When President George W Bush signed into law a controversial new ban on late abortions, he unleashed a bitter conflict between American liberals and the religious right that will almost certainly end in a showdown in the supreme court. In Russia, too, recent legislation has reduced from 13 to four the conditions under which women can apply for abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. This new law is probably due, at least in part, to the rising influence in Russia of the Orthodox church, which, like the Roman Catholic church, is adamantly opposed to abortion.
Wherever religion plays a major role in the forming of public opinion, termination of pregnancy becomes a highly emotive issue. In Britain, where only about 6% of the population attend a religious service regularly, there is far less concern about abortion than in America, the second most religious country in the world after India.
Is it possible to find a way of accommodating abortion within a religious perspective? The new ban in the US prohibits dilation and extraction, popularly known as "partial birth abortion", which is usually carried out after the 27th week of pregnancy. The foetus is partially delivered and the skull pierced with a sharp object. This procedure is not available in Britain, and in the US accounts for only 0.17% of all abortions; it is usually carried out only when the foetus is severely deformed or when the mother's life is in danger. Critics of the new legislation in America point out that it makes no exceptions to protect the health of the mother, and many fear that this is simply the first move in a campaign to outlaw abortion altogether.
The world religions all insist that human life is sacred and inviolable. The Christian right believes that abortion in any form is one of the most brutal manifestations of secular modernity. Fundamentalists are entirely unmoved by the argument that a woman has the right to choose, since it smacks of feminism, which they regard as another of the great evils of our time. No religion has in practice been good for women, and in adopting a pro-choice position, some liberal Christians are beginning to redress centuries of oppression by taking women's rights seriously.
But if all life is sacred, can a woman legitimately choose to terminate her pregnancy? Christian fundamentalists dispute the US supreme court decision Roe v Wade (1973), and claim that a foetus is a person and has full civil rights. Other opponents of abortion take a more moderate line: even if a foetus is not alive in any meaningful way, its potential for life must be protected. This is a perfectly respectable religious position. In the religions of the Indian subcontinent, for example, ahimsa ("harmlessness") forbids people to injure even the lower and apparently inert forms of life. Jains, in particular, take the greatest care to avoid trampling on insects, and some have even worn masks lest they inhale microbes.
A scrupulous concern for human life is also central to Christianity. But - herein lies the rub - you may not pick and choose which forms of life you will graciously patronise. Thus it is unacceptable to champion the rights of the foetus while dispatching scores of people to the execution chamber, as Bush did when Texas governor. It is also invalid to be militant in the defence of American life in embryo while showing no remorse for the 3,000 men, women and children who died during the war in Afghanistan and the 10,000 civilians who died during the invasion of Iraq. In religion, consistency is all, even if it conflicts with your material or political self-interest; otherwise it becomes at best trivial and at worst pernicious.
If taken to an extreme, however, ahimsa could bring life to a standstill, Indeed, in the sixth century BCE, some of the Jains became literally paralysed by their fear of injuring other creatures: some refused to move at all and starved themselves to death. Sadly, it is impossible to live without harming and even destroying other beings. To an extent, our lives depend upon the death of others. This tragic vision is one of the very earliest religious insights of humanity.
Thus during the Palaeolithic period, hunters, who depended upon meat for their very survival, found it highly problematic to prey upon their fellow animals. To this day, in tribal societies the hunt is surrounded by religious sanctions, designed to assuage guilt and envisage some kind of posthumous existence for the beast.
Even after the invention of agriculture, the old hunting rituals were preserved in animal sacrifice, a major form of religious expression in the ancient world. Officially, people could only eat red meat that had been sacrificed to the gods, with rites that honoured the animal that was laying down its life for the sake of humankind. Killing was a terrible but necessary act, and the shock of sacred awe, when the victim's throat was slit, paradoxically gave worshippers a profound sense of the sacred value of life. It also forced people to confront the violence upon which civilisation depended.
Today we carefully shield ourselves from this uncomfortable perception. It is possible, for example, to buy a neatly packaged joint of meat without giving a thought to the way that the animal lived and died. In the same way, abortion is often regarded as a simple, painless procedure. The ghastly image of the surgeon approaching the infant's skull with surgical scissors reminds us that, even though this is a very rare procedure, abortion is always a deadly serious business.
Nearly every abortion represents a human tragedy. This is something that the shrill rhetoric of the Christian right tends to ignore. Perhaps, when facing the possibility of terminating a pregnancy, we should return to the ancient insight that while it is an inexorable law of life that our survival often depends upon the death and suffering of others, there is something terrible about this, and that we must force ourselves to look clearly at what we are doing.
Thus, while it may be religiously impossible to sanction abortion undertaken for trivial reasons - for mere social or professional convenience - it may be tragically necessary to sacrifice a potential life to nurture the life we have already. This is also a sacred requirement. The foetus may have to die for the sake of its mother's physical or psychological health, for the economic survival of the family, or to prevent a marital breakdown that would damage its siblings. And that is why the woman has to make this painful choice, as only she can evaluate her circumstances. But we should never lose our sense of the awful gravity of the procedure, because - as in ancient religion - therein lies our sense of life's sacred value.
This religious vision also demands absolute consistency. It should make us deeply unhappy about a global and economic system that enables an elite to prosper at the expense of the majority, and should force us to confront the grim reality upon which our success and world dominance depend and adamantly oppose policies inspired by trivial, blatant self-interest.
· Karen Armstrong is the author of A History of God
karmstronginfo@btopenworld.com
