The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online Page B

Church gives to potential life. Humans, it says, blaspheme when they throw away a fetus, because they cannot assume the right to dispose of another’s life and they cannot presume to know the future. Children born with appalling deformities in sordid and overcrowded homes have been known time and again, after all, to defy all material odds and become exemplary, or merely human.
    But the nobility of this essential teaching is compromised by the fact that it depends on an unnecessary theological assumption about “ensoulment”—thepoint at which Thomas Aquinas maintained that a life became human and immortal. Two objections can be made here, the first being that human life can and should be respected whether or not it is constituted by a creator with an immortal soul; to make the one position dependent upon the other is to make the respect in some way contingent. Second, if a fertilized egg is fully human, then all terminations of pregnancy at any stage and for any reason are to be regarded as murder. This offends against the natural or instinctive feeling in favor of the pregnant woman and the occupant of her womb, because it blurs the distinction between an embryonic group of cells and a human with a central nervous system. The distinction between abortions in the first and third trimesters, a distinction which speaks both to our ability to avoid casuistry and to our inborn wish to have a say in our own fates, is therefore null and void in Catholic teaching. Some of the coarsening in arguments on the other side of the case—arguments which bluntly and unscientifically define the fetus as a mere appendix to the woman’s body—no doubt result from confrontation with this absolutist edict.
    Then there is the fact that Catholic prohibition on abortion comes indissolubly linked to a prohibition on birth control and contraception. Again, more is involved than the technical and dogmatic findingthat certain forms of contraception, such as some versions of the intrauterine device which expels fertilized ova, actually are abortifacient in the fundamentalist definition of the term: the ban extends to all means and methods of avoiding conception, and indeed to the very intention of doing so. It is as “natural” in humans to seek control over their biological fecundity as it is for them to wish to have children in the first place. The Roman Catholic Church stands alone in condemning the desire to remove oneself from the caprices of nature and evolution, and the Roman Catholic Church has great political power over millions of poor and fertile people.
    The Church’s teaching seems to deny any connection at all between the rapid exponential growth in human population and the spread and persistence of disease, famine, squalor, ignorance and environmental calamity. One need not be a follower of the grim Reverend Malthus to deduce that there is indeed such a connection and that, moreover, it works in the other direction as well. In every developing country that has been studied, a clear correlation can be found between the limitation of family size and the life chances of the family members. Where such measures cannot be freely taken, by means of education and example, they have been enforced in desperation by authoritarian regimes. We have beforeus the forbidding example of the People’s Republic of China, which limits families to one child apiece and is thus, in the name of Communism, preparing a future in which the words “brother” and “sister” will have no literal meaning. And we have the instance of Mother Teresa’s friend and admirer Indira Gandhi, who launched a demagogic and brutal attempt to bring about male sterilization by a combination of bullying and bribery. (Salman Rushdie’s short story “The Free Radio” in East, West brilliantly shows the pathos and emptiness of this effort.) Certainly these are not kind solutions, but they evidence the severity of a problem which the Church has chosen entirely to