To what extent is belief in the right to life of unborn children a religious belief? That, in essence, is the question posed by Laura Kennedy, a columnist with The Irish Times. Her own answer is, it’s very much a religious belief.
Kennedy wrote along these lines in The Irish Times a few months ago and repeated the same argument on Claire Byrne Live on RTE 1 on Monday night.
In her column in April, Kennedy recounted a conversation she had in a restaurant with a woman who is pro-life, or, if you prefer, anti-abortion.
She went through the woman’s objections to abortion one by one, for example, that the vast majority of children who are diagnosed before birth to have Down Syndrome are aborted. She did this in order to find out if the woman would still object to abortion even if those consequences did not exist. And of course she would still object. Why? Because the woman believes that life begins at conception.
This was Kennedy’s ‘gotcha’ moment. She wrote: “Belief in this statement is the real reason Eileen is ‘pro-life’. It’s intrinsically tied up in Christian theology and, in this country, Catholicism.”
In fairness, Kennedy allows that you can believe this without being religious. Nonetheless, she insists that the idea that life begins at conception “originates in and is inextricable from religious ideology.”
Why is Kennedy making this argument? Is it to somehow de-legitimate the pro-life case on the grounds that religiously-based argumentation is somehow less ‘rational’ than other forms of argumentation and therefore less admissible in public debate? That certainly seems to be so.
But even if we allow that the pro-life case is ultimately religious, why is this less rational, simply by virtue of being religious than say, philosophical arguments?
Those who are pro-choice place huge value on personal autonomy. Why do they do this? Why should we respect a woman’s wish to have her unborn baby aborted? Killing is a very drastic action. They must come up with a justification for this.
This reason cannot be scientifically grounded. It is simply a value judgement. Is it rationally superior, simply on the fact of it, to the value judgement that all human life, from conception to natural death, is inviolable?
You can’t bring the argument to an end simply by saying one argument is ‘religious’, and the other is not. You must make your case for why one value judgement is rationally superior to its rival.
This is what the debate about the right to life versus the right to choose comes down to everytime. Trying to short-circuit the debate by labelling one argument ‘religious’ is not to have an argument at all, and therefore does not properly respect reason.
