Shoud Osama Bin Laden's Mother Have Considered Abortion?

If logic is important to you, and you approve the killing of Osama bin Laden, I would expect you also to approve of abortion. It is simply a matter of consistency, holding to the principle that humans have the power and the right to decide who should live and who should die.

“What?” you immediately protest. “No fetus has ever killed thousands of people in terrorist acts. This is apples and oranges.”

“But,” I respond, “Bin Laden was once a fetus, destined to kill thousands. Would it not be better to have aborted him?

“Come on,“ you insist. “Arbitrarily choosing which fetuses to allow to live and which to eliminate is a crapshoot. What if Osama’s pregnant mother was carrying the future Mother Teresa? We pro-life advocates affirm that every baby is a creature of God, therefore it is not our place to abort. Rather, it is God’s will that we accept and work with whatever results from pregnancy. Osama Bin Laden is one of those results. Killing him is the sensible and just way to deal with the results, but not before he was born.”

“Why not?” one might teasingly suggest. “Abortion for mere convenience of the mother is a different question, but logic that allows killing a killer, provides an argument for abortion as a preemptive measure. Just move the time table up, and allow abortion as preemptive action when we recognize the strong probability of future heartbreak and misfortune that unwinds from the birth of an infant with marring birth defects, or birth into a pitiably dysfunctional environment, or imminent child abuse from a resentful or irresponsible mother. By categorically declining the abortion option, we become torturers, culpable participants in preventable scenes of personal suffering and social trauma ready to unfold. Killing before the fact to prevent certain expected tragedy, and killing after the fact, when tragedy has become history, is a mere matter of timing."

I am not drawn to the above argument, but it has logical consistency. If the premise is applied evenly to abortions and assassinations, the conclusion of each follows in like kind from the argument as thus set up; both abortions and assassinations are valid or invalid by the same reasoning. If I should decide that killing Osama bin Laden now is the proper way to handle the problem and bring justice, then I have good reason for the use of abortion as proactive justice, or abortion as early stage, preemptive euthanasia. This conclusion follows patently from the premise that we humans serve as God’s virtual magistrates for administering justice in this earthly domain. The problem with this chain of logic is that it is marinated in solipsistic self importance. Its merit depends on our presumptive claim that we humans have full and rightful authority to speak for God.

The first clue that we are not qualified to carry out this high level, supposed assignment is that, unlike God, we do not have prescient knowledge of a fetus’ future to make abortion judgments that would cohere with our capital judgments about villains bearing criminal records. Indeed, killing murderers in God’s name is not consistent with God’s own obvious hands off approach that allows fetuses like bin Laden to come to full term and enter the stage of human drama. A second clue is the logical inconsistency of pro-lifers killing murderers.

The best way to determine if we are mirroring God’s intentions in these matters is to look at the record. Granting that humans are God’s creatures, the daily commission of abuse and mayhem in every generation since Adam and Eve makes it clear that eugenics (a first cousin to abortion) is not God’s mode of propagation control. As for thieves and murderers, God provided refuge for Cain, and Jesus ushered the thief on the cross into heaven as a rebuff of Roman style executions. This looks to me as if God is consistent regarding the fate both of fetuses and criminals. When we take a stand on abortion and capital punishment that is gutted with logical incoherence, we should take notice. Is our God an inconsistent, illogical God? Is the God we are trying to image, a God who is both anti fetal-slaying, and at the same time pro assassination? If the answer is yes, how does such brutal irony escape our notice?

Personally, I feel killing Bin Laden was the right thing to do. But how then can I be pro-life about abortion? I can’t, logically. So I stand defenseless in the great abortion debate, along with all other pro-lifers who wanted the bearded terrorist killed. And any pro-choicers who favor execution of criminals are in an equally awkward position. If we embrace the irony and discard logic as not useful in this tortuous issue, we find ourselves making internationally important decisions in a cloud of moral and philosophical confusion.

I think the way out of the quandary is to make a distinction between morality and practicality--and not make morality serve our practical purposes. I agree that we had to “put Bin Laden away,” and I think the most practical way to do this was to kill him, but I see no moral justification for doing so. And I oppose abortion on a moral basis, but at the same time see no practical justification for wholesale pro-life decisions.

So while logic is of no help here, at least I admit it and do not self-righteously proclaim that my position in the debate is “God’s position.” I only take my stand on what I think is the best thing to do at a given moment, and give an understanding nod to those who disagree.

God has given us the freedom to stumble around in the trouble we cause for ourselves until we, someday, will arrive at a consensus to do everything God’s way from the start. This is what the future millennial reign of the returning Christ means. I expect we, the human race, will reach that millennial finish line, or should I say starting line. The descriptive expectation of the “return of Christ” is a metaphor for the moment when we reach that point of critical mass in the development of our understanding. That is why Christ has not returned yet--we are not ready. It does not look like we are making much progress, hence the seemingly irresistible urge to want Christ to return in a swooping, triumphal descending from the sky.

Last week-end’s capture and bloody death of a mass murderer in truth has had numerous historical precedents. The clue to my astonishing optimism is the evidence that this time, internationally, we consider the question of how to “handle” Osama bin Laden as worthy of debate. That is a pretty feeble sign of progress, but then, time is a relative matter.

To turn a phrase around: a thousand years is as a day. Humans had been around a long, long time before Jesus was born, yet he was quite an optimistic fellow. He was not characterized by numbing resignation.

Doug Good