Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade last June, significant state-level legal restrictions on abortion have been proposed, and some have been enacted. One prominent scholar recently proposed that this legal activity, while necessary, is insufficient for eliminating the evils of abortion.
Dr. Carl Trueman, Professor of Biblical & Religious Studies Grove City College delivered an April 13 lecture titled “The Weakest Argument Remains the Strongest: Why Abortion is Likely to Stay” at the college’s conference “Post-Roe America.” Trueman is an accomplished scholar and has published several books, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Trueman noted that “legal judgements are important” to the issue of abortion but argued that it is the result “of a much broader and deeper cultural malaise.” Trueman built on English ethicist Oliver O’Donovan’s observation that a philosophically weak argument – that unborn children are only a part of a woman’s body – proved to be much more societally powerful than he expected. O’Donovan’s proposed explanation for this, Trueman said, was that the argument “resonated with the deepest currents of how people imagine themselves to be.”
Trueman compared the issue to the cultural response to same-sex marriage, recalling his students asking in 2015 how they ought to argue against it.
“I can provide you with many good arguments against gay marriage,” Trueman told his students, “but none of them will have any effect.” The reasons for gay marriage’s support is not rational arguments, but because “imaginations have been shaped by the rhetoric and the cultural factors that are in play in the world around us.”
Key to this imagination is anthropology – what it means to be human. Trueman highlighted the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a partial cause of anthropology influencing popular opinion on marriage and abortion today. Trueman noted Rousseau’s emphasis on freedom and autonomy, and that our “relationships are therefore contractual and predicated on whether they enhance or detract from our freedom and happiness.”
Trueman suggested the valuation of freedom and happiness is also seen in the acceptance of no-fault divorce, which reveals “a sentimental shift that assumes a reconceptualization of marriage that prioritizes the psychological feeling of the people who are married over all else.” This is a “fundamental redefinition of what marriage is,” he said, and neglects the importance of children to marriage and family. This devaluation of children furthers the acceptability of abortion.
Trueman also attributed altered public opinion to the influence of technological development. He especially focused on how technology has changed how people interact with music, noting that music used to be primarily communal, and “reinforced the idea that human beings exist as human beings in community.”
Now, however, music is heavily individualized. It is primarily listened to alone, and it is listened to at the whim of the individual.
“You’re the consumer and you can choose what you listen to in what small units you choose to listen to it,” Trueman explained, furthering his overarching point about the increasing societal prevalence of individual autonomy and pleasure.
Similarly, Trueman suggested abortion and contraceptive technology has led to the prioritization of recreational sex over procreational sex. Now, he said, “sex [is] all about me rather than about a couple or about society and social implications.”
“Our world is one that teaches us that we’re sovereign and our desires are the most important things in the world,” Trueman summarized. Because of this, “the weakest argument – that the child is just a part of the woman’s body – has an innate appeal to it.” If a woman’s bodily autonomy and desires are hindered by a baby, why not eliminate what is allegedly but one part of the body?
Due to the power and influence of this narrative for humans who are “creatures of desire,” Trueman suggested that “arguments will continue to have their place, but they will only prove successful if we’re engaging at a deeper kind of level.”
Trueman’s proposed antidote? “We need to reshape the strategy based upon stories. Success stories: babies brought to term, babies conceived in tragic circumstances. Dealing with ideas in the abstract is never as powerful as being confronted with the face of the idea in reality. Only, I think, if we can start doing that kind of thing do we stand any chance of changing the culture in which the weakest argument proved to be the strongest.”
As Trueman noted, rational argument and subsequent legal action are vital in the battle against abortion. He is right, however, that reason and power alone will not turn the tide. Instead, we must regain a proper underlying understanding of the human person and be able to articulate that understanding through stories. While proponents of abortion rights emphasize emotion at the cost of reason, we must not emphasize reason at the cost of emotion. Stories can help us avoid that error.
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