What, you may ask, is the connection between these two news items? Beyond the obvious fact that they both involve the issue of abortion, I would argue that there is, another connection: namely, that these reflect the fact that a “culture of death”—a term popularized by the late Pope John Paul II (I’m not Catholic, by the way)—has become rooted both in China and the United States. Without a doubt (and I can say this as someone who has lived in both countries), China and America are in many ways very different, and yet, they are alike in that a philosophy that devalues the life of the unborn has become the basis of official government policy. To be sure, to some extent that philosophy has been justified on somewhat different grounds in each country. In China, the policy of promoting abortion has been predicated on the argument that China cannot afford to have too many people—it is supposedly a matter of promoting the good of society as a whole. In the United States, abortion has been promoted as a matter of personal “choice”—in other words, a matter of personal freedom. Thus, these differing rationales in an ironic way reflect the differing emphases in the two countries on the importance of society versus that of the individual. Nevertheless, the resulting legitimization of abortion is the same.
Now some might argue that the Gosnell case is an outlier—that almost none of the “abortion providers” in the U.S. are guilty of such horrific actions. This may very well be true. But it has emerged in this case that one reason Gosnell was able to continue his atrocities was a failure by governmental agencies to carry out their regulatory responsibilities regarding his “women’s health center,” and it appears that at least one reason for this failure was a fear that any effort to enforce even existing regulations would run afoul of the supposed constitutional “right to choose.” In other words, a public policy that enshrines abortion as a “right” trumped any other concerns.
As for China, the argument that the country couldn’t afford to have so many people might appear reasonable on the surface. No doubt, had those abortions not been performed, China would have a much larger population than it actually now has and the cost of those additional people would made it much harder for the country to make the sort of gains in reducing poverty that it has made over the last several decades. However, I would argue the human cost—in terms of the lives of the unborn themselves, the lives of the mothers and families, and the moral fabric of the country—has been much greater.
That abortion should become so widely practices (and accepted) in China shouldn’t be totally surprising. After all, China is ruled by a Communist Party whose ideology is rooted in a militant atheism that logically leads to the notion that individual human beings (unborn or born) have no inherent value (after all, if we are only the chance products of evolution, rather than creatures made in the “image of God,” why would we have any intrinsic value?). While it is probably true that many Chinese these days are not committed Communists, its ideological assumptions seem to still permeate society to some extent at least. In contrast, the United States is a country founded on certain principles that derive ultimately from the Judeo-Christian belief in the value of humans as beings created in the divine image. However, it seems that such a notion has come over time to be subverted by another (very American) value—the rights of the individual.
Consequently, two countries with quite dissimilar cultures and histories have come to share a common trait—a massive moral failure with regard to those who are among the most defenseless in the human family. As a Christian, I must say that it is difficult not to imagine that such a failure shall result in an awful act of divine judgment unless repented of.
Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Massacre of the Innocents" from Buzzdixon.com