One can desire a child—but never this child.
A child is out there, running around, at the breast of your friend, on the knee of your sister, and you can want it in roughly the same way you want a garage or a pet iguana. This child is a secret, a surprise, and it comes with a strange law: you can never want it directly, only indirectly and vaguely, in the manner in which a man wants an adventure or the ending of the world.
A child is a wish, a dream construed out of what resources reason provides. This child jumps out at us like a deer onto the highway. The little girl with her doll and the new husband envisioning his “first” both imagine what it would be like to have a child, and then desire or disdain what fruit imagination coughs up. Their reasons for so wanting or so disdaining may be noble, may be base, but they are always their reasons.
The arrival of this child destroys what was merely imagined. The first tender moments after the birth bear witness to this, characterized as they are by wonder: “I can’t believe he is here.” “I can’t believe he is ours.” Incredible, that what we anticipate for nine months seems incredible when it arrives. Absurd, that we are surprised by what we knew was coming. But were some wit to scoff, “What do you mean you can’t believe she’s here? What is surer, except that day follows night, than that birth follows pregnancy?”—we would call him witless, because he takes as his topic a child, a thing which has so little to do with this child as to seem like a dream: “I knew I would have a baby, but never in a million years could I have imagined it would be you.”
The fulfillment of the desire to have a child creates the very desire that it fulfills. The desire is fulfilled only insofar as it is killed, wrenched away from “a child” to shine upon this child, here, in a conversion which we could never effect on our own, since it could be caused only by the child himself.
This is why there is a certain infertility in arguing with the willfully infertile. They may, after all, be quite correct: they may not want a child. The problem is not that they have deficient imaginations; that they have not yet warmed up to what delights toddlers offer; that they have failed to consider the tax benefits. In short, the problem is not that they should want a child and don’t, but that they believe, or feign to believe, that “a child” is the object in question. They are asking whether they want something they know; in fact, they don’t know her (if she is a her) at all. They are measuring their rooms to decide whether to accept or reject a reality which cannot be measured, for the small but significant reason of not existing yet. They say “I don’t want a child,” and imagine themselves rebellious. But the mother of eight agrees with them: “I have ceased wanting a child, for all I ever receive is this child, and that child, and that other one over there, sharpening a stick into a spear.”
The intentionally childless are not dumb—they are cowardly. For it is not prudence or human figuring that eagerly anticipates a child—it is courage. Pregnancy does not simply await a gift—it also bears an apocalypse. That the child arrives in blood and screams is proper to the event. The woman dies, literalizing in her flesh what is true for both parents: that their desires will die and be reborn in relation to a newly revealed other—in relation to this child, whom they could never have expected.
The whisper after birth is, “Who could have thought?” Fitting, because the “who” that thought of “the child” is gone, dead, buried; the woman dead, made mother; the man slain, made father; the child disintegrated, and replaced with this child, screaming in the light. By prudence we choose what is good for us—and well we should. But by courage we bear those destructions which change the very nature of “what is good for us.” Prudence picks through the wasteland that courage suffers to find new gleanings, for the arrival of someone new means that “what is good” for us is not what it was; we are forever changed by the relation.
Abortion is cowardly—not because it is unwilling to suffer, but because it is unwilling to die. It murders so as not to be murdered. The pro-life movement scoffs at the violent rhetoric whereby the child is conceived of as an unnatural invader of the womb, and they are right to do so, but they do so from the vantage point of anthropology that is not universally held; a vantage point won, with great effort, by the Church. If the person flourishes by being brave, then the child is a “natural” inhabitant of the womb. If it is proper to the human animal to die and rise again, then pregnancy is without violence. If surprise, adventure, and the reckless risk of an unanticipatable Other belongs to humanity like a heart belongs in its rib-cage—then, and only then, can we shake our heads at those who would deny the fittingness of the infant to its womb.
But where cowardice is taken as human nature, where the self-interested individual is taken as the fundamental unit of society, then the new child is a violence, contra natura. Where the purpose of life is not to die for something but to persist in being just what I am, then the pro-choice rhetoric is right, and the fetus is an occupying force. Where prudence is merely the selection of apparent goods without the courage necessary to suffer the loss of those goods and the birth of new ones—babies are killers.
In truth, being pro-life only makes sense to those who are pro-death; openness to life without openness to death is usually revealed, within about three years, to be nothing more than the self-satisfied, bourgeois reproduction of one to two children, resented in secret.
Abortion makes “every child a wanted child.” That is to say, in an abortion regime, every child that survives abortion can take for granted that their existence did not strain against the individual desires of their parents and of the adult population at large—at least not so much as to merit a genuinely possible and legal execution. “Every child” within an abortion regime is, de facto, an unthreatening child; a future deemed acceptable and so chosen: “And do I want this child? Yes, yes, I do.” And this decision can never be made on the basis of this child—who remains unmet, unknown, wrapped up—but only on the basis of a child, a concept derived without courage; without birth. Abortion is a ritual cowardice that gives birth to a society of cowards.
