Pip: There’s a streaming service out there that markets itself on wholesome family content — and somehow that’s where this episode begins, with a hymn, a British abolitionist, and a question that has no comfortable answer.
Mara: cj’s writing takes us into the moral and philosophical territory of abortion, tracing a line from William Wilberforce’s biography through scripture, law, and the question of what we lose when we define life by its quality. Let’s start with that argument.
Understanding the Moral Debate: Abortion and its Implications
Pip: The post opens not with a policy brief but with a biography — specifically, a detail about William Wilberforce that stops the reader cold. The question underneath it is ancient: who decides which lives are worth sustaining?
Mara: The setup is a passage from Stephen Tomkins’s biography of Wilberforce. Here it is: “In later life he often reflected with gratitude that if he had been born in what he was pleased to call ‘less civilized times’, his parents would not have taken the trouble to keep him alive.”
Pip: So the man who dismantled the British slave trade — one of the most consequential moral reformers in history — was himself a weak, sickly child who, by a different calculus, might never have been kept alive. That’s the stakes the post is building toward.
Mara: And the post connects that directly to current law. Massachusetts recently eliminated gestational limits on abortion, joining Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington D.C. The post pulls from Britannica to name the reasons often cited as justification — quality of life, physical or mental well-being, rape, incest, fetal abnormality.
Pip: The post pushes back on the word “serious” in that last category — arguing it’s undefined, that what counts as serious shifts person to person, and that the word functions more to soften opposition than to set a real boundary.
Mara: Right. And the post returns that back to Wilberforce: poor eyesight, small, sickly — none of it disqualifying by the standards of his time and place, but potentially disqualifying by ours. The post asks, plainly, how many breakthroughs, leaders, and lives were foreclosed by that same reasoning.
Pip: It’s a question the post acknowledges no one can answer — and says no one dares try.
Mara: The post closes with scripture from James, First Peter, and Ecclesiastes, grounding the argument in the idea that life is knit together by the Creator — and that choosing otherwise is, in the post’s own image, ripping the needles from His hands.
Pip: The metaphor lands harder than most policy arguments do.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is the question of what we lose when quality of life becomes the measure of a life worth living.
Pip: Wilberforce wouldn’t have passed that test. Worth sitting with before the next episode.
Read the post in its entirety here: Understanding the Moral Debate: Abortion and its Implications
The Way of the Rabbi 