Just a few days before the end of the last academic term, we ended up talking about infanticide in one of the courses I teach.

Infanticide is a common practice in the hunter-gatherer world. We humans have spent the majority of our time as a species of discarding newborns who have the misfortune to be born into particularly desperate material circumstances. At the best of times, the hunter-gatherer world was one of bare subsistence, in which there were few spare calories available to be stored away for a rainy day. Sometimes things were so tight that a newborn and a sibling who was still nursing could not both be nourished by the same mother. Instead of risking two deaths, and perhaps the illness and death of the mother as well, the parents abandoned the younger of the two.

Christianity distinguished itself from the religious context in which it emerged by its opposition to infanticide. Going forward, the practice was considered a major transgression of moral law. The Church even thought through how to make theological sense of those cultures before Christianity that engaged in the practice for the kinds of reasons I just gave.

I admit to a certain amount of confusion on the matter of those hunter-gatherer infanticides. They are guilty of one of the most serious crimes, there can be no doubt about this. Yet it is hard to altogether deny the possibility that trying to preserve these children would have caused still greater human suffering. I throw my hands up in the face of this and just say that it’s above my pay grade to determine the final moral valence. I would very much like to be able to say something like, “I could not do that with my own child.” But I would say that as someone in a modern society of abundance. I have never been a hunter-gatherer living in a pre-Christian subsistence society, not even for a minute, and so I do not know how I could make such a statement with any confidence.

Infanticide and abortion are not precisely the same thing, but they are certainly members of the same family of moral consideration. Abortion, of course, was a topic of much consideration in the recent presidential election, and clearly, there exists a massive divide in the American public on the issue.

I admit that in thinking through the question in reaction to my classroom conversation about it, I am drawn not to the topic’s philosophical and theological elements, but in a very specifically autobiographical direction.

I was born in 1966. My parents faced a difficult situation in the second half of 1965. In July of that year, my mother got pregnant. She and my father were unmarried, young, uncertain of their career goals and future lives and, indeed, of the future of their relationship. And now they had an unexpected pregnancy.

This was pre-1973, so there was not yet a Roe v. Wade. There was only just Griswold, which produced the Court-invented constitutional right to privacy that later, in Roe, provided the aegis for a federal right to abortion, up until Dobbs revoked that right in 2022. In 1965, the year my mother got pregnant with her first child, abortion was illegal in all 50 states, except in cases wherein the pregnant woman’s life was in danger.

The expansion of abortion only began in the year after my birth. Between the year after I was born and the advent of Roe, about a third of states liberalized their abortion laws to some degree, a tiny handful completely repealing existing abortion bans, most of the others only slightly enlarging the cases in which abortion was legal (e.g., permitting it when the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or the fetus had serious and life-threatening abnormalities). The chances that my parents, who were in none of these mitigating circumstances, could have secured a legal abortion in 1965 in any part of the country were zero.

I have little doubt that, in a post-1973 world, my parents, given their situation and their cultural attitudes, might well have made a different decision about that pregnancy. They were young and indecisive about their collective future. They were also not overly religious. Though some members of their families were more immersed in faith than they were, I have no reason to believe that they would have been swayed by their views on this if they had decided it was too risky to have a child and if there had then existed a legal framework that made abortion possible.

It is a bracing thought to understand that, had the fetus that was me been conceived a decade after it was, when it might have been legal to abort it, there is a considerable possibility that it would have been aborted. That I would have been aborted.

Advocates for such a right might well and effectively make the argument that such a decision might have been materially and personally better for the two people who, in the world we are in, became my parents. They might have avoided a turbulent 10-year marriage. They have both told me since that a central reason behind their marriage then was the pregnancy and the pressure of both families to “do the right thing.” They would also have avoided the very messy divorce that concluded that decade of turbulence and the births of two more children after me. The entire creation of the family that was broken in half by the divorce, almost certainly with serious negative emotional consequences for everyone involved, would not have happened.

And I and my siblings would never have been born.

My position on abortion—which is that of the Church to which I belong—is perfectly congruent with that autobiographical bit of interest. If, though, for philosophical or political reasons, I felt compelled toward a position on the other side of this question, my own history would pose a problem.

You will understand, I am sure, that I am very happy to have been born, even into a less than perfect familial situation, and I am overjoyed that I got the opportunity to grow up and to meet my wife and that the two of us were able to have the two beautiful children we are raising.

It cannot really be said any other way: I am grateful that in my society there existed no notion of “a right to abortion” when I was conceived, as there is good reason to believe I would not exist if my parents could have decided what to do about the pregnancy with that as an option. And everyone in a similar situation to mine is compelled to the same view, unless they will their own self-annihilation.

I stop short of drawing any conclusions about the American debate on abortion. You may draw them as you will. I think we will agree, though, that there is something important here.