Abortion, Acedia, and Us
a little book from R.J. Snell is going to explain our problems
In The Free Press article Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions? Kara Kennedy spoke with women about why they chose abortion, often multiple times over. For context, recent data shows that “close to one in three pregnancies in Britain now end in termination.” The cost of living is cited by some experts, but Kennedy chose to ask around, inquiring of the women themselves:
“The cost of having a child did not come up. Not once, even among younger or working-class women. Instead, the reasons sounded like this: “My relationship with the father didn’t feel stable enough”; “I didn’t feel ready to become a parent”; “I feel it’s wrong to have a child when I’m so damaged”; “The poor child deserves better than me”; “I could never be a parent because I overanalyze everything”; and, finally, “I just think I would’ve irreparably fucked them up.” In other words, more so than financial strain, what emerged was a pervasive belief that parenthood is a highrisk opportunity to do irreversible harm, and that opting out entirely is the responsible choice. The fear in these women was palpable.” Additionally, Kennedy shares, “Interestingly, none of the women I spoke to described being pressured by partners, friends, or family members to end their pregnancies. The pressure, instead, was internal—and relentless. They didn’t feel good enough to be mothers.”
This puts a twist in many preconceived notions about abortion. Even Daniel K. Williams’ phenomenal 2025 book Abortion and America’s Churches doesn’t get to the widespread availability of home-delivered abortion pills met with such widespread malaise.
Sloth and the Noonday Demon (of life)
In R.J. Snell’s exquisite 2015 book Acedia and Its Discontents, he begins with an excursion into Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The diabolical Judge Holden “is portrayed as the most educated man in the territory… The judge treats all being, personal and impersonal, this way, as something to possess and discard… a diabolical revelation of our actual malaise, one held captive to the madness of sloth. Having rejected any norms given in creation, freedom is under no authority other than the awful lightness of the will; we are free to do as we wish, including violence against all being.”
“Violence against all being” is a phrase which pierces. Michael Hanby’s term “ontological violence” is another fitting one.
Furthermore, Snell explains, “Sloth is not laziness, although the term in time does come to mean mere inactivity. Rather it reveals frustration and hate, disgust at place and “life itself.” In acedia, the monk abhors what God has given, namely, reality and the limits of order, especially the limits of one’s own selfhood. Thomas Aquinas describes sloth as a sad rejection of loving, intimate union with the Creator. Since such union, according to Aquinas, is our ultimate happiness and joy, sloth very oddly rejects happiness and chooses sorrow instead.”
It seems as though these feed off each other: a cavalier posture toward the integrity and order of creation, and a bored malaise about the tasks and living before us. In Snell’s estimation, “sloth is a failure of love–an aversion to being, a sadness at the good, and an inability to act well.”
Sloth and desecration go hand in hand. What meaning is there in living if there is none in creation itself? This awful, unbearable lightness is everywhere.
Revolt against the givenness of existence, against the potential for existence, against the children brought into existence—it all fits the description of lightness. Such violence against our bodies and our offspring is the logical result of a metaphysical boredom, of sloth, of a loss of Christian hope.
In speaking to the vibrant material goodness of creation, Snell writes, “Things, in this sense, bear interiority which they present or give to the world, and in that interiority possess a thickness, a weighty dignity which we ought to recognize and respect… this dignity is bequeathed to things by the creative gift of God, for things are given to themselves, but this very contingency establishes rather than diminishes their integrity and weight.”
If we sit with the despair which now colors much of the world, we might be honest enough to recognize the devastatingly consistent posture toward it such abhorrence really is. Meaningless indifference is, from this vantage point, at least understandable.
Wholeness and the Weight of Things
Commenting on Wendell Berry’s notion of health as wholeness, Snell argues that “Specializing in the body without consideration for the soul, or, for that matter, specializing in the soul without including the body in the health of the person, devalues the body, our own as well as the bodies of others.”
