“I feel fine, considering the alternative.”337
—RONALD REAGAN, when asked how he felt about turning seventy-nine
“Every child should be a wanted child.” This is one of the slogans of the pro-choice movement. And behind it is a strong argument for the legality of abortion. The argument goes like this: lots of children live unwanted, miserable lives. If their parents don’t want them, why bring them into the world? Many children who are aborted come from broken homes, areas with gang violence. They are conceived out of wedlock. They have parents on drugs. They clearly would live miserable lives. There’s very little hope for them and those environments. They really are better off dead.
People who work in the foster care system have pointed out that they see very young children who are mistreated, sexually abused, burned with cigarettes, and subjected to painful, horrible conditions. Some of them come to believe that these children don’t have a life worth living. They would be better off if they were prevented from coming into the world and experiencing so much pain. So why torture them by bringing them into this world?
I agree that being unwanted is a very bad situation for any child. After all, children are dependent on their parents, completely dependent in the very early years and largely dependent for many years after that. And if your parent or parents don’t want you, then the chances are that they will not take care of you very well or that they will neglect you and treat you the way people treat something that they don’t want.
The argument about unwantedness, and the idea that a child is being set up to have a painful life, rests on a hidden premise. And that premise is that pain and pleasure are the two governing principles of life. If pain is going to outweigh pleasure, or if one is being set up for a life largely made up of pain, that life is then not worth living. The thinking is that our purpose in life is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. And if pain is really in your future, you’re better off not existing at all. This argument was first made, I believe, by the philosopher Epicurus, and it is sometimes called the Epicurean position. The modern name for it is a limited form of hedonism where pain versus pleasure is measured.
Let’s evaluate this argument. Historically, of course, the distinction between the wanted child and the unwanted child would seem to be inapplicable. Historically, most pregnancies were unplanned. Children typically were conceived accidentally. In this respect, they were unwanted in the beginning. Being a parent is scary, and even a married couple may not be quite ready to have a child. They know intuitively it’s going to completely change their life, and yet the actual experiences of history is that children become wanted once they are around. Imagine all the people today who have kids that they didn’t want, didn’t plan for when they had them. How many of those people today would genuinely say or feel, “Hey, I wish I didn’t have my kid. I really wish I had aborted him or her.” That is rare. It is profoundly abnormal.
Most parents who initially didn’t want their kids later say, “Hey, I never could have imagined my life would have turned out like this. I never thought I could love someone so much.” Or something like, “Yes, my kid has completely changed my world. And it has also changed me for the better. I can’t imagine my life now without them.”
Even in the extreme situation, just because someone is unwanted by a parent doesn’t mean that they are unwanted by everyone. I think for example of the inner cities, where a lot of times when a single mother has a child and either doesn’t want the child or is in no position to raise a child, but there’s somebody else who does. The grandparents often step in. They’re willing to take on the role of the parent. And of course, in other cases if the parent doesn’t want the child, they can put the child up for adoption.
But now I want to face the pro-choice argument at its strong point and look at children who are abused and ask, “Are these children really better off dead?” Among kids I’ve spoken to who have grown up in foster care or in broken homes, I have yet to meet one who says that he wishes he had been aborted. A good friend of mine, Terrence Williams, is a comedian who was raised in terrible conditions. His mother was a drug addict. He was raised in a series of foster homes. He faced abuse there. But Terrence has a strong spirit. He has become successful; he’s made the most of his life. I’m not saying that every child will reach Terrence’s level of success or achieve his strength of spirit, but what I am saying is that they, like Terrence, all believe that they are better off alive. They would rather cling to life, even a difficult life and struggle, rather than simply throw in the towel and quit. They do not believe that they would be better off dead.
Consider all the children in Africa, in India, in poor parts of the world who have so little, with no one to care for them. These children often don’t even have enough food, water, or medicine, let alone a caring environment. And yet they struggle, they survive, they even smile. Americans are always struck by the smiles they see on the faces of children in Africa and India, and it’s because sometimes Americans are shocked to see that even poor, sick children find meaning in life. They experience the full range of human emotions, happiness as well as sadness.
Interestingly, the actor Jack Nicholson was born out of a pretty difficult situation. He didn’t find this out until he was thirty-seven years old, when a reporter for Time magazine dug deep into his past while putting together a cover story on him. The woman Nicholson had always thought was his sister, June, was actually his mother. And the woman he always thought was his mother, Ethel, was actually his grandmother. Both were dead when Nicholson found out, so he called up his brother-in-law Shorty (who was actually his uncle). Shorty denied the questions from Nicholson but then gave the phone to his wife, Lorraine, who said that what he’d found out was true.
