For reasons which will be obvious to anyone who follows the news, I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be 'pro-life' - and also what it doesn't mean. What is a distinctly Christian approach to the ethical issues surrounding the beginning and end of human life? Here are some thoughts, not all well developed at this stage.
1. The theological foundations of a Christian pro-life stance are creation and Christology. The doctrine of creation teaches us that each human being is made by God, in his image, and belongs to him. Life - including my own life! - does not ultimately 'belong' to any of us, but to God. That is why a human being cannot arbitrarily take another human being's life - consider Genesis 9:6. Christology comes in because it is, if you like, the highest compliment that could be paid to human nature that God the Son took it on himself and became incarnate. If we doubt the value of human life, the doctrine of the incarnation should be a sufficient rebuttal of those doubts. We could also add that, de jure, each human life belongs once again to God, this time not only by right of creation but by right of redemption.
2. The ethical implications of these foundations are sometimes very clear, and sometimes not so much. I think that anyone who celebrates the Annunciation - I don't mean necessarily by keeping the feast, but by being gladdened by the angelic news of the incarnation - ought to recognise that Christ in his incarnation sanctifies human life from conception. We ought to be pro-life in the narrower sense of 'against the deliberate ending of life in the womb'. But we need to recognise that issues around end-of-life care just are more difficult. There can be a moral difference, for example, between deliberately ending a life and withdrawing treatment - although both will end in death, and are undertaken in that knowledge. We ought not to act or talk as if this stuff were simple and straightforward.
3. To be pro-life is not the same as being anti-death. One aspect of recognising the sanctity of life is recognising that the mystery of its end does not lie entirely within our power. Thanks to medical advances, we can often delay death - but whether we ought to do so in every case is surely very doubtful. Especially for the Christian, who believes in and looks for the resurrection of the dead, being pro-life ought not to mean 'prolonging life wherever possible regardless of other considerations'.
4. It seems to me that many people - especially, I have to say, Americans - muddy the waters by confusing more than one issue. For example, in some of the tragic issues involving children which have come up in the UK, American commentators have been quick to equate being pro-life with believing in absolute parental autonomy. Some talk as if parents own their children's lives, something which I can't accept on theological principle (see 1, above), and some import the distinctly American (but not Christian) idea that the community and the state ought to have no input into tough decisions involving children. This is an unhelpful blurring of issues, and particularly when it is being shouted across the Atlantic sounds a lot like real-life tragedies here are being used as ammunition for ongoing culture wars there. (And as an aside, if the sanctity of life means anything, it means that issues of life must not be used in this way).
5. A distinctive of Christian engagement with this issue ought to be a certain amount of calm. Don't get me wrong: there should be anger when the sanctity of life is not respected, and there should be grief over individual tragedies and systemic horrors. But there needs to be somewhere behind that the faith in God who raises the dead and gives each one his or her due, so that we can engage without bitterness and frenzy.
6. Life is a gift. It is all too easy to present life as a burden - and then say that you have to carry it anyway, because hey, we're pro-life. Life is a gift. There should be joy in being pro-life, joy in honouring the greatest thing the Creator has made, joy in the fact that Christ came that we might have life, and life to the full. The Christian pro-life position is full of gratitude, seeing goodness where nobody else can see it, the joy of glimpsing the imago dei even in the briefest flickers of human existence and the hardest moments of human being. Tone matters, because it betrays what is really going on in our hearts.
