Behind and Beyond the Shout for Abortion
We need works of art that convey
the radical horror of abortion
Rosemarie Tischer Stith, “Triumph” (1973)
The US Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) stated in support of abortion that the “ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
But laws are not the only impediment to a woman’s choice to abort.
The negation of social as well as legal constraints on abortion is necessary for abortion freedom. Moral qualms (and consequent mental health worries) could stop the choice of abortion. These, too, must be negated in order for women to feel free to abort. Abortion must become a normal part of a decent life.
Women must be made ready and willing to choose abortion if they are to “participate equally in . . . economic and social life” with their male colleagues. Abortion must become ordinary.
To this end, women are being encouraged to speak loudly about their abortions.
Shout Your Abortion is a movement working “to normalize abortion through art, media, and community events all over the country,” according to its mission statement. It’s a kind of shame-shaming in which women are exhorted to normalize “terminations,” to see them as an everyday part of life.
Its Twitter feed is full of messages like:
- “Abortion is normal. Our stories are ours to tell. This is not a debate.”
- “I aid and abet abortion and will do so proudly and constantly for the rest of my life.”
- “Happy #CelebrateAbortionProviders Appreciation Day!”
- “It seems incredibly damaging to label folks who choose abortion as naïve or uneducated or selfish. Or victims.”
From the beginning, as in the basic training of soldiers, shouting was going to be needed to make humans feel good about killing other humans.
Words can go only so far in combating this purposeful hardening of hearts. Closely reasoned arguments and statistics may fail to pierce the defiance of its “iron dome.” There is a thick layer of pain, abuse, fear, loneliness, and anger shielding abortion supporters from the truth.
Perhaps the best way to dissolve this coating is with art. Recall Picasso’s great painting of the carpet bombing of a town in northern Spain, Guérnica (now Gernika). It is a more radical revelation of the horror of war than any textbook.
Where is the art radically uncovering the horror of abortion?
I’d like to nominate the sculpture below: “Triumph,” by Rosemarie Tischer Stith (1973)
Artist Stith, herself a child refugee from the WWII firebombing obliterating Dessau, Germany, foresaw the great shout for abortion way back in 1973, the year a right to abortion was first proclaimed by the US Supreme Court.
Her 36-inch ceramic sculpture, “Triumph,” depicts a woman — standing tall in victory — her left hand on her hip and her right fist thrust into the air. Her head and hair are back. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is open in a cry of triumph. Her chest swells in exultation, while her peculiarly elongated legs raise her pridefully high.
Under her feet lies her vanquished baby.
Here we see a mother’s contemporary assertion of dominion over her unborn child, but with her triumphal shout she dehumanizes herself rather than her child.
Indeed, the child is still intact, not yet aborted but only made available for abortion. The point of the sculpture is to depict not abortion itself but the new idea of motherhood that came with the US Supreme Court’s abortion proclamation.
This brief video reflects further upon old and new ideas of motherhood:
artist Rosemarie Stith and author Richard Stith, wife and husband
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Richard Stith is a professor emeritus of law at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He is on the board of the Consistent Life Network. See selected works.
This is a slightly revised version of an article appearing in MercatorNet, 3/28/22
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For more on art and the consistent life ethic, see:
Art Exhibit
Gendercide: Millions of “Missing” (Dead) Women
Poetry
“Seamless Garment” – Poem by Daniel Berrigan
Let us all agree on this one simple thing: It is not OK to kill people.
For more of our posts from Richard Stith, see:
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life
“Trust Landlords”: Pro-Choice Candidate Supports Eviction Rights (satire)
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
A Hidden Cost of the Ukraine War: How Russia’s Invasion Encourages the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
by John Whitehead
The terrible toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is plain to see: thousands killed and millions driven from their homes. The invasion also threatens to bring about a nuclear disaster. Fighting around Ukraine’s nuclear power plants might cause an accident like that at Chernobyl almost 36 years ago. The war might draw NATO into direct conflict with Russia, leading to nuclear war. All these costs and threats from the war require an immediate humanitarian and diplomatic response.
In addition, we should not forget a subtler, longer-term impact of the Russia-Ukraine war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine could seriously damage the cause of nuclear nonproliferation. The current war provides fresh encouragement for nations to build or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. Even if this war ends without nuclear disaster, the world may well be living with dangerous nuclear consequences for a long time to come.
Ukraine Gives Up Nuclear Weapons
Ukraine today possesses no nuclear weapons and is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which commits the country to not seek such weapons. However, this situation is a change from 30 years ago.
When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the country was a base for Soviet nuclear weapons. At the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, 1,900 nuclear weapons remained stationed on Ukrainian soil. Measured in sheer numbers, Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, after the United States and Russia, within its borders. This arsenal included weapons with a destructive power of 400-550 kilotons, or more than 20 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Newly independent Ukraine’s government took an ambivalent stance toward the nuclear weapons on its territory. President Leonid Kravchuk established “administrative control” over the nuclear weapons in 1992 but assured US President George H. W. Bush that Ukraine would get rid of the weapons while “taking into consideration her national security.” The Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, similarly declared that the country would disarm but first required security guarantees. Ukrainian policymakers were presumably concerned about post-Soviet Russia, with which relations were tense. Meanwhile, the Bush administration wanted to reduce the number of former Soviet states with nuclear weapons to just one, Russia, perhaps out of a fear of a nuclear exchange among feuding post-Soviet states.
This situation led to a long diplomatic wrangle between the United States and Ukraine. American policymakers offered assurances to the Ukrainians about their country’s independence and territorial integrity being respected. However, the American policymakers would not offer their Ukrainian counterparts what the latter wanted: a legally binding guarantee that included assistance to Ukraine and automatic sanctions on an aggressor in the event of a threat to Ukraine.
Ukraine, the United States, and Russia were eventually able to negotiate a settlement, which included the Budapest Memorandum of December 9, 1994. In the Memorandum, the United States and Russia (and the United Kingdom, which was also a party to the agreement) committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
The Memorandum contained essentially no means of enforcing this commitment, though: Russia and the United States pledged “to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine… if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression.” Since both nations are veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council, each could block any Security Council “action” on Ukraine’s behalf.
Whatever the Budapest Memorandum’s shortcomings, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons and to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—although the Rada warned that Ukraine might withdraw from the treaty if its territorial integrity were threatened. The Ukrainians began transferring their nuclear weapons to Russia and dismantling their own means for using such weapons. The last nuclear warhead left Ukraine in 1996; the last missile silo was demolished in 2001.
The limitations of the Budapest Memorandum became apparent in 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the territory’s transfer. Russia used its veto again this February to stop a resolution condemning its current invasion of Ukraine.
The terrible significance of these events for anti-nuclear activists is clear. As Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association recently commented, “[Russian President Vladimir Putin]’s behavior undermines the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] and reinforces the impression that nuclear-armed states can bully non-nuclear states, thus reducing the incentives for disarmament and making it more difficult to prevent nuclear proliferation.”
