300 Roses
by Rosalyn Mitchell
Rosalyn currently works with the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. She has also served as an intern for the Consistent Life Network.
Artwork by Sonja Morin
A rose is never just a rose. As Mother Teresa said, “How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.” To me, a rose is symbolic of the struggle of each person to secure their God-given dignity. Liberation begins in the womb. Abortion ends the life of 300 Canadian “roses” daily, denying their right to life. Countless born roses wither, struggling to secure bread and shelter. Our common struggle is God’s struggle. He died on the cross so we can bloom through His perfect love.
What we believe about those unlike ourselves reflects how we treat others. In the culture, the pro-life movement is stereotyped as old, white, rich Christian men who want to control women. We pro-lifers know that isn’t true, but it would be a lie to say it doesn’t hurt. Worse still is when we stereotype the pro-choice movement as angry white secular feminists.
Today’s blog post doesn’t share my testimonies of pro-life conversions. Instead, I choose to share stories of two pro-choice women. My goal in sharing Katia’s and Lindsey’s stories is to show the culture, and pro-choice people, that we care about them. I hope, by engaging their humanity, they re-think abortion. How can they see the humanity of aborted children if we deny pro-choicers’ humanity?
While the reality of abortion cruelly ends the life of a child, women who support abortion should not be vilified. Abortion, a socially accepted ending of human life, starts with the dehumanization of the born. The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) seeks to win people, not debates, by touching hearts through seeking to understand, love, and inspire. How can we defend human rights for all human beings if we dehumanize pro-choicers?
Katia gripped her bike handle, her slender frame standing in the distance, observing me with curious brown eyes. Developing the courage to approach, she began to tell me her story, deep brokenness becoming apparent. In some conversations you teach others, but today, she taught me the heart-breaking reality of mothers abandoning their infants in trashcans. Of a mother who lost her war with depression, committing suicide as no psychiatric treatment alleviated her pain. Committing suicide, she orphaned her children by throwing herself out a window.
Katia shared her story of being raised in Russia. Arriving in Canada as an immigrant, she navigates her teenage years as a stranger in a foreign land. How would she face an unexpected pregnancy? Fully aware of the child within, yet hardened by life, she thinks abortion is a kinder fate than life. Abortion to her is an exit from an endless cycle of generational trauma passed between parent and child. Dear Katia. If by grace you are reading this, I want you to know that life is cruel yet worth living. Your past does not define your future. This cycle continues unless each child has an opportunity to live. Abortion denies this opportunity. If you or any pregnant woman needs help, please visit choice42.com amongst other resources like pregnancy care centres. I care and see you.
Lindsey contrasted with Katia, with her infectious energy making the absurd seem joyous. Amongst counter-protesters, she stood out by creatively vying for attention. She held a cardboard sign engaging traffic to honk, “If you are horny.” Her message was not hostile, unlike other protestors whose objective was to shut CCBR down. She is a filmmaker who tells stories from the perspective of the “other.” The outcasts, the forgotten ones. Dear Lindsey. If by grace you are reading this, please know that there is none more othered than abortion victims. Children who are denied their humanity.
You have a quick wit and bright intellect. You asked why photos are used to expose abortion. As a filmmaker, you know the power of media to “other” people as our culture reduces children to a clump of cells. The graphic images we display are armour to protect against the lies that deny children their humanity. Yes, abortion is shocking. The reality of a brutal act that ends a child’s life. The photographs pierce through the mask of choice to ask what choice is abortion.
Society’s moral consciousness calls for justice. It becomes personal, as reflected by your shirt calling to end police brutality. Black Lives Matter challenged narratives like the American dream as flawed due to the systemic denial of freedom. Today I challenge our collective moral consciousness for the 300 Canadian roses killed daily through abortion. I challenge us to question the narrative of choice, which creates a grave of bloody roses.
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For more of our posts on personal journeys, see:
On Being a Consistent Chimera / Rob Arner
Why Conservatives Should Oppose the Death Penalty / Destiny Herndon-de la Rosa
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
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons / Karen Swallow Prior
“Shut Up and Enjoy it!”: Abortion Promoters who Sexually Pressure Women
by Ms. Boomer-ang
Andrew Cuomo
For the second time in 13 years in the same state, an abortion-promoting governor has resigned because of sexually “liberated” practices that displeased women. Besides Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, other prominent “liberals” have acted the same. Some have gotten in trouble for it, some have gotten away with it. But their actions show that supporting abortion is compatible with sexually exploiting women, and that many women don’t like “liberated” sexual experiences.
