue. During my evangelical days, I gradually came to accept the hard line view that life must begin at conception and therefore any intentional destruction after that must, by definition, be a type of murder. Long after my faith had been abandoned, that view lingered. But my opinions have changed, once again, gradually over the past few years.
I?m sympathetic, on an emotional level, with the anti-natalist point of view. But I don?t think it stands up to ethical scrutiny. If life has any intrinsic value at all, and if it is something more than the sum of suffering and pleasure, then the anti-natalist position cannot be right. Suffering being subjective, only the individual can determine if his or her life was worthwhile when it is about to end. That there is a potential for suffering when each child is brought into the world can only trump the value of life if life has no intrinsic value to begin with.
But acknowledging that life has some intrinsic value doesn?t mean it is the ultimate value. Imagine that an evil sadist held a number of women captive. The sadist gets his kicks torturing small children, so he impregnates the women, forces them to bring their babies to full term, then ?fattens them up? so he can torture them in horrible ways. Is there a scenario more evil than this? But if the intrinsic value of life is always greater value than the expected quality of life, then it would still be morally wrong to abort those little unborn children. That?s obviously absurd. So there are at least some situations where the quality of life must be taken into consideration.
The state has the potential to be the evil sadist. Who is in the best position to weigh these factors and determine if the quality of life value outweighs life?s intrinsic value? Only the mother. It?s imperfect, and unfortunately human beings tend to make decisions based on selfish motives, so most mothers will make that decision in a cloud of imperfect reasoning and emotional baggage. But the alternative is much more horrific. A total ban on abortion, which is the desired goal of one half of our political duopoly puts the state in the position of potential evil sadist.
The recent hullabaloo about forcible and legitimate rape is of interest only to the extent that it exposes the philosophical?inconsistencies?in this debate. If the intrinsic value of life is paramount, then the idea that the origin of conception is relevant is an inconsistency. All life should be preserved, no matter the cost or quality, under all circumstances. And I know that that is precisely the view held by the vocal opposition to abortion.
My friend may still adopt. Whatever child the state grants him permission to care for, that child will be among the most unwanted in society. The child will have been a foster child shunted around from home to home. He or she will probably be school age already, and is more likely to be a minority from an impoverished family. That there are more of these children than there are loving families to care for them must be factored into the equation. But then, as St. Paul said:
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,??Why did you make me like this??Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience?the objects of his wrath?prepared for destruction?
There you have it. Some life is made only for destruction, so that God?s glory might be more fully revealed. And if the suffering of children adds to glory of God, then it has to be good.
Source: http://abonilox.net/2012/08/23/forcible-legitimate-life/
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