squaring "pro-life" with "pro-animal"

Excerpts from a provocative and beautifully-written piece by Mary Eberhardt in First Things...

Why aren't vegetarians and pro-lifers more closely aligned? After all, the best writing about ethical vegetarianism—the moral case for refusing meat, as opposed to the more self-interested arguments from health or finance—is good enough to provoke serious reflection, even among nonvegetarians....

Though admirable is not the first word that leaps to mind when facing some of the practical consequences, [Princeton ethicist Peter] Singer's theory does have the virtue of a ruthless consistency....Perhaps most infamously, he has argued that, since a newborn infant lacks self-consciousness, autonomy, and rationality, "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."...

Consider the work of Carol J. Adams, whose 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat was widely hailed even outside academia...the notion that the so-called objectification of animals in a carnivorous society and the so-called objectification of women in a patriarchal society are somehow linked....

I had that book for awhile and used it as a crank gift!

Eberstadt then points to a common "blindness to any moral connection between prerational human life and nonrational animal life"-- and quotes an example: "...we are still confronted by the question as to who is the appropriate moral agent to resolve any potential conflict between the primary rightholder (the woman) and the subservient rightholder (the fetus)."

Interestingly, the pro-choicer "objectifies" the fetus/baby and reaches a perverse/incoherent conclusion.

Eberstadt then returns to one of her theses here-- that "contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it."

Then, Eberstadt comments on RJN's writing in this area:

No less an authority than Richard John Neuhaus gently reprimanded readers a few years ago after receiving letters unhappy with the respectful review he had given to the book Dominion, Matthew Scully's evangelical case for vegetarianism. "Some readers," Fr. Neuhaus wrote, "think vegetarianism is so manifestly and self-evidently wrongheaded that, after rejecting it on first encounter, one would be a moral idiot to give it a second thought."

Much of that conservative dismissal, of course, is not about vegetarianism as such but about the baggage that has come to be associated with it....

Yet leaving those historical accidents aside, what is there intrinsically about vegetarian practice for a moral traditionalist to object to? As a matter of history, over the centuries a number of serious Christians have spied a connection between vegetarianism and religious belief—a history that is somewhat at odds with the frequent conflation by conservatives of vegetarians with tree-hugging pagans....

She provides an array of individual and communal examples, before concluding:

In short, vegetarianism is not easily dismissed either morally or intellectually, despite the fact that some traditionalists have relished doing just that for several decades now. Like the boutique academic theorists speaking in vegetarianism's name, these traditionalists seem to have missed the moral forest for its more superficial trees.

My purpose in untangling these distinctions is not to put anyone in the moral dock, whether vegetarian or carnivore. It is rather to point out something easily overlooked—that there is more common moral ground between vegetarians and people concerned with the life issues than either side seems to realize.

Most people who adopt a vegetarian or cruelty-free diet do not do so on the basis of the antihumanist, anti-life ideas that prevail in academic thought....[they are instead] acknowledging and acting on a moral intuition....Consider, for example, the explanation most commonly offered for vegetarianism...."concern for animal suffering"...what they believe to be an intuitively appealing moral principle....

In 2002, Richard John Neuhaus, though no vegetarian, affirmed this same point...he went on to suggest a limited defense of meat eating and a call to regulatory intervention into the crueler factory farming practices. Even so, he cautioned readers against dismissing in principle the budding moral sentiments of our twelve-year-old selves....

For a great many other people, too, as one hears often at pro-life rallies, moral intuition about abortion was sparked by quotidian events—that first picture of an aborted fetus, the birth of their own first child, and the first moment of watching a fetus move on a sonogram. As with the vegetarians, once such an insight is digested and acted on, few people turn back to where they were before—a fact that speaks as no other could to the transformative power of the insight in question....

...the line connecting the dots between "we should respect animal life" and "we should respect human life" is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism. Any moral intuition powerful enough to cause second thoughts about a widely accepted practice—and to re-shape personal behavior accordingly—is an intuition that religious believers ordinarily take seriously indeed....

Vegetarians and pro-lifers are strangers to one another for reasons of accident rather than essence, and they also, furthermore, have a natural bond in moral intuitionism that should make them allies.

The work of developing that bond could be done, and the benefit might be immense for both sides—like finding a few million friends that you never knew you had.