I think the quest for respectability is one of the easiest traps to fall into and has some of the worst consequences for one's soul in matters of religion. That doesn't mean that all ideas are equally valid, but the Christian faith and its moral implications are always scandalous in some way or another to every society.
For the record, this sort of thing is very much a trap I have fallen into myself and could easily in the future but for the grace of God, so I'm not throwing stones without pitching back at me.
Clarity and moral courage are essential when addressing abortion or any moral issue. This doesn't require impugning N. T. Wright's entire theological legacy based on these recent remarks. His biblical scholarship has influenced generations of thinkers across denominations, liberal and conservative, who do not question his spiritual integrity or moral fervor. Contesting his prudential judgments on complex issues does not require recasting him as a cautionary tale of elite betrayal or theological compromise. The church needs leaders who speak plainly and act boldly—but also those who model the gravity and complexity that pastoral discernment demands. Nuance is not moral evasion, nor institutional credibility inherent evidence of corruption.
I agree that clarity and moral courage are essential when addressing issues like abortion.
I have always had independent reasons for not finding Wright's biblical scholarship particularly significant, though I realize others disagree. However, whether that work is significant or not, it's entirely appropriate for statements of anthropological heresy--which is what these comments amount to--to mar his legacy. By indicating that there could be a stage at which the unborn child has less than full human dignity, he is also, it should be said, committing Christological heresy, since this would imply there was a point at which the unborn Christ was less than fully human.
Abortion is not a "complex issue," nor should it have been difficult for Wright to give the young woman who wrote in seeking his guidance a clear answer. "Nuance" is not always moral evasion, but sometimes it is precisely that.
You're free to point out where I say that institutional credibility constitutes "inherent evidence of corruption." That is certainly not my argument here.
By asserting abortion "is not" complex, you assume you've already established this point, when the complexity or simplicity of the issue is precisely what's in dispute--which years of pastoral experience have taught me working with mothers, and families, in anguish about this life-and-death matter. To dismiss Wright—whose pastoral experience is considerable—or the voices of mothers grappling with this profound issue, in the crude and reductive language you've chosen (“throat-cleared his way into an extended apology for selective child murder”; “Christians need to inhabit a very specific Goldilocks zone: not too infanticidal, not too embarrassingly pro-life, but just Wright”) is precisely the kind of rhetoric that fuels fratricide among Christians on a matter so fundamental, it insults the Spirit of Christ. Like you, liberals can be a lot better than talking that way themselves.
Once again, I must gently reassert that you are simply mistaken here. Either the child in the womb is a human being or he is not. If he is (and unless we want to relitigate the science of embryology, that would seem established), then his deliberate killing would be murder. I realize Wright wants to say that murder could be the "lesser of two evils" sometimes, but let's speak plainly about what he's actually saying.
You're not reasserting; you're flattening. To say either the child is a human being or not may sound clarifying, but it's actually reductive. Of course, the unborn child is human—so is the mother. The ethical question isn't what it is, but how to weigh competing human claims in a world where tragedy doesn't always yield to syllogism. Wright isn't denying the gravity of killing; he's refusing to treat moral complexity as a failure of nerve.
If we must “speak plainly,” let’s also speak fully. Otherwise, what you call clarity may be little more than a rhetorical shortcut.
I'm sorry, but this is just so much footstomping to evade the fact that a child is sacred, and the sacred is inviolable. No one is denying things like the trauma of rape or the tragedy of disability. The solution is not to compound evil. And if you've counseled women to abort, then I urge you to repent while there is still time to seek God's mercy.
Calling a child sacred doesn't end the moral question—it deepens it. If we truly value the sacred, we must also honor the person whose body and future are part of that reality. Jesus didn’t enforce choice. He lifted burdens, restored agency, and stood with the wounded. The unborn have no choice—but neither does the person, if we deny them one. Moral clarity isn’t found by erasing one life to elevate another. It’s found in mercy that sees both.
I'm absolutist on killing innocent humans, if that clarifies things.