Even before the current invasion, some Ukrainians seemed to have second thoughts about giving up nuclear weapons. In 2014, at the time of Crimea’s annexation, several Rada members proposed that Ukraine withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Others introduced a bill, which was ultimately defeated, calling for a renewal of Ukraine’s nuclear status. Volodymyr Ohryzko, a former Ukrainian foreign minister, proposed that the country start producing nuclear weapons. Ohryzko commented, “[W]e have the moral and legal right to restore our nuclear status and take measures to protect ourselves independently.”
Ukrainian popular opinion became more supportive of obtaining nuclear weapons again, with almost 50 percent of survey respondents favoring this policy in 2014. More recently, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seemed to suggest in spring 2021 that Ukraine could pursue nuclear weapons in the future—although the Foreign Ministry later walked back that comment. What course Ukraine will ultimately take, like the conclusion of the present war, remains to be seen.
Best Option Available?
The dangers of nuclear weapons spreading to more countries is yet another tragic result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Faced with such a maddening situation, the temptation is to say that the Budapest Memorandum should have provided more robust, definite guarantees to Ukraine. What such guarantees might have been is not obvious, though.
Had the United States signed a legally binding treaty in 1994 promising to defend Ukraine from attack, such a treaty would have been the practical equivalent of making Ukraine part of NATO. Yet Ukrainian NATO membership has been one of the central sticking points in US-Russian relations and has arguably contributed to the current conflict. Such a promise by the United States might have led to a conflict with Russia sooner rather than later.
An American guarantee of aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia in the event of a Russian attack on Ukraine might have been more politically feasible in the early 1990s. However, a combination of aid and sanctions has essentially been the actual American response to Russia’s 2014 and 2022 aggression against Ukraine—and, as we have seen, such a response has hardly resolved the problem.
The disheartening reality may be that the United States and other western nations did not have a practical way in the early 1990s of protecting a nuclear-free Ukraine from Russia. The largely symbolic Budapest Memorandum may have been the best available option. Beyond the Memorandum, the most effective way of protecting Ukraine would have been preventing the relationships among Ukraine, Russia, and the west from deteriorating to the level they reached in the 2010s. That did not happen, though, and now Ukraine and the world must deal with the consequences.
Several significant events over the last 20 years have made nuclear nonproliferation and controlling nuclear weapons more difficult. One was the 2011 military intervention by a coalition of nations, including the United States, in Libya. By leading to the overthrow of Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi, who had renounced his nation’s nuclear weapons program in 2003, the intervention provided another strong incentive for rulers to acquire nuclear weapons and never give them up.
Other significant events have been the United States’ withdrawal from agreements such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, as well Russia’s apparent violations of the latter treaty. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, are yet more episodes in this lamentable pattern.
The two nations with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals have predictably proven to be among the most significant obstacles to reducing the nuclear threat.
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For more of our posts on Ukraine, see:
Not Your Pawns: A CLE Examination of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
A Catastrophe Decades in the Making: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat “An Inferno That
Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons
What Studies Show: Impact of Abortion Regulations
The upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which may overturn or curtail Roe v. Wade, calls for educating about this question: What do we know about what restrictions do?
The edited excerpts below are from Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion, Chapter 15, The Psychological and Social Impact of Legal Regulations.
by Rachel MacNair
Different states (U.S. and Mexican) had regulations in effect one year but not the previous year. Some impact one group more than another; for example, parental consent laws only matter to minors. Therefore, this could be analyzed as a natural experiment.
Women Who Ask and Are Turned Down
When abortions were primarily illegal and societal pressures for legalization were mounting, one method of easing restrictions allowed women to apply to a committee for permission to abort a pregnancy. A 1988 book reporting research from this condition is Born Unwanted: Development Effects of Denied Abortion.
How would the children compare with the children from accepted pregnancies? The answer is complicated, but the author’s summary includes:
Inspection of the data reveals that the difference is not so much in UP [unwanted pregnancy] children failing more often, but rather in being substantially underrepresented among the students graded above average, very good, or outstanding . . . the UP children consistently appeared worse, primarily due to underrepresentation in the above-average categories. (p. 88)
To re-iterate: “the UP subjects are not so much overrepresented on the extremely negative indicators as they are underrepresented on the positive ones” (p. 124).
Those of the “abortion-as-violence” position, however, argue that if abortion is killing a human being, doing so to avoid being underrepresented among the above average seems rather draconian. (The headline in Sisterlife, then newsletter of Feminists for Life: Prof Repulsed by Working Class; Recommends Elimination. Not Clear Who Will Repair His Mercedes.)
Funding
In the United States, after the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade suddenly legalized abortion in all 50 states, the Medicaid program for funding medical services to low- income people included abortion. Then in 1976 a legislative provision, the Hyde Amendment, restricted Medicaid funding to only cases of rape, incest, and preventing the death of the pregnant woman. These being rare, in many states funding was immediately severed, while other states continued. This provided a natural experiment.
The Guttmacher Institute reported that in states without funding, the abortion rate was 1.6 times higher for Medicaid-eligible women than for women of higher income. The fact that it is greater than one to one suggests poverty plays a role in abortion decisions. However, the rate in states with funding is 3.9 times higher for women on Medicaid.
Yet childbirths in the states without funding either stayed the same or were also reduced. The missing abortions were not entirely replaced by women continuing pregnancies, but by couples taking more care about becoming pregnant.
Distance of Facilities
An early study showed counties further away from the abortion clinics of Atlanta had lower abortion-to-live birth ratios than those nearer. A more recent study in Texas using 1993 data found the probability of a pregnant woman choosing abortion appeared quite sensitive to availability variables; women in counties further away from clinics had a lower rate than those near.
Parental Involvement
See the topic page on this at Peace and Life Referendums: What Studies Show for Parental Involvement for Abortions Performed on Minors.
Outright Legal Ban
The restrictions covered here will only prevent abortions in women whose desire to have an abortion is sufficiently ambivalent, or if the added inconvenience of procuring abortion puts the inconvenience of using a condom in a better light. Pregnant women who are determined to have an abortion will find funding, drive extra distances, tolerate information and waiting periods, and forge ahead. Only an outright legal ban makes abortion essentially unavailable. Even then, determined women will travel to where they are not banned or have them surreptitiously.
Two countries that have instituted legal bans after a period of fairly free availability are Poland in 1993 and Nicaragua in 2006. In both, the abortion rate went down (inasmuch as it was reported since it was banned), the maternal mortality rate went down, and indicators of maternal health went up.
However, there were simultaneous dramatic occurrences in both – a transition out of communism in Poland, and an assertive women’s health-care campaign by the Nicaraguan government.
In the opposite direction, abortion legalization in South Africa, Ethiopia, and Nepal was also accompanied by better maternal health outcomes, and likely for similar reasons.
