Peter Risholm writes about abortion and the Christian view of humanity in Subject. You can also read the text here:
In his defense of expanded abortion rights, medical student Jonas W. Olsen does not explain how Christians view abortion. Let me elaborate, writes Peter Risholm.
Before Christmas, the government's abortion committee presented its recommendation for a new abortion law. In a debate post in Subjekt on January 15, Jonas Wøien Olsen supports the committee's proposal to expand the abortion limit, and points out that the idea of the fetus's right to life originates from traditional Christianity.
He writes that Christianity says that life begins at conception, and that Christian morality therefore says that the fetus has a right to protection. That new life begins at fertilization is probably widely agreed upon, and this is probably only part of the explanation for the Christian approach. The fetus's right to life is about what a human being is worth, and the idea that every human life has absolute value is of Christian origin.
As Christianity became more and more common in the Roman Empire, one could assume which families were Christian, and which were not, based on the gender composition of the children in the family.
In classical Roman families, boys were considered more valuable than girls, and newborn girls risked being left to die. Because Christianity says that all people are created in the image of God, Christian families did not abandon their female children. In Christian families, there was therefore an even distribution between boys and girls, while in non-Christian families there was a predominance of – or only – boys. In Norway, leaving children to die was prohibited when Olav the Saint introduced Christian law.
The Christian view of humanity thus says that all people are of equal value, and because this is absolute, it applies from the moment life begins until it ends. This is what gives the fetus the right to life. It is a human being with infinite value – only very early in its life cycle. The idea that all people are of equal value is taken for granted by many of us today, whether we are Christians or not, but this idea is completely unthinkable without its origins in Christianity.
There are many ways in which abortion is attempted to be legitimized. Some of these are expressed in Olsen's post, where pregnancy is presented as a (temporary) permission for the fetus to borrow the mother's body. However, the fetus cannot be held responsible for being where it is. Olsen also attempts to legitimize abortion based on different stages of fetal development. But this is also a difficult exercise because abortion is about ending a human life. Any limit on when this can be done would be artificial because development is a continuous process.
How an abortion is performed is a medical question, but whether it is morally right or not is not.
Because abortion is a question of value, the medical profession cannot answer whether abortion is right or wrong – it needs support from other disciplines. To ethically legitimize the removal of the fetus, the idea of what a human being is worth must therefore be based on something other than their value solely in light of being a human being.
The answer to this can be traced to the abortion committee's justification for access to abortion up to week 22. Today, it is the fetus's health condition that can provide access to abortion after week 12. The committee wants to change this. The woman's assessment of her own life situation should be decisive, not an assessment of the fetus' condition (as the law stands today).
The change was made because the committee wants to clarify that all people are equally welcome in our society regardless of diagnoses and characteristics. Unfortunately, this loses some of its credibility when we, in the same way as before, have time to detect fetal defects, as well as remove fetuses based on diagnoses – such as Down syndrome. However, in the recommendation, late-term abortion is justified by one's own life situation instead of the fetus's condition.
The new wording does not really change the fact that healthy fetuses and fetuses with diagnoses are not equally valuable. At the same time, we should of course be careful not to dismiss the fact that the life situation of the parents is unimportant. If you have a severely disabled child and are told that another one is on the way, it is obvious that this will have major consequences for the life situation of those who may then choose to keep the child.
But referring to the mother's or parents' life situation to legitimize abortion is not new. This has probably been the basis for many who have considered or had an abortion in the period before late-term abortions were relevant. Probably in a context that bears the hallmark of far less seriousness than the one above. Context is then given greater value than the fetus in all cases, and context is most often subjective.
A child that is aborted is probably considered less valuable than one that is kept. And when it is considered less valuable, feeling it is the expectations the child can possibly fulfill that are valued, not the child itself.
It is this subjective perception of value that legitimizes abortion, and the recommendation with its proposal to expand the boundaries is therefore a step away from the perception that the fetus has its own value.
Before Christianity, everyone agreed that not all people were worth the same; we agreed that free people were worth more than slaves, and that men were worth more than women. With the introduction of Christianity, everyone became worth the same in principle. Today, after Christianity, a person's worth is a subjective decision by whoever has the power to define it.
There should be no doubt about what happens when an abortion is performed: another human being's life is ended. Whether we believe this is okay or not is something we as a society can consider, but we should be aware that the committee's recommendation represents another step away from the idea that all people are of equal value.
Whether we like Christianity or not, we have lived for a very long time with the Christian view of humanity as our foundation. This has worked very well for the organization of our society and is probably perceived by many as something universal more than something Christian.
This story about what a person is worth is in all likelihood worth listening to – Christian or not.