However, many pro-lifers do carve out the one exception if the life of the mother is threatened, although I don't think the "self-defense" framing is good--tiny babies literally just existing should not be framed as "invaders."
Wright's cliched dodge about leaving questions of viability and personhood to "the philosopher doctors" is grotesque and shameful, given his supposed intellect.
A rational person can reason out that the unique DNA of the newborn baby existed from conception. However, having acknowledged that fact, the person then has to face the reality of what "terminating" that unique human being would entail. N.T. Wright would apparently rather stick his head in the proverbial sand. Disappointing in the extreme.
Par for the course for British public intellectuals to a very great extent. There is a real sense of Oikophobia as the Brexit wars showed us. It’s rolling out now to conversations on immigration.
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.“
Well a “plummy” accent can fool the respondents that indeed NT Wright was correct in defending abortion. It’s really quite disgusting and elitist to decree some lives are not worth living. Sound familiar?
I am so glad to be Catholic. This half as*ed weak sauce of a response does not exist in the Catholic Church. I am an adult convert and it was escaping Protestantism with its focus on being part of the cool kids that was the reason.
Honestly though it wouldn't surprise me if Martin gave a similarly wishy-washy answer here in the name of being "pastoral." And there definitely are compromised priests out there on the issue, and who knows how many laymen, sadly.
I have been and will continue to be an avid reader of N.T. Wright; I have many of his books on my shelves, and refer to them often as reference works. I had not read of his stance on abortion, but if yours is an honest assessment – and I have no reason to think otherwise apart from N.T.'s widely regarded scholarship – I must say it is disappointing. Another Englishman – since deceased – I read frequently is missiologist and formerly widely regarded missiologist Lesslie Newbigin. His impressive study The Gospel in a Pluralist Society I highly recommend in our contemporary evangelical too-often polarized theological practice. On abortion, here is a question that he was confronting while attending a conference in Brazil: "When we stood in the old slave market in Saturday morning on those rough stones which had felt the weight of the bare and bruised and shackled feet of countless of our fellow human beings, when we stood in that place so heavy with human sin and human suffering and we were asked to spend two minutes in silence waiting for what the Spirit might say to us, I thought first how unbelievable that Christians could have connived in that in human trade; and then it came to my mind the question: Will it not be the case that perhaps our great–grandchildren will be equally astonished at the way we in our generation, in our so-called modern, Western, rich, developed culture, connive at the wholesale slaughter of unborn children in the name of that central idol of our culture – freedom of choice?"
Very good! And Francis Schaeffer lived just long enough to address his critics.
Professor Ronald Wells:
“I was very disappointed to see, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his shifts of emphasis from intellectual history, philosophy, and theology to a focus on contemporary American social and political issues. Many of us who were with him in the early years could not grasp why his later efforts had descended to bombastic essays that gave intellectual firepower to the then-new “Christian Right.” Books like Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and especially The Great Evangelical Disaster were embarrassingly different from his earlier works. How did the intellectual hero of our generation move to be a person embraced by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Randall Terry?“
Schaeffer:
“This criticism, however, really is not accurate. A more correct way to look at my work would be to see a continuity from beginning to the end. My earlier books dealt especially with intellectual matters and the area of culture. Then there were the books dealing with the Christian life and the church. My later books have made specific application of my earlier work to the area of law and the society as a whole, especially in relation to the crucial issues of human life and freedom of religious expression.”
Now, was the brand new early-1980s Religious Right, which had been hastily cobbled together from concerned evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and even Mormons to fight for the right to life and cultural sanity, always highly thoughtful, intellectual and sensitive? No. But Schaeffer wasn’t going to let us get away with lazily dismissing the whole effort on that basis.
Schaeffer: “Regardless of whether we think the Moral Majority has always said the right things or whether we do not, or whether we think they have made some mistakes or whether we do not, they have certainly done one thing right: they have used the freedom we still have in the political arena to stand against the other total entity [by which he means secular humanism].
“They have carried the fact that law is king, law is above the lawmakers, and God is above the law in to this area of life where it always should have been. And this is a part of true spirituality.
