Printer-friendly versionThis is a critique of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan William's, anti-abortion views.   The Pro-Life Argument of Rowan
Williams by Victor Lee Austin             One keeps
being surprised by our new archbishop of Canterbury. He has been arrested as a
protester at an American military base in England, even as he was about to
assume Oxford’s prestigious Lady Margaret chair of divinity. One might call him
a conservative theologian, if by conservative one meant someone “who did not
think it the business of theology to make Christian faith less offensive to
modern man, but rather to expand modern man’s imagination to the dimensions of
trinitarian faith.” Yet his way of thinking theologically hardly rivets his
mind to the past. Oliver O’Donovan describes Williams as an “orthodox liberal,”
who starts in the subjective realm of the human spirit but has an eye fixed on
the truths of Christian doctrine. He is a pastor, a father, a scholar of
rarefied distinction, and a man who says his prayers.           And he is,
one keeps discovering, a person whose conceptual world is quite fairly
described as pro-life. I am told that at the recently-concluded Trinity
Institute, Archbishop Williams put it forth unequivocally, that on the abortion
question he holds anti-abortion views.           In his
first Christmas message from Canterbury, the archbishop chose to shape his remarks
around a Christmas carol. He focused on its second stanza: “For in this Rose
contained was Heaven and earth in little space.” We have here marvelously
evocative words, with which the archbishop imaginatively plays. What makes us,
he asks, “too massive and clumsy to go into the ‘little space’ where we meet
God in Jesus Christ”? Yet along the way, without making a point of it, just
assuming, just simply assuming the truth of the pro-life understanding of human
being, we find the archbishop uttering these amazing words:           “And here,
in the “little space” of Mary’s body, divine fullness is alive.  . . .           “Only when
we are very quiet can we hear. Only when we stand still can we give him room.
Faced with the fullness of God in the embryo, the baby, the tired wanderer in
Galilee, the body on the cross, we have to look at ourselves hard, and ask what
it is that makes us too massive and clumsy to go into the “little space” where
we meet God in Jesus Christ.”           Every one
of us—sinners all—will feel the challenge of these words. But it is not
arrogant to note that they bear a particular challenge to people who are
accepting of abortion. There is a spiritual danger in denying the humanity of
the human embryo. If the embryo is not permitted her place in the story of a
human person, we miss an important part of the story, and we fail to perceive
the infinite humility of Jesus, “a God”—in Williams’s closing words—“whose
fullness dwells in that space we are not small and simple enough to enter.”             “Childhood
and Choice” is the extended essay in which Rowan Williams makes his
anti-abortion argument. I propose to examine this essay carefully. For while it
is undeniable that Williams opposes abortion, his way of reaching that
conclusion takes us through a theologically-informed critique of culture. And
Williams’s cultural critique is likely to bring unease to supporters and
opponents of abortion alike. Which is another way of saying, he is likely to
show us our complicity with social sin and thus lead us toward repentance.           Published
as the first chapter of Lost Icons:
Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, “Childhood and Choice” has three main
parts. The opening is an inquiry into the difference between being a child and
being an adult, and our culture’s efforts to erase the difference. This leads
to an examination of the child as a consumer. A consumer culture is of course a
culture of choice. The third section probes the complexities of choice in two
public policy arenas: education and abortion.           What is
clear from this outline is that the archbishop does not tackle abortion as an
isolated issue, but locates it within a wider understanding of broad cultural
problems.   Childhood, Play,
& Adult Responsibility           When we
think of childhood we think of play. We do so, perhaps, as people who benefit
from living in cultures which are rich or secure enough to make play an
important element of childhood. Williams recognizes the cultural-conditioning
of our concepts. Yet, we could say, if a culture was such as to forbid play to
its children, it would be a culture which forbade children from being children:
rather, perhaps, they would have to be small productive adults. In our
culture—as we will see—although child labor is outlawed, children nonetheless
are made to be small consuming adults, a fate just as damaging to childhood.           To play, as
Williams teaches us, is to try out a reality without having to be committed to
it. Thus to enter the world of play is to enter a world whose security is
guaranteed by the adult world outside it. A necessary condition for a child
being able to enter the world of play is the certainty that she doesn’t have to
stay there. She can play at whatever—and when the time is done, leave the
play-world and not be trapped in her imaginings. None of this requires that the
play of children be innocent; it may, in fact, seem dangerous to adults. Yet
Williams reminds us that the play-world is essentially “irresponsible”: that
is, the child is not responsible. That’s what it means to play, to try out a