Legal abortion has deprived women of once-accepted justifications for refusing a man’s sexual advances. In return, sexual libertinism helps generate demand for abortion. An early supporter of the post-1965 abortion push was Playboy’s Hugh Hefner. Is it any wonder that some men labeled as “women’s allies” for supporting abortion have sexually harassed, exploited, and/or abused women?
Powerful men have promoted abortion for both reasons related and reasons unrelated to sexual libertinism. For various reasons, including to wipe out justifications for rejecting their sexual advances, they imposed a sexual revolution about 50 years ago.
The sexual revolution put both men and women under pressure to increase their sexual activity. Men were told it was abnormal not to make more sexual advances. Women were told, “Don’t consider it harassment or exploitation. This is what you really want. This is what you really long for. Yes, you do! Be liberated! Shut up and enjoy it!”
Sexually demanding associates and bosses like Harvey Weinstein were portrayed as not abusers but teachers. How many men exposed for their sexual shenanigans react with, ‘I was just doing what was expected of me’? How many women endured their abuse convinced it was remedial sex education for their own good?
For years, the message has been: “The Sexual Revolution has won. If you complain or disrespect this victory, you’re a Religious Right, Puritan enemy of freedom.”
After all, didn’t the media report stories about Thomas Jefferson’s and John F. Kennedy’s extramaritial dalliances with happy excitement? Did not it treat Bill Clinton’s episode with Monica Lewinsky as happy entertainment?
Bob Packwood
For decades, Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon – a Republican abortion advocate – took sexual advantage of his female staff. Compatible with the image of exploiter as teacher, “at one point . . . he suggested it was his ‘Christian duty’ to have sex with a woman he thought deprived of it.”1 In 1981 or 1982, Mary Hefferman of NARAL was in his office, finishing up a discussion of abortion legislation, when he touched and kissed her in unwanted sexual ways. After that, Ms. Hefferman avoided being alone with him, but “she did not complain to anyone about the incident out of concern that it would adversely affect the abortion-rights cause.”2
But unlike many sexual harassers, Mr. Packwood did not get away with his behavior. In 1991, he and his first wife, Georgie, divorced. Soon after, a Washington Post investigated rumors about his womanizing and unethical activities. In 1995, the Senate concluded that his actions had “discredited” it, and he had to resign.
Georgie, quoted in the Buffalo News on September 10, 1995, said that his “shadow life made a mockery of my marriage . . . [and] a mockery of Bob’s dedication to equality for women.”
Eliot Spitzer
About a decade later, Eliot Spitzer was the Attorney General of New York State, and his agenda included closing down crisis pregnancy centers. In 2007, he became governor and championed a drastic bill to reduce a woman’s right to escape abortion and reduce a professional’s right not to participate in it. Roe v Wade denies women any protection from unwanted abortions in the first trimester. Spitzer’s bill would have extended that denial to all three trimesters. Pro-life publications suggested the bill could allow even chiropractors and massage therapists to cause miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy without the woman’s explicit permission and could require health care professionals to perform abortions in order to get licenses.
Silda Wall (Spitzer), divorced 2013
Before the bill was finalized, someone discovered that Spitzer was indulging in luxury prostitutes. His wife Silda, whatever she thought of his social agenda, looked very unhappy in the photo accompanying the news story about the prostitutes. In March 2008, Mr. Spitzer resigned. The Spitzers divorced in 2013.
But the media and prominent voices continued mocking those who objected to sexually libertine behavior – except if the exploiter espoused a “cultural conservatism” cause or belonged to a pro-life entity.
But then some women remembered that Harvey Weinstein had treated them as badly as the media was noticing Donald Trump had treated other women.
Harvey Weinstein
Weinstein was known as a big supporter of “women’s rights,” the New York Times acknowledged, but the story was too big to shove aside. Ironically, right after Trump’s election, the story of Weinstein’s sexploitation of women came out, and the #MeToo movement arose.
Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, who had succeeded Spitzer as Attorney General, became Governor of New York in 2011. He and his wife, Kerry Kennedy, had divorced in 2005. His agenda was “culturally liberal.” In the middle of the last decade, he told pro-lifers (as well as people culturally conservative in certain other ways) that we don’t belong in New York.
In 2020, he proudly and excitedly signed a version of Spitzer’s abortion-promoting law. I don’t know how it compares with the Spitzer proposal. But one of its proud points is making it easier for parents to force a minor to abort against her will, no matter how late in gestation they discover the pregnancy. To celebrate this violent law, Cuomo had his girlfriend flick a switch that turned lights in New York City pink.
Kerry Kennedy (Cuomo), divorced 2005
However, late that year, it came to light that some women complained about Cuomo’s making unwanted sexual moves on them. His misdeeds, from reports I read, seem less severe than Packwood’s. Would Cuomo have gotten into trouble if this were before the Weinstein exposure? Would he still have gotten into trouble if he were moving more quickly and energetically in enacting more points of a culturally/ ethically “liberal” agenda? Where was First Girlfriend now? In any case, some of Cuomo’s fellow Democrats rumbled about impeaching him. In August 2021, he resigned.
(New York State got its first woman governor, Kathy Hochul, as a consequence, but I don’t have high hopes for her. That’s a different story.)
In his resignation speech, Andrew Cuomo said, “In my mind, I never crossed the line with anyone. But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate.”
However, the “line” between acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior had been redrawn before to the position he was used to in about 1970, before he entered his teens. That was the “generational and cultural shift” everyone spoke about. Maybe the line has been redrawn again since the Weinstein exposure, but it still is looser than it was before 1970, and we don’t know how long it will keep its new position.
They say baby boomers made the sexual revolution. But I was born at the height of the baby boom, and by the time I entered high school, the line was already at the position Andrew Cuomo was used to. Most women of my cohort felt they had no choice. Cuomo is a couple of years younger than me; maybe he didn’t remember the line’s pre-1970 position.
On August 13, the New York Times published a letter from a Gail Griffin saying, “Who drew the line in the first place? Whom did the [c.1970-2017] ‘rules’ serve? And most important, do you actually believe that the women being harassed approved of those ‘rules’ or enjoyed that treatment? . . . The fact is that women adjusted. Accommodated. Endured . . . The final test of a man’s ‘good intentions ‘ and respect for women might be whether or not he can identify enough with women to see how the . . . ‘rules’ dehumanized, demoralized, terrified, hurt, and deranged us.”
The media told us that sexual libertinism is what women really want, but only now are some taking seriously that a lot of women don’t like it.
Footnotes
1Helen Dewar, The Packwood Report, released September 7, 1995, Forward p. vi
2Testimony to Senate Ethics Council, Ibid, p. 65
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For some of our other posts on abortion and women’s rights, see:
Abortion and Violence Against Pregnant Women / Martha Shuping, M.D.
The Myth of Sexual Autonomy / Julianne Wiley
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture / Rachel MacNair
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy / Richard Stith
Gendercide: Millions of “Missing” (Dead) Women
Hard Questions about the Response to Terrorism: Looking Back on September 11th
by John Whitehead
Simply Asking Questions
Andrew Young, the civil rights activist, politician, and diplomat, was present in Selma, Alabama, during the “Bloody Sunday” violence of March 7, 1965. When hundreds of Black Americans and others tried to march for voting rights only to be beaten and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers, Young helped the wounded and others retreating from the violence. He also faced the challenge of talking down people who wanted to respond with violence of their own.
As Young recalled,
[T]here were people who…started talking about going to get their guns. You had to talk them down…and you had to talk them down by simply asking questions,
“What kind of gun you got, .32, .38? You know, how’s that going to hold up against the automatic rifles and the 12-gauge… you know 10-gauge shotguns that they’ve got? And how many have you got? There are at least 200 shotguns out there with buckshot in them. You ever see buckshot? You ever see what buckshot does to a deer?” You know, and most of them had. And you make people think about the specifics of violence, and then they realize how suicidal and nonsensical it is…
I mean there were, in other situations, when people would really get bad, and we couldn’t turn them…we couldn’t physically restrain them, [and] we’d say, “All right, go ahead. Help yourself. Go ahead and… who are you going to kill first, you know? And what’s going to happen when you kill that one?” See? “Where are you going to go after you’ve killed two or three white folk?” See. “You got an escape plan?” Say, “Where are you going to hide? Where are you going to get money to live? Are you ready to take on an underground terrorism movement?” And you know, once they realized they hadn’t thought about even violence…and that what they were really doing was a kind of macho foolishness…they’d calm down.