“The Moral Majority has drawn a line between the one total view of reality and the other total view of reality and the results this brings forth in government and law. And if you personally do not like some of the details of what they have done, do it better. But you must understand that all Christians have got to do the same kind of thing or you are simply not showing the Lordship of Christ in the totality of life.”
I've long been wary of N.T. Wright. Alas, I did not know his "nuanced" views on abortion. As a former fetus, he should intuitively know when human life begins. Thanks for reminding me of CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring."
Wright continues to be highly adept at being unable to give a simple, direct, and unequivocal answer to what really is a simple, direct question. His notoriety for giving five different answers to any given question will undoubtedly be undiminished in the coming weeks as he gets asked about this ridiculous “answer “.
I was so happy to hear someone else mention the fact that the NT Wright/Michael Bird book, The New Testament In Its World, was just a fluff piece - I had bought it at Wheaton College when they came there to speak. At least I believe they were referring to this book.
Bethel, I totally agreed with everything you pointed out!
“The best and the brightest” always have an available support structure just like the rest of us —the glory of God. Von Balthasar once said that Jesus never asked his disciples, of varying levels of education, to accept things they could not understand, only to see and accept his glory. We must use our brains mindful of the fact that our rational faculty has a blind spot that makes it ignorant of Gods glory and susceptible to hubris. (The conceit of the human rational faculty has been interestingly portrayed by Iain McGilchrist). Why our smartest in many instances turn out to be our dumbest. We have to have patience with them but also be ready and willing to call out the hubris.
Calling a child sacred doesn't end the moral question—it deepens it. If we truly value the sacred, we must also honor the person whose body and future are part of that reality. Jesus didn’t enforce choice. He lifted burdens, restored agency, and stood with the wounded. The unborn have no choice—but neither does the person, if we deny them one. Moral clarity isn’t found by erasing one life to elevate another. It’s found in mercy that sees both.
The woman is not being "erased." She is being called to fulfill her high and noble duty as mother and protector, and to be spared from a lifetime of guilt for complicity in murder. How many devastated post-abortive women have you counseled?
If the role of women is so “high and noble,” why is it only fulfilled through self-sacrifice, subjugation, and the denial of agency? Protecting life includes respecting a woman’s conscience, complexity, and circumstances. You use guilt as a weapon, not compassion. If you truly care about post-abortive women, start by respecting their choices—not shaming them.
Many women suffer greatly from post-partum depression or otherwise face overwhelming odds when attempting to raise their already born children. Would you accuse me of these various things if I said these women should be prevented from infanticide?
Dr. McGrew is not doing this, nor are other pro-lifers. ignoring or minimizing the woman's suffering. It's saying that killing the child is inherently wrong, so that isn't on the table to relieve the suffering.
"Protecting life while acknowledging hardship is moral clarity, not hypocrisy."
That includes the tragedy of weeping with someone in incredibly difficult circumstances. And yes, we can be compassionate on someone who has had an abortion whether their circumstances were defensible or indefensible. However, it's just as important to moral and spiritual growth for a person to acknowledge he or she (the he being the boyfriend/husband who pushed for an abortion) committed great sin, no matter how mitigating the circumstances may be. It's not compassionate to say something is ok when it's actually not.
This is so disingenuous. Truly with abortion, Stalin's purported maxim that one killing is a tragedy and a million is a statistic applies. In a fallen world, there will be genuine tragedies towards the mothers, arguably the greatest in medically borderline situations or in situations where the evidence is clear but the doctor hesitates out of more concern for prosecution than saving the woman's life, but those are conveniently nameable and identifiable. That type of situation should be mourned and things like policies, training, and the like improved. On the other hand, every successful abortion results in at least one murdered child.
Whatever on a legislative or compromise side might have to be condoned in a society for hard cases (life of mother, rape/incest), "I don't wanna have a baby," which is the overwhelming majority of abortions, is vastly, vastly outwieghed by the basic right the child has to actually live.