So let’s return to the Free Press article:
““Abortion is now largely destigmatized,” Furedi said. “For most people, it’s seen as a backup when contraception fails—or when women fail to use it.” True, many women in developed, secular countries do not see a meaningful difference between preventing a pregnancy and ending one. In both cases, often all you have to do is take a pill.”
Instead of becoming more whole, we allow ourselves to be, as Snell puts it, “disintegrated and manipulable” in the way “our mainstream fertility specialists and pornographers understand reality, and sexuality in particular…”
We have allowed our bodies at the most intimate parts of us to be rent asunder, desecrated and profaned. Such meaningless indifference—toward our bodies and sexuality, toward our fertility and actual offspring—makes sense in this vision of reality. And these attitudes are more intertwined than we may care to admit. Some choose to call it part of the Culture of Death.
In Snell’s estimation, we “violate the integrity of reality to remove any natural consequences of aggressive but frustrated desire.”
This sounds right. And sexual desire that refuses to embrace even the possibility of that natural outcome of children, or the possibility of being made new through enduring unknowns, inconvenience, suffering, and parenthood itself—especially at such a wide scale—is a society sick with the vice of sloth.
To delight in the whole of being would include a rightful, integrated delight in the full mess of life and relationship, marital union and bearing children (perhaps costly in every sense of the word) but still gift. What is sensed in the responses Kennedy received is an incapacity for jumping into the reality of life’s gifts.
Narratives as Ecosystem, Choices as Witness
What I hear in the accounts from these women are that life, and thus parenthood, is only valuable once you get your psychological, emotional, and interpersonal ducks in a row. That getting entangled in one of the most natural relationships of all is now only for those who have worked to achieve a squeaky clean and ordered personal life.
Good things are now neglected or refused if unable to be performed in an ideal state.
Do we approach anything else in life worth doing with this mindset? In reality, we usually start imperfectly—a bit terrified and uncertain—where we are, and edge out from there. Imagine approaching Christianity with this mindset.
What I hear in these stories are narratives which have become strongly embedded. Narratives of fear, control, perfection, and the resulting resignation have dug deep into our collective psyche. An apathy toward the poetic weight of creation—and subsequent throwing up of our hands up at life itself—has become pervasive across modern society.
The stories spread and imbibed by the women of Britain (and indeed, all around us) speak something both about the density of creation and the value of living itself.
Undoubtedly, the end result is disturbing. A world in which the most violating acts are normalized is a world which got there slowly. It is a world in which narratives created an ecosystem. Discreetly disturbing acts, damped with particular language at a mass scale, created such an ecosystem.
When it comes to the creation of such a world, our collective hands are not entirely clean.
Even as Christians, the most intimate parts of our bodies, and thus our persons, have been stripped of integrity in clinic rooms with a soft violence, fertility in married sexuality has been trivialized, children have been subsequently transformed by our language and actions from gift into a preferential lifestyle choice—avoided or forced into existence through any means necessary.
This is ontological violence, and it is spiritually violating whether we recognize it or not.
It would be understandable to wonder what this has to do with parenting, or the responses in the Free Press article. But the ways we speak of parenting and our plans for it are significantly impacted by language about the body, assumptions about sexuality, and the procreative potential wrapped up in both. Over and over I see this to be the case.
Our personal desires often trump the objective goodness in things God has declared so, of hard-won truth, of the beauty of faith in the suffering Savior we claim to embrace: “Our modern Empire of Desire manufactures endless appetite while simultaneously denying that anything is objectively good, beautiful, or desirable. The result is not great yearning or passion, but acedia or sloth, a pervasive ‘noonday demon.’”
If rampant abortions are one stark outcome of this Empire of Desire, we ought to be self-reflective enough to ask whether it has subtly warped the intuitions in our own Christian communities. While it is cheap and easy to point out the most grievous narratives in secular culture, it does provide a chance for honest self-evaluation of the stories we ourselves have come to believe.
As those in particular denominations and particular churches, what narratives are being reinforced among us?
