The Problem with N. T. Wright’s Abortion Remarks

Anglican theologian and former bishop of Durham N. T. Wright has landed himself in hot water following remarks that abortion is acceptable in “some circumstances,” such as rape, incest, or disability. This should not have been a total surprise; Wright weighed in a year ago on American politics to bemoan U.S. conservatives who defend gun rights and attack abortion, describing them as “powerful men” trying to “tell women what they could and could not do.”

Inevitably, both remarks were made on podcasts, and it’s hard not to have a certain sympathy for otherwise thoughtful public figures asked to comment on complex matters on the spot. We were certainly not getting a thorough and considered ethical response from Wright, but rather off-the-cuff remarks made in answer to specific questions. He did also go on to say that abortion was “tragic” and that he had considerable moral concerns with it, especially in the case of late-term abortions. 

But this, one felt, was also exactly the problem. This is a man who has written over seventy books on every sort of theological subject, covering the Bible, politics, history, and ethics. It is not a matter beyond his expertise or his merited concern, yet we are hearing about it not in a serious academic format, but on a podcast. Having listened to both of the relevant discussions in full, there was something especially dispiriting about hearing a supposedly eminent theologian declare that the question of when life begins was a matter for doctors, and not for him: “I am not medically qualified to say at what point I would draw a line.” 

This is, to be blunt, just not good enough from any public intellectual, let alone a Christian theologian. I would be very surprised indeed if he thought that the ethics of bombing civilians was a matter for explosives experts or if the evils of child abuse are a question for social workers. It is also obvious to any reasonably intelligent and informed person that there is no medically objective test for when life begins. Indeed, doctors cannot even say definitively when life ends—has a resuscitated patient “died”? Even apparently “objective” criteria such as viability are in practice subjective and continually shifting due to the advances of medical science. At present there is a discrepancy between abortion law and medical science, in which children whose life could be saved outside of the womb are instead delivered and allowed to die—or killed in the operating room. That disconnect is only going to get larger if something like artificial wombs become a reality. 

The problem with Wright here isn’t simply that he is a liberal on abortion, but that he approached such a grave question in a careless fashion. Where life begins, when we become ensouled, and when we attain moral personhood are not easy questions, but they are just the sort of questions that philosophers and theologians must answer. If one cannot answer such questions, or at least coherently articulate the inherent ambiguities that preclude clear answers, then perhaps one should not be opining on the issue at all. 

Wright framed his view as allowing compassionate exceptions in difficult circumstances, but his answers felt glib and outdated. His list was not much different from the one that regulates British abortion law. Theoretically, two doctors must agree that a woman’s pregnancy would pose a greater risk to her physical or mental health than termination, but in practice this standard is applied so liberally as to allow abortion on demand up until twenty-four weeks. Indeed, since the pandemic, abortion pills can be mailed directly to the patient, a policy that has already led to tragedy. The culture of shame and disapproval, combined with economic peril, that made single motherhood an existential danger in past ages is long gone in Western cultures, with over half of British babies now born outside of marriage, and a welfare system that actively encourages this situation. Far more often, despite the widespread availability of effective contraception, abortion is used as a form of birth control, and not as a tragic resort for desperate women, with one in three women having an abortion in her lifetime.

Wright embodies a problem that bedevils many theologians and Church leaders of his generation, especially here in Britain. Such figures love moderation to a fault and defer excessively to the ethics and politics of modern liberal democratic society. Wright’s comments on U.S. gun culture and abortion politics were typical of British prejudices that take little account of America’s distinctive constitutional and cultural development, and passively absorb the narratives of one side of a highly polarized media culture. While I share his frustration with the culture war, what such critiques miss is the deeper failings of modern liberal democratic societies, betraying something like the complacency often found among secular centrists in the face of civilizational decline.

We do not live in a society that weighs abortion with moral seriousness in difficult edge cases, but rather one that treats the matter as trivial. This widespread indifference sees us sleepwalking into an unstable ethical landscape, in which new technology will make abortion potentially avoidable, while at the same time handing parents new motives to seek it out. Sex-selective abortion, which Wright mentions in passing, is just one of the early moral abominations of this new technologically accelerated abortion regime. With more sophisticated genetic screening, not only will disabled children be selectively aborted, so too might unborn children judged to be academically slow, mentally ill, or simply possessing the “wrong” height, hair color, or facial structure. 

Here is an area where even Christians who concede tragic exceptions to abortion opposition ought to admit that our current legal and social regime is sick and dangerous. Women often cite threats to their education and employment as a primary reason for seeking an abortion. We are at real risk, having supposedly moved on from exploiting women’s lives and bodies, to simply handing them over from the patriarchy to the oligarchy; and from bullying husbands to bullying managers. In the emerging culture in which we live, unwanted pregnancies are seen as a threat to earning potential, and below-replacement birthrates can be met by importing cheap labor from abroad. Every aspect of human life, from womb to tomb, could become technologically managed by state and market, a situation that is sold to us as an exciting consumer “choice.” This coming bioethical metacrisis is one that Christian leaders and apologists must not meet with complacency.