I also would reject the idea that rape/incest present morally "hard cases," although if I were a legislator trying to move the ball forward and had to settle for an imperfect law with those carveouts, I would take it as an incremental win.
That's my position as well - the only one that requires nuance in the care/approach is life of the mother, and even then there's a wide difference in intent and action between an abortion and say removing an ectopic pregnancy that theoretically could be implanted in an artificial womb if the technology existed.
I was speaking on the legislative/incrementalist side as far as that part of the argument goes, basically in the sense that "let's discard the exceptions that tend to swallow up the general rules."
Thank you Bethel for always having the courage to be kind and criticise. There is no one served by reputation protection, backscratching etc. NT Wright had become a Shibboleth for polite and academically informed orthodoxy despite his leanings and pronouncements outside of expertise. His book Christ and the Powers, written by a Brit and an Aussie about the US is about as far an overstretch as one can go without a mat and Lycra.
"Fully actual"? Both Aristotle and Aquinas adhered to the concept of delayed ensoulment. Aristotle stated that the soul enters the male fetus at 40 days and the female at 90 days. Aquinas asserted that the rational soul is infused only once the body is suitably organized, following Aristotle's theory. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas regarded the fetus as fully human. Summa Theologica (Part I, Q. 118, Art. 2)
Aquinas condemned abortion as sinful, but the gravity of the act depended on whether the fetus was "ensouled" or not. He did not hold the modern Catholic view that life begins at conception in the same strict sense.
Aristotle said, "It depends." Reasonable moral discourse leaves room for such ambiguity, with personal convictions tempered by genuine respect for contrary positions. Aristotle wrote (Politics - Book 7, Chapter 16) that abortion was permissible before the embryo develops sensation and life: "for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive"... being fully actual.
I think the quest for respectability is one of the easiest traps to fall into and has some of the worst consequences for one's soul in matters of religion. That doesn't mean that all ideas are equally valid, but the Christian faith and its moral implications are always scandalous in some way or another to every society.
For the record, this sort of thing is very much a trap I have fallen into myself and could easily in the future but for the grace of God, so I'm not throwing stones without pitching back at me.
World-class article and much needed context on Wright, but my absolute favorite part was the amazing puns on "Wright" :D
They... Wright themselves. :)
Clarity and moral courage are essential when addressing abortion or any moral issue. This doesn't require impugning N. T. Wright's entire theological legacy based on these recent remarks. His biblical scholarship has influenced generations of thinkers across denominations, liberal and conservative, who do not question his spiritual integrity or moral fervor. Contesting his prudential judgments on complex issues does not require recasting him as a cautionary tale of elite betrayal or theological compromise. The church needs leaders who speak plainly and act boldly—but also those who model the gravity and complexity that pastoral discernment demands. Nuance is not moral evasion, nor institutional credibility inherent evidence of corruption.
I agree that clarity and moral courage are essential when addressing issues like abortion.
I have always had independent reasons for not finding Wright's biblical scholarship particularly significant, though I realize others disagree. However, whether that work is significant or not, it's entirely appropriate for statements of anthropological heresy--which is what these comments amount to--to mar his legacy. By indicating that there could be a stage at which the unborn child has less than full human dignity, he is also, it should be said, committing Christological heresy, since this would imply there was a point at which the unborn Christ was less than fully human.
Abortion is not a "complex issue," nor should it have been difficult for Wright to give the young woman who wrote in seeking his guidance a clear answer. "Nuance" is not always moral evasion, but sometimes it is precisely that.
You're free to point out where I say that institutional credibility constitutes "inherent evidence of corruption." That is certainly not my argument here.
By asserting abortion "is not" complex, you assume you've already established this point, when the complexity or simplicity of the issue is precisely what's in dispute--which years of pastoral experience have taught me working with mothers, and families, in anguish about this life-and-death matter. To dismiss Wright—whose pastoral experience is considerable—or the voices of mothers grappling with this profound issue, in the crude and reductive language you've chosen (“throat-cleared his way into an extended apology for selective child murder”; “Christians need to inhabit a very specific Goldilocks zone: not too infanticidal, not too embarrassingly pro-life, but just Wright”) is precisely the kind of rhetoric that fuels fratricide among Christians on a matter so fundamental, it insults the Spirit of Christ. Like you, liberals can be a lot better than talking that way themselves.
