Fetal positions: and the odor of Narcisse - evaluation of Catholic Church's policy on abortion

The New Yorker's first issue (October 5) under new editor Tina Brown (former editor notoriously of Vanity Fair) presented its readers with a table of contents of unprecedented detail, a number of graphic innovations, an overpowering aroma of Narcisse, and a new stock of paper that increased the heft of the magazine by 25 percent. Equally heavy in the hand was a gratuitously snide essay on abortion and Catholicism as they combust in American politics.

In a piece wittily titled "Fetus, Don't Fail Me Now," Time magazine's formidable art critic Robert Hughes claims to have detected an unmistakable resemblance between something called "Whatizit," an anomalous and misshapen mascot for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and a fetus. "The fetish of the religious right had become an Olympic mascot," he surmises. The Whatizit "is a phantom of the zeitgeist, a case of overspill, or precipitation, from a popular culture laden with fetal obsession."

"Being an ex-Catholic, I am readily irked by such matters," Hughes explains. Thus begins a brief rehearsal of his gothic religious and sexual education under the Jesuits in Australia. "Every sperm was sacred," he says. Catholic metaphysical claims about the sacredness of sex and its necessary connection to procreation-especially admonitions against masturbation-did not sit well with adolescents "crammed with unruly testosterone." "The notion that some small part of the cosmic order hung on our teen-age willies was a heavy load for us young soldiers in Saint Ignatius's Army of Christ," recalls the pun-prone Private Hughes, who adds that "something of this fetishism about sperm continues to haunt the abortion debate."

Pausing between these spasms of ridicule, he takes a conventionally prochoice position, arguing, somewhat obscurely, that "the innocence of letuses is not in doubt. But it is not a moral value. Lettuces are innocent, too." He urges that the Olympic sponsors "abort" the Whatizit: "Anything but this lurid homunculus."

At this late date in the abortion debate it is remarkable that the New Yorker should publish such a tired caricature of Catholicism animated by Hughes's truncated understanding of the United States' abortion law. To suggest that the vast majority of Americans who find abortion-on-demand a moral difficulty are acting out of some sexual superstition exemplified by the teachings of the Catholic church is merely the most fashionable kind of prejudice. Conflating exaggerated Catholic condemnations of masturbation with abortion and mocking the idea of fetal life is, to say the least, disingenuous. Lettuces, indeed.

What Hughes tightly criticizes as traditional moral theology's "iron law of abstraction" is equally at work on the prochoice side of this debate. Some abortion-rights proponents champion the "iron law of abstraction" to the point of suppressing the facts about the beginning of human life. No less than Catholic moralists, they extend a logical scheme unreasonably in the face of human complexity and interdependence.

The cultural forces and intellectual antecedents of the abortion conflict have deep and ambiguous roots. How curious, for example, that Hughes concludes his diatribe by evoking the image of a "lurid homunculus." The homunculus--a small man or dwarf that some of the first men of science believed was inside the sperm--has an interesting history, and one that suggests abortion may have strange fathers indeed. In his recent book, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (Knopf), historian David Noble argues that the quest for the homunculus inspired some of the earliest scientific efforts of a celibate, clerical elite.

In the sixteenth century one prominent theory envisioned incubating semen in horse dung, thus producing a "homunculus, a motherless child." As Noble notes, "the idea of the homunculus, based upon spermist theory of conception, continued for some time to hold great attraction for men of science." Noble suggests that the Western rationalistic quest for technical mastery of nature has been driven for 1,000 years not by "men playing God" but "[it can] more appropriately be described as men playing women."

Today technologies of reproduction and genetics have brought us near a culmination of what Noble regards as an essentially misogynist scientific culture. "The very word 'mother' has become a scientific anachronism," he writes. "The obsessive scientific pursuit of a motherless child remains the telltale preoccupation of a womanless world."

So perhaps Hughes has misread this picture. The Whatizit may be an expression of the zeitgeist, but not of the particular zeitgeist he thinks. What if abortion is not the technological tool that finally liberates women from brute biological servitude, but the final weapon of a triumphant "law of abstraction" driven by the fugitive dream of a "womanless world"? Could the "feti sh" and "obsession" of our age be rationalistic dreams of emancipation from the bonds of nature--a dream that Hughes, like most of us, rejects when he hears it from "celibate theologians" but fails to recognize in modern, prochoice dress? Odder still, what if Catholicism's stubborn instinct about the moral dangers of separating sex from procreation proves a truer safeguard of the dignity of women--and of men--than Hughes's faith in the autonomous self? Stranger things have happened. Remember the homunculus.

PAUL BAUMANN

Paul Bautnann is the associate editor of Commonweal.

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