Mexico had a “natural experiment” as abortion was legalized in some of its 32 states but not others. One 2015 study tested whether there was an association with maternal mortality (from both aborted and continued pregnancies) after controlling for other variables such as clean water. Over ten years, they found states with less permissive laws had lower maternal mortality than states with more permissive laws. However, there were independent associations with female literacy, skilled attendance at birth, low birth weight, clean water, sanitation, and intimate partner violence, which in a regression accounted for most of the variance in maternal mortality. Authors conclude: “Although less permissive states exhibited consistently lower maternal mortality rates, this finding was not explained by abortion legislation itself. Rather, these differences were explained by other independent factors, which appeared to have a more favorable distribution in these states.” The question of why less permissive abortion laws were associated with these other measures of benefit was beyond the scope of the study.
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For our posts on similar topics, see:
Why the Hyde Amendment Helps Low-Income Women
Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation
“The Daily Show” Doesn’t Do Its Homework
A Process of Tender Understanding and Loving Closure when Life Ends
Lois Kerschen
by Lois Kerschen
Palliative Care
Legislatures around the world are increasingly passing bills that allow for euthanasia and assisted suicide. This is a trend we must resist, and we can do so by educating ourselves and others about palliative care.
Allow me to recommend an excellent book on this subject: That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour (2019), written by Dr. Sunita Puri.
This book is not technical or academic. It is biographical, easy to read, and a fascinating meditation on Dr. Puri’s experiences during her residency in palliative medicine. She takes you through the options and emotions involved in end-of-life care for the patient and the family.
While the concept can be applied to any serious illness, terminal or not, the goal to relieve symptoms and stress for the patient becomes even more important if we want to facilitate a peaceful death.
This effort entails creating a team of health care providers who are all on the same page with the patient’s wishes and each other. This collaboration gives patients more control over their care and improves their quality of life.
Quality of life in this discussion means that patients get to die with dignity on their own terms. Sometimes patients feel as if they can’t deal with the pain, or that they are a burden to their families, so they try to hasten death with assisted suicide.
As Dr. Puri notes, studies show that, with palliative care, most patients get sufficient pain relief to be able to function at an acceptable level to make their remaining time worthwhile. Patients can also be treated for the depression that causes them to want to die by suicide.
Sometimes worries about financial or family matters can be alleviated through counseling with the palliative specialist. Serving as a buffer, and sometimes as the voice of reason, the palliative specialist often deals with one of two extremes.
One is that the family is making the patient feel like a burden and seems to be looking for ways to dump the patient or hasten death. The palliative specialist can recommend compassionate and practical options to the family and provide support to the patient.
The other is a family that won’t accept the impending death and is demanding extreme efforts to save the patient’s life. This situation often results in great suffering and distress for the patient who submits to unwanted treatment to appease the family.
Palliative care helps the family hear what the patient wants, accept the inevitable, and make the best use of the remaining time with their loved one.
Perinatal Hospice
Perinatal Hospice is a wonderful, compassionate practice that is not well-known. It is intended for pre-born children who have serious medical problems that result in death, either shortly before or just after birth.
In those rare cases, it is important that we respect their humanity and provide a dignified end of life while helping the parents and family to navigate a very difficult ending to what started as joyful expectation.
Perinatal Hospice provides a support system for parents who receive a terminal diagnosis for their unborn child such as a lethal heart defect, Trisomy 18, limited brain development, or other conditions. Knowing that carrying to term will not mean carrying home a baby is, of course, heartbreaking, but it can be an awe-inspiring and uplifting experience, nonetheless.
Sometimes the child will die before being born. Other times it will live just a few minutes, hours, or days, but that precious time can be filled with profound love.
Perinatal hospice is not a place but a process. Planning starts at the diagnosis with the parents fully involved. Basically, though, whether the child is born alive or stillborn, it is bathed, wrapped in blankets, and given to the parents to hold (and perhaps other family members). The baby is made comfortable with pain medication, if needed.
The grieving process is eased if the parents have something to remember, so they can take a lock of hair and photos, make a footprint mold, pray or sing to the child — whatever is meaningful to the family, including the presence of clergy and a baptism. Then, the baby will pass away in the arms of its parents having known only love.
There will be a birth certificate, a death certificate and a funeral to validate the child’s existence. The parents could also provide the life-giving gift of donated organs.
Abortion Fixes Nothing
Most of the time, when parents are given an “incompatible with life” diagnosis, they are advised to abort the child. The abortion mentality justifies this action by claiming that that the child will be spared suffering, and that it is emotionally too distressing for the parents to continue the pregnancy.
In truth, the emotional toll of abortion is much worse. Parents who abort are left with the guilt and grief of having killed their own child. They do not usually get to see the child who has been dismembered (causing excruciating pain) and discarded with the medical waste.
Sometimes, in a third trimester abortion (in which the child is stabbed through the heart with a needle, injected with a poison, and delivered intact), the parents will be allowed to hold their dead baby, but that’s it. There is no birth certificate, no organ donations, no death certificate, no funeral for closure, no photos or footprints, no lock of hair, no happy memories of love and comfort, just the possibility that the mother has been harmed by the procedure.
The reality of the situation is that abortion is promoted because the more people have abortions, the more normal and acceptable it becomes, and therefore more abortions will be sold by the abortion industry. Who cares if parents are left bereft if abortion can get one more stat in its favor?
Compare the two outcomes between abortion and perinatal hospice and it seems obvious which is the better choice.
Learn More
Unfortunately, there are only about 250 programs in U.S. hospitals, although many more allow the parents to create their own experience. Still, all who understand the value of the palliative concept need to request or initiate Perinatal Hospice in their communities.
Perinatal Hospice & Palliative Care
Amy Kuebelbeck is the editor of this clearinghouse of information, including a list of American and international programs. She is also the author of A Gift of Time: Continuing Your Pregnancy When Your Baby’s Life Is Expected to Be Brief and Waiting with Gabriel: A Story of Cherishing a Baby’s Brief Life.
Other sites:
Perinatal Care Helps Families Deal with Heartbreaking Situations
The Welcome Outreach of Perinatal Hospice
Perinatal Hospice Supports Parents When a Baby’s Life is Short
The Pain – and Surprising Beauty – of Hospice Care for Babies
Secular Prolife: A Pro-Life Introduction to Perinatal Hospice
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For posts on similar topics, see:
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean?
#SayHisName: The Medical Murder of Michael Hickson
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill
The Traumatized Lash Out
by Rachel MacNair
Addressing the question: From where do abortion-performing doctors get their social support?
An excerpt from Achieving Peace in the Abortion War.
Chapter 11: Colleagues and Clients
(sources adapted for a website)
Gratitude?
If other doctors and the pro-choice movement are inadequate as sources of support, then surely at least the clients can be expected to be grateful. And of course many of them are. Yet many seriously do not want to be there. This isn’t unusual in medicine, but most medicine has on-going care so that the doctor is able to monitor the patient and see that she’s improving, allowing for both a sense of accomplishment and gratitude.