Once again, I must gently reassert that you are simply mistaken here. Either the child in the womb is a human being or he is not. If he is (and unless we want to relitigate the science of embryology, that would seem established), then his deliberate killing would be murder. I realize Wright wants to say that murder could be the "lesser of two evils" sometimes, but let's speak plainly about what he's actually saying.
You're not reasserting; you're flattening. To say either the child is a human being or not may sound clarifying, but it's actually reductive. Of course, the unborn child is human—so is the mother. The ethical question isn't what it is, but how to weigh competing human claims in a world where tragedy doesn't always yield to syllogism. Wright isn't denying the gravity of killing; he's refusing to treat moral complexity as a failure of nerve.
If we must “speak plainly,” let’s also speak fully. Otherwise, what you call clarity may be little more than a rhetorical shortcut.
I'm sorry, but this is just so much footstomping to evade the fact that a child is sacred, and the sacred is inviolable. No one is denying things like the trauma of rape or the tragedy of disability. The solution is not to compound evil. And if you've counseled women to abort, then I urge you to repent while there is still time to seek God's mercy.
Calling a child sacred doesn't end the moral question—it deepens it. If we truly value the sacred, we must also honor the person whose body and future are part of that reality. Jesus didn’t enforce choice. He lifted burdens, restored agency, and stood with the wounded. The unborn have no choice—but neither does the person, if we deny them one. Moral clarity isn’t found by erasing one life to elevate another. It’s found in mercy that sees both.
I'm absolutist on killing innocent humans, if that clarifies things.
However, many pro-lifers do carve out the one exception if the life of the mother is threatened, although I don't think the "self-defense" framing is good--tiny babies literally just existing should not be framed as "invaders."
Wright's cliched dodge about leaving questions of viability and personhood to "the philosopher doctors" is grotesque and shameful, given his supposed intellect.
A rational person can reason out that the unique DNA of the newborn baby existed from conception. However, having acknowledged that fact, the person then has to face the reality of what "terminating" that unique human being would entail. N.T. Wright would apparently rather stick his head in the proverbial sand. Disappointing in the extreme.
Par for the course for British public intellectuals to a very great extent. There is a real sense of Oikophobia as the Brexit wars showed us. It’s rolling out now to conversations on immigration.
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.“
Well a “plummy” accent can fool the respondents that indeed NT Wright was correct in defending abortion. It’s really quite disgusting and elitist to decree some lives are not worth living. Sound familiar?
I am so glad to be Catholic. This half as*ed weak sauce of a response does not exist in the Catholic Church. I am an adult convert and it was escaping Protestantism with its focus on being part of the cool kids that was the reason.
You do have your James Martins though!
Martin is a heretic on sex and gender issues but so far he is anti-abortion.
What astonished me was learning NT Wright was still alive. He must be about 100 years old.
Honestly though it wouldn't surprise me if Martin gave a similarly wishy-washy answer here in the name of being "pastoral." And there definitely are compromised priests out there on the issue, and who knows how many laymen, sadly.
I have been and will continue to be an avid reader of N.T. Wright; I have many of his books on my shelves, and refer to them often as reference works. I had not read of his stance on abortion, but if yours is an honest assessment – and I have no reason to think otherwise apart from N.T.'s widely regarded scholarship – I must say it is disappointing. Another Englishman – since deceased – I read frequently is missiologist and formerly widely regarded missiologist Lesslie Newbigin. His impressive study The Gospel in a Pluralist Society I highly recommend in our contemporary evangelical too-often polarized theological practice. On abortion, here is a question that he was confronting while attending a conference in Brazil: "When we stood in the old slave market in Saturday morning on those rough stones which had felt the weight of the bare and bruised and shackled feet of countless of our fellow human beings, when we stood in that place so heavy with human sin and human suffering and we were asked to spend two minutes in silence waiting for what the Spirit might say to us, I thought first how unbelievable that Christians could have connived in that in human trade; and then it came to my mind the question: Will it not be the case that perhaps our great–grandchildren will be equally astonished at the way we in our generation, in our so-called modern, Western, rich, developed culture, connive at the wholesale slaughter of unborn children in the name of that central idol of our culture – freedom of choice?"
