Bodies and Battlefields

Abortion, War, and the Moral Sentiments of Sacrifice

Tadd Ruetenik

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725271944
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

Bodies and Battlefields shows how our attitudes about war and about abortion are united in the idea of sacrifice. This work is intended to instigate a cultural transition toward different moral sentiments about violence.It is an attempt to promote new reflections on important ideas, risking challenges on all sides. It does more than note the hypocrisy of the anti-war people who support abortion. It does more than note the hypocrisy of the anti-abortion people who support war. Its positive goal is to develop new moral sentiments that promote a culture that is open to creative and radical moral revolution that will overturn an ancient cultural residue that makes us believe killing is inevitable.

1

Sacrificing for Life; Sacrificing for Death

In her essay “A Baby is Born,” Dorothy Day reflects on a 1941 New York Times story in which the figure of $17,485,528,049 was given as a budget estimate for US participation in World War II. For some reason she wonders about the last two digits, noting that $49 is about the cost for a poor person to give birth in an area hospital. Day’s own publication, The Catholic Worker, printed an article about the birth of a boy to a single mother, which she considered “the most beautiful news, the most tragic news, and indeed more worthy of a place in a headline” than how much war costs.

And this tiny creature, who little realizes his dignity as a member of the Mystical Body of Christ, lies upstairs from me now as I write, swaddled in a blanket and reposing in a laundry basket. He is rosy and calm and satisfied, a look of infinite peace and complacency upon that tiny countenance. He little knows what is in the world, what horrors beset us on every side.1

Day’s idyllic description makes him sound like the mythical baby Moses, precariously floating through a dangerous world. What is most remarkable about this passage is how it shows Day viewing the birth of a child in a pessimistic way. Pro-life is often thought of as an optimistic attitude about birth. Day, however, sees the event as filled with danger. The blanket swaddles the baby amidst the threat of war and the big budgets it brings with it. He is protected by a force that sees him as a citizen of a country and not merely as a child of God.

Day’s description of a child born during war represents much of the spirit in which this book is written. Day has a greater, more comprehensive understanding of life than do many pro-life advocates. Appeals to the innocence of babies—so common in the rhetoric of pro-lifers—are not only aesthetically offensive to some, but even ethically questionable. By insisting on the innocence of babies they suggest that it is possible for babies to be guilty. Babies are not guilty. They just inherit the guilt of a world that thinks it needs large military budgets.

Day continues her reflection by focusing on the single mother:

There you have the tragedy of the refugee, there you have the misery of homelessness, the uncertainty as to food and clothing and shelter (and this woman had known hunger). And there, too, you have the pain and agony of the flesh. No soldier with his guts spilled out on the battlefield, lying for hours impaled upon barbed wire, suffers physically more than a woman in childbirth.

Day not only raises up the mother, but just as importantly, she brings down the soldier. The mother is superior to the soldier, Day says, because she sees that the suffering of childbirth “brings forth life. In war . . . there is only death.”2 Bodies and Battlefields constitutes an elaboration on Day’s point. It will show that, if we value the idea of sacrifice at all, we should acknowledge that a woman’s sacrifice is morally superior to a warrior’s sacrifice, since soldiers kill while mothers do not.

Day’s essay makes us compare two types of sacrificial figures: the warrior and the mother. In addition, she focuses our attention on their bodies. The soldier spills intestines, the mother spills an umbilical cord. This focus on bodies and battlefields also shows up in US artist Barbara Kruger’s 1989 silkscreen, which depicts a woman’s face partitioned with harshly contrasting colors, captioned with the words “Your body is a battleground.” Kruger is saying, of course, that she believes that there is a war on women, that the battles between men are ultimately battles against women’s bodies, expressed in antiabortion laws. If that interpretation is correct, then the act of abortion can be considered sacrificial. Women fight for control of their bodies, and the result of this is bodily sacrifice. This bodily sacrifice may be considered as referring to both a fetus and a woman. In my view, too much pro-life rhetoric is focused on a vaguely expressed, and often overly sentimentalized baby, fetus, or embryo victim. If we are to refer to victims, we do better to refer more comprehensively to sacrificial bodies. And accordingly, it is both the women and the fetus that are sacrificial bodies. It is relevant that one of these bodies chooses the sacrifice and the other body has a choice imposed upon it, and it is also relevant that one of these is uncontroversially considered a body, while the other is not. But it is evident, at least to me, that these questions engage people in metaphysical disputes that can be interminable, and result in people grouping themselves together into warring factions. Before we get down to fighting over bodies and choices, I think it is better that we consider what got us into this position in the first place. Our choices are conditioned by our moral sentiments, and our moral sentiments are conditioned by our culture. My argument is that we have a culture that hides its violence, in part by making it seem that such choices are inevitable.

In Bodies and Battlefields I will look at both the violence of war and the violence of abortion. Immediately, however, we encounter a problem with the use of “violence.” Those who tend to defend war cannot deny that war is violent, but they can and do deny that such violence is necessarily bad. Some of those who defend abortion believe that violence is bad but that abortion should not be considered violent. Or, in another approach, abortion rights advocates acknowledge that abortion is violent, but in a tragic or sacrificial sense. This book will assert that both war and abortion are violent and need to end.

In doing so, the moral authority of nonviolence will be assumed. To answer questions about when war or abortion are justified would be to give in to the notorious technique of counterexample that philosophers use, and which creates an excessive focus on exceptional and often horrific cases. When someone says that they are against abortion or war, an opponent activates their violent imagination, devising scenarios such as “What if your wife were being raped?” or “What if you see Americans about to be beheaded?” We are not interested in considering morbid scenarios. There is no reason we must mentally plan for violent acts. If such acts happen, it is not the obligation of the victims to explain how they are going to act. In such scenarios whatever happens happens. The goal should be to persistently oppose violence while working to develop habits that make the violent scenarios more and more ridiculous to consider.

Philosopher Cornel West identifies himself as a prophetic pragmatist, one who is tied to a “tradition of prophets who brought urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day.”3 This book takes up that call, but also focuses its prophetic glare at our ideas of compassion themselves. I believe our problem is not necessarily a lack of compassion. The problem is that we have allowed killing to be rationalized as an act of compassion. Compassion can serve as a cover-up for violence. This is the case both with wars done out of concern for oppressed people, and abortions done out of concern for the inordinate burden that women have in all matters of reproduction. We do not necessarily need more compassion; rather, we need to better direct our compassion, and imagine ways of acting compassionately that do not involve killing as a response to social and political problems. Doing so might mean making radical social and political transformations.

At the least, it will require more sophisticated ways of looking at pro-life ethics. For one example, there is the 2010 book Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity, by theologian Rob Arner. Arner argues against abortion, against war, against capital punishment, and against euthanasia. While I am supportive of the consistently pro-life position, I believe it has limits. The idea of consistency implies a legal and intellectual understanding of morality that is simply too narrow to reflect our habitual and emotional responses to these topics. Although it provides a sense of rational purity that suggests justice, it just does not reflect the emotional and even sentimental nature of our attitudes about matters of life, death, and killing. Saying that someone needs to be consistent in their views implies that morality is a strategy game governed by rules. And these rules are to be followed by all, although used to the advantage of the more cunning. For example, pointing out a contradiction in an opponent’s argument is a common technique of both amateur and professional philosophers. But although the contradiction identifier gains a sense of rational superiority, the loser does not necessarily change their mind. When you lose at a game of strategy, you just assume you either had insufficient understanding of how to use the rules, or knew the rules...