As Snell explains, “We live in a time of open revolt against God’s law—a time of sloth. Rather than causing delight and comfort, the story God tells of creation is thought repugnant to our autonomy, and we insist that we are suzerains, those rulers countermanding all other laws, even the rule of God. Limits of body, sexuality, death, or life, all are thought obstacles to overcome rather than considered the graciousness of being.”
With a black hole in formation, filled by cultural osmosis, we contribute to plausibility structures wherein the will alone reigns because creation no longer bears its own integrity. It is unmoored and muted. We become the suzerains who get everything we want and nothing we do not. That graciousness of being is all but given lip service.
Embedded narratives often require a painful expulsion. Even the most careful gardener uses the force of pulling what needs thinning, of cutting off what needs pruning. They examine what has been neglected and unattended, noticing what has grown over in its place. Lesser stories go unchecked in our own spaces. We are not immune to believing stories of the ideal, struggle-free life, shaped more by cultural scripts than by scripture, the wisdom of Christian tradition, and spiritual authorities in our lives.
Our own attitudes about parenthood flow, to some degree, from what we believe about each of these matters and their relationship to the other.
And our imaginations can diminish. In what ways have we developed a slothful, desacralized, and secular approach to speaking of the mysteries of our bodies, of the givenness of life?
In Snell’s words, we are tempted to be among those for whom “...the world becomes mere resource, raw material, what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve,” a stocking or storehouse of energy for us to use when and how we wish, waiting at attention for us. Its interiority is denied, its splendor formae dimmed, there is no kābôd or “freshness deep down”; the Holy Ghost does not brood, Christ’s play has stilled, and only we father forth. There are no gods anywhere, and the world has been stripped of its intrinsic value, serving at our beck and call. It is no longer gift, merely a stark given, mute.”
This is a world in which precious few things are left to consider sacred. Few things in creation are left which hold purchase or meaning. If we cannot demonstrate otherwise with our bodies, the fullness of sexuality, or the wonder and proper place of procreation, we can hardly be surprised if our witness to revering what’s holy (or the claim of our bodies themselves being living sacrifices) sours into something less than compelling.
In our books shared on marriage and sex, in the premarital counseling sessions conducted, in the innumerable side conversations that inevitably come up about “family planning” and parenting:
What language comes up over and over? What attitudes and narratives get imbibed? What norms become solidified? Where does living within the created order, of sanctification in suffering, of submitting the totality of our selves to the Lord come in? Do we make decisions solely in the flesh, only within our perceived capabilities, and under ideal circumstances? Where do we take into account the supernatural grace and strength we confess to being recipients of?
Our witness here can become perplexing, perhaps even spiritually damaging, to the onlooker. “Why should I believe you?” is a valid question. The spiritual life of a Christian shows up in ways of being in the world. The stories we tell with our choices can transform into a stumbling block to another’s honest faith. A witness which violates certain things can itself become spiritually violating.
Do our choices show a true story or one incongruent one? Can people believe what we say about eternal things by the way we carry our own realities? Do our actions solidify or erode a sense of credibility?
Accepting our given bodies, honoring the procreative potential of married sexuality, and having a posture of openness toward the fruit of that union—even if it feels like carrying a cross—would be a start. Humility, generosity, and gratitude are incompatible with the Empire of Desire.
Taking Up Our Tasks, Taking Up Hope
According to Snell, we are creatures in need of both work and Sabbath feasting. We need to guard our ability to take up the labors we were created for, and take delight in leisure—the celebratory delights of the world. God instructs us to live in a “cycle of provision and rest.” Those around us need to see this kind of posture in life generally, and with matters of childbearing and parenting in particular. It gets to infuse it all:
“Sabbath teaches us to guard everything–to respect the integrity of things–by making us festive people, the non-barren capable of noting and attending to the richness deep down things… Sabbath retrains sight and love, guiding us in entering fullness after the bondage of Egypt (sloth, boredom, and nihilism).”
Our sight and loves may need to be retrained. And not only for our own good, but also for those around us.
Opportunities exist in all our interactions for us to embrace language which reframes these experiences less in terms of scarcity, fear, and control and more in terms of the abundance of God and our grateful receptivity. This is the Sabbath-shaped life.
Our bodies and sexuality, pregnancy, and parenting are all touched by the fall. But they are still good, and hold ways in which we were meant to know the Lord. In its sufferings, we were meant to press into the Holy Spirit. Christians do not jump ship at the first sign of struggle.
These experiences, being both physical and spiritual, are made of a gritty richness. They are glorious, if our souls will feel it. Our experiences of sexuality, pregnancy, and parenting this side of the fall are now places God desires to meet and be near to us, to bless and change us.
Fortunately, meeting acedia and all it breeds with the claims of Christianity doesn’t entail a blind optimism. In Confidence In Life, Matthew Lee Anderson writes, “Christianity simultaneously transcends optimism and pessimism and (paradoxically) deepens them, allowing us to approach the evils of the world with a practical seriousness that pessimism cannot muster, and to have a confidence about its fundamental goodness that optimism can merely mimic.”
People need to see the worthy work of parenting carried out by imperfect people. It is in work such as this, and other average endeavors, that we are given over to, as Snell puts it, “perfecting both the world and ourselves through our labors.” Such work is for others, but also for us.
He goes on to say, “If we remain at our work, we love the world back into graciousness as we refuse sloth’s abhorrence of place, sadness at the good, and refusal to act. When we act, we operate in keeping with the richness of the world and our own selves, and so encounter God as our friend.” So, then, we can take action where we find ourselves.
Snell brings us a line from Evagrius in which he explains the slothful wish to be somewhere else, concocting “big plans for charity and service, something noble and great, refusing to “see the grace in barren places.”
That toil in seemingly barren places could surprise us.
Furthermore, Snell writes, “Redemption is concrete, and God creates and heals in history, including our personal histories as we live them out in our ordinary days… Sloth’s cure is staying in the cell, remaining yoked to the work God has given…”
To the women who so desperately want to be well and whole before taking up the most human of tasks: Stay in the proverbial cell. That is how any of us do this. Don’t despise the yoke of persevering in small, concrete duties over and over. These are the most ordinary of human endeavors. Taking them up is how we are trained, how we are changed. As Snell puts it, “Mere repetition does not make us virtuous, but there is no virtue without repetition… We become the people we are by what we choose to do again.”
How else is one transformed and perfected into this ideal prospective parent? I’m not sure. But parenthood and childbearing itself can change us into new selves, if we let it. If we have no children of our own, becoming enmeshed in the lives of those who do can be mutually life changing.
The mysterious ways of generativity, of yielding to its various demands, can be what sets a person free from the inhumanity we shackle ourselves with. There is a weight to accepting reality that, in the end, transforms into an exhale of festive lightness.
After all, children see through our slothful rejection of the good. They call us, and society, to take up our tasks. They call us to revel in the joyous, to receive a more humane kind of life.
The smallest among us are icons of newness of life itself, our own included.
In Sum
What I would give for a world in which the Christian witness showed the true density of things, the integrity of creation and the cosmic realities radiating from it.
In faith, hope, and love we would show our tasks are worth carrying out, and our crosses worth carrying.
We would live into truer stories—because our Lord is with us, and for us. That is what shines in our persistence that life holds many imperfections, much suffering, and yet retains an integrity worth delighting in.
We would tangibly bear in our bodies, in any gifts of children given and embraced, that a Christian vision of reality is actually true. The alternative is lying with our lives.
But we are children of the resurrection, which is simultaneously absurd, impossible, and true. A sad and small culture of death never has the last word.
For the women of Britain, indicative of the wider despairing and indifferent world, we can become beacons. Beacons dancing and alive in the dark, a testimony to another way of being.
“Carrying the fire” is possible, but only if we have held onto it.
All your essays slap, but this one certifiably so.
This is so good, Haley. I will be pondering the contrast of sloth and Sabbath:
"After all, children see through our slothful rejection of the good. They call us, and society, to take up our tasks. They call us to revel in the joyous, to receive a more humane kind of life."