The assembly-line set-up of the average abortion clinic is not asking for respect from the clients. In fact, this technique may be employed partly because of knowledge that the gratitude is never really going to come. It’s deliberately not asked for . . .
An abortion doctor who had a problem with inner strength commented on this in the Boston Globe (November 11, 1994) “I could have put up with some more, but I felt no community support at all. I could have taken a lot more abuse, but there was not even a patient saying, ‘I know you’re not a murderer.’ That demoralized me.”
The Feeling is Mutual
Feeling highly stressed can be expected to lead to a lashing out. The lambaste can be aimed at several targets, and for the abortion doctor, there are plenty available. Pro-life picketers are among the best to aim for, but they’re outside the building. Throwing barbs at them on the way in and on the way out only does so much. Politicians, media, other doctors, and the pro-choice movement can be complained about, but they’re off somewhere else and so can be targeted only verbally. Staff people are close by and can make excellent targets, but they’re hired and not likely to stay if they are the butt of too much resentment. Besides, they’re in the same fix.
There is one target left that falls into place nicely – the person that the doctor has never seen before and likely will never see again. The person who is going to allow the doctor to come close to her with sharp instruments. The person who makes this whole job necessary, then isn’t even grateful.
The doctor can blame the person who, if she had only kept her pants on, wouldn’t be doing this. Never mind that there is, in each and every case, another person who could also have prevented it by keeping his pants on. He’s not there to lash out at, and she is. Besides, blaming the woman for getting pregnant is traditional.
Current abortion opponents are not the only ones to have noticed this phenomenon. Marjorie Brerer’s position is unambiguously in favor of ready access to abortion. Yet on a panel discussion at a conference on RU-486 she listed one of the reasons for someone being an abortion provider as, “a relatively sadistic way of punishing women.” She later says that, with RU-486, she, “would like to ask whether providers will still be able to have a punitive role, if that’s the role they want to have.”1
Those that have looked at this in scholarly fashion have found indications of this. “Many faculty and resident physicians doing abortion work reported clinical symptomology. Among these symptoms, the researchers discovered obsession over abortion per se and over the morality of abortion, depression, a need to find ‘reasons’ for performing the abortions, and anger directed primarily at the aborting women.”2
Dr. Hern notes: “One respondent expressed increasing resentment of the casual attitudes of some patients considering the emotional cost to those providing the service.”
The American Medical News article, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts,” indicates that anger at the woman is regarded as a commonplace, especially for women who wait for late terms. “A New Mexico physician said he was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. ‘But paradoxically,’ he added, ‘I have angry feelings at myself.'”3 Why is this paradoxical, when he is just as much a participant as she is? Because it’s unusual to admit that responsibility lies on everyone involved, and blaming the woman alone is more common.
Another example is recounted in Don Sloan’s book, Abortion: A Doctor’s Perspective, a Woman’s Dilemma. Dr. Sloan was an abortionist (his own self-description) who was still in the field and still advocated for it strongly. He tells this story (pp. 234-235) as told to him by one of his patients:
“I was working upstate, and I got involved with this guy – it was dumb, but I got pregnant. I mean, we both knew it was just a summer thing, that we weren’t going to see each other again. Well, I asked around and got the name of a doctor there who did abortions in his office. It wasn’t that expensive, a few hundred bucks, and we could get that together between us. I mean, the guy was all right, he just wasn’t the love of my life. So I made an appointment.
“The people in the office seemed real nice, so I was kind of surprised by this guy. He kind of leered at me, you know? But at the same time he really had an attitude – like I was dirt or something. I thought, was it ’cause I’m black? But I think it was just him.
“He said, ‘Get your things off and lie down.’ And I’m thinking isn’t there a gown or something? I was standing right there. So I asked for some place to change and he said, ‘Do it here. We have to get this over with.’ But he gave a sheet to wrap up in, which was clean, at least.
“When I went to put my feet in the stirrups, my legs were too long. And while he’s adjusting them, he’s making these cute little remarks about my legs and my nail polish. I’d already paid, and I wanted to get it over with too, or I’d have been out of there, I swear. I was that angry.
“It hurt – a lot. And I could hear the suction thing – it was real loud, and it was like it was sucking out my whole insides. I kept asking questions, and the whole time, he didn’t say one thing. Just ignored me.”
It seemed like an eternity, Keisha said, but it was probably only a few minutes until the doctor told her he was done.
“When I got up, I felt sort of faint, and there was blood running down my leg. I showed him, and he said it was nothing. But when I went to get my clothes, the blood was getting on the floor. And he said to me, ‘You’re dirtying things up. Get back up here.’ He did some more stuff, and I heard the machine again. It didn’t hurt as much, though, or maybe I was just so out of it I didn’t care.”
He gestured to her to get up again, and this time he gave her a sanitary napkin. ‘You know how to use these things, I suppose?’ he sneered.
Dr. Sloan blames this unknown doctor’s attitude on sexism, a reasonable assessment. He then goes on to relate it to other kinds of sexism in the health care system, as with obstetrics, and he’s right that those are areas in need of improvement. Of course, in any individual case, the doctor may have had a major argument with somebody that day and been in a sour mood. Nor would it be fair to draw any conclusions from one incident.
Still, it does fit the pattern. It could be that the doctor was frustrated for the reasons we’re talking about now, or it could be that the patient was seeing the symptom of estrangement from others that is a symptom of post-traumatic stress.
Sexism is something that can be gotten rid of, to a large extent, if it’s worked on. It certainly can be removed from areas like obstetrics, diagnostic D & C’s, hysterectomies, and C-sections. Much progress has been made already, and hopefully more will be made. If that’s the problem with abortion, progress will be made there as well. But if the problem is the lashing out or the alienation that goes with PTSD, then progress toward sensitivity to the clients could be harder to come by.
Footnotes
- Antiprogestin Drugs: Ethical, Legal and Medical Issues, Arlington, Virginia, December 6-7, 1991.
- Marianne Such-Baer, “Professional staff reaction to abortion work,” Social Casework, July 1974.
- Diane M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993.
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For similar posts, see:
“I Became Like a Soldier Going to Battle”: Post-Abortion Trauma
Abortion Doctor Says: We are the Executioners
“But I was Empty”: The Story of a Doctor Who Left Planned Parenthood
For more on how various kinds of socially-approved killing are traumatizing to those doing the violence, see Perpetration Trauma.
A Catastrophe Decades in the Making: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
by John Whitehead
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a monstrous injustice. Russia’s blatant aggression of 2022 recalls such similar infamous episodes as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, repression of a rebellion in Hungary in 1956, and annexation of the Baltic states in 1940.
How many people have been killed since the invasion began on February 24th is unknown; as of this writing, there are hundreds of Ukrainian civilian deaths, including children. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled Ukraine. Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has warned that “The humanitarian consequences on civilian populations will be devastating . . . countless lives will be torn apart.” Perhaps most worrying, Russian President Vladimir Putin has apparently placed Russian nuclear forces on heightened alert. How this conflict will end is anyone’s guess, but more people will die before it does.