reality without being committed to it.           Language is
learned through play. Identity is discovered and molded through play, where one
can find what it means to be X or to do Y, and what it doesn’t mean. Without
access to play, the process of identity-discovery is thwarted. Which is to say,
children need play in order to become adults. And they need the security of the
distinction between the adult world and the play-world in order to be able to
play.           From which
Williams draws the point: “The responsibility of the adult in all this is
crucial.” He mentions “the wave of nausea” that sweeps over us when we learn of
children who have committed murder. “There is a peculiar horror and pathos in
children not—as we say—allowed to be
children.” And then he asks, Who is the “we” in that sentence? What might our
culpability be in not allowing children to be children? Do we “live in an
environment in which the definition of the child as a choosing and consuming
subject undermines the whole enterprise of nurture”?   The Child As
Consumer           It is clear
that we do in fact live in an environment where children are consuming subjects
whose economic choices are increasingly manipulated. The archbishop’s argument
proceeds now along two complementary paths. First, he makes the point that
economic choices always entail the limitation of options as capital is
committed to a particular risk for the sake of profit or gratification. Adults
know that we can’t make an economic choice without, as Williams says,
“commitment and risk.” But consumerism is the employment of rhetoric so as to
“soften” our appreciation of that reality. “All advertising tends to treat its
public as children—tends, that is, to suggest that decisions can be made
without cost or risk.” And while adults understand (or are supposed to understand)
how advertizing works, the child doesn’t. “He or she becomes an economic
subject without the opportunity to recognise those painfully-learned truths
about how economic activity commits and limits you.”           In short,
consumerism as we experience it makes children into pseudo-adults. The same
point can be made of the treatment of a child as a sexual subject. Advertising
suggests “that being a sexual subject is fairly unproblematic,” whereas the
commitments and risks involved cannot be understood by a child. Williams wants
to insist that there needs to be some non-erotic realm—such as that posited by
the incest taboo. There needs to be a place where children are not
pseudo-adults. That space is shrinking, as we see in “the slippage in our
public images and practices towards treating the child as consumer, an economic
and erotic subject.”           This is the
first path of his argument. The second is complementary: if humans are to be
able to learn how to choose, then adults in turn cannot be pseudo-children. For
if adults do not know how to make choices, then they will botch the nurture of
children, and will fail to develop into “real political subjects.” Here it is
that abortion enters the argument. The unfortunate reality is—as our society’s
talk about abortion makes clear—we do not know how to think about
choice-making.   Adults & Choice           It is the
illusion of advertizing that we can choose whatever we want without having any
consequential effect on our future choices. The reality of choice is that every
exercise thereof limits and shapes my future possibilities. A choice gives
definition, and a definition involves a boundary: this, over here, rather
than that other over there. “I am changed by my choices,” Williams writes.
“Real choice both expresses and curtails freedom.”           Archbishop
Williams looks at two political issues which invoke the rhetoric of choice: not
only abortion, but also education. The call for parents to have choice in the
schools which educate their children has an appealing sound, yet upon
inspection is found to have a deceptive core. It makes schools into competitive
providers whose “excellence, measured in the apparently straightforward ways
specified in present policy, is bound up with [their] capacity to attract
customers away from competitors.” When X is chosen, Y loses. The rhetoric of
parental choice hides from view the consequences to others of my choice, and
diverts our attention from political responsibility for education. True choice
involves limitation, and that limitation must be acknowledged also in its
social effects.           With this
conclusion we can see more deeply the problem of childhood and choice. “If we
lose the edge to our thinking about choice, lose the awareness that choice
means loss, and that the morally taxing questions are about how that loss is
‘distributed,’ it is natural enough that we lose the awareness of the
distinction between how adults choose and how children choose.”           And so to
the question of abortion. “The question that arises . . . is whether the word
‘choice’ itself translates simply as the freedom to protect your own interests
at the inevitable expense of other makers of choices.” The archbishop’s
argument moves with dialectical subtlety.           First, he
acknowledges the assertion, often made, that the fetus is not a real subject
whose “freedom” is violated in abortion. Can the fetus even be said to have
“interests” which are harmed in its abortion? To answer this objection,
Williams points to our societal practices which do tend to treat the fetus as
having “claims.” He points to warnings against smoking or drinking during
