Like many of you, I grew up heavily involved in the Pro Life movement. While I never attended the March for Life, I did go to many pro-life camps and events throughout junior high and high school. These events came off as tone-deaf to me at the time because I was homeschooled, awkward, and fat, and hence the possibility of my impregnating anyone at any point seemed slim; surely, I was not the one that needed these talks or these reasons. I repeatedly heard the same arguments: heartbeat at six weeks, life begins at conception, etc. As time went on I became weary of the arguments and considered myself “out” of the movement once I entered college. I thought abortion was wrong, to be sure, but I had decided it was the kind of “wrong” that could only be understood through the faith, since it seemed arbitrary to determine the destruction of something so far below what we consider to be human, even if it is “alive”—which asserting that “life begins at conception” does not prove, just asserts—and hence faith-based. Much of my time in graduate school has been spent trying to sort out the connection between arbitrariness and faith. I have yet to come to a definitive answer, but that there is some need for arbitration seems clear: if to believe in Christ is a choice, there is some arbitrariness to the choice prior to having made the choice which evaporates, in some sense, once the choice is made. Once the affirmer has affirmed or the denier has denied in some final sense—which affirmers will assert is not possible until our final judgement—the other option appears as illusory and unreasonable. Retaining an understanding of the choice as choice is hence difficult if one has in fact chosen, and all manner of confusion follows for those that think they can prove or disprove Christ when the question of His reality is begged no matter which choice one makes. To clear this question up, one would have to develop a clear understanding of the relationship of faith and reason which accounts for the way reason itself appears to change for the subject after this choice is made, and such a study, as far as I know, has not been attempted. Regardless, the arbitrariness of the Catholic Pro Life movement’s apologetics made me shrink from the social issue on the grounds that it could only succeed insofar as non-believers chose to believe its base premises, and if that was the goal one might as well try to convert them to the faith entirely. Given how secular the 2010’s already were, I considered that a fool’s errand on any institutional level. Hence I allowed my zeal for moral truths to cool into detached disapproval of the general culture which I thought generally unassailable.

            Given the title of this article, one can guess that becoming a father changed this attitude. The difficulty I have is that it did not so much change any of the opinions I related above but simply revealed a new facet of the issue from which I was previously excluded. This surprises no one, I am sure.

            When we discuss or argue about abortion, the culture loves to focus the issue on the autonomy of the mother. Since our culture values autonomy above all else—something which MacIntyre and many others have argued against and illuminated quite well—it argues that because autonomy is the highest good, we ought to preserve it at all costs. Having a child limits autonomy, hence abortion should be allowed so that one is in fact acting autonomously—one has a choice—when one does or does not have children. Abortion and autonomy are thus a package deal, on this view. The most visceral change in my approach to the subject comes from the realization that autonomy so conceived is a lie: pro-abortion advocates are only interested in the autonomy of the mother, not the father.

When the father fathers, he is not allowed to act autonomously about remaining a father. The choice is the woman’s, not the man’s. Clearly, I do not hold with autonomy-centric worldview, but the flat contradiction inherent in the argument galls me so deeply now because I fly into a rage at the thought that my children could have been taken from me—indeed, not just my children but my understanding and love of my children that can only be seen from within fatherhood—without my real understanding or even autonomous “consent.” There is no way to understand and value autonomy if it is predicated on a lack of understanding, much less if it really only means autonomy for a few over and against the many, in this case the few pregnant mothers against the autonomy of men in general.

Moreover, no matter which side of the political isle you find yourself, there are economic reasons for avoiding fatherhood: if you are a liberal, you consent to abortions because it allows you to pursue the goods you already enjoy without any change, while conservatives avoid it based on ever-shifting goalposts regarding how “secure”—i.e. how wealthy, how successfully self-interested—one ought to be before accepting such a responsibility. If we were honest with ourselves, we would understand that liberal license and conservative greed are both compatible with abortion insofar as they each value individual goals over anything that might break the individualist frame. Children have an incredible ability to re-frame every aspect of one’s life such that the image of “the individual” begins to dissipate under the necessities of relation: “Graham” ceases to be so much a unit stumbling between jobs, hobbies, and bills and becomes “Fiona’s father.” That relation and its manifolds could never have been communicated before fatherhood in any language, let alone the language of autonomy. Can someone really be called “autonomous” if one does not know the nature of his choices? For my part, I did not know my son or daughter before they were born and hence had no basis, no right, to decide their fate. Now that I know them, I cannot imagine the opposite choice. Hence, from this side of the choice, the position of autonomy appears not only as self-contradictory—for only potential mothers are allowed to choose parenthood—but completely fictive: one can only imagine children as consumers are blocks to one’s own wants, in our cultural frame, prior to having them.

            Hence what I believe becomes apparent from my reflections here is how opposed to revelation our culture is when it comes to marriage, sex, and children. What is to be avoided is the revelatory nature of those three things if we are to attain autonomy in the sense I expressed above: marriage, sex, and children must be just what they appear to be from the outside. Whatever is revealed within the choice to marry, make love, and have children must be idiosyncratic at best or illusory at worst, for if it were of such a kind as to be only capable of being understood from inside, then the choice to remain outside would be invalidated. In a way, this returns to my observations regarding the reality of Christ: in affirming or denying Him, we are let in to the perspective on the world which only allows for affirmation or denial. He who denies Christ looks back in the world he inhabited before the denial and sees in it only that which led to the denial; he who affirms Christ looks back and sees in it that which prefigures Christ. In the same way, he who chooses to deny fatherhood by aborting his child—which, to one within fatherhood, appears as only a cessation of fatherhood—must affirm the world prior to that choice as one which affirms his choice—static, perpetual, and predictable—while he who embraces his child affirms the world prior to that child as prefiguring the revelation of both himself as father as his child as his. To affirm abortion, one must deny validity to or reduce to idiosyncrasy the view of fatherhood from within. The culture of death hence opposes revelation insofar as fatherhood reveals a man to himself.