Last year, BBC’s Channel 4 ran a series titled Banged Up, which featured minor celebrities locked up in a decommissioned prison with ex-prisoners. Conservative journalist Peter Hitchens—author of books such as A Brief History of Crime and The War We Never Fought (about the ‘war’ on drugs)—participated, describing his experience in essays for the Mail on Sunday and the Spectator. The cameras captured several moments of extraordinary power. At one point, a young ex-con named Tom Roberts asked Hitchens to read the Bible to him. Sitting in their small cell, Hitchens read aloud from the greatest of English Bibles, the King James Version.
The series contained one scene that I have rewatched many times over the past year as abortion dominates international headlines. Sitting in their small cell, Roberts asked Hitchens if he had any brothers or sisters. “I had one brother,” Hitchens replied. “I would have had two other siblings, but my mother had two abortions. So they were, I rather guess, the sisters I wish I’d had. I do really wish I’d had sisters.” He stopped, emitting what sounded like an expression of strangled grief. “Why is that?” the young man asked. Hitchens held out his hands, clenched them. “I just would have liked to have that in my childhood.” He paused again: “Sorry.”
“I get that,” Roberts replied. “I’ve got sisters, and you’ve made me feel very grateful.”
It was not the first time Peter Hitchens has spoken of abortion—he is one of the UK’s most eloquent defenders of the voiceless unborn—but it was the most personal. His atheist brother, Christopher, who died in 2011, was similarly troubled by abortion. He wrote of his lost siblings in an essay for Vanity Fair titled “Fetal Distraction”: “I was in my early teens when my mother told me that a predecessor fetus and a successor fetus had been surgically removed, thus making me an older brother rather than a forgotten whoosh.” He added that at least two children of his own had gone the same way:
At least once I found myself in a clinic while ‘products of conception’ were efficiently vacuumed away. I can distinctly remember thinking, on the last such occasion, that under no persuasion of any kind would I ever allow myself to be present at such a moment again.
These experiences, one suspects, contributed to Christopher’s opposition to abortion, a subject upon which he differed strongly from his fellow leftists. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or even spent an hour with a textbook on embryology knows that emotions are not the deciding factor,” he wrote. “In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain, and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture some organs.” In one debate, he affirmed that he considered himself a fellow traveler of “the pro-life movement.” Despite fellow atheist Sam Harris and others insisting that Hitchens was pro-choice, Christopher expressed his support for a federal abortion ban, with exceptions, in an interview in 1988:
I would like to see something much broader, much more visionary. We need a new compact between society and the woman. It’s a progressive compact because it is aimed at the future generation. It would restrict abortion in most circumstances. Now I know most women don’t like having to justify their circumstances to someone. “How dare you presume to subject me to this?” some will say. But sorry, lady, this is an extremely grave social issue. It’s everybody’s business.
Christopher also observed that one reason that so many feel ambivalent about expressing opposition to pro-life views is because they find it difficult to make this case when it becomes personal. “I myself was reluctant to do this even when my wife got pregnant,” he said. “It came at the worst possible time. Neither of us wanted to have a kid. My wife was considering an abortion. I urged her not to get one, and ultimately, she decided not to, and didn’t. But I wouldn’t have, even if I could, gone beyond an effort to persuade her.” Our ingrained libertarian impulses often override even the most basic instincts (where they are still present)—to protect our own offspring.
As Peter once wrote: “Those who wonder what they would have done had they lived at the time of some terrible injustice now know the answer. We do live in such a time. And we do nothing.”
Peter Hitchens’ grief for his lost siblings was a visceral reminder that abortion is perhaps the most intimate form of violence. The victims of abortion are so much more than a political ‘issue’ or discarded tissue. They were sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters. Their absence forms yawning black holes large and deep enough to encompass entire unlived lives. Who were these branches hacked from the family tree? Who would we have been, if they had lived? How would they have changed us? What would they have looked like? What ancestral glimmers of parents and other family members might their eyes and voices and movements betrayed? The silent graves—grim dumpsters behind clinics—offer only silence.