pregnancy, and to admonitions about exercise and lifestyle. Do not such
practices place “the relation of mother to foetus . . . morally nearer to this
public territory than to the liberty of an individual to treat her body as she
chooses”?           Yet
(voicing the other side again) the relation of mother to fetus is far different
from a relationship to a real, independent “other.” To this objection, Williams
points to the obvious fact that the fetus’s very dependence points to its
otherness. The woman has a relation to her fetus which we are unable to say she
has to her kidneys. And he makes the further argument that to deny the “real moral otherness” of the fetus has
dangerous implications. If we, for instance, say the fetus lacks moral standing
because it lacks rationality, the same argument could be made against
vulnerable newborns as well as the senile. (The notorious ethicist Peter Singer
has drawn this conclusion, and finds infanticide morally acceptable. His logic,
at least, is coherent.)           To the move
that would identify a point during pregnancy before which the fetus may be
aborted, since it is at that stage at least not “a plausible sharer of our
interests,” Williams challenges that there is any such clear point. In the past
few decades the ability to photograph the fetus has brought to public
consciousness the awesome beauty of these small members of our species. The
response of identification which we have to such photos is an “animal”
recognition, Williams says, and it is significant that to make the “pro-choice”
argument it is necessary to suppress such feelings. What is the moral
consequence of learning to suppress “animal recognition” as part of forming
moral judgments? It is “a very ambiguous principle” that we thereby learn: that
it is appropriate to question “animal recognition.” Again we raise up “criteria
for ‘counting’ as a human being” and all the dangers of saying these humans are not people who count.           But
(Williams notes the objection): the early human embryo, at least, does not
raise such questions, since it is only a few cells, hardly recognizably human.
Williams admits the point, in terms of what is visible. Yet, he says, if we
look to the structure of the embryo, it is “what it is in virtue of what it
will develop into.” The earliest embryo is a member of our kind, and no other.
“[I]f the real issue is not ‘counting as a person,’ qualifying to join the
company of fully-fledged possessors of personal rights, but simply being a
moral other, the possessor interests not reducible to mine, the case is not so
clear.” We can’t rule the fetus out, we can’t even rule out the earliest human
genetic streak. Although it will develop greatly, and move through various
levels of dependence, it will never make “a transition from one kind of life to another.”           This is our
new archbishop of Canterbury’s subtle working-through of the question of
abortion. It does not lead to a particular position on abortion legislation. It
emphatically does not lead to assertions of the fetus’s rights (e.g., a
purported “right to life”), for the notion of rights is as confused for British
and American society as the notion of choice. Williams does hope to have made
feminists, in particular, uncomfortable with the invocation of “choice” as the
decisive abortion consideration. In almost every other ethical sphere, feminist
ethics has tried to expose the ways some human beings control others. The
language of choice obscures how that same dynamic of dehumanizing power has
been at work in abortion.   Vision in Canterbury           Thus Rowan
Williams argues for the standing of unborn children as “moral others” demanding
our respect. It is a pro-life argument, but not one based on rights nor focused
on changes in positive law. It is, rather, an argument based on human reason
applied to scientific evidence and proceeding with respect to common intuitions
(the rightness, for instance, of our respecting what comes to us by “animal
recognition”). His posture is deeply relational.           Our
archbishop is revealed as a person who cares about the possibility of true
political community, a society of adults who make choices as adults. That
community needs to cultivate within itself the space where human beings can
learn to make choices. Such a space would permit children to be children, to
play and imagine without the burdens of adult responsibility. In such a space a
child is neither economic nor a sexual subject, but allowed to be different
from adults, who are both. To learn to make choices is to demythologize the
notion of choice. Adult choice involves full recognition of choice’s limiting,
formative character. Adults make choices with recognition of the claims that
other moral subjects make upon them. Adult choice, in short, is not the freedom
of autonomous individuals.           To move
toward the healing of our society, the archbishop is saying, we must cease
conceiving such issues as education and abortion as matters whose essence is
choice.   SOURCES           For the
quotations in the first paragraph, see Oliver O’Donovan, “Archbishop Rowan
Williams,” Pro Ecclesia 12
(2003):5–9. The Christmas 2002 sermon of Archbishop Williams was published on
the Internet by Anglican Communion News Service. “Childhood and Choice” is in
Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections
on Cultural Bereavement (Harrisburg, et al.: Morehouse and T&T Clark,
2000), 11–52.           Reprinted
from The Anglican, July 2003.