Jack Nicholson told Rolling Stone in the 1980s, “I don’t have to question the abortion issue in my mind. It’s an open-and-shut case where I’m concerned. As an illegitimate child born in 1937, during the Depression, to a broken lower-middle-class family, you are a candidate for—you’re an automatic abortion with most people today.”338 Jack Nicholson describes himself as personally pro-life because of his experience. “I’m positively against it,” he has said. “I don’t have the right to any other view. If June and Ethel had been of less character, I never would have gotten to live. These women gave me the gift of life.”339 He describes his only emotion as one of gratitude, literally for his life.
Celine Dion is another celebrity who was almost aborted. Her mother had already had thirteen children, making her pregnancy with Celine number fourteen. Celine’s mother was devastated that she was pregnant and wanted an abortion. She sought the advice of her priest, who encouraged her to have the child. Celine Dion told the National Post, “Once my mother got over her disappointment that an abortion was out of the question, she loved me as passionately as she’d love the last little ones.”340 Celine is pro-life because of this.
Justin Bieber’s mother, Mallette, was a victim of sex abuse. She was two years old when her alcoholic father walked out the door and three years old when she was sexually molested by an array of family friends and other male visitors. She was “sexually violated so many times that it began to feel normal.”341 She came to view herself as “a dirty girl” and turned to drug addiction to numb her pain. She attributes much of her pain to the “void of having a father in my heart.” She left home at sixteen and turned to petty crime and dealing in pot to pay for drugs. She had an on-again, off-again relationship with Justin Bieber’s father, Jeremy Bieber, for about four years starting when she was fifteen. At seventeen she threw herself in front of a truck. She survived and was sent to a mental ward. This is where she first found Jesus, though she quickly returned to drugs when released and got back with Jeremy. Then she found out she was pregnant.
Everyone in her life told her to just get an abortion, but she says, “I knew that I had to do what it took. I just couldn’t abort him.” She was eighteen years old and living in a home for pregnant girls when Justin was born. She went on government assistance, and a neighbor paid for a year of Justin Bieber’s day care. Mallette went back to school and earned her degree, vowing at age twenty-one not to have sex outside marriage and to follow her Christian faith. Justin started singing at age six, and the rest is history. Mallette revealed her story in her book Nowhere but Up. Justin Bieber has had his own share of drug issues, and this led him and his mom to become estranged. She never wanted that for him. Justin says, “I was distant because I was ashamed.”342 They were seen going to Hillsong church together in 2018. I pray that their future is nowhere but up.
Isn’t nowhere but up what we should want for all children? I am not saying that all children will become celebrities, but I am saying that there is hope and that we should take chances on kids. It is not their fault that they are born into a tough situation, and we should do everything we can to improve their situation. If you genuinely feel that their lives are so miserable, literally unbearable, then you should do something to help them.
Should we just kill everyone who has a difficult upbringing? Both my parents were brought up in difficult environments, whether it’s impoverished India in the case of my dad or the white working class in the case of my mom. My grandparents were brought up in even more difficult environments. My grandmother was a refugee during World War II who had to flee Burma with her family, leaving behind all of their possessions, and resettle in Bombay. My other grandmother in America lost her father at sixteen, worked in a factory, was injured, and lost her brother in the wake of World War II. Both have passed away in the last year, and I am sure they would not like to hear these “better off dead” arguments if they were alive. No child is better off dead.
What the most privileged in society often forget is that people rise up out of situations, as they have for all of history. The solution is not to kill people in bad environments, claiming you’re doing them a favor. We should instead focus on bettering those environments. We should create a culture of wantedness. We also need to inspire people to have personal responsibility and to make good choices with what they do have in order to make a better life for themselves.
I can’t imagine a more difficult environment than being born a slave. In the case of slavery, there were parents who wanted a child but the slaves always knew that they wouldn’t have any control over the child’s life or would have very little; literally, the child belonged to, was the property of, the master. And the master was going to use the child for its whole life to serve the economic needs of the master. So, what kind of a life would that be? Nevertheless, slaves had children. They did not believe that these children would be better off dead. And some of them made great lives for themselves. I think, for example, of Booker T. Washington, born a slave, and yet he went on to found the Tuskegee Institute and became one of the leading African Americans in the United States—an inspiration to this day to people around the world.
Mother Teresa, a pro-life nun, said of abortion, “Give that child to me. I want it. I will care for it. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.” And I think what Mother Teresa was getting at here is that a child may be unloved by a parent but that child is not unloved by her, Mother Teresa, and it’s not unloved by God. And as it grows up, it will take charge of its own life and become an individual who is not at the mercy of its parents or caretaker. Saying a child is unwanted does not make it any less human at birth. Life is the right of every person. Our worth as human beings should not be determined solely by whether our parents want us. That doesn’t define worth at all. Human life has an intrinsic dignity, an intrinsic preciousness, an intrinsic worth. And it is that worth that determines our right to live.