Abortion & Battlestar Galactica

BoomerBattlestar Galactica has recently addressed the issue of abortion–twice–and they’ve done it well both times.

The first time it happened was when the question of aborting Boomer’s human-cylon baby came up.

For those who don’t know, the cylons are artificial entities (who seem more biological than not) that wiped out human civilization in a distant star system. (The survivors are now fleeing the cylons and trying to find the lost colony called Earth.)

Boomer (left) is a cylon who was able to mate successfully with a human, and now she’s pregnant. In view of what her people did to ours, though, there are a lot of folks who want her and her hybrid baby dead, and the question of forcing an abortion upon her was floated on the show.

Ultimately, there was no abortion. This was good not only from a moral perspective (violence was done neither to the baby nor the mother) but also from a dramatic perspective. (Killing Boomer’s child would deprive the show of a huge amount of dramatic possibilities as well as completely turn off the audience.)

They also had the saving of the child result (via a kind of stem cell-like thing) in curing the terminal cancer of President Laura Roslin (below), who was the chief one wanting the baby dead. So even before the child was born, it saved a life.

Abortion then came up a few weeks later, when a girl from a pro-life colony tried get an abortion from the doctor aboard the Galactica.

RoslinThis episode established that abortion had been legal before the cylon attack, and so it was still legal. Further, President Roslin was very much a pro-abort. Yet she was also regarded as a religious figure by the pro-life colony, and she needs their political support to stay in office and keep the ragtag fleet of survivors safe.

As we know from the opening credits of the show every week, there are only 40-something thousand humans who survived the cylon attack, and more are getting picked off each week.

As Roslin herself said in the immediate wake of the attack, human civilization is doomed if they don’t get away from their home solar system " . . . And. Start. Having. Babies."

So the episode pits her pro-abortion ideology against the fact that humanity is facing extinction, and in this episode she’s told that unless demographic trends change (the trends including new cylon attacks on a regular basis) that the human race will be dead in less than 18 years.

Dramatically, this is very good. We’ve got internal conflict in the character. Laura Roslin is in the process of being mugged by reality.

And so in the end she issues an executive order that criminalizes abortion and makes anyone who would interfere with the birth of a child–whether mother or doctor (fathers don’t get mentioned explicitly for some reason)–subject to criminal penalties.

Two points for BSG!

But only two, because the writers throw a bone to the pro-aborts in the audience by letting the girl from the pro-life colony have the abortion before the executive order is issued–possibly costing President Roslin the support of the pro-life colonials in the upcoming election.

This also may not be the last time the subject comes up, because Roslin–who is now a "personally-in-favor-of-abortion-BUT" candidate (how’s that for a switch!) is pitted against a true pro-abort.

Interesting stuff.

Part of what I find interesting is that the writers of the show seem to be quite liberal (as you learn if you listen to the podcast commentary), but they’re telling a story that regularly forces them into having to take conservative positions on the show, because the conservative positions are the ones that are required for the survival of mankind.

"Liberalism is a luxury we can’t afford" is the message that keeps coming out.

Watching the characters from a pampered civilization get mugged by reality and have to shed their former illusions may not be one of the reasons that TV Guide called this "The best show on television," but it could have been.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

24 thoughts on “Abortion & Battlestar Galactica”

  1. My only criticism of the episode involved the apparent abuse of executive authority when the President overruled settled legislation by fiat.
    But then, they’ve never really explained how the Colonial Constitution works; as far as I can tell they aren’t even under martial law, which would be the least you would expect of a society on the brink of extinction and which could actually take votes by a show of hands.
    PVO

  2. It is a great show. One thing I wonder about is the effectivness of nukes against a ship in space. Are there any nuclear weapons specialists reading this site? How powerful would a nuke be in space? Galactica and now Pegasus have survived multiple nuke strikes. That’s some impressive armor!

  3. I’ve never watched BSG(yet) but I’ve recently been watching some re-runs of STNG and saw what I thought could be “pro-life” themes even the the writers might not have thought of them as such.
    Themes denouncing genetic manipulation and engineering, ect and euthanasia.