Very good! And Francis Schaeffer lived just long enough to address his critics.
Professor Ronald Wells:
“I was very disappointed to see, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his shifts of emphasis from intellectual history, philosophy, and theology to a focus on contemporary American social and political issues. Many of us who were with him in the early years could not grasp why his later efforts had descended to bombastic essays that gave intellectual firepower to the then-new “Christian Right.” Books like Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and especially The Great Evangelical Disaster were embarrassingly different from his earlier works. How did the intellectual hero of our generation move to be a person embraced by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Randall Terry?“
Schaeffer:
“This criticism, however, really is not accurate. A more correct way to look at my work would be to see a continuity from beginning to the end. My earlier books dealt especially with intellectual matters and the area of culture. Then there were the books dealing with the Christian life and the church. My later books have made specific application of my earlier work to the area of law and the society as a whole, especially in relation to the crucial issues of human life and freedom of religious expression.”
Now, was the brand new early-1980s Religious Right, which had been hastily cobbled together from concerned evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and even Mormons to fight for the right to life and cultural sanity, always highly thoughtful, intellectual and sensitive? No. But Schaeffer wasn’t going to let us get away with lazily dismissing the whole effort on that basis.
Schaeffer: “Regardless of whether we think the Moral Majority has always said the right things or whether we do not, or whether we think they have made some mistakes or whether we do not, they have certainly done one thing right: they have used the freedom we still have in the political arena to stand against the other total entity [by which he means secular humanism].
“They have carried the fact that law is king, law is above the lawmakers, and God is above the law in to this area of life where it always should have been. And this is a part of true spirituality.
“The Moral Majority has drawn a line between the one total view of reality and the other total view of reality and the results this brings forth in government and law. And if you personally do not like some of the details of what they have done, do it better. But you must understand that all Christians have got to do the same kind of thing or you are simply not showing the Lordship of Christ in the totality of life.”
I've long been wary of N.T. Wright. Alas, I did not know his "nuanced" views on abortion. As a former fetus, he should intuitively know when human life begins. Thanks for reminding me of CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring."
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Wright continues to be highly adept at being unable to give a simple, direct, and unequivocal answer to what really is a simple, direct question. His notoriety for giving five different answers to any given question will undoubtedly be undiminished in the coming weeks as he gets asked about this ridiculous “answer “.
I was so happy to hear someone else mention the fact that the NT Wright/Michael Bird book, The New Testament In Its World, was just a fluff piece - I had bought it at Wheaton College when they came there to speak. At least I believe they were referring to this book.
Bethel, I totally agreed with everything you pointed out!
“The best and the brightest” always have an available support structure just like the rest of us —the glory of God. Von Balthasar once said that Jesus never asked his disciples, of varying levels of education, to accept things they could not understand, only to see and accept his glory. We must use our brains mindful of the fact that our rational faculty has a blind spot that makes it ignorant of Gods glory and susceptible to hubris. (The conceit of the human rational faculty has been interestingly portrayed by Iain McGilchrist). Why our smartest in many instances turn out to be our dumbest. We have to have patience with them but also be ready and willing to call out the hubris.
Calling a child sacred doesn't end the moral question—it deepens it. If we truly value the sacred, we must also honor the person whose body and future are part of that reality. Jesus didn’t enforce choice. He lifted burdens, restored agency, and stood with the wounded. The unborn have no choice—but neither does the person, if we deny them one. Moral clarity isn’t found by erasing one life to elevate another. It’s found in mercy that sees both.
