Literature for the Pro-Choice

Human Life Review, Summer 2006 by Short, Edward

"History," Hugh Trevor-Roper told his students in his valedictory to the Oxford History School in 1980, "is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened."1 Trevor-Roper was not a particularly good historian-he made a terrible ass of himself when he insisted on the authenticity of those obviously forged Hitler diaries-but he was right about the importance of might-have-beens. To ignore such lively possibilities is to subscribe to historical determinism. For years Marxist historians claimed that the impact of the individual on events was negligible because impersonal trends, not people, drove history. It has only been fairly recently that historians have begun repudiating that immense fallacy. Mighthave-beens are crucial to this task because historians can only measure an individual's impact by asking what history might have looked like without this or that individual. The case of Churchill vividly illustrates this. If Lord Halifax instead of Churchill had become prime minister in June 1940, after France had fallen and the invasion of England seemed imminent, it is questionable whether Halifax would have pushed for total victory to rid the world of Nazism. His fondness for appeasement throughout the 1930s suggests that he would have done a deal. He would have spared his compatriots Churchill's blood, toil, tears, and sweat; and Nazism might have triumphed indefinitely. What might have been, had there been no Churchill, is rather horrifying.2

One of the might-have-beens that has always intrigued me is what English literature might look like if the different societies for which it was written had agreed with the pro-choice view that abortion is not only defensible but actually humane. The first thing that strikes one in considering this possibility is that it would almost certainly have resulted in fewer authors. How many of those that were unwanted or simply unplanned would have survived is, of course, impossible to say. But a world favorable to abortion would probably not have been favorable to the survival of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, or Saki-to name just a few English authors.

It requires some suspension of disbelief to imagine the parents of, say, Swift reasoning that the most humane alternative to an inconvenient birth might be abortion. The Anglo-Irish were a peculiar people-they drank a lot, gambled a lot, built houses they could never afford to finish, and loved suing each other-but they were never known to care a pin for the sort of theoretical thinking that would later lead to the French Revolution, which, in turn, produced the moral relativism that animates the pro-choice position. Still, we are speaking of contra-factual history and if, somehow, pro-choice views had obtained in 18th-century Dublin, Swift might never have seen the light of day.

As it was, Swift claimed that he had been bom in his father's house at Number 7 Hoey's Court, a smart residence before it succumbed, like so many of Dublin's Georgian houses, to disrepair. But in her recent biography Victoria Glendinning asserts that "Such a house could not have belonged to Swift's impecunious father, [who was] clinging on to a less than glorious legal career.. ."3 The house probably belonged to Swift's uncle, Godwin, a prosperous businessman, who took young Jonathan in after his father's death. Swift's father died in his twenties after siring five daughters and six sons. About Swift's mother Abigail, we know little other than that she took no part in her youngest son's upbringing. The one time she returned to Dublin to visit her grownup son she stayed in a boarding house where she told the landlady that she had come to town "to receive the addresses of a lover and under that character received her son.. ."4 Mother and son clearly shared the same droll sense of humor. In all events, if Georgian Dublin had subscribed to the tenets of Planned Parenthood it is questionable whether that awkward tryst would ever have taken place. And without Swift we should never have had "A Modest Proposal" (1729), which provides one of the greatest of all critiques of the pro-choice mentality by satirizing the arrogance and the ruthlessness of those who treat human life as though it were nothing more than a matter of expedience.

The peculiar solicitude that advocates of so-called reproductive rights show women-their contention, for example, that aborting babies somehow redounds to the dignity of women-is of a piece with the philanthropy of Swift's projector who, deploring the number of poor Irish mothers, "followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for alms" observes that "whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve well of the public."5 The solution he proposes has nothing if not a certain elegant finality. "A young healthy child well nursed is at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."6 The solution to the problem is cannibalism, the benefits of which Swift's projector sets out with studied reasonableness. It will decrease the number of papists (as much a nuisance for the Protestant Anglo-Irish as unwanted black children were for Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood); provide poor tenants with money to pay their rent; enhance the national cuisine; free parents of the burden of supporting costly children; give the owners of taverns something new to offer their customers; and improve relations between husbands and wives.