  4. From my relatively sparse knowledge of atomics and space physics, the armor would have to be quite impressive indeed. However, the most impressive part of the armor would have to be of a magnetic field variety, rather than of bonding forces.
    A nuke, detonated in space, would create an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) that would fry the circuitry of all ships within a large radius from the blast. (I will defer to others who are more knowledgeable on this subject – it could be that disrupting the Earth’s ionosphere is the reason for the EMP.)
    I believe this was a major reason for the Space Weapons Treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – even if the nuke didn’t reach the opposite country before detonating, it could wipe out every computer in every military installation, hospital, water treatment plant, business, factory, school, etc. merely by detonating in space.
    A strong magnetic field would have to surround every ship in the fleet, in order to deflect the EMP. (This would be similar to how the Van Allen Belt surrounding the Earth prevent us from being overly bombarded by EMPs/high-energy particles from the sun’s fussion reactions.)
    Of course, I could be wrong. I’m a database programmer with 1 semester of modern physics under my belt from 12 years ago – I’m not a nuclear physicist.

  5. I think the writers deserve a lot of credit. They didn’t have to address this issue in the first place, but they courageously did – and came to a conclusion that is against their liberal sensibilities.
    They didn’t have to tell this part of the story – they could have opted out of the abortion debate entirely. But they took it head on and found the pro-abortion position lacking.
    I would recommend praying for the writers of this very challenging show.

  6. Amen, Paolo!
    I really, really need to get into BG! Can’t miss this one like I did Babylon 5.

  7. My wife and I love this show, and after having to drop another show we watched because of an abortion plot (Boston Legal), we are praying that Battlestar doesn’t jump the shark on this one.
    I agree with Jimmy that they handled it well enough. But I’m not sure it will all turn out well, altough there are ways that it could.
    Cylon Sharon’s baby won’t be aborted, even though I think theoretically, you could make a moral case for it since, after all, the Cylons may really be computers mimicking sentient life and thus it would be erasing a program rather than ending a life. I wouldn’t agree with that proposition, as the Cylons bear too much resemblance to sentience to be certain, but someone could make the case.
    Anyway, the problem I had with the episode was the lack of a sympathetic pro-life voice. There were two opportunities. One was the religious community’s rep to the president, who started off as an inoffensive mouthpiece for a liberal’s view of the pro-life argument in the case (“she belongs at home with her parents”), but who in the end seemed to be on the verge of screeching at the president about her allowance of the girl’s abortion.
    This prompted the president to say something to the effect of “you have your pound of flesh, no get out” (and I hope that “pound of flesh” comment wasn’t some kind of very off-color joke . . .)
    The other possibility was Adama, the agnostic admiral, who was the one pointing out to the president that they needed more people. His was an argument for survival though, not against abortion per se.
    Finally, the “18 years left” number was given to the president by the bad guy, and although there’s no indication it isn’t correct, he used her outlawing abortion (criminalizing the mother, and by fiat no less, as paul says above) as an excuse to run against her in the election, saying basically if we have to die as a race to keep abortion, then that’s what we do.
    Granted, he’s the bad guy and that’s a stupid bad guy thing to say, but the show’s writers seem to go out of their way to have no one be completely good or bad, so this could be portrayed as a moment of “goodness” for Baltar.
    Anyway, here’s hoping and praying they end it well, or at least lay off the abortion plot, although it’s got at least another episode or two’s life left in it.

  8. Cylon Sharon’s baby won’t be aborted, even though I think theoretically, you could make a moral case for it since, after all, the Cylons may really be computers mimicking sentient life and thus it would be erasing a program rather than ending a life. I wouldn’t agree with that proposition, as the Cylons bear too much resemblance to sentience to be certain, but someone could make the case.
    The Cylons mimicking sentience is akin to passing the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.
    However, the moral case against abortion is not based on the killing of a sentient form of life. (One could, theoretically, argue that dolphins are sentient life, as well as lower on the “intelligent animal” scale.) The immorality of abortion is based on the fact that it is the putting to death of a human being – a person, with an animal body inhabitated by a soul that is a spirit in the image and likeness of God.
    The question of abortion, regarding Cylons, would then be concerned with the issue of personhood. Do the Cylons have souls/spirits? More to the point, would the human-Cylon hybrid be a person with a spirit? (Not that I know the answer, but I believe this is the question.)
    Anybody else have other views or a better explanation? (I’m just an amateur at this – I don’t pretend to be able to translate morality to fictional realms.)

  9. It’s important to realize here that, sentient or not, a cylon would not have a soul. It therefore would be a being whose actions were entirely determined by its environment and its programming. It would not have a true moral capacity, which requires an un-determined free will, an impossibility in a purely material nature. Therefore, there is no moral issue involved in the termination of a cylon other than purely material considerations of cost vs. benefit. The situation is completely different for a real human being. The problem with programs like Battlestar Galactica is that they portray reality in purely material terms. The same thing is true of all the so-called plot twists involving the android, Data, on Startrek TNG. There, as in almost all other science fiction “programs,” intelligence and emotion are considered merely as phenomena of “highly advanced” circuitry.