The primary responsibility and guilt for this invasion lies with the Russian government, especially Putin. Putin’s decision to order this invasion of another country is wholly without justification.
While the Russian invasion may be unjustified, it was not unpredictable. That events would come to this could have been foreseen, even before the build-up of Russian troops close to Ukraine began in fall 2021. This invasion is the end result of a long sequence of events stretching back over 20 years.
Putin and other Russian policymakers bear the primary responsibility for this war, but they do not bear it alone. Other people, including policymakers in the United States, helped bring events to this point. This outbreak of war in Europe is an occasion to remember how events got to this point and to consider what to do next.
NATO Expansion and the Seeds of Conflict
While Putin no doubt has multiple motives for invading Ukraine, a significant motive is the desire to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Putin has repeatedly expressed his view that Ukrainian NATO membership would pose a threat to Russia. If Ukraine becomes part of NATO, the country could become a gateway for a future western invasion of Russia or a base for US nuclear missiles capable of reaching Moscow quickly.
Fear of a NATO threat to Russia was a major theme, along with other grievances, in Putin’s speech of February 21, in which he said that “Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities” would mean “the level of military threats to Russia will increase dramatically, several times over. And I would like to emphasise [sic] at this point that the risk of a sudden strike at our country will multiply… Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead for such a strike.”
Such fears of future threats are not a moral justification for invading another country. Nevertheless, such fears are the kind of realpolitik security concerns one might expect a nation’s leaders to have. In the western hemisphere, the United States’ policies toward Cuba, for example, provide a parallel to Russian policy.
A prudent US and NATO policy would have anticipated Russian security concerns and avoided provoking a military intervention such as the one currently unfolding in Ukraine. However, prudence has been sadly lacking in this area since the 1990s.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, NATO expanded to include nations that had previously been in the Soviet sphere of influence and even former Soviet republics. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in 1999; followed by Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 2004.
Many prominent US policymakers warned about how Russia would react to NATO expansion. William Perry, who was secretary of defense when the expansion was being pursued, commented in 1997 that the Russian reaction “ranges between being unhappy to being very unhappy…This is not just one or two or a few officials expressing a view, this is a very widely and very deeply held view in Russia.” Years later, Perry reflected that in the post-Cold War period, the Russians “were beginning to get used to the idea that [NATO] could be a friend rather than an enemy…but they were very uncomfortable about having [NATO] right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”
William Burns, who was serving in the US embassy in Moscow in the 1990s (and is currently CIA director), cautioned at the time that “Hostility to early NATO expansion…is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum [in Russia].”
George F. Kennan, a US diplomat who had played an important role in making US Cold War policy, said of NATO expansion: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake . . . Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia.”
In 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration was pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine, Burns, who by now had served as US ambassador to Russia, offered a new warning:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin) . . . In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Burns also prophetically wrote that the pursuit of Ukrainian NATO membership would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
In 2014, when Russia was fulfilling Burns’ prophecy by annexing Ukraine’s Crimea region, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote that “if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either [Russia or the West’s] outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.” He also flatly stated “Ukraine should not join NATO.” Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski similarly commented that Ukraine could have “no participation in any military alliance viewed by Moscow as directed at itself.” During the Cold War, both Kissinger and Brzezinski were associated with hawkish US policies, yet they did not advocate Ukrainian NATO membership.
Fear of NATO is not necessarily the only reason Russia has now invaded Ukraine. (Nor, for that matter, is NATO expansion the only reason the Russians might understandably be suspicious of the United States and its allies.) The prospect of NATO including Ukraine has played a role in creating the current crisis, though, as demonstrated by the Russians’ repeated emphasis on this point during the lead-up to the invasion.
Granted, Russian actions over the past few months made preventing Ukrainian membership in NATO far more politically complicated. The United States and other NATO countries would understandably refuse to make such a major concession in the face of apparent military threats. A concession would be rewarding aggression. (For my part, I argued against such a concession earlier in this crisis.) In retrospect, however, maybe an unyielding stance was not the correct one to take. Compromise in the face of a threatened invasion would have been bad, yet failure to compromise may have led to the far worse outcome we are seeing today.
What Next?
Avoiding any escalation in the war is imperative. If another nation gets directly involved in the war, the violence might only worsen; if the United States or NATO gets directly involved, then World War III becomes a possibility. US President Joseph Biden’s repeated statements that American troops will not intervene in the Ukraine-Russia war are encouraging. The United States and other nations should remain committed to non-intervention.
While not as perilous as direct involvement, the United States or other nations continuing to send weapons or military equipment to Ukraine could be very dangerous. More weapons could mean longer and bloodier fighting and greater loss of life. Rather than send more weapons to Ukraine, the community of nations should make every effort to keep additional weapons out of Russia’s hands.
Economic sanctions on Putin and other Russian elites are a reasonable response. Also, the Ukrainians should seriously consider using nonviolent methods of resistance to defend their independence. Compared to violent resistance, such methods are more likely to succeed in at least limiting Russian rule over the country and are far less likely to provoke extreme violent repression.
Giving refugees from the fighting a safe haven and getting humanitarian aid to those affected by the war is essential. Please consider giving to Catholic Relief Services, Mennonite Central Committee, and other groups working to help people in Ukraine.
Above all, diplomatic efforts are needed to bring about a cease-fire. The actions of peace-minded Russians who have protested the war in spite of state repression are encouraging. Let’s hope their voices and those of others opposed to war prevail.
Russian anti-war protester in 2014
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For our posts on similar topics, see:
Not Your Pawns: A CLE Examination of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Seeing War’s Victims: The New York Times Investigation of Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria
Using Empathy during a New Cold War
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
Suicide Prevention and Other Kinds of Killing
by Rachel MacNair
War
It’s well-documented that combat veterans have a shockingly high suicide rate. Much of this comes from being traumatized by war. There are many kinds of trauma. The one I study most is Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, which comes from the act of killing itself.
For my dissertation back in 1999, I got the US government’s data set of 1,638 combat veterans from its war in Vietnam, called The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study. One question was: “Did you kill or think you killed anyone in Vietnam?” I made two groups – those who answered “yes” and those who answered “no.”
For trauma as a whole and for every symptom but one, those who said yes had much higher trauma scores than those who said no. This is even when taking intensity of battle into account. Results can be seen in Chapter 1 plus the appendix of my book, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing.
The symptom that was the one exception was suicidal thoughts. I puzzled over this until I had a chilling thought: being “more severe” in suicidal thoughts could mean having actually committed suicide. Those whose symptoms were most severe may not have lived to be included in the data set.
Abortion
Post-Abortive Women:
Studies based on thousands of records comparing medical records and death certificates show considerably higher suicide rates among post-abortive women in Finland, , and California. A study showed increased suicidal behaviors.
