It is a terrible irony that in this age of medical advancements and economic resources, to hate the vulnerable—and wish their destruction—has become so normalized in our society as to go without notice. I think about this today, the fifty-second anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Roe was technically overturned in the Dobbs decision two and a half years ago, but a report from CNN in August of 2024 showed an increase in the number of abortions in 2024. Pew Research Center’s summary of data shows that majority public opinion supports the practice:
In a Center survey conducted nearly a year after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, 62% of U.S. adults said the practice should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Another survey conducted a few months before the decision showed that relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the issue.
An astonishing 62% of Americans support abortion “in all or most cases.” And of the 36% who think it should be illegal, many support a variety of exceptions that end up being quite extensive.
In the meanwhile, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada has rapidly grown since the law’s initial passing in 2016. The sixth leading cause of death in Canada when I completed final edits for my book on issues of life and human flourishing in 2023, it was the fifth leading cause of death by the time my book was actually published in fall 2024.
On the website of the organization “Dying with Dignity Canada” is the slogan: “It’s Your Life, It’s Your Choice.” Kind of like the slogan around abortion rights in America: “my body, my choice.”
No question about it: we, as a society, do not like the weak and the vulnerable. Instead of investing resources in them, it is much more convenient to destroy them ourselves (the promise of abortion, which involves the medical killing of the baby in utero) or encourage the vulnerable to destroy themselves (as MAID attempts to do in Canada with medical killing of eligible adults over the age of eighteen). Tragically, some of the weak and the vulnerable—pregnant women in crisis situations, the drug addicted, the ill, the poor—are the most likely to buy into both of these lies. But is this true? Do we as a society realize that we tell some people outright:
Your life is not worth living.
You do not deserve to live.
Your child does not deserve to live.
What kind of monsters does this make us? Of course, most people who support abortion and/or euthanasia do not think overly much about the precise mechanics of what happens in the process. It’s easier to talk about it as “the realm of medicine.” As the slogan goes, “Abortion is healthcare.” This makes it, therefore, generally belonging to the realm of science, and you wouldn’t want to oppose or disrespect science, would you?
This general comfort of our society with such medical killings (which is what these are) is the result of faulty theology and faulty anthropology that has permeated our modern secular therapeutic age. What do I mean by this? I think a lot about the Judaeo-Christian view, first articulated in Genesis 1:27—that God made people in his own image. In modern Hebrew, by the way, the term used in that verse now means “photograph.” It is a fitting reminder of what all people are as image-bearers: We are, in a strange and beautiful way, photographs of God! This includes the broken, the wounded, the vulnerable—absolutely everyone. To say that every single person is a priceless treasure in God’s eyes, someone in whom God delights unconditionally, is a revolutionary statement that no other religion in the world has ever made.
I think, by contrast, of such declarations as Table IV in the earliest Roman lawcode, Twelve Tables. Table IV deals with paternal power. Simply and chillingly the opening clause therein states: “A notably deformed child shall be killed immediately.”
I’ve always found this particular law striking. The Romans, after all, had great respect for the father’s absolute power of life and death over his household. But this clause is an exception to that rule. The law doesn’t state that the father can decide what to do about a deformed child. There is no option given here for a wealthier family to keep such a child and raise him or her, if they so choose. Rather, the law orders this killing as a matter of fact—as a legal requirement. To violate this command is to break Roman law. Romans, after all, are not allowed to have flaws.
In upholding abortion and euthanasia as acceptable killings in a world where we otherwise condemn murder, we civilized denizens of modernity are repaganizing. The non-Christian world has always been built on the bodies and bones of the weak and the vulnerable, Louise Perry has argued. She is not wrong.
In a recent essay in Plough, “The Body She Had,” scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson who has lived a life with a disability, wonders about people who choose to not bring a child into the world. “This girl who is not in the world because of ‘the body that she had’ had a body like mine and a body like those of many of my friends. She was a girl with a body we now talk about as having a significant congenital disability.” People speak so matter-of-factly, Garland-Thomson notes, of lives like hers as “not worth living.” Yet here she is—a professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University, a talented writer with bylines including the New York Times, and also a woman with a body deemed flawed and imperfect. Perhaps a Roman father would have killed her outright. Plenty of parents today would too.
In our throwaway culture, we shun and discard everything and everyone who isn’t perfect—or even just isn’t what we wanted right now. The problem is, how we treat the vulnerable and the powerless is how we treat everyone else, and even ourselves. How else would 15,300 people in Canada have requested to be euthanized in 2023? The lie is convincing.
Yet it is still a lie—just as it was in the Roman world. And we do not have to live by it.