I am increasingly appreciating Ross Douthat’s work. His piece on January 2 on abortion should not be missed.

The paradox of abortion in our culture illuminates the conflict between our deep drive for mastery through volitional agency and the giftness of life. One of the deepest tenets of our cultural faith is the goodness of choice. Countless times I see people facing difficult, sometimes life threatening circumstances and what they really want are options even if all of them are bad. Countless times I hear well meaning friends offer the comfort “at least you have choices” even if their choices are life-robbing chemotherapy or death. If we have not options we feel our identity compromised.

Deep in Genesis 2-3 is the gnawing paradox of mastery. Adam and Eve long for mastery and jump at the serpent-offered path to the apparent full flourishing of their divinely imaged agency. The consequences of choice as the vehicle for mastery come quickly. Are they really now free to live with nakedness? Fruitfulness whether by womb or soil is fraught with frustration and unintended consequence. Choice seems always to promise mastery but any honest tracker of past years resolutions should admit the promise is regularly denied.

Reproductive control, the most brutal and dramatic expression of which is abortion, is all about life on our terms. As genetic science continues to expand our power to determine predictable physical attributes of our heirs the conflict will heighten. “I gave you life so that you would embody the values I cherish!” My agency as life giver then confronts the agency of the life I initiated. This is every parent’s experience. We wanted our Father’s throne but like so many things, attempting to sit in it was not how we imagined it would be.

One of the most dramatic observations of the Reformation is that a chief obstacle to reconciliation with our divine Father is the acknowledgment that we are not our own. We are not our own masters. We didn’t author ourselves and the path to reconciliation and resolution of the age of decay is likewise beyond us. Salvation like life is finally a gift, not an achievement. This is deeply disturbing for addicts of choice. I was surprised by the resurgence of squabbles between Arminians and Calvinists but I should not have been.

The great contribution of America has been the gift of making what was once only afforded by nobility the “inalienable rights” of all. Kings, nobles and powerful people have always had the power to define the good, to give life and take it away. Through custom, law and technology now we all get to choose.  We imagine it will give us mastery. We imagine it will make us like God. We tell ourselves that with enough mastery we would improve on God’s moral performance and truly bring peace on earth, at least how we define peace. This self-evaluation can only be maintained if we keep our relationship neighbors polite and poorly informed, which is what we do with abortion.