Why 'Personal Autonomy' Doesn't Move Anti-Abortion Crusaders
Religious and secular ideas of freedom don't align
Got an opinion about the control of abortion? If you're an American, you pretty much have to, since the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded a 50-year-old constitutional right. And whatever that opinion is, it will be a claim about what the government should not care about.
You might claim that society should not care about the circumstances or the wishes of a pregnant woman, because the unborn child must be protected. The counterclaim is that society should not care about the embryo, because the woman who carries it has a right to personal autonomy. (It would be more politic to write "care less about" here, but this is an all-or-nothing policy choice — the interests of one entity prevail completely over the interests of the other.)
I don't mean everybody-makes-a-good-point, both-sides-are-equally-valid. I do not believe that an embryo can or should be considered a person. So I believe there is no reason to make women of childbearing age less equal than other citizens.
I'm writing instead to point out something that may not be apparent to my fellow pro-choice people. You may think that it's effective — killer, even — to argue the value of personal autonomy, to say, as AOC says here, “your bodily autonomy belongs to you.”
After all, this is the USA, land of the free, where a sizable portion of the population thinks having to wear a surgical mask at Walmart is an outrageous constraint on its liberty. Surely all Americans want personal autonomy, right? Aren't we just arguing about how to interpret that shared value?
Reader, we are not. To many people opposed to all abortion, appeals to autonomy will fall on deaf ears. Those people partake of a counter-tradition that has no problem with limiting personal freedom in private life. In fact, it holds that personal freedom in one's intimate life has to be constrained by wise government. Yet they'll still sincerely pledge allegiance to liberty.
It's not hypocrisy. It's a different idea of freedom, which is equally — if not more — deeply rooted in the history of Europe and its colonies.
I learned this from J.B. Schneewind's 650-page The Invention of Autonomy, an exhaustive (and kind of exhausting) account of how the Enlightenment notion of autonomy evolved. (Schneewind wants to explain specifically how Immanuel Kant's ethics came to be. But his history includes so many political, legal and theological thinkers that it's an excellent anatomy of all the ideas that make up our modern notion of personal freedom.)
That modern idea, Schneewind explains, is rooted in a 17th century controversy over the relationship between God and ethical principles — like, (my example, not his), "don't commit murder."
Perhaps murder is wrong, therefore God says "thou shalt not kill" (he will always observe the universal law). But perhaps murder is wrong because God says "thou shalt not kill." That's a big difference. In this second case, God can change his mind. If he says tomorrow that murder is cool, then henceforth it is OK.
For centuries, Schneewind writes, most European thinkers were of this latter school — morality is what God says. The idea that morality might be changeless and universal law, binding even on God, arose only in the 1600s.
Without that fine distinction, there would be no modern notion of personal freedom. Here is why: If morality is whatever God says, it follows that experts on God will know best. You should obey them, and who cares what you want? However, if morality is a set of universal laws, then the peasant in his wheat field could perceive those laws as well as the theologian who has read the Bible in four languages.
Reducing Schneewind's magisterial history to these few sentences is like writing that War and Peace is about Russia, but I do think this is a reasonable tl;dr: Belief that morality is universal leads to the belief that each person can, on her own, perceive the Right. Morality then is no longer a matter of obeying religious authority. Instead, it became something each believer can work out on his own.
From that theological starting point, the Western world was now on its path to the idea that each of us should decide what to do with herself, without obligation to take others' orders. A democratic government, chosen by such free individuals, might decide, in a democratic way, to oblige citizens to pay taxes (or wear masks during an epidemic). But outside the public sphere, in matters of conscience, you were as capable as the Pope of figuring out what was right to believe and to do in your personal life. So we come to today’s belief, which I share, that no one has the right to override your decisions about your own body.
Yet the other side in this European theological debate did not disappear. On the contrary, it thrived for centuries. The freedom for which the Protestant Reformation fought, for example, wasn't for each human being to chart her own course. It was for each human being to discern what God wanted. Just because a believer wanted to ignore the Pope's answers did not mean there was no right answer.
On the contrary. John Milton, for example, wrote the first great defense of free speech in English. But his notion of freedom was being perfectly aligned with God's will — not ignoring it, or getting it wrong. If you freely chose the wrong path, your end wasn't supposed to be "we agree to disagree." It was a gallows or a roaring fire.
A Christian conception of freedom as alignment with God's will lives on today. When you talk about freedom as doing what you want, you will make no sense to a believer who thinks freedom is doing what God wants.
This is bracingly and beautifully put by David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions (a book all of us atheists should read, if only to see what we are missing — in every sense of the word):
To choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to use the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. We see and we act in one unified movement of our nature toward God or the Good, and as we progress we find that to turn away from that light is ever more manifestly a defect of the mind and will, and ever more difficult to do. Hence Augustine defined the highest state of human freedom not as “being able not to sin” (posse non peccare) but as “being unable to sin” (non posse peccare): a condition that reflects the infinite goodness of God, who, because nothing can hinder him in the perfect realization of his own nature, is “incapable” of evil and so is infinitely free.
So, my fellow pro-choicers, can we please stop expecting that talk of freedom and autonomy will persuade anyone on the other side of this fight? The two sides in this struggle exist in different irreconcilable moral universes.