Abortion defenders point out that when we’ve selected women who’ve had abortions, we’ve also selected a group more likely to have problems, such as being victims of intimate partner violence.
Still, there are reports of attempted or completed suicides on the anniversary date of the abortion or expected due date, which suggests that abortion may in fact be a major contributor. There are also individual women’s own stories that suggest an abortion-suicide connection.
Un-aborted Children:
What about children whose mothers intended to abort them but were unable to? One justification offered for abortion is that it’s so very hard to be an “unwanted child.”
A 1988 book called Born Unwanted: Development Effects of Denied Abortion tries to make this case. They report on studies in Sweden, Finland, and Czechoslovakia, coming from the days when women had to apply to committees for abortions. If they were turned down, they appealed. If turned down again, they had the baby. Follow-up studies were done matching these children with children of similar demographics.
The authors report, with a straight face: “the UP [unplanned pregnancy] subjects are not so much overrepresented on the extremely negative indicators as they are underrepresented on the positive ones” (page 124). That is, they’re underrepresented among the above average. They were excessively average.
The authors argued this grave disadvantage means abortions shouldn’t be denied. This led Frederica Mathewes-Green, editor of Sisterlife, then the newsletter of Feminists for Life, to report on the book using this headline: Prof Repulsed by Working Class; Recommends Elimination. Not Clear Who Will Repair His Mercedes.
Many mothers changed their minds, as over a third – 36% – denied they had made the abortion request, and 73% were satisfied with how the situation was resolved (page 48).
As for suicide? The children don’t seem to agree with the proposal they’re better off dead. Only one suicide was found, a very small proportion given the size of the group (page 43). There’s no reason to think that failure to kill the children earlier means they’ll just kill themselves later on.
Abortion Legislation:
found states with parental involvement laws (notification or consent) were associated with an 11% to 21% reduction in suicides among females 15-17 years old. Yet they found no difference for males in that age group or older females.
looked at what impact waiting periods had on mental health. Did such periods serve as a protective cooling-off period? Or were they instead a source of additional stress? It used suicide rates of women in different states as a way to measure mental health. The analyses found the states with waiting periods associated with about a 10% reduction in suicide rates.
While it may be that notifying parents or being informed and waiting may lead post-abortive women to be less likely to commit suicide, another explanation is that these methods lowered the abortion rate, and that in turn lowered the suicide rate.
Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia
Are unauthorized suicides connected to “authorized” suicides? Once you tell the 16-year-old girl that her grandmother is justified in committing suicide because life with a severe disease or disability is so difficult to bear, how do you tell her that the fact that her boyfriend left her doesn’t make her life too difficult to bear? With talk of bringing on death as a form of autonomy, and individuals deciding for themselves what is and isn’t a worthy life, where does the reasoning end?
We’re also disproportionately putting certain people – especially those with disabilities – into a category of people who don’t get the suicide-prevention services normally offered to everyone else.
The alternative idea by euthanasia proponents is that offering assistance is supposed to reduce suicides, because people don’t feel the need to do it quickly while they still can, before they get too sick.
A major study done on this, comparing US states, found that when assisted suicides were legalized, all suicides went up. The “non-assisted” suicides stayed about the same once researchers statistically controlled for several things. So the pro-euthanasia idea that allowing euthanasia lowers suicide rates isn’t backed up by the evidence so far (as always, more studies are needed).
In this field, we have another variable that studies tend not to consider: the actions of the pro-life and disability-rights movements may have served as a brake on suicide reasoning being applied too broadly.
Conclusion
The Consistent Life Ethic, which opposes all forms of killing human beings with a focus on when such killing is socially approved, also holds that these forms of killing are connected. Violence forms a web, causing more violence – and stopping violence is also in that web, stopping more violence. Studies on suicide back this idea up: violence unsurprisingly leads to more suicides, and preventing that violence (as seen in the abortion-regulating legislation mentioned above) may help to prevent suicides.
Suicide prevention efforts targeted at individuals are a crucial service. But when wider societal violence is at the root of so many suicides, preventing that violence is also crucial to preventing subsequent despair and suicide.
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For posts on similar topics, see:
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean?
“I Became Like a Soldier Going to Battle”: Post-Abortion Trauma
“But I was Empty”: The Story of a Doctor Who Left Planned Parenthood
Abortion Doctor Says: We are the Executioners
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
Achieving Diplomatic Breakthroughs in the Past and Future: The “Opening to China” After 50 Years
by John Whitehead
China and the United States began a new era in their relationship 50 years ago this month. US President Richard Nixon’s arrival in Beijing, on February 21, 1972, and his subsequent meetings with Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai marked a resumption of relations between the two countries after decades of hostile silence. Since those dramatic meetings, China and the United States have had a sometimes friendly, sometimes very tense relationship.
With the relationship between these two powerful countries turning increasingly tense in recent years, this anniversary seems an appropriate time for reflection. How did the resumption of relations – sometimes called the “opening to China” – happen? How might China and the United States avoid confrontation and the risk of war in the future?
Seeking a Renewed Relationship
The 1949 Chinese revolution, in which the Communists overthrew the Nationalist regime, led to a break in US-China relations. The United States preferred to support the Nationalists, now exiled to Taiwan. The Korean War, which brought Chinese and American troops into direct conflict with each other, only deepened the nation’s enmity. During the 1950s and 1960s, China and the United States had next to no diplomatic relations with each other, no direct trade or travel, and little direct knowledge of one another.
American diplomats suspected of sympathies with Communist China were driven out of government or otherwise sidelined: one leading China specialist ended up as ambassador to Iceland. Meanwhile, China remained relatively isolated, having relations with only about 40 countries. That isolation deepened in the late 1960s during the internal upheaval of China’s Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution led to considerable hostility toward foreigners, including foreign diplomats in China, and a scaling back of China’s diplomatic presence abroad.
Despite their differences, China and the United States shared a common enemy in the Soviet Union. Although the Chinese had initially been allied with their fellow Communists in Moscow, Chinese-Soviet relations gradually deteriorated to a state of near-war. In 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops along the two countries’ shared border began openly fighting with each other. A Soviet nuclear attack on China seemed possible. The Soviets’ long-time Cold War adversary, the United States, took note.
Advisers to Mao, the Communist Party Chairman, and Zhou, the Premier, suggested the time had come for an opening to the United States. Chen Yi, a former foreign minister, wrote that “The last thing the U.S. imperialists are willing to see is a victory by the Soviet revisionists in a Sino-Soviet war” and that China could use “the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in a strategic sense and to pursue a breakthrough” (quoted in Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, pp. 143-144).
Some powerful Americans were also interested in a breakthrough with China. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on pursuing a new China policy. In the late 1960s, Nixon wrote that “we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.” Nixon’s rival, the Democratic politician Hubert Humphrey, called for lifting the trade embargo on China and “the building of bridges to the people of mainland China” (quoted in James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton, pp. 16, 18) Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield wrote letters to Zhou asking for permission to visit China. In 1968, the State Department tried to revive talks between the American and Chinese ambassadors to Poland.