But where every child is a wanted child, every pregnancy is transformed into a wanted pregnancy. To oppose abortion, one avoids speaking about “pregnancies” and their termination, speaking instead about children and their death sentences, but there is a truth to the first way of phrasing things: the human person is first given as an effect on another prior to being revealed as a reality in himself. This is proper. Again, the woman lives in her flesh what everyone must live in the spirit—a violent transformation in relation to a new creation, one that we do not make ourselves. The mother literally becomes fit for the child; her body literally desires new goods and suffers the loss of old ones, even to the point of banal changes in her taste, her choice of food. The body is the teacher of the soul, and unless the woman’s neighbors take the lesson of her swelling, her discomfort, her sudden gasp at a kick from within, they will remain cowardly, unfit for the reception of a new human life except as the fulfillment of some ill-construed and general expectation.
Abortion renders every pregnancy a wanted pregnancy, in theory and in fact, for where the child is positively chosen in opposition to the equally possible choice of abortion, the pregnancy is reconstrued as an unfortunate means to a desired end. The meaning of a pregnant woman is no longer apocalypse, adventure, death and resurrection—only one more way of gratifying an individual desire. Investors suffer to get their desired profit, shoppers suffer to get their desired iPads, bodybuilders suffer to get their desired muscles, and women suffer to get their desired child. It might seem puzzling that most abortion regimes are basically pro-natalist, matching the murder of some children with tax breaks to encourage the production of others, but this is the destiny of any social order that would kill its children and yet persist in being—the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Still, the pregnancy “supported” by abortion regimes has been changed; the body does not signify the surprising child and the courageous mother, but the desired commodity and its necessary packaging.
I have noticed that pregnancy means something different when it is suffered by a poor woman as opposed to a wealthy one. Consult your own experience—not the brave and tragic pregnancies of a Dickens or Hugo novel, but the actual American Pregnancy, the Wal-Mart pregnancy, the food-stamp pregnancy, the welfare mom. No beauty here, no powerful woman living her best life—just mild disgust and a worry that “this one is in over her head.” Pregnant bellies are beautiful when they are posed and well moisturized; excessive and indulgent when they are falling out of a sequined tank-top. Is this just the usual problem of privilege, that the wealthy and the beautiful can afford the maternity dresses that lend the sense of serenity and mystery to the swollen glands, the aching joints? Does money mystify a basically harsh reality, allowing those who have it to soothe the violence of pregnancy into a natural experience, so that it is all home-births and self-realization for the rich, hospitals and strongly suggested sterilizations for the poor?
Undoubtedly, but there is something more going on here. Eugenics is not a possibility of an abortion regime that may or may not be actualized—an optional eugenicist icing on an indifferent infanticidal cake. Rather, an abortion regime is a eugenics regime by default, and for the reasons above—every child is a wanted child, every birth is a wanted birth, a birth deemed good, a eu-genesis. Notions of heredity are secondary—the primary eugenic impulse is a direct effect of the social possibility of abortion, which makes every child, in a totalizing way, the extension of the visible mother, the outcome of her choice—her desired commodity. We do not see surprise and courage dancing in the body of the woman—we see a self-interested choice, a thing deemed fitting and proper to the ideas, plans, and desires of a grown-up, who can choose only on the basis of herself, her own conception of “a child.”
This, more than any boring notion of genes, makes the child appear as a mere repetition of its parents—that it was chosen by its parents. This, more than any theory of traits, makes the child appear as just more of the mother—that the mother could have killed it if it seemed to strain, in the slightest, against who she conceives herself to be—against any of those goods that already make up her life. Human beings do not reproduce themselves, but submit to the divine creation of a new person out of what flesh they have to offer. But human beings within abortion regimes certainly appear to reproduce themselves as the other animals do, for the child is a choice, and a rational choice can only be made on the basis of what resources one already has; a practical decision to let a child live can be made only on the basis of those values that the mother and father already perceive. To commit an act of non-abortion is to say that the child has been sufficiently deemed as fitting for me, and if a stupid, greedy, person decides to let her child live, we are inclined to believe that the child has been deemed perfectly fitting within her world of stupidity and greed. Eugenics pretends to be a science, but it only ever gives a materialist gloss to that fundamental denial of the Christian doctrine that every child is a creation of God, pandering to our legal enforcement of a world in which it appears that every child is the creation of man, who must kill, kill, and kill in order to maintain such an illusion.
The trouble with making every child a wanted child is that it can only mean that every child is a child wanted by an adult—and adults are, to date, hateful, mean, ignorant, vain, petty, foul, smelly, greedy, lustful, vicious, and worse than all these, often poor. The unequal distribution of pro-natalism within abortion regimes is a consequence of all this. Wealthy women have beautiful pregnancies and poor women have ugly ones because we perceive each as having more of the same; more of themselves—hermetically sealed, by the possibility of abortion, from the newness, the surprise of this child. Tubal ligations for the poor, doulas for the rich; sneers for the pregnant body using food stamps, adulation and anticipation for the celebrity body—the only one that can have more than about three children without being disgusting. Planned Parenthoods next to the projects, midwife centers near the suburbs; suspicion over the black belly, praise for the white belly—unless the former is famous, and so long as the latter is middle-class and not from Appalachia. The pregnant body has become a package wrapping a known and desired commodity, rather the bearer of an unanticipatable surprise. Eugenics has not gone anywhere—it was always just abortion, playing out its abominable logic into the entirety of society.
This is the difficulty with convincing the pro-abortion mind that the fetus is not “just a clump of cells,” virtually identical with the body of the mother, and therefore given over to her sovereign violence. Arguments that point to the life, potential, independence, and genetic uniqueness of that same clump of cells are quite correct, but they do not address the symbolic identity of the child with its mother that is invented by the very possibility of abortion itself.