“A simplistic pro-choice feminist assertion that the fetus is not a person and therefore has little to no value until birth or near birth is as phenomenologically and culturally myopic as a pro-life Christian assertion that a conceptus is an unborn baby. In part, the feminist willingness to reengage with the issue of fetal value emerges from the recognition that the more one attends to women’s experiences and the materiality of gestation, the harder it is to discount fetal significance.”
Margaret Kamitsuka, Abortion and the Christian Tradition
Margaret D. Kamitsuka’s Abortion and the Christian Tradition challenges several foundational assumptions that exist at the heart of contemporary abortion debates, assumptions that very often keep those debates stagnant and stalemate. As the quote above illustrates, one of the book’s main contentions is that a pro-choice position must necessarily negate “fetal significance.” For Kamitsuka, the value of the fetus need not belong exclusively to the pro-life position, and acknowledging the value of the fetus does not automatically make it morally wrong to terminate a women’s pregnancy when necessary. In terms of the Christian perspective, she is interested in reappraising the theological arguments against abortion that have been constructed by theologians over the course of the church’s history, especially given that they are being leveraged in many evangelical/neo-conservative interpretive communities today.
Kamitsuka takes issue with the assumption that the church’s historical stance toward abortion has always been that it is sinful and unethical to terminate fetal life, and that feminist and pro-choice theologies therefore constitute a departure from this historical position. From this perspective, the “crime” of the pro-choice position is two-fold, and might be simplified as follows: abortion is a sin because it is morally wrong to kill another human being; abortion is a sin because it does not conform to traditional church teaching on this subject. Actual ethical considerations are incidental to this latter point—it is about obedience to this religious principle. Conversely, in pro-choice perspectives, acknowledging the rights, personhood, and divine image of the fetus runs counter to the political goal of granting women bodily autonomy and reproductive agency. Ethics in the pro-choice position relates to protecting the freedom of the mother (a full human) to exercise her will over and against the physiological intrusion imposed upon her by the fetus, who does not/cannot have political rights or full human status.
In the case of Christianity’s “historic” pro-life stance on abortion, Kamisuka uses this very reliance on and appeal to history to demonstrate that, in fact, the historical record does not straightforwardly condemn abortion on account of the sanctity of fetal life. Much is overlooked about the reasons why abortion was considered a sin when pro-life traditionalists reconstruct the theological past. She argues that abortion was often understood as a sin necessitated by other precursory sins, namely the sin of adultery and having sex outside of marriage for non-procreative purposes (22-23). I also found Kamisuka’s discussion of penitential manuals very illuminating, as it clearly showed that abortion was understood within the local ecclesial contexts, and often took into account the socio-economic-conditions of the mother (30).
In a pro-life, conservative view, fetal personhood is simply assumed, as is the idea that theology has historically expressed an “unyielding condemnation of abortion and univocal view of the sanctity of fetal life” (17). As it turns out, this may be more of a caricature of Christian history than an actual fact. However, Kamitsuka does not pretend pro-choice positions are without their weaknesses, and boldly suggests that they lack moral gravity because they have felt compelled to minimize the inherent worth and value of the fetus to justify ending its life. However, she argues that emphasizing “the incremental aspects of gestation does not mean that no value adheres to a fetus” (117). She makes the case that one can and should attribute value to the fetus no matter the stage of development, because doing so “emphasizes the moral seriousness of any abortion decision without undercutting a pregnant woman’s maternal authority to determine her reproductive life and the fate of her fetus (117).
There’s no doubt that devaluing the fetus has created an impossible spiritual and psychological tension which forces women to choose to act humanely either towards themselves or towards the fetus. It incentivizes the suppression of any instincts in which they may want to hold fetal life in high regard while choosing not to grant it any special privilege over their lives and their futures. Kamitsuka addresses these tensions throughout the book, taking stock of the theoretical vulnerabilities of the pro-life position as well as the ethical contradictions that riddle the pro-choice position. There is also an additional deficiency in our thinking about abortion, which is more of a weakness intrinsic to taking a purely intellectual approach I think, which is that neither of these positions speak truthfully about the actual lived experience (political, spiritual, economic, emotional, etc.) of becoming pregnant, the importance of which Kamitsuka is always careful to remind us of.
Additionally, she is also concerned about establishing a morality for needing an abortion not simply because it better supports women’s complex psyches and emotions, but because not attending to the moral questions of abortion actually lessens a woman’s “moral authority” (144). Indeed, a fully ethical subject is not content with partial definitions of justice that only benefit herself; she is not content to guarantee that justice is done only to her body, but also considers how her desires and decisions might grant or deny justice to others—whether fully human or not—outside herself. Therefore, Kamisuka both reclaims and reintegrates a robust ethical sensibility back into the pro-choice position, which secular feminists have not tended to prioritize. It is a desperately needed undertaking which she does deftly.
In the second half of the book, Kamitsuka goes on to argue that abortion is itself a decision made within the parameters of mothering (122), one that pregnant women, as potential mothers, have the maternal authority to make. It is not an abdication of mothering, and the intrusion is not the fetus (as it often is for feminist legal theorists), but the patriarchal legislation forcing women to gestate and parent against their interests. Overall, I find her concept of gestational hospitality quite lovely, as well as her conceptualization of pregnancy as an opportunity for mothers to show hospitality to fetal life in the same spirit of the Good Samaritan (Chapter 6). Framing pregnancy as an act of hospitality removes any obligation to carry it out without the host’s consent. For both mothers and the Good Samaritan, care and hospitality for the other is valued as a spiritual act, but it remains one that must be freely chosen. Overall, this book bravely charts new territory for contemplating the complexity of questions at the heart of reproductive justice.
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