‘Pro-choicers’ have a ‘choice’ for you

Secular liberals are fond of exposing the hypocrisy of their conservative Christian opponents. It is often not difficult to do so. We are sinners and we sin. Proposing a standard of morality is one thing; living consistently by it is another entirely. Only by the grace of God can it be done.

Hypocrisy, though, is not the act of having a standard and then breaching it. Hypocrisy is having a standard, breaching it, and then refusing to admit that breach. Or worse still, having a standard, breaching it, refusing to admit it, but still expecting others to live by that same standard.

Because God’s standards are high, it is relatively easy for the liberal to bring in the charge of hypocrisy when a Christian is found to have acted in a way utterly inconsistent with his profession, even if the Christian is clearly repentant. One of the reasons they do this, I believe, is that it provides a shield for them, covering them from the notion that it is actually possible for a secular liberal to be a hypocrite as well.

In his hugely enlightening work Intellectuals, Paul Johnson states, “One of the most marked characteristics of the new secular intellectuals was the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny. … The verdicts pronounced on both churches and clergy were harsh. Now, after two centuries during which the influence of religion has continued to decline, and secular intellectuals have played an ever-growing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions, it is time to examine their record, both public and personal.”¹ In other words, is it possible that the same people who have been ever-willing to point the finger at Christians and bring in the charge of hypocrisy—is it possible that they themselves can fall short of their own standards?

The answer is, of course, that it is indeed possible, and, if we look in the right places, we shall find a number of examples. To name but two:

• Politicians preaching about the necessity of open and honest government, only to be found fiddling their expenses or taking bribes.
• Actors and actresses calling for the state to bring in gun laws, despite having made their names and fortunes playing in movies which glorify gun violence.

However, few issues expose secular hypocrisy quite like the abortion issue. What is the fundamental tenet of the misleadingly named pro-choice movement? It is, of course, that a woman has the absolute right to choose what she does with her body. And given the (false) assumption that the baby she is carrying is part of her body, it then follows that she can choose to do whatever she likes with it. (As an aside though, if millions of women around the world all started cutting off their limbs, it is unlikely that this would be greeted with wholehearted approval by the liberals. It is only because the “part of her body” that she mutilates when she has an abortion isn’t really her body at all that makes it OK for them.)

So if a secular liberal had to play fill in the blank with the following sentence, “It is the fundamental right of every woman to choose what she does with the baby inside her, except when ____________,” their response should, according to the fundamental tenet of the pro-choice lobby, be “except when nothing.”

Yet there are a few scenarios—some old and some new—which show that this is not the case. There is, of course, already an exemption from the doctrine based on what might be called the “squeamishness” factor. This is when the child inside the womb reaches such an age that even the most ardent pro-choicers begin to get a bit squeamish about destroying “it.” Do they believe that the baby ceases to be part of the mother’s body at that point? Well, the baby is still attached to the umbilical cord, still remains inside her, and still relies on her for sustenance. So nothing has changed there. But, of course, “it” now really looks like a baby so making the woman’s right an absolute at that point just becomes that much harder to do.

Yet there are now at least a couple of other exemptions from the absolute of the woman’s right to choose. These are both cases from the U.K., though I’m sure that the United States has probably either had these issues, or will have them in the very near future.

The first was the decision of an National Health Service trust to take an 18-week pregnant woman to court, seeking an order to force her to have an abortion against her consent. The woman in question had the rare blood disease, sickle cell anemia, which had caused her to have some strokes, and she was also said to have significant learning difficulties. The authorities argued in court that she shouldn’t be allowed to keep the baby because of the risks to her health (even though maternal mortality rates for SCA have dropped significantly over the past few decades), and that she wasn’t sufficiently able to make an informed choice. Thankfully, the judge in this case overruled them and allowed her to keep the baby.

What this shows, quite apart from the utter callousness of those in authority, is that the woman’s right to choose was and is a complete misnomer. I’m sorry to break the news to all those women out there who believe that they have this absolute right, but, no, you don’t, and you never did. All you ever had was permission from the state to destroy your baby and by corollary permission from the state to keep your baby. Under Godless secularism you have no absolute rights. All you have is a state-given right which can be revoked at any time if the state so chooses.

The other interesting issue was an outcry over gender selection for abortions among immigrant communities in the U.K. This is no news in countries like India and China, where it is commonplace, but in the West we like our abortions to be gender-neutral.

Listening to the howls of outrage over this practice is particularly bad for the digestion. A U.K. Department of Health spokesman described it as illegal and immoral, which, of course, it is, but remember that this comes from the same people who think that “normal” abortion is perfectly moral. So, in their estimation, abortion only moves into the category of immoral when modern society’s deadliest sin—sexism—is breached. Egalitarianism trumps everything.

The question that needs to be posed to those who howl in outrage at abortion by gender, but who in all other circumstances approve of it, is this: Are you upset that thousands of baby girls are being destroyed, or are you upset that thousands of baby boys survive?

Think about it. The decision to abort on the grounds of gender can be seen from two completely opposite standpoints. It can, of course, be a couple finding out that their baby is a girl and so deciding she should be aborted. Yet it can also be a couple finding out that their baby is a boy and deciding he should survive.

The secular liberals would like us to think that their problem is that the girls died. But they have no problem with baby girls dying. They approve of it under “normal” circumstances. Their real problem is that the boys survived. Had the boys as well as the girls died in equal numbers, they never would have mentioned it.

Where, we might ask, is the absolute commitment to the woman’s right to choose in all this? It is nowhere to be seen, that’s where. If a mother chooses to abort a baby on the grounds that she doesn’t want “it,” secular liberalism says this is her body, and therefore her right to decide what she does with it. Yet if she chooses to abort a baby on the grounds that she doesn’t want her because she is a girl, secular liberalism suddenly drops its fundamental commitment to her right to decide, and makes the decree that she should not be allowed to do this. But why? Isn’t it her body and her right?

With both examples, we can see that, when push comes to shove, the secular liberal position is this: “We believe that a woman has the right to choose, only up to that point where we say she doesn’t have the right.” If she is deemed unfit to make a choice, then the “choice” must be made for her. If her choice is deemed to be against the current egalitarian zeitgeist, then “choice” must be taken away from her.

All of which is to say that “choice” never has and never will reside with the woman in the secular state. Rather, choice is something the secular state grants to her, only inasmuch as it does not conflict with their grand agenda.

There is a word for this. It is hypocrisy.

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine, Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.