But you… you see, we were convinced that violence was weakness, that violence wasn’t strength, and that violence was the surest way to get a whole lot of people killed.
I have repeatedly thought about Young’s story when I reflect on another infamous act of violence, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Specific, Practical Questions
Like most Americans, I watched with horror as the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. I remember being very afraid, in the days that followed, about future terrorist attacks. I remember being very angry about the pre-meditated murder of 2,977 people. I also remember being uncertain about how best to respond to the attacks.
I wasn’t then (and still am not now) a pacifist, but I also wasn’t sure if the US invasion of Afghanistan that followed 9/11 was a good or just response to the attacks. I vacillated for months in my views. Then, I eventually settled on a generally supportive attitude toward the hawkish policies that the Bush administration pursued—which, I deeply regret to say, included support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many years would pass before I came to take a far more skeptical, nonviolence-minded view of American wars and military policies.
Looking back, some 20 years after 9/11, I ask myself what would have convinced me back then to take a different course. What would have persuaded me that war and a generally violent response to terrorism wasn’t wise? And I think of Young’s story.
I appreciate how Young and his colleagues asked specific, practical questions. Asking such questions about the response to 9/11 might have made a difference:
Will denying al Qaeda terrorists a base in Afghanistan really be that big an obstacle to their committing more terrorist attacks? Couldn’t al Qaeda establish new bases in other sympathetic or unstable communities—such as areas of neighboring Pakistan? What kind of longer-term responsibility in Afghanistan is the United States taking on by invading? What might the costs of such a responsibility be? If the policy is to stop further attacks by killing al Qaeda terrorists, does that mean also killing them in countries other than Afghanistan? What are the implications of such a wide-ranging license to kill? How confident can we be that those targeted in this way are really guilty of terrorism? These and similar questions were ones that deserved serious thought back in 2001.
Twenty years later, the price of the US response to 9/11 has been enormous. To highlight just a few costs, over 7,000 US military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees have been killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as related military operations.
Estimates of others killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars include over 1,000 allied military personnel; over 7,000 US contractors; and perhaps over 100,000 security personnel, over 200,000 civilians, and over 80,000 opposition fighters in the nations where these wars have been fought (these imprecise estimates might well understate the numbers of dead). Not all these people were directly killed by US forces, but US policy created the context in which they died.
Outside these war zones, the US policy of targeted killing, by drones and other methods, has killed perhaps 5,000 people.
What has all this loss of life achieved? Granted, no terrorist attacks on a scale comparable to 9/11 have occurred on American soil since 2001. Yet terrorist attacks and plots by people allied with al Qaeda or ISIS, or who have similar ideologies, have still occurred in the United States. Examples include the 2009 plots to bomb New York’s subway system and a Northwest airlines flight, the 2010 attempt to bomb Times square, the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, and the 2016 Orlando massacre. Almost 100 people have died from such attacks and that number could easily have been higher except for pure luck: the bombs on the Northwest flight and in Times Square failed to work properly.
The United States’ costly wars and counter-terrorism policies failed to prevent such attacks or near-attacks. In fact, these policies might have contributed to them: for example, the would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Orlando killer Omar Mateen all cited US-sponsored violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere as justifications for their acts. Such a record is not very reassuring, especially given how much the anti-terrorism policies have cost Americans and many others.
Looking back, I cannot help but think that a more restrained, less militarized response to 9/11 would have been better. Such a response might have emphasized measures such as seeking to track down, arrest, and legally try individual terrorists; improving transportation security; and securing dangerous materials that could be used to make chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, so they couldn’t end up in terrorists’ hands. Such a response may have been equally if not more successful in preventing further attacks and have left far fewer people dead.
I wish I had thought harder about the practical questions of how to stop terrorism. I wish someone had pressed these types of questions on me as Young and others pressed questions on their colleagues in Selma.
Twenty years later, the anniversary of 9/11 is a time to mourn: to mourn all those killed in the September 11th attacks and the many people killed because of the responses to those attacks. The anniversary is also a time to resolve in the future to ask the hard, practical questions about responding to terrorism.
