A constitutional enshrinement of abortion as a principle of government is as literal a repudiation of Burkean intergenerational consciousness as can be imagined.
A constitutional enshrinement of abortion as a principle of government is as literal a repudiation of Burkean intergenerational consciousness as can be imagined.
O bserving France at the beginning of its revolution, Edmund Burke was skeptical. Hearing its cry of “liberty,” he noted that “the effect of liberty to individuals, is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.” France’s liberty would give the world much to complain about over the next few years. Even Thomas Jefferson, initially (and foolishly) enamored of the revolution, later lamented “those enormities which demoralised the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of its inhabitants.”
France has changed much, and been through many forms of government, since that epochal revolt destroyed its ancien régime. But it still aspires to change history. Which is exactly how the French prime minister described the decision, earlier this week, of lawmakers to enshrine a right to abortion in the French constitution. It is the first country in the world to do so. Future French leaders are now forbidden to “drastically modify” the nation’s abortion regime of permissibility up to 14 weeks gestation. A standing ovation ensued in the body after the vote.
If France is going to continue to insist on making history like this, one could do worse than to turn to Burke. His Reflections on the Revolution in France, issued before the revolution took the Jacobin turn it presciently anticipated, is strikingly relevant to the action France has just taken. Burke’s remarks on the continuity of generations speak most directly to France’s present folly.
Burke’s Reflections formed one of the earliest coherent articulations of the conservative worldview; its tenets and even some of its most famous passages are likely familiar to many conservatives. Consider, for example, its condemnation of France’s pretension to jettison those seemingly irrational trappings of society that, in reality, were indispensable to its function:
All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
He advised, instead, that “it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.” Burke gave a refined voice to a previously unformed sentiment in favor of preservation. His worldview did not preclude reform, of course; “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he also wrote.
But reform should not be so drastic as to sever a people’s connection to its past. For Burke, it is impossible to think of only the present when considering society. Society is, instead, a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This perspective ought to induce humility in those currently living. “Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them,” he wrote.
A nation, in this way of thinking, is not merely borders on a map and people in a census. It is, rather, “an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space,” the result of “a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice,” but of “a deliberate election of ages and of generations,” he wrote in another work. To cut oneself off from this past is also to cut oneself off from the future, and from concern for it. “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors,” he argued in the Reflections.
A constitutional enshrinement of abortion as a principle of government — and at the same time preventing future generations from altering it — is as literal a repudiation of Burkean intergenerational consciousness as can be imagined. It repudiates not only tradition but also posterity. It forces France ever closer to an eternal present. The ultimate result: a society in which “no one generation could link with the other.”
In such a polity, only a liberty precisely as shallow as that which Burke criticized would be welcome. He wrote in another work that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.” For a monument to this superficiality, behold the Eiffel Tower, that famous symbol of French identity, lit up after the vote with the phrase “My body my choice.”
So what if people do not properly restrain their appetites? Burke believed it will lead to a society in which “the murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.” One in which a nation, having rejected the precepts which once guided it, would allow “some uncouth, pernicious and degrading superstition” to take their place. One needn’t cling to monarchy to worry about the degradation of human life France’s decision inaugurates. This won’t be the last time we see its effects.
Burke almost eerily predicted what the French Revolution would bring in the short term. But France, having survived its many tribulations, may well now scoff at his judgments and warnings. Indeed, Burke himself thought little of his own persuasive power. Russell Kirk recounts in The Conservative Mind that “Burke, fearing the triumphant English Jacobins would desecrate his bones, left instructions for his body to be interred secretly.” His fears proved unfounded.
But the spirit of France’s recent decision may have already left its borders. The end of Roe v. Wade reportedly inspired France’s abortion enshrinement. But many U.S. states have far more permissive regimes than what obtains in France. And abortion Jacobins in this country would happily loosen them further and impose similar permissiveness on the nation. They would bathe an already incarnadine America in yet more blood. Americans must stand against any forces that would further fracture this nation’s continuity of generations.