In these days of darkness, prudence demands a sober look at the stratagems and deceits of the culture of death. One of these deceptions is sentimentalism – its tentacles choking clear thought, courage, and genuine love.
Take a recent example, Ada Calhoun’s New Republic story on Jennie Linn McCormack and “The Rise of DIY Abortions.” Pregnant as a young teenager, McCormack kept the baby, now an adult and in jail. At 18, she married, had a daughter, divorced, and conceived her third child with another man – a fling. Mere months after the birth, she conceived again, with yet another man, an abusive ex-felon who paid for an abortion before returning to prison, leaving her pregnant once more.
Hers was a desperate situation—five pregnancies by four men, three children by different fathers, pregnant once more, the father in prison, and with no income other than a few dollars of child support. Deciding to end the pregnancy, McCormack discovers that the nearest clinic is many hours away and the law requires a three-day waiting period, forcing her to make the trip several times or to stay at a hotel, neither option financially possible.
Jennie Linn McCormack. (Robyn Twomey for Newsweek)
In some confusion, she asks her sister to procure abortion pills online, subsequently aborting the baby at home, on a Christmas Eve. A DIY abortion, what one magazine callously termed, “2012’s Hottest New Trend.”
Troubles did not end for Jennie Linn McCormack, however. She was farther along the pregnancy than anticipated and could not bring herself to discard the child’s remains. Eventually, with decomposition far advanced, she notified the authorities who charged her for having a non-sanctioned abortion. While the charges were ultimately dismissed, her attorney pressed the matter and the subsequent decision of the Ninth Circuit may potentially halt all prosecutions for illegal abortion in Utah.
The publicity has not been kind. Many abortion advocates will not support McCormack because of the unsympathetic nature of the case. Many in the town have shunned her and she’s reported alienation and condemnation from her church. McCormack remains underemployed, without child support for any of her children, and struggling to care for her youngest.
Hers is a terrible story from beginning to end, one rather cynically used for Calhoun’s own purposes. Absent McCormack’s story, it lacks punch to merely note that “Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties now have no abortion provider. Several states … have only one.” With the story, however, it is now a tragedy that accessing “clinical abortion … has become increasingly difficult, especially for poor women.” From behind a façade of concern for the vulnerable, Calhoun is able to heap scorn on the “fetal personhood” movement and “the concept that a rights-endowed person is created the second that sperm meets egg.”
Note how Calhoun does an end-run around a serious moral matter: Without needing to grapple with the scientific, philosophical, moral, and theological basis for the dignity of the unborn, she recasts those principles as arbitrary and cruel. The (obviously wrong) moral principles are pilloried without argument as causing the pain and sorrow of women like Jennie Linn McCormack—poor, alone, helpless. Given this, who could possibly object to safe, harmless, cheap, private, and accessible pills?
Now, of course this story ought to evoke sadness, for the sufferings of this young woman—and many like her—are considerable. Yet the proposed “solution” is not as obvious as the story might suggest, for Calhoun covers over the background commitments implied by DIY abortions: radical individualism, undifferentiated autonomy, disposability, and unfettered freedom.
It’s no accident that she presents no arguments, only a story of pathos and sentiment; our age finds it difficult to examine the principles, often viewing them as depersonalizing and alienating—but a story, this moves us! As such, Calhoun is attempting to dominate the discussion, tilting the table in her favor before the conversation begins, for who, after all, can wish to foist even more cruelty on Jennie Linn McCormack?
This is how moral principle is subverted without being answered, defeated without receiving a response. Flannery O’Connor identified this vice of the mind some years ago: “If other ages felt less, they saw more … with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” Or, in the case of our example, tenderness ends with the prescription bottle.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, “The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends … all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other object than to arrive at love.” Of course, it is not our task or our right to condemn Jennie Linn McCormack. The Faith offers life, health, joy, and hospitable welcome, but it is our task to undo the culture of death, especially when it masquerades in sentiment. And especially when it uses the sufferings of others in deceitful ways for its own malevolent ends.
R. J. Snell is professor of philosophy and director of the philosophy program at Eastern University where he co-directs the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. His latest book (with Steve Cone) is Authentic Cosmopolitanism: Love, Sin, and Grace in the Christian University.
