Neutrality With Blood on Its Hands

When “choice” becomes the highest public good, the weak don't become safer. They become easier to sacrifice.

Tolerance is often praised as a civic virtue, but in reality it begins as a wound. I tolerate only what I judge to be wrong, offensive, or dangerous, and only when I have the power to resist and yet refrain. There is no tolerance where nothing in me protests. There is no tolerance where I am indifferent. Tolerance isn't the absence of moral judgment. It's moral judgment under restraint.

Modern liberalism likes to imagine it's found a way around this. It dreams of a public square so neutral that no conviction can stain it, a state so hygienic that no moral odor clings to its hands.

But this is a fantasy.

A referee who can't be offended can't tolerate anything. He merely permits. He doesn't stand above the conflict; he's already defined it in a way that hides his own involvement.

That illusion collapses most dramatically in abortion, because abortion is not a dispute over preference, style, or private self-expression. It's a dispute over whether one of the smallest and most vulnerable members of the human family counts as someone the law must protect. Is the child in the womb a life with claims upon us, or a problem to be managed? A patient, or an intrusion? A neighbor, or a disposable possibility?

The language of “choice” pretends to float above these questions. But it only works by settling them in advance. One may safely say, “leave it to the individual,” only after quietly deciding that what's being ended isn't the life of someone to whom justice is owed. That's not neutrality. That's a moral conclusion dressed up as procedural modesty.

If abortion is the deliberate taking of innocent human life, then the state’s refusal to protect that life isn't neutrality. It's abandonment. And the citizen who is told to call this arrangement “tolerance” is being asked to misname moral surrender as civic virtue.

Here the paradox of tolerance becomes impossible to ignore.

A pluralistic society tells itself that it must tolerate profound disagreement. But abortion is not the kind of disagreement that can simply be bracketed for the sake of peace, because the disagreement concerns the very beings to whom peace and justice are owed. The pro-life citizen doesn't merely think abortion is regrettable. He thinks a child is being killed. He's therefore told, in the name of tolerance, to endure what he believes to be the destruction of the innocent. That's not a small request. It's a demand that conscience become anesthetized.

And that demand reveals something essential: tolerance has limits, because justice has limits. We're not asked to “tolerate” theft by declaring that ownership is subjective. We're not asked to “tolerate” abuse by pretending victimhood is a private perception. We recognize that some questions precede tolerance because they concern the protection of those who can't defend themselves. The entire pro-life argument is that abortion belongs in that category.

The courtroom becomes the most revealing stage for this drama because courts embody the modern procedural dream. A judge, robed in neutrality, attempts to speak from nowhere, as though law could float above metaphysics, biology, dependency, and grief. But the judge can't avoid naming reality. A regime that protects abortion must deny, either explicitly or functionally, the full human standing of the unborn. A regime that restricts abortion must affirm that there are two lives present and that one of them is too vulnerable to survive without the protection of others. There is no neutral escape hatch here. The referee is already in the game.

And yet our culture keeps invoking neutrality as if the word itself could wash the blood from our categories.

The deeper irony is that liberal societies fear moral seriousness because they remember (rightly) that moral zeal can become persecution. States that tried to make men virtuous have often made them miserable. So we're told to avoid public claims about the good, to lower our sights, to let procedure replace substance. But procedure never stays empty for long. Law always encodes a moral judgment, even when it pretends not to. If it doesn't enthrone God, it enthrones something else.

In the case of abortion, what's been enthroned is choice.

Choice has become the one sacred word modern people can invoke without embarrassment because it seems to bless freedom without telling us what freedom is for.

But choice severed from truth becomes a hollow god. It can justify anything except limits. It can honor every preference except the claims of the weak. It can speak eloquently of autonomy while remaining strangely mute before dependency, helplessness, and innocence.

Pregnancy, of course, is the great scandal to this vision of the self. It announces, in the body itself, that we're not absolute sovereigns. We're creatures bound up with one another. We inherit obligations we didn't script. We encounter claims that arise not from contract but from nature, from embodiment, from relation, and, ultimately, from God. The child in the womb is the most radical reminder that freedom is never the freedom to define reality at will.

That's why abortion occupies such a central place in modern moral imagination. It's not merely a medical procedure or a contested right. It's become a ritual of sovereignty, a declaration that the self may decide which claims upon it are real and which are removable. But every such declaration has a cost, and in abortion the cost is not borne only by the one choosing. It's borne by another, smaller, voiceless human being whose entire future depends on whether someone stronger recognizes him as one of us.

To call this “tolerance” is therefore false. Tolerance suggests enduring a rival way of life. Abortion is not merely a rival way of life. It is, from the pro-life view, a regime of permission around lethal injustice. The grammar of tolerance breaks down because the issue is not eccentricity but victimhood, not taste but protection, not preference but whether the law will shield the innocent or leave them exposed.

So what replaces tolerance when tolerance becomes morally dishonest?

One answer is brute majoritarianism: whoever wins enough elections gets to name reality. But that's not wisdom. It's only power wearing the suit of legality. Another answer is procedural quietism: no one names reality, everyone retreats to private values, and the law pretends to hover above the conflict. But that too is a fraud, because the law still acts. Clinics open or close. Children live or die. Women bear burdens or are told they have escaped them. Society doesn't avoid judgment; it simply hides judgment behind euphemism.

The only honest path is to admit that law can't avoid moral claims, and that the first moral claim of any decent society is the protection of the vulnerable. If the unborn child is human—and all the biological evidence says he is—then the central question isn't whether his presence is convenient, chosen, or emotionally manageable. The question is whether justice extends to him before he's wanted, before he's seen, before he can speak.

That, in the end, is the real scandal of the pro-life position. It insists that dignity doesn't depend on recognition. It insists that value isn't conferred by consent. It insists that the smallest human being isn't a possession, not a projection, not a policy problem, but a member of the human community whose weakness is precisely the reason he most deserves protection.

On the judge’s bench sits a wristwatch, ticking. It doesn't settle our metaphysics for us. But it does remind us of one sobering fact: time doesn't suspend responsibility. “Later” isn't a moral category. Delay doesn't become innocence simply because it's procedural. A society can postpone naming reality for only so long before its evasions harden into doctrine.

So when we say, with that modern shrug that pretends to be wisdom, “let people decide,” we should at least have the courage to ask the hidden question plainly:

Which people?

Because if the child in the womb is one of them, then the whole moral architecture changes. And if he's not, then we should stop speaking as though neutrality got us there. It didn't. We got there by deciding, in advance, that some human lives may be placed outside the circle of protection.

That isn't tolerance. That's exclusion with cleaner language.