Relations between China and the United States gradually thawed. The United States reduced its naval activity close to China’s coast, eased and eventually lifted restrictions on travel and trade between the countries, and exchanged messages with China through Pakistan. An unusual olive branch came from the Chinese in April 1971, when the Chinese government invited an American table tennis team to visit China.
The historic invitation came about partly through happenstance. The Americans were participating in a competition in Tokyo along with a Chinese team. The Chinese were impressed by the American players’ friendliness. When American player Glenn Cowan hitched a ride to the tournament hall on the Chinese team’s bus, Chinese player Zhuang Zedong presented Cowan with a gift of a silk scarf. (Cowan later reciprocated with a gift of a red-white-and-blue shirt bearing the peace symbol and the Beatles-inspired slogan “Let It Be.”)
Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan
Back in Beijing, Mao decided to invite the American team to China, commenting “Zhuang Zedong not only plays good Ping-Pong but knows how to conduct diplomacy as well” (MacMillan, Nixon and Mao, p. 178). In China, the regime rolled out the red carpet for the American athletes, who became, to great international media attention, the first American delegation to visit the country since 1949.
An invitation at a more official level came a few weeks later. The Chinese suggested Nixon or an envoy could come to Beijing for talks. The Nixon administration enthusiastically accepted the offer. US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger made two trips in China in 1971 (one secret, one public) to prepare for Nixon’s visit the following year.
The presidential trip to China lasted a week. It included visits to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai and talks among officials on various topics, including the Soviet Union. Nixon and Mao also had one conversation, which was limited to generalities but symbolically significant: the top leaders of two powerful and previously hostile nations were sitting down together to talk.
The trip ultimately produced a joint China-US statement, known as the Shanghai Communique. While expressing numerous disagreements between the two nations, the Communique also included the important statements that international conflicts should be resolved “without resorting to the use or threat of force” and that both nations “wish to reduce the danger of international military conflict.” A few years later, China and the United States established formal diplomatic relations.
Seeking Coexistence Today
Fifty years after Nixon’s trip to China, much has changed in the American-Chinese relationship. With the Soviet Union’s collapse and the Cold War’s end, the two countries stopped being de facto allies in that struggle. Economic ties between the two countries have grown dramatically, with the value of US-China trade rising from roughly $4 billion in 1979 to more than $600 billion by 2017. China is today the United States’ third largest trade partner. China’s economy has undergone an extraordinary transformation, from having in 1980 a GDP, as measured by the amount of goods and services a consumer can buy within their own country, that was equivalent to 10 percent of the United States’, to having in 2014 a GDP equivalent to 101 percent of the United States’.
Perhaps the most significant change is the increased hostility of recent years between China and the United States. President Biden has the United States’ “most serious competitor.” Possible Chinese efforts to build more or more advanced nuclear weapons may increase tensions with the United States. Will US-China relations become only more hostile, with war becoming a possibility? Or can relations be improved, as they were 50 years ago?
The United States and China might be able to maintain a peaceful coexistence but, like the diplomatic opening of the early 1970s, realizing this goal will require considerable effort. As political scientist Graham Allison aptly put it, American-Chinese coexistence is “a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation … Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries.”
Beyond requiring effort, managing the US-China relationship can’t and shouldn’t rely on a common enemy, as in the 1970s. Today the United States is more likely to be the target of a common alliance between China and Russia than an ally of either one against the other. In any case, such an adversarial approach hardly promotes peace. That was the earlier approach’s great flaw.
Both countries must avoid falling into an arms race or a pattern of escalating aggressive actions. The United States should resist the temptation to further expand its own nuclear build-up in response to expansions in China’s nuclear arsenal. The recent declaration by several nuclear powers, including the United States and China, that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought is encouraging. The United States should consider following up on the declaration by pledging never to use nuclear weapons first – a pledge that would align US policy with China’s. To echo the Committee for a SANE US-China Policy, both countries should also carefully coordinate and reduce their military activities in high-tension areas such as the South China Sea, to avoid potential clashes.
Outside government circles, continued travel, cultural exchanges, and other contact between Chinese and Americans can promote understanding between the nations. We should remember the example of “ping-pong diplomacy.”
Maintaining peaceful US-China coexistence will not be easy. The two nations made a diplomatic breakthrough in the past, though, and might yet do so again.
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For other similar posts by John Whitehead, see:
A Cold War Comes Home? Anti-Asian Racism in Light of US-China Hostility
“Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ‘Em Dying”: War and Racism in the Pacific
No Combat Experience, No Opinion: Parallels in Pro-bombing and Pro-choice Rhetoric
Climate Change and the Consistent Life Ethic: An Opportunity to Connect Issues
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Hard Questions about the Response to Terrorism: Looking Back on September 11th
Promoting Peace at Home and Abroad: A Challenge for Peace Activists
by John Whitehead
Among the many challenges facing peace activists is how widely to spread their peacemaking efforts. Should they devote their energies to opposing wars and other hawkish policies pursued by their own countries? Or should they work against hawkish policies pursued by all countries, everywhere? Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages and, as is usually the case, finding a balance between extremes is necessary. I would argue that peace activists should focus on working against their own countries’ wars and preparations for war—but that this focus should be carefully qualified.
Promoting Peace at Home
The main argument for focusing on opposition to one’s own country’s wars is that such opposition is the most practically effective strategy. A country’s citizens generally have far more influence over what their own government does than what other countries’ governments do. While the odds are typically stacked against peace activists’ efforts in any situation, such activists have at least a better chance of stopping or limiting their own governments’ war-making than of having such an impact on other governments. A home-country focus is a better use of one’s energies.
Further, trying to stop other countries’ hawkish policies isn’t only inefficient, it can be dangerous. Pushing for opposition to or confrontation with another country can easily increase international tensions in a way that makes war more likely or can escalate existing wars. This danger is especially great if activists try to exert pressure on other countries through their own governments, which are full of policymakers who don’t share the activists’ own concern for peace.
Promoting Peace Abroad
In contrast, advocates for anti-war efforts with a more global scope could argue that peace activists need to be concerned with war and its victims everywhere, regardless of the countries involved. National boundaries don’t eliminate the larger bonds of humanity, and work to stop war’s violence shouldn’t be limited by such boundaries either.
Further, trying to stop only one’s own country’s hawkish policies isn’t a good long-term response to war in general. Even if activists could end all wars and related policies pursued by their own governments, war would presumably continue in the world, and peace activists would still need to grapple with that. Also, if peace activists’ own country is directly involved in a conflict with another country, that situation might well require activists to identify responses beyond just refraining from waging war. Working to stop another country’s hawkishness might be inevitable in such situations.
Possible Approaches
I see the strengths of both positions. Finding some balance or middle way between them that doesn’t set peace activists against each other is difficult. I will just offer some tentative thoughts on how to address the legitimate concerns of both positions:
- Peace activists should devote most of their time and energies to opposing the wars and hawkish policies of their own governments. This is the area where peace activists can be most effective (and therefore perhaps have the greatest obligation to act). Peace building at home should be activists’ focus.
- However, this home-country focus should not become an exclusive focus only on one’s own country’s war-making. Peace activists should sometimes work against other countries’ war-making, even if this isn’t their primary concern.
- On those unusual occasions when peace activists do work against other countries’ war-making, they should strive to work through channels other than their own government. Working through international institutions such as the United Nations or non-governmental organizations and (perhaps most important) working in collaboration with peace activists in the targeted country is a preferable way of opposing another country’s hawkish policies. Working through one’s own government is a risky approach, as it can all too easily turn opposition to the other country’s war into a cover for one’s own country’s hawkish policies.
- While peace activists should focus on opposition to war-making by their own countries, they should always remain aware of and informed about war-making by other countries. They should cultivate this global perspective for two reasons:
- Even if we cannot do anything else, the absolute least we can do for victims of war around the world is to recognize their suffering.
- A global awareness of war makes peace activists more effective in the struggles within their own countries. Having a broad, cross-cultural understanding of wars and the situations in which they occur makes peace activists better analysts and critics of their own countries’ wars. For example, knowing that countries that are very different (politically, economically, or culturally) from an activist’s own country have nevertheless pursued similarly hawkish policies can give that activist a more sophisticated understanding of why countries pursue such policies.
- Peace activists should always seek to identify creative new ways of resolving conflicts without resort to violence. This will help both in opposing their own countries’ wars and those of other countries. (This last point is perhaps the most obvious one of the whole list, but it never hurts to emphasize it.)
As I said, these are just tentative ideas. Whether or not these particular suggestions are the best approach, peace activists should give careful thought to the problem of how we can best promote peace at home and abroad.
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For more of our posts on the peace movement, see:
Making the Case for Peace to Conservatives
Fifty Years of Protesting for Peace
Life as a Pro-life Progressive
by Lisa Stiller
Even as I type the words in that title, I realize how redundant they really are.
Because to me, being pro-life is part of being progressive. Being progressive means protecting all life. Being progressive means putting the needs of the most vulnerable, lower income people first. Being progressive means rejecting all violence.
Becoming a Pro-life Progressive
I seemed to have been called to political involvement and activism since high school, in the midst of the movement against the war in Vietnam and the racial conflicts of the late 60s. I started a small group of young activists who helped make phone calls about getting out the vote. I joined an interfaith group that was focused on healing racism. I tutored low-income minority elementary school students in a very poor neighborhood and struggled to understand why their world was so different from my own. I landed in college as the Vietnam death tolls skyrocketed and started to help organize protests almost as soon as I got to campus. I remember protests happening just about every day on campus, as we ran from tear gas carrying water bottles and bandanas. I remember the National Guard walking through the streets at night.
I got involved in draft counseling work in my junior and senior year in college, hoping that I helped some avoid the draft. I stood in front of the White House one summer with a group of Quakers from New York protesting the war 24 hours a day. I was among the first group of people to be arrested in the May Day protests of 1971, at 5:30am, as we started out to block the 14th Street Bridge. I volunteered at a co-op distributing free food to students and low-income people, which turned out to be more a more meaningful experience than any class I took.
And one day, a conservative friend with whom I’d had many friendly political discussions gave me one of those tests to see where I stood on the political spectrum. We both knew our scores were going to be very different, so it was just for fun. One question asked whether I supported abortion. I stopped and stared at the question. I had never really thought much about it, although I had heard plenty of discussion among my women progressive friends.
And suddenly, I realized I didn’t. It was killing. Wasn’t I running around the streets of DC protesting the war in Vietnam and all the deaths, injury, and destruction?
That is when I realized I was in a political no man’s land. My “progressive” friends were clamoring for the legalization of abortion and then cheering the Roe v Wade decision. What was progressive about championing death?
Suddenly, I felt uncomfortable among these people. My questioning was met with hostility. I was told I needed to support “women’s rights.” Well, I do, I said. I supported women’s rights to equal pay for equal work, to affordable child care and health care, and to aim higher than just college then marriage then children. (This was the early 1970s.)
But that was not enough. The Holy Grail was the “right” to have an abortion– what I realized was really the “right” to kill an unborn child. I couldn’t believe that supporting abortion was a litmus test for being a feminist, even back then.
I finished college, eventually went to the Bay Area, and just partied for a few years. I returned to DC to work for a year, then moved to the west coast again. Political activism called me back almost right away, this time in the form of protesting the contra wars and Reagan’s war on the poor and a few years later the first Iraq war. I remember marching through the streets of Portland, Oregon every day that war lasted.
But becoming involved with a political party meant I had to pass the abortion litmus test.
I failed, of course. I realized I was politically homeless, and I had no clue what to do except to keep speaking out against war and poverty in any way I could. I organized protests against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. I didn’t need to belong to a political party to do that.
Acting as a Pro-life Progressive
During the March for Life events in Reno, mostly attended by very conservative groups, I carried a sign saying No War, No Death Penalty, No Abortion; I almost always made the news with that sign!
I became known in the community as a strong peace activist. I even eventually tried getting involved with the local Democrats so I could round them up for antiwar protests. But I kept feeling like I was living a lie. As long as the abortion question didn’t come up, I was safe. I lived in fear that it would.
Finally, one day in 2001 I was sitting at my computer and I googled “opposing abortion progressives”. Up popped something called the Seamless Garment Network. There were people like me somewhere out there! The only other place I had found any companionship politically was with my Catholic Social Justice group. I felt no need to be part of a political party; I just needed to act out what our faith taught us about social justice.
Rose Evans
It took about 9 or 10 years for me to actually reach out, and by then the Seamless Garment Network had become the Consistent Life Network. Around 2010 I found an email list for pro-life Quakers, which led me back to the Consistent Life Network. I signed up as a volunteer and got on the mailing list. Then one day about two years later I got an email from a Rose Evans (I had no clue who she was) inviting me to join the board of Consistent Life. I finally had a political home. (And I finally met Rose, one of the most amazing women I have ever met!)
And I found out there really were lots of other people like me.
I’m still politically active in my community. I’m always emphasizing the need to support programs that help children and families, as well as opposing every single possibility of war anywhere.
I hate having to live a lie, not being free to speak up. I love going to conferences and speaking to people who feel the same way I do, and talking to people who, although we may disagree about one issue, still accept me.
Life as a prolife progressive is tough. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
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For other personal journeys in our blog posts, see:
On Being a Consistent Chimera / Rob Arner
Peas of the Same Pod / Elena Muller Garcia
Coming to Peace and Living a Consistent Life After Military Service / Eve Dawn Kuha
My Personal Journey on Veganism, War, and Abortion / Frank Lane
Off the Fence and Taking My Stand on Abortion / Mary Liepold
Sharon Long: My Personal Pro-life Journey / Sharon Long