  10. I’m still trying to figure out why only the Cylons believe in the one God. Are the writers trying to elude to something? Bad guys/gals believe in one God? It seems all the humans are either atheist/agnostic or believe in “Gods”.

  11. The Cylons appear to have a more or less panthesitic theology — while they talk about “the one God” quite a bit, the few times they go into any more detail about their theology they seem to be asserting that _they_ (and everyone else) “are God”. Rather New Age, really.
    The human religion, on the other hand, is more or less old-fashioned polytheism, though on occasion they will make reference to “God”, unqualified. I’m not sure whether that’s sloppiness on the part of the writers or an actual shadow of monotheism like that which sometimes lurks in polytheistic religions.

  12. Incidentally, in response to Fr. Larry’s comment, it’s not entirely clear yet that the writers are taking a purely materialistic tack.
    As a whole, cylons and humans in the show both appear to take the notion of immaterial immortal souls seriously.
    The cylons have taken elaborate technological lengths to “counterfeit” them (a dying cylon’s mind will be remotely copied and “reincarnated” in a new body), but when it comes down to it they seem to recognize the deficiency of the counterfeit.
    There are some suggestions in the show that the reason the cylons seem so intent on interbreeding with humans before they destroy them is that they hope that the hybrid will have a real immortal soul on account of its human ancestry.

  13. Ah, heck. While I’m responding to the whole thread: in a vacuum, a nuclear explosion would mainly be burst of high-energy (“hard”) x-rays.
    Most of the “interesting” and spectacular effects we associate with a nuclear explosion are due to interaction with the atmosphere. The EMP effect is due to the interaction of electrons stripped from the atmosphere and the Earth’s magnetic field.
    That’s not to say that nukes couldn’t be effective against ships in space (particularly manned ones, just on account of the radiation), but to get the most effect you’d probably want to either deliver them via armor-piercing munitions, detonating them inside the target ship, or wrap them in a lot of material which the nuclear explosion can impart energy to in lieu of an atmosphere.

  14. I disagree with Jimmy on this one, since I did not like the way BSG handled the abortion issue. The reason? They accepted the debate solely on the pro-aborts terms; that is, that the right to abort an unborn child is a human right which accrues to the mother. No mention of the baby and *its* possible rights was made, which is *exactly* how pro-abortion folks frame the discussion. At the very least, they should have raised the question: what about the right of the unborn child to life? Instead, the “right” to abort is eliminated due to expediency, just as a right to free speech could be similarly curtailed.
    That being said, BSG is still far and away my favorite television show!

  15. It would have been SOOOOO AWESOME if they had recalled what Adama told Starbuck when he cancelled the assasination order of [Ensign Rho.]
    Remembering the conversation he had with Cylon Sharon about why the Cylons hate humans, he told Starbuck that it wasn’t enough for humanity to survive, they had to be worthy of survival.
    Any society that allows the termination of its own young really ought to consider whether they are worthy of survival?

  16. Good grief! How can people waste even one minute on such garbage? (Rhetorical question. Won’t be reading any answers. Can’t waste a minute on them either.)

  17. The polytheism versus monotheism in the show is quite real, and they’ve been quite consistent. In fact, in one deleted scene (available on DVD) we hear the human priestess explain that the reason humans left Kobol is that one of the gods falsely claimed to be the One, True God.
    The original BG was created by Glen Larson, who wrote the underlying theology as explicitly Mormon — including some literal quotes from Mormon theological sources. But the current writers are not Mormon and it seems that the lingering Mormon traits in the show are due solely to holdovers from the old series.
    I’m very curious what the final theology of the show will turn out to be — but based on the old show and that deleted scene, I suspect that the gods are quite real, and (at least) one of them is not very nice.

  18. Gene Branaman wrote:
    I really, really need to get into BG! Can’t miss this one like I did Babylon 5.
    Battlestar Galactica is quite good, but it’s not as great as Babylon 5 or Buffy or Firefly. And of all these shows, only B5 had any serious theological reflection (and not, really, all that much of it).
    BG is fun if you get the DVDs, because then you can watch the entire run of the show in a few weeks. You can also buy the episodes on iTunes if you don’t mind the lower video quality.

  19. I am of the position of believing that BSG is a pre-history of mankind rather than a futuristic history. That is why there is a vague pantheism or a polytheism that is presented in terms of religion.
    But what I find most important is that religion IS in the picture when it could be completely left out. Religion is presented very much “in your face” in BSG, but it isn’t overwhelming – especially to a very skeptical sci-fi audience. I thought it was amusing in Season 1 when Baltar tells the blonde Cylon agent that he is surprised that such a beautiful intelligent woman like her would believe in God.
    It may not be Christian in its approach, but it’s quite a leap from what I’m used to in most Sci-Fi films and movies. Even Firefly, with an obvious Christian preacher, did not dare venture into the realms that BSG dares to trod.
    The whole abortion debate seems to have skirted around the “personhood” issue, but I find that irrelevant. From a completely naturalistic philosophy that doesn’t rely on theology of the soul or the idea of “personhood”, abortion is insane from the stand-point of biological survival. It is literally genetic suicide. So even though the writers of the show never framed the abortion debate in Christian terms, they still tackled it (and rather well) from purely naturalistic terms.
    I think that they did have to throw a bone to the pro-abortion side, just to not completely lose their more liberal audience, but I think that the message was pretty crystal clear by framing the debate in purely naturalistic terms. Abortion is suicide for the human race.
    It seems to me that if there are Christians who write BSG, they are being very prudent in how they approach the issues of abortion and religion. They don’t lose the liberal audience by making it so overtly pro-life and Christian. They cater to both sides – showing how uncharitable pro-lifers can sometimes be, but also showing that abortion is suicide for humanity.
    And if they aren’t Christian… Then the Holy Spirit is working pretty hard on these people to come to such stark conclusions about their own liberal leanings.
    Either way, they need prayers. Who knows how much this particular episode has gotten some pro-abortionists to rethink about humanity’s survival.

  20. I think we are all overestimating the effect of the “survival of the species” argument. Most pro-choice people I know (and myself, when I was) really believed that there are TOO MANY people on this planet already. And of course it would be politically incorrect to suggest that any particular culture or civilization should reproduce in order to keep pace or outnumber any other. Remember that thinking about demographics still reeks to many people of Nazi-era social engineering.
    The beauty of BG, and SF in general, of course, is that you can put humanity in such extreme situations that the “reality” of overpopulation doesn’t apply.
    Now I’m just wondering when did Lee become such a slut? And why did dear Billy have to die?

  21. Dear Beth,
    I think with the great “Birth Dearth” in Western Civilization, China, Japan and industrialized Asian countries, the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the general demographic collapse due to the success of UN population control, people will soon realize that we do need to start having more children to preserve our society and save our species.
    Or we can continue on our merry way and give up our civilization to a monotheistic fanatics, hell-bent on destroying us all or interbreeding with us out of existence.
    Thinking about it… Maybe that’s the inspiration for the series…

  22. Billy had to die because the actor got a better job as the lead in a new show coming out. Some sitcom if I remember correctly.

  23. In answer to the query about the effectiveness of nukes in space, I thought these articles by Paul Lucas might be helpful:
    Hunters in the Great Dark, Part 1: A Hard-Science Look at Deep-Space Warfare
    Hunters in the Great Dark, Part 2: The Weapons of Deep-Space Warfare
    Excerpts:
    One obvious candidate is a nuclear warhead, the more powerful the better, to propel thousands of high-density, high-speed shrapnel fragments from a specially designed casing. Assuming at least a 1-megaton blast, the nuke’s heat and radiation flash, electromagnetic pulse, and hypervelocity projectiles could prove a very deadly combination for any spaceship even dozens of kilometers away. Far more powerful warheads with much larger danger zones may be desirable, and research has shown that it is possible to tamp nukes to direct over half of the bomb’s energy in the enemy’s general direction.
    It should be noted that one thing a nuke in space will not produce is a significantly powerful shockwave. Shockwaves on the surface of Earth are propagated by the atmosphere; in space the only shockwave felt would be that produced by the vaporized bomb casing, and at typical space-engagement distances its impact on a ship would be negligible. However, without the atmosphere to absorb all that excess energy, both the heat and radiation flash of the bomb would prove much more lethal at much greater distances.

    Two caveats: 1) The E-zine that the articles appear in, Strange Horizons, does have an editoral agenda, but the above two articles are pretty much on the up and up. 2) BSG, like all SF, employs some “handwavium” in its make up. Sometimes you have to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the story.

  24. I’ve been pleased with the general level of “realism” the directors of BSG have put into such things as dogfight physics and explosions in space (I especially liked the external view of the suicide bomber blowing up on the refinery ship), but nuclear warheads are one area where they let the desire for good visuals overwhelm the physics.
    When the ship takes a hit from a nuke, they want it to rock like a dreadnought under fire to communicate the visceral physical danger, rather than just showing every electrical console shutting down or shorting out.
    PVO

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