10 - Marking the absence of an embodied theology: an analysis of how people of faith talk about abortion in Northern Ireland

Summary

Introduction

How people of faith consider the issue of abortion from a prochoice perspective is largely unexplored in academic literature. This chapter draws on focus group data to examine the degree to which the embodied nature of becoming and being human, and a sense of God as love or compassion, contribute to study participants’ understandings of ‘the ground’ of the self and the modes of self-assertion these enable, particularly for pregnant people.

Many study participants spoke of the importance of love, compassion and respect within their faith communities, and to their own ways of being in the world. However, we propose that although they may have had this aspect of ‘self-grounding’ in common, absent substantive consideration of embodiment and interdependencies, their views of what constitutes sentiments and acts of love and compassion disregard the bodily autonomy of pregnant people. We argue that those participants who had an in-depth awareness of both the embodied nature of becoming and being human, and a sense of God as love or compassion, for God, and for one another, had to largely give up on the need for an unquestionable ground upon which to base self-assertion, be that ground based on doctrine and/or gendered norms.

Self-grounding and self-assertion

Within Christianity there is a belief that we are each made in the image of God and it is this that secures our dignity or inner core as humans. However, many (though not all) forms of Christianity also upheld a distinction between men and women, arguing they are not the same, with women historically constructed as men's ‘helpmates’ (Peters, 2018: 86). Furthermore, what counts as ‘life’ within the concept of the sacredness of life has shifted over time. As Rebecca Peters demonstrates, from the fourth to the seventeenth century most Christian theologians held that a prohibition on abortion only applied after ‘quickening’. Within the Catholic Church abortion was not completely prohibited until 1889 and it was as late as 1965 when the primary concern about abortion shifted from it being about the concealment of sexual sin to the protection of ‘life’ (Peters, 2018: 94). Thus, a range of shifting beliefs and practices within Christianity have constituted personhood differently over time.