Solidarity or autonomy?


Published October 17, 2024

WORLD Opinions

Sarah Elaine Harrison is upset that she doesn’t get more sympathy for her abortions, and she recently took to the pages of The New York Times to let the world know about it. Specifically, she wants her first abortion, which she procured because caring for a baby would have interfered with “pursuing the career I wanted” while already a single mother, to be judged as sympathetically as her second, which followed a diagnosis of Trisomy 18 for one of the twins growing in her womb.

Harrison complains that though her second abortion is generally viewed as excusable, “the public is not similarly sympathetic” to her first abortion—and most abortions that are like it. She insists that it “was just as important as” the second and, “Not being able to receive abortion care in either situation would have been detrimental to my life.”

Pro-lifers might respond that her abortions were more detrimental to the lives of the developing human beings she had killed. This is true, but we should not leave it there, for Harrison has provided a perfect example of how liberalism’s ideal of autonomy destroys its professions of solidarity.

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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research interests include American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien.

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