We can also sympathise with good and decent people who have become victims of a culture that is not given to thinking deeply, is impressionistic and easily led.

Contributing factors to this culture include the pressing demands of family life and work, leaving little time for careful reading, reflection and processing information; bombardment by head-lines and sound-bites that can diminish people's ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time; the gradual dumbing down that comes from relentless light entertainment and trivialisation.

In this context, it is easy to be carried along by second-hand opinions, superficial impressions and misinformation.

This is the context in which people can talk about abortion as if it didn't involve the taking of a life.

In our country, we have even passed legislation based on that assumption.

It has been a long time since the sciences established that the embryo is human life in its own right, not just a part of its mother's body - already her child's body!

On top of the pressures already mentioned, people's sympathies are more easily directed towards the people they see than to the embryos they don't see, and "what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over."

However, that is not quite true: the reality of post-abortion trauma suggests there was at least an oblique awareness that a child was involved.

This unthinking and non-scientific culture is also a problem and closer to the problem I am addressing.

A sharp incongruity

But there is a deeper problem, involving views that are doctrinaire and even anti-scientific.

It involves the highly politicised and much-publicised clamour for a so-called right to choose abortion for whatever reason, even just personal convenience.

There is dramatic incongruity in the fact that people who have the most to say about an individual's "right to choose" never seem even to mention those who are most affected by abortion - the ones whose lives are being terminated (whether by dismemberment or by medication).

The silence is as stunning as the clamour.

• Is this incongruity due to simple ignorance of well-established scientific data?
• Or is it due to wilful ignorance, through fear of what the truth might be?
• Or, something deeper still and more dangerous?

I make no judgement of the people involved. But the incongruity they are caught up in involves denial, which is never healthy: and that is the subject of this article.

The individual's "right to choose" has become a kind of stand-alone value, so absolute that it trumps every other consideration.

The act of choosing means more than what is chosen.

According to a statement by the U.S. Supreme Court, "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life".

So

• Where does this cult-like status of the individual's freedom come from?
• Can choice make something right regardless of all else?
• Does the democratic majority override the need to enquire any further?
• How come public service media feel entitled to give "pro-choice" such one-sided publicity?

The incongruity is rooted in an understanding of freedom that goes back a long way.

A main achievement of classical liberalism was its vindication of the rights, equality and freedom of individuals, over against the authoritarianism, class privilege and obscurantism of earlier times.

This required restricting the role of the State to maximising the conditions that enable individuals, with all their diversity, to live together with dignity, equality and freedom. (This now includes allowing for subsidiarity, partnerships and ‘power sharing'.)

Less positive consequences arose when the status of individuals came to be expanded in far-reaching ways - to meet social, cultural and economic interests. Both right-wing and left-wing movements would expand the status of the individual beyond that promoted by the Enlightenment.

Francis Fukuyama traces these developments further back to Jean-Jacque Rousseau for whom autonomy meant the recovery of one's authentic inner self by escape from the social rules that imprisoned it; (Liberalism and its Discontents; Profile Books 2022, p. 51).

Right-wing movements pushed the rights of individuals in favour of greater market freedom. State regulations, social welfare legislation and the redistribution of wealth were not in their interests.

They still push in the direction of unregulated markets and unregulated exploitation of resources, regardless of the inequalities that this causes. Not to mention the highly developed techniques for brainwashing developed by right-wing media in USA - and their success in generating doubt, fear, falsehood and anger.

Left-wing movements pushed in the direction of ever-expanding claims for personal autonomy and self-actualisation over against various social norms and traditions.

They, too, resent legislation that restricts personal choice and freedom.

For some, self-actualisation repudiates anything that appears to limit that ‘inner self' Rousseau spoke of. E.g."The gender paradigm sees "truth" and "reality" as exercises of social power. Our bodies are blank slates; they do not carry any intrinsic meaning, and we should use technology to overcome any supposedly "natural" limits that impinge on our autonomy". (Prof. Abigail Favale PhD, Interview in The Catholic World Report, July 12, 2022).