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For more commentary by John Whitehead on historical events, see:
Finding Common Ground on and Learning from World War II
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
“Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ‘Em Dying”: War and Racism in the Pacific
East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution: Remembering the Berlin Wall’s Fall
The Danger That Faces Us All: Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 75 Years
“The Affairs of a Handful of Natives”: Nuclear Testing and Racism
Lethal from the Start: Uranium Mining’s Danger to the Most Vulnerable
#Rehumanize 2021
International panel. Left to right, clockwise: Luke Silke, Ireland; Maria Oswalt, moderator; Kristina Artukovic, Serbia; Stephanie Midori Komashin, Japan; Martha Cecilia Villafuerte, Ecuador
John Whitehead comments:
The Rehumanize 2021 Conference sessions on Global Perspectives on Abortion and on Nuclear Nonproliferation both touched on a common challenge for activists: overcoming apathy.
Kristina Artukovic and Stephanie Midori Komashin observed that in Serbia and Japan abortion is not a controversial topic. The practice is largely accepted, with little debate. Pro-life activism is minimal in both countries. Further, this indifference toward abortion is part of larger patterns. Kristina commented that abortion generates little debate in Europe generally. In Japan, Stephanie explained, indifference about abortion is consistent with a general apathy toward politics among young people.
Tim Wainwright sounded a similar note in his talk on working against nuclear weapons. In contrast to the vibrant, engaged anti-nuclear movement of the late 20th century, peace activists today struggle to generate interest in the nuclear threat (Tim’s comments here definitely echoed my own experiences).
Such apathy is disheartening, but it also has a hopeful aspect. A general lack of interest in certain life issues also means that defenders of life don’t have to face highly motivated opposition. For example, Stephanie observed that her pro-life activism generates very little active opposition in Japan. For my part, I have been somewhat heartened by how anti-nuclear activism hasn’t become a highly fierce, emotionally charged “hot button” issue. When people haven’t yet become deeply invested in an issue, they might be willing to listen to the pro-peace, pro-life perspective on it.
Julia Smucker comments:
The most striking presentation I heard at this conference was by Sabrina Butler-Smith, who shared her experience of being wrongfully convicted for the death of her child. Her descriptions of coerced confession, prosecutorial misconduct and inadequate defense demonstrated how skewed the US criminal legal system is toward finding someone to punish rather than finding out the truth. Parts of Sabrina’s story reminded me of similar ones recounted in Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about wrongful convictions and related issues.
Anita Cameron
Anita Cameron, director of minority outreach for Not Dead Yet, also spoke powerfully about the ableism that undergirds the push for assisted suicide, pushing back against the demeaning assumption that it’s better to be dead than disabled – a point that Beth Fox, another disability rights self-advocate, also added to in her breakout session that immediately followed Anita’s keynote.
I also found it refreshing to simply meet and reconnect with other consistent life advocates in the regionally-based chat session and virtual expo booths. This allowed us at least a small taste of the social dynamic of an in-person conference, an experience I hope we can safely return to sometime in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, I commend our friends at Rehumanize for putting together another full and dynamic online conference
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For more posts on consistent conferences, see:
When Women Lead: The Pro-life Women’s Conference
Rehumanize International – 6th Annual Conference (2019)
#Rehumanize2020: Experiences of a Virtual Conference (2020)
Zoom Conference: April 24, 2021
Intervention: What a Red Rose Rescue Reminds Us About Civil Disobedience in the Consistent Life Movement
by Sonja Morin
Susan B. Anthony being arrested for voting when female suffrage was not yet attained. Henry David Thoreau refusing to pay taxes to support unjust war. Abolitionists flaunting the attempts of slave catchers to arrest escaping Black families. The sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and marches of the civil rights movement of the last century. Civil disobedience has long been an essential part of advocacy, especially in our country and for the consistent life movement.
Much of the pro-life movement has shied away from this type of action. My theory is that, due to the fragile state of our cause, many fear bad publicity. Regardless of the reason, civil disobedience is crucial to any social cause because it interrupts normalcy to draw attention to an issue that concerns the whole community. It makes the issue impact the individual, to the point where they are forced to confront its consequences and be encouraged to act.
An act of civil disobedience was undertaken on Friday, August 27 in Philadelphia at the city’s Planