Who may draw the line?

I like an honest opponent. They are rare in the abortion debate, so when I read Stavros Kelepouris' opinion piece in De Morgen last week, I sat up and paid attention. ‘Not only cd&v fails in the abortion debate’, it was headlined. And what followed was surprisingly fair.

Kelepouris admitted that the cd&v's position is defensible: a party may draw an ethical line at fourteen weeks, and it doesn't have to be ashamed of that. He even went further: he did not dare to claim with certainty that the population supports an extension to eighteen weeks, even though there is a broad majority in parliament for it. That is more honesty than we are used to in this matter.

Yet he stops one step too early. His own findings point to a conclusion he doesn't draw — and one I do want to draw: not only the progressive parties fail in this debate, and not only cd&v. We all fail. And the deepest failure is that of the voices that have the most to say about the value of a human life, and which you hardly hear.

Science measures, it does not value

‘Let science be decisive in abortion, not politics.’ It sounds sober. It's a mistake.

Think of a thermometer. It can tell you that it's four degrees, but not whether that's too cold — because that depends on what you want to do: skate or swim. The thermometer measures. It does not value. So it is with all science. It can tell us from when a fetus registers pain stimuli, what the medical risks are, how a procedure proceeds. But it cannot tell us what value we should attach to those facts, or where we draw the moral line.

The philosopher David Hume already saw this in the eighteenth century: from a description of how something is, it never compellingly follows how it ought to be. Between fact and norm lies a chasm that no measurement bridges. So whoever says that eighteen weeks is ‘scientifically justified’ smuggles a value judgment under the cloak of a fact. Because ‘justified’ is not on any measuring stick.

Who is allowed to draw the line then?

Here comes the core question: if science cannot draw the line, then who can? By what light do we judge the facts?

At that point, it becomes silent. Or rather: the debate avoids the question behind a new facade of neutrality. Morality may come from anywhere — from 'public support', from the 'reasonable citizen'. Just not from religion. Religion, it is said, has no role to play here.

Note that this is exactly the same trick. 'Eighteen weeks is scientifically justifiable' disguises a value judgment as a fact. 'Religion doesn't belong here' disguises a philosophical choice as a rule of the game. Because the assertion that moral authority cannot come from a religious tradition is itself not a scientific fact. It is a worldview, dressed up as objectivity, and used to shut down the conversation before it even begins.

Everyone avoids the real question

Viewed this way, the entire abortion debate is an escape from moral language to seemingly safe ground. And everyone participates.

The progressive parties hide behind 'science'. They have — and Kelepouris admits it — failed to explain substantively why this expansion should happen. They lean on the argument that women would otherwise travel to the Netherlands, and act as if an expert report settles the discussion. Social support counts — but it should not be the only yardstick. Majorities have also approved injustice in the past.

Conservatives just as eagerly resort to apparent certainties. Cd&v clings to one debatable study on fetal pain, instead of honestly stating what it's really about: that they have an ethical, ideological, and human problem with a term up to about half of the pregnancy. The party that should defend nascent life grasps the same pseudoscientific fig leaf as its opponents. Rather an uncertain small study than an honest conviction.

And then there are the voices that have the most to say about the value of a human life — and who are the loudest in their silence. The religious voices. I'm not a fan of that silence. But I've seen it happen countless times beside me, and I understand the logic: if you speak, you're backward, you threaten the separation of church and state, you want to impose your morality. It's safer to drink your glass empty.

The failure of the believer is twofold. First, there is silence. But those who do speak often fall into the other pitfall: retreating to bare authority — ‘God says’, ‘the Church teaches’ — as if that were an argument. That is weak. Whoever speaks like this wants to win instead of convince, and wields the truth as a hammer instead of an outstretched hand. They confirm precisely the caricature that kills the conversation.

What a human being is worth

Why does this debate touch so deeply? Because, beneath all the terms and studies, it hides one ancient question: what is a human being, and what is a human being worth?

Here I speak without hesitation. I believe that man is created in the image of God:

‘And God created man in His own image’ (Genesis 1:27).

That is not a pious interjection. It is a claim about what a human being fundamentally is: not a random accumulation of cells that only gains value once we agree upon it, but a bearer of a dignity that he does not owe to us — and which we therefore cannot take away from him.

‘Remember that the worth of souls is great in the sight of God’ (Doctrine and Covenants 18:10).

That is precisely what no graph can ever show. You can measure, weigh, and visualize a fetus down to the millimeter. But you will never be able to read its dignity from it, because dignity is not a quantity you measure. It is something you recognize — or not.

And then there is the other side of that question. The woman facing an unbearable choice. Whose pregnancy is sometimes the result of circumstances she did not choose, or that threatens to shatter her life in a way that is hardly comprehensible from the outside. That despair is not an abstraction. She does not deserve to be looked away from, no cheap answers, no condemnation from a safe distance. She deserves exactly what this debate gives her the least: honesty, compassion, and the courage to face the full question. Because the question of whether, andfrom when, and to what extent that half-grown life deserves the recognition of human dignity — weighed against the freedom and necessity of the woman carrying it — that is the actual question. To be asked with humility. But it is the question, and no single measurement answers it.

How a believer should speak

Does this mean that religion must win the debate by decree? No. And here I touch on something dear to me, because our scripture says it more sharply than any secular rule:

'No power or influence by virtue of the priesthood [can] be maintained except by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned' (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41).

No coercion then, but conviction. Read that carefully. This is not a tactical concession to the spirit of the age. It is a commandment to the believer themselves: persuade, do not impose. Whoever wants to impose the truth with the blunt axe of authority not only acts clumsily — they act faithlessly.

The believer who remains silent fails. But the believer who shouts instead of persuading also fails.

And when I speak with reasons, I am not alone. The jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde — not a preacher, but a constitutional thinker — summarized it: the free, secularized state lives on conditions that it cannot guarantee itself. A shared sense of human dignity. A moral basis for law. These conditions come from sources, often religious, that the state itself does not produce. You cannot cut off the root and expect the tree to remain standing.

Even Jürgen Habermas — a pronounced secular thinker, not a religious program — argued that a mature democracy should not waste the moral power of religious traditions. If he says that, by what right does a table discussion — or an opinion page — then put religion out the door?

And the reproach that religious morality is 'subjective'? Every moral framework starts from a premise that you cannot prove — including the secular one. Why is autonomy the highest value? That is not a measurement result, that is a deep, debatable choice. Honesty means laying your assumptions on the table, not pretending that one side has none.

The courage to believe out loud

A society that only allows the language of the measurable has disarmed itself for its most difficult questions. It can read reports, but no longer weigh values. It confuses a graph with a conscience.

Kelepouris was right: not only cd&v falls short. But the deepest omission is not that of a party. It is that of each of us who knows that something sacred is at stake — and yet drains their glass.

I have never been able to keep silent, nor do I plan to learn. But I do want to keep doing it well. Not to prove a point, and certainly not to lecture someone facing an impossible choice. For scripture does not ask me to be silent out of fear:

‘For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and self-discipline’ (2 Timothy 1:7).

But neither does it ask me to shout. A spirit of power, of love, and of sound mind — of a clear and sober understanding. That is precisely the covenant between faith and reason that I am always concerned with.

So the next time the conversation drifts that way and everyone nods, I will say something again. That surprises no one who knows me. As always: not loudly, not to win, but with reasons, with gentleness, and without shame.

And you, who feel the same but remain silent because you know how quickly it is dismissed: I understand you. But if we only talk in graphs and majorities, we forget what truly makes a person valuable. The conversation needs every voice that dares to speak. Including yours.