Favale's critique obviously refers to the ideology of gender fluidity, with its gratuitous spurning of any ‘natural limits' - using technology/medication if necessary to remove them.

This would make sexual identity and gender identity simply matters of personal choice.

But the critique applies also to the question being addressed here: abortion - at any stage of pregnancy - comes to be thought of only as the means we use to remove an obstacle to complete personal freedom.

Further, if personal freedom is the basis of a person's rights and personal worth, this is bad news for those whose ability to exercise their freedom is still developing or diminished by age or illness.

Alas, however, freedom that is not bound by "truth" or "reality" or any of the order inherent in nature is ultimately freedom for make-believe - because the world is not like that.

"Human beings are not free-floating agents capable of reshaping themselves in any way they choose; this only happens in online virtual worlds…

"Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by screens that allow us to easily imagine ourselves in alternative realities or as alternative beings. …

"The real world, however, continues to be different: wills are embedded in physical bodies that structure and also limit the extent of individual agency…" (Fukuyama, 153)

In other words, our true self is not some inner self waiting to be liberated from every requirement of nature or society; our true self is our whole self in right relationships with all else.

Not the heirs of classical liberalism

The liberal agenda benefits us all where it fosters the development of personal responsibility, moving away from social patterns and leadership styles that were more typical of feudal societies and that prolonged over-dependence on others.

The problem is with the excesses and exaggerations of individualism.

The further these movements slip away from reality into the realms of subjectivism, the more they begin to look like a return to the obscurantism that classical liberalism would have spared us by its respect for the reality of an objective world, the importance of scientific method, and acknowledgement of objective truth and knowledge.

To regard objective reality and truth as "exercises of social power" which inhibit one's "inner self" implies willingness to accept unreality and untruth.

And so, the difference between right and wrong becomes just a matter of public opinion.

In debate with Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas argued for the primacy of democratic choice over whatever the choice led to. Lincoln's response was that there were more important principles at stake than democracy, namely the premise that "all are created equal" - and on that premise, slavery was wrong, whatever about any democratic majority; (Fukuyama, p. 123). (President Biden could learn from his predecessor.)

Classical liberalism was right to affirm the rights, equality and freedom of individuals. But, ironically, it is precisely these values that are put in jeopardy by exaggerated claims made in the name of individual rights and personal autonomy. All the more because, unlike classical liberalism, which promoted tolerance, the more extreme left and right-wing ideologies have become intolerant, even aggressive, in pursuing the interests of the self.

Of course, if there is no meaning to life and the universe beyond what the individual decides to make of it, then there is no point in talking about a common good to which the individual has any obligation.

Right-wing movements need to learn that "if economic freedom to buy, sell, and invest is a good thing, that does not mean that removing all constraints from economic activity will be even better." (p. 154).

The left needs to learn that "if personal autonomy is the source of an individual's fulfilment, that does not mean that unlimited freedom and the constant disrupting of constraints will make a person more fulfilled." (p. 154)

The pursuit of exaggerated claims has been facilitated by the widespread assumption that what we can do with nature, we may do.

However, perhaps that kind of thinking has had its hour.

A new ecological awareness cogently reminds us that there are purposes built into nature, including human nature, that cannot be ignored with impunity; that everything is connected, and that there is still a difference between using nature and abusing it.

And in real life, there are life-giving ways of relating and caring that completely transcend individualism's narrow horizons.

• Peter Cullinane was the first bishop of the Diocese of Palmerston North. Now he is "finding retirement more like being re-cycled."

This is not some fanciful doctrinal pronouncement from a bunch of desiccated old men wearing weird clothes in the Vatican. It's a clinical statement from medical professionals describing a biological reality.

The point here is that it's impossible to arbitrarily determine any moment after fertilisation when a foetus suddenly and magically morphs from being a lump of tissue to becoming "human," since it's already a genetically unique and complete living being. Any such theoretical point (12 weeks? 20 weeks? The point at which the baby can survive outside the womb? The moment of actual live birth?) can be chosen only for reasons of convenience, pragmatism or sentiment - or perhaps all three.

