Eminem and Gandhi Are Right

First, let’s hear from Eminem. His new album Revival, though not an overnight commercial triumph, nonetheless unveiled last month to ubiquitous notices. That’s small wonder, for two reasons: First, because Eminem is an uncannily gifted wordsmith, above all in feminine rhyme/assonance, who never fails to deliver novel verse; and second, because most of the album’s themes are either guaranteed fan-base pleasers (vintage soundings of domestic and social grievances); or squarely in the political safety zone (attacking Donald Trump).

What is something of a wonder is the track on that album called “River”—an anthem variously sung and rapped by Ed Sheeran and Eminem. In it, a male narrator who’s a self-described “liar,” “thief,” and “cheat” looks back on exploiting one particular woman, then living with the knowledge of her abortion.

Note, first, that there is no sanitized “reproductive freedom” here. Instead, the vicar of rap deploys the progressive equivalent of both the b-word—“I made you terminate my baby”—and the c-word—the song ends with, “what’s one more lie to tell our unborn child?”

“Didn’t really wanna abort,” the narrator further explains. Maybe that’s why the New York Times didn’t even mention “River” in an otherwise detailed review of the album; and why SPIN, though criticizing the track for several paragraphs on ostensibly musical/rap grounds, managed somehow not to mention the abortion at all. Measured by mores in the entertainment industry, “River” might be the most subversive song ever from a artist whose entire career has been defined by transgression.

As it happens, both rock and rap have strayed from secular dogma on abortion before, beginning with the Sex Pistols’ still-shocking 1977 “Bodies.” (In which an apostrophized fetus yells, “I’m not an animal!” at “Mummy.”) There’s also African reggae star Alpha Blondy’s 1994 “Abortion is a Crime,” which opens with the sounds of a baby’s voice (“Jah say don’t let His children cry”); Kid Rock’s 2000 track “Abortion,” whose narrator ponders suicide upon realizing what he’s done (“I know your brothers and your sister and your mother too/Man I wish you could see them too”); alternative rock group Ben Folds Five’s ambiguous 1997 “Brick,” about a high-school sweetheart; and several numbers by Leonard Cohen that perennially annoy his progressive fans, including the 1992 song “The Future,” whose lyrics include: “Destroy another fetus now / We don’t like children anyhow / I’ve seen the future, baby / It is murder.”

Of course pro-abortion and related ideological ballads abound in rock and rap as well, by feminists and others for whom “pro-choice” is a cat whistle. But like Sherlock’s telling canine, what’s interesting here isn’t what we would expect to hear—i.e., lefty-leaning pop music producing lefty-leaning abortion-and-feminism songs. It’s instead the contrarian fact that other songs, like “River,” prove something more unexpected, and hence interesting: Emotional dissent from the pro-choice party line continues to resonate somewhere out there in pop’s audience.

None of which is to accuse Eminem or other renegades of signing on to natural law theory, any more than “STD” in popular music means Sacred Theology Doctorate. But that’s just the point. You don’t have to wear a cassock, or follow around people who do, to get that the “blob of tissue” narrative is a problem—and emanations from popular music are just one example of that wider truth.

Which brings us to a second witness in defense of the proposition that the pro-life movement will live long and prosper, even if some churches don’t. Contrary to common impression, the world’s greatest apostle of nonviolence was no man of the social left. Readers, meet Mahatma Gandhi.

The brilliant Hindu barrister-turned-moral theorist was an admirably consistent thinker: His concern for the well-being of animals extended not only to other species, but also to his own. Among other teachings in keeping with that paradigm, he rejected abortion, including in hard cases.

In a collection of his works called All Men are Brothers, Gandhi counsels a young husband presenting a particularly thorny situation: his wife was impregnated by someone else while the husband was traveling, and now his family is urging abortion as the only way of saving face. While acknowledging that cases like these aren’t rare, Gandhi remains true to the principle of anti-violence. “The essence of goodness is: to preserve life, promote life, help life to achieve its highest destiny,” he tells the husband. “The essence of evil is: destroy life, harm life, and hamper the development of life. . . . It seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.”

Gandhi also understood, and condemned, the practice of rich Westerners pressing contraception on poorer, darker India and poorer, darker, others, too. He rejected the popular idea—popular among some better-off white people, anyway—that humanity’s best interests mandate a diminution of non-whites. Not even a lengthy visit by the sainted Margaret Sanger could shake his conviction that life is good, and that thwarting it by violence or artificial means is wrong. “If love is pure it will transcend animal passion and will regulate itself. We have not had enough education of the passions,” he told her.

Whether embodied by the angry remorse of “River” or in the teachings of one of the most inspirational figures of the modern age, there’s no shortage of ongoing resistance to the notion that abortion is “sacrosanct,” as grim custodians of the theology of Roe believe. And plenty of this cultural counter-traffic isn’t being directed from St. Peter’s Square.

Who, for example, said each of the following:

(1) “I’m positively against it. I don’t have the right to any other view. . . . My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life.”

(2) “I am obviously a pro-lifer (not for religious reasons, but because I am an atheist who can read biology).”

(3) “The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief.”

(4) “It is a poverty that a child must die so that you can live as you wish.”

The answers are: (1) Jack Nicholson, whose teenage mother nearly aborted him; (2) Nat Hentoff, the left-wing civil libertarian and longstanding pro-life champion who died last year; (3) Emma Goldman, an anarcho-communist atheist; and (4) Mother Teresa.

Admittedly, that last one was an out-Catholic, so she shouldn’t count. But the rest of these, and many other voices questioning the theology of penumbras decreed in 1973, aren’t trolls for Rome—and haven’t been, and won’t be.

And that, in the end, is exactly the case for optimism about the pro-life movement’s continuing vigor: because as it turns out, you don’t have to be a card-carrying Thomist to understand a few big, simple things. Life—including life of homo sapiens—is intrinsically good. Cavalier violence is intrinsically bad. To love creation is to love ourselves. And micro-humans don’t belong in garbage pails.

When a lie becomes whopping enough, one doesn’t need philosophy or theology to pierce it. As the life work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, goes to show, just understanding what it means to be human is enough. It’s a principle that extends to empathy for the ways in which the lie distorts the lives of those who don’t see through it. The godawful internet meme #shoutyourabortion, to name just one example, is a pitiable, mass-deluded attempt to expiate what pro-abortion ideology says needs no expiation in the first place: natural remorse.

It’s true that 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian teaching are the tent-poles of the pro-life movement, all around the world. But it’s also true that plenty of other people will keep finding the same tent, Hindus and atheists and “nones” and drifters, included.

Some of these people will become believers. Others remain fellow travelers, sharing nothing with the rest of the tribe but an instinctive empathy for the small and weak. Still others won’t care about metaphysics at all—but will care about the baggage that they, or their friends or family members, are burdened with. (Second thoughts about life after the sexual revolution are now a vector into the pro-life movement all on their own.) And of course for millions of other people who lean more toward Gandhi than toward Cecile Richards & co., just the image posted on Instagram from the latest high-tech glimpse in utero will be enough.

In church or out of it, macro-humans both present and to come are finding more reasons than ever to question the baleful assault on humanity licensed 45 years ago; to err on the side of their own kind; and to think—even shout, sometimes—#Imwiththem.

Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and author of several books including Adam and Eve after the Pill and How the West Really Lost God.