Solidarity or autonomy?

Sarah Elaine Harrison is upset that she doesn’t get more sympathy for her abortions, and she recently took to the pages of The New York Times to let the world know about it. Specifically, she wants her first abortion, which she procured because caring for a baby would have interfered with “pursuing the career I wanted” while already a single mother, to be judged as sympathetically as her second, which followed a diagnosis of Trisomy 18 for one of the twins growing in her womb.

Harrison complains that though her second abortion is generally viewed as excusable, “the public is not similarly sympathetic” to her first abortion—and most abortions that are like it. She insists that it “was just as important as” the second and, “Not being able to receive abortion care in either situation would have been detrimental to my life.”

Pro-lifers might respond that her abortions were more detrimental to the lives of the developing human beings she had killed. This is true, but we should not leave it there, for Harrison has provided a perfect example of how liberalism’s ideal of autonomy destroys its professions of solidarity.

Harrison made a point of noting that the career for which she procured her first abortion was “in public service.” She has followed through—if a career that currently consists of being a professional Israel-hater for a left-wing nongovernmental organization is, in fact, public service. Still, she presumably thinks so and thereby illuminates an important feature of contemporary liberalism, which is that it views solidarity as a job and autonomy as a way of life.

Modern liberalism has sought to reconcile caring for everyone with freedom for everyone. It has done so by professionalizing solidarity, largely through the welfare state and its various programs and associated NGOs. Indeed, the welfare state is seen as not just a safety net but as a means of expanding autonomy by making the responsibilities of caring for others collective and professional rather than personal.

In this model, solidarity is something to be done professionally during office hours, preferably with government cash funneled through a web of programs and NGO grants. When one wearies of it, one can always look for a new job with a new cause or no cause. This solidarity is just autonomy and a paycheck with pretensions to noblesse oblige.

No wonder so much “public service” is performative, focused on posturing rather than results. For example, despite all the rhetoric about the importance of public education, there is indifference to the dismal results it so often produces. The disasters of public education in, say, Chicago and Baltimore are simply accepted as the way things are.

Such doleful results are only to be expected because real solidarity must be an ethos, not just a job; it is about our whole lives, not just our work lives. Genuine solidarity integrates the well-being of others within our own. It comes with obligations and responsibilities, some of which are unchosen. And this authentic solidarity is antithetical to selfish autonomy.

This is why Harrison, who professionally weeps over every person who dies as collateral damage in an Israeli airstrike, also demands sympathy for having turned her offspring into personal collateral damage. As she put it, “My two abortions were a decade apart and different in so many ways. But my choice to have them hinged on the same innate desire to exercise the freedom to determine my future. Both allowed me to care for my children, protect my health and pursue my career in the ways I determined were best.” Indeed. Her abortions were all about her and what she wanted—even her children mattered only insofar as she wanted them (or not). She did not care for the child she had killed for her career in “public service” or for the child she had killed because it would have been disabled and likely short-lived.

This sort of autonomy is based on a false anthropology that takes selfish, independent adults as normative. But we are born dependent and attain freedom and rationality only partially and only through the unearned aid of others. And this autonomy is necessarily exploitative and violent when it encounters the unyielding realities of human nature, especially the asymmetry of human reproduction. Female conformity to the ideal of male autonomy requires violence against the most vulnerable and dependent, and solidarity as a career will not stop it.

Only genuine solidarity, which is a way of life that acknowledges obligation and dependence and constrains choices in service to others can do that. This ethos is often challenging. But it is better, for it can provide happiness that autonomy cannot. We were made for love and relationships, which solidarity nurtures and selfish autonomy destroys.