Fertility cults

The debate over abortion is a fight over the mythic belief in fate. People like to believe that getting pregnant is one of those archaic moments of divine intervention.

The issue is not so much a Christian concern for life. It is the far more ancient belief that some higher being, the gods written in small letters and never really identified, have brought about fertility. Abortion riles conservatives not because of their interpretations of the old testament, but because it runs against the fatalistic urge to reproduce. Fertility is treated as a sacred blessing that cannot be denied for fear that worse punishment will appear, death.


Life is sacred to the conservative right because they are more prone to mythic thought, to looking for the intervention of chance, the possibility of a random selection which when granted must be accepted. If you are picked then you must accept your lot, so the mythic logic.

Christianity is simply layered on top of this much older belief. Pro-life defenders want to believe that there is still a place for divine intervention in the world, and pregnancy, to the extent that it has not been determined by science, seems like one of the few remaining instances when the hand of the gods might be felt.

The language of the old testament still applies to current discourse: “a couple is blessed with children,” “they are left barren.” The implication is not that it is their fault. Mythic thought is discerning enough to know that the virtuous are quite as likely to be denied children as anyone else, --a quality which makes pregnancy an even more random, archaic gift. Even the evil doers have children.

Fertility is beyond good and evil.

Many people barely believe in the gift of Christian salvation, yet they can accept that children are a divine present. Our consumer desires readily adapt to the older mythic sense of receiving fertility.

A Christian face can easily be put on the gift, it can be ascribed to the Christian God , and thus doubly deserving of defense, as a last proof of the Lord’s care for us on earth and as a communal fear that one ought never spit in the face of the chthonic gods of fertility.

That this more ancient concern not to deny fertility precedes Christianity is demonstrated by the great tolerance Christians show premarital sex in relation to abortion. While sex outside marriage is warned against, once pregnancy occurs, another set of rules appears. The sin of adultery is acceptable if it results in fertility, a far more fundamental human concern than the proper regulation of sexual practice.

The pro choice position arises from the Enlightenment, and it implies religious tolerance as much as it does personal rights, the question of whether one would give oneself over to the reasoning of fertility cults or whether one would declare self-disciplining control over reproduction is the kind of ethical concern first extended to women as a result of the Enlightenment

That women have always practiced abortion is the something that neither the Enlightenment nor conservative Christian discourse knows how to address.

The prochoice position would leave the matter to the individual as if the question would be a matter of personal faith. The anti abortion activists want to characterize the matter as a communal threat. It is not just a personal decision with isolated implications, rather is affects the entire community.

So too with fertility rituals; they were never confined to isolated couples, but were readily understood as applying to the entire community. For one person to defile the fertility rites was to threaten the entire community. The life of the fetus argument is an attempt to make the question juridical, to find an Enlightened argument to counter the tolerance defence.

However the real concern of conservatives, their primal anxiety, is that the community as a whole will be denied future fertility because of one person’s sacrilige. The abortion debate concerns our understanding of what we might deny happening, our sense of the future.

Fertility superstition swirls through us all.

The depression of frustrated women, the male fear of impotence, the urgency to have children, the so called biological clock are manifestations of an older thinking, one that does not have to be reduced to just biology, but involves older practices and beliefs that have saturated our culture so completely that we don’t see them until they come into play