If we accept the biological fact that life starts at the moment of conception, then it follows inexorably that abortion at any point during the development of the foetus involves extinguishing a human life. Whether you choose to call that murder is another matter. Society chooses not to, generally preferring to regard murder as a crime that can be committed only on a living, breathing, sentient human. (I say "generally" because the Crimes Act provides for a jail term of up to 14 years for someone "who causes the death of any child that has not become a human being in such a manner that he or she would have been guilty of murder if the child had become a human being". I'm not a lawyer, but I think this offence is used in cases where a pregnant woman is violently assaulted, resulting in the loss of her unborn baby.)

The idea that abortion is murder is usually dismissed as unrealistic and absolutist, even fanatical, yet it's one that can reasonably and logically be held. Society rejects it, however, because a consensus view has evolved that there are circumstances in which abortion is justified, necessary and humane. Placing time limits on it, as most abortion laws do, is essentially a pragmatic compromise aimed at making acceptable what might otherwise be unthinkable. Thus society is prepared to approve thousands of foetuses being aborted at, say, 12 weeks - although even then a baby is fully formed, with all its organs, muscles and limbs in place - but recoils in disgust at the idea of a baby being removed from the womb alive and left to die, cold and gasping for breath, in a hospital back room. (Couldn't happen? Oh, but it did.)

At whatever point the abortion takes place, the timing is still arbitrary. There is no magic line marking a point beyond which snuffing out a human life (often by violent means, including dismemberment) suddenly becomes unacceptable. But what has happened in New Zealand, as in other "progressive" democracies, is that as society has become more inured to the idea of abortion, limitations on when the procedure can be carried out have been stretched to the point where they eventually disappeared altogether. Under the Abortion Legislation Act 2020, there's nothing to prevent babies being aborted even when they are capable of surviving outside the womb. All that's required is for two doctors to agree that the late-term abortion is "clinically appropriate".

At this point, abortion really is tantamount to murder, albeit carried out with the sanction of the state; in other words with our concurrence. But we're not told how often this happens in God's Own Country, because since the passing of the Act there's no longer any provision for the collation and publication of information about abortions. It's legal now, you see, so the public is deemed to have no more interest in knowing about abortions - how many are performed, the reasons for them and the gestational age of the baby - than it has in knowing about tooth extractions, facelifts or hernia repairs.

This probably suits most people perfectly well, since what they don't know won't trouble them. Society has been conditioned by decades of feminist indoctrination into believing abortion is a human right and a women's health issue. What it actually entails - that is to say, the moral implications as well as the physical detail - is something people prefer not to dwell on. Easier just to ignore the whole thing.

The morality (or otherwise) of abortion has suddenly been brought back into sharp relief by the furore over the US Supreme Court's reversal of the Wade v Roe judgment. Much of the reaction - for example, the grotesquely hysterical scenes at American protest rallies and the ostentatious displays of hand-wringing by the likes of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi (both nominally Catholic, incidentally) was predictable. What was less so was the desperate attempt by abortion rights activists in New Zealand, assisted by their allies in the media, to make political capital out of the decision despite it being of no direct relevance here.

Even in America, the primary consequence of the majority ruling is simply that decisions on abortion laws will be handed back to the states, which is where they belonged in the first place. This has been wilfully misrepresented as a deliberate assault on American womanhood when in fact it's an acknowledgement that decisions on issues like abortion should be made by elected legislatures in state capitals, not by a judicial elite in Washington DC. (Last time I checked, American women were allowed to vote, so are free to exert influence on their politicians via the ballot box.)

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, we were subjected to the unedifying spectacle of politicians from across the spectrum scrambling to clamber aboard the abortion rights bandwagon, each trying to outdo the others with their pronouncements of woe and despair. Even David Seymour, who has arguably the least to gain and the most to lose by pandering to leftist feminists, couldn't resist joining the chorus of denunciation. It wasn't the first time Seymour had allowed his obvious antipathy toward the anti-abortion lobby to get the better of his political judgment. So much for ACT's greatest political virtue, which is that it isn't like the other parties. On this issue Seymour hunted with the pack.

Less surprising was Christopher Luxon's eagerness to convince the media that a National government would leave the abortion laws alone. This was a no-win situation for Luxon; people who hate National didn't believe him anyway, while people who might be inclined to support the party probably thought less of him for his moral equivocation, given that he has previously declared himself to be pro-life. He should have taken a less defensive stance. As it is, voters are entitled to wonder whether Luxon (a) has any bedrock values or (b) has been intimidated by the media into watering down his personal principles in order to appear more woke.

Instructing his MP Simon O'Connor to take down a tweet welcoming the Roe v Wade decision didn't help. Abortion has traditionally been treated as a personal conscience issue for MPs, so O'Connor's exercise of his right to free speech need not have been seen as a threat to the party. By censoring him, Luxon achieved the unusual feat of simultaneously appearing timid and a control freak.

As for the New Zealand media - well, needless to say they covered the issue with their customary detachment and unstinting commitment to neutrality and balance. The tone of the TV coverage was a blend of despair, denunciation, alarmism and moral panic, and overall only marginally less hysterical than the footage of a woman shown on her knees sobbing inconsolably in the streets of Washington. The dominant narrative, shared across all mainstream media but with no obvious basis in fact, was that women's abortion rights were threatened in New Zealand too, although exactly how or by whom wasn't explained.

I was able to predict with almost 100 percent accuracy the pro-choice activists who would be wheeled out to tell us what an appalling setback for women the court's decision was. Both channels had 87-year-old Dame Margaret Sparrow (Newshub honouring her with the adjective "legendary") and the voluble American Terry Bellamak - media favourites both - plus an unfamiliar (to me) American academic from the University of Otago who baldly pronounced, with no basis, that Luxon shouldn't be believed when he said National would leave the abortion law intact. In an item that took up much of the first segment of Sunday night's 6 pm news, Newshub could find no room for a single pro-life voice. (TVNZ, to its credit, did.)

At the heart of the protests over Roe v Wade is the notion that abortion is a human right - a very recent idea that has somehow taken precedence over the right to life, which is at the core of most moral values systems. This can only be explained as a triumph of ideology over humanity.

When I did a rough calculation in 2018 (the last statistics were published in 2019), the number of babies aborted in New Zealand since the law was first liberalised in 1977 was creeping up towards the half-million mark. In the US, more than 40 million babies were aborted between 1973 and 2019 - more than the population of Canada or Poland. Pro-abortion lobbyists celebrate this as a triumph for women's rights, but it seems a tragically perverse way to assert women's autonomy.

• Karl du Fresne has been in journalism for more than 50 years. He is now a freelance journalist and blogger living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand.
• First published by Karl du Fresne. Republished with permission.

Peace involves the human person as a whole, the Pope says, so true peacemakers defend human life at every stage of its existence and promote the common good through their economic policies and activities.

Among the points the Pope makes are:

• In growing sectors of public opinion, "the ideologies of radical liberalism and technocracy are spreading the conviction that economic growth should be pursued even to the detriment of the state's social responsibilities and civil society's networks of solidarity".

One of the social rights and duties most under threat today is the right to work. A fresh understanding of work, as a fundamental good for the individual, for the family and for society, is required so that a policy of universal employment can be realised.

• At this stage in history, it is becoming increasingly important to promote the right to religious freedom "not only from the negative point of view, as freedom from — for example, obligations or limitations involving the freedom to choose one's religion — but also from the positive point of view, in its various expressions, as freedom for - for example, bearing witness to one's religion, making its teachings known, [and] engaging in activities in the educational, benevolent and charitable fields".

• Every offence against life, especially at its beginning, "causes irreparable damage to development, peace and the environment", so those who support abortion "will never be able to produce happiness or peace".

• There is also a need to "acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union".

Such principles, the Pope says, are inscribed in human nature itself and the Church's efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character but addressed to people of all religious affiliations.

Sources:

Catholic News Service

AsiaNews

Text of Pope's message

Image: Brainflash