The woman is not being "erased." She is being called to fulfill her high and noble duty as mother and protector, and to be spared from a lifetime of guilt for complicity in murder. How many devastated post-abortive women have you counseled?
Also, the unborn child is a person, to be clear.
If the role of women is so “high and noble,” why is it only fulfilled through self-sacrifice, subjugation, and the denial of agency? Protecting life includes respecting a woman’s conscience, complexity, and circumstances. You use guilt as a weapon, not compassion. If you truly care about post-abortive women, start by respecting their choices—not shaming them.
Many women suffer greatly from post-partum depression or otherwise face overwhelming odds when attempting to raise their already born children. Would you accuse me of these various things if I said these women should be prevented from infanticide?
Of course not—protecting life while acknowledging hardship is moral clarity, not hypocrisy.
Yes. My point exactly.
Then we agree—compassion and moral boundaries can coexist. !
Dr. McGrew is not doing this, nor are other pro-lifers. ignoring or minimizing the woman's suffering. It's saying that killing the child is inherently wrong, so that isn't on the table to relieve the suffering.
"Protecting life while acknowledging hardship is moral clarity, not hypocrisy."
That includes the tragedy of weeping with someone in incredibly difficult circumstances. And yes, we can be compassionate on someone who has had an abortion whether their circumstances were defensible or indefensible. However, it's just as important to moral and spiritual growth for a person to acknowledge he or she (the he being the boyfriend/husband who pushed for an abortion) committed great sin, no matter how mitigating the circumstances may be. It's not compassionate to say something is ok when it's actually not.
This is so disingenuous. Truly with abortion, Stalin's purported maxim that one killing is a tragedy and a million is a statistic applies. In a fallen world, there will be genuine tragedies towards the mothers, arguably the greatest in medically borderline situations or in situations where the evidence is clear but the doctor hesitates out of more concern for prosecution than saving the woman's life, but those are conveniently nameable and identifiable. That type of situation should be mourned and things like policies, training, and the like improved. On the other hand, every successful abortion results in at least one murdered child.
Whatever on a legislative or compromise side might have to be condoned in a society for hard cases (life of mother, rape/incest), "I don't wanna have a baby," which is the overwhelming majority of abortions, is vastly, vastly outwieghed by the basic right the child has to actually live.
I also would reject the idea that rape/incest present morally "hard cases," although if I were a legislator trying to move the ball forward and had to settle for an imperfect law with those carveouts, I would take it as an incremental win.
That's my position as well - the only one that requires nuance in the care/approach is life of the mother, and even then there's a wide difference in intent and action between an abortion and say removing an ectopic pregnancy that theoretically could be implanted in an artificial womb if the technology existed.
I was speaking on the legislative/incrementalist side as far as that part of the argument goes, basically in the sense that "let's discard the exceptions that tend to swallow up the general rules."
Thank you Bethel for always having the courage to be kind and criticise. There is no one served by reputation protection, backscratching etc. NT Wright had become a Shibboleth for polite and academically informed orthodoxy despite his leanings and pronouncements outside of expertise. His book Christ and the Powers, written by a Brit and an Aussie about the US is about as far an overstretch as one can go without a mat and Lycra.
"Fully actual"? Both Aristotle and Aquinas adhered to the concept of delayed ensoulment. Aristotle stated that the soul enters the male fetus at 40 days and the female at 90 days. Aquinas asserted that the rational soul is infused only once the body is suitably organized, following Aristotle's theory. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas regarded the fetus as fully human. Summa Theologica (Part I, Q. 118, Art. 2)
Aquinas condemned abortion as sinful, but the gravity of the act depended on whether the fetus was "ensouled" or not. He did not hold the modern Catholic view that life begins at conception in the same strict sense.
Aristotle said, "It depends." Reasonable moral discourse leaves room for such ambiguity, with personal convictions tempered by genuine respect for contrary positions. Aristotle wrote (Politics - Book 7, Chapter 16) that abortion was permissible before the embryo develops sensation and life: "for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive"... being fully actual.
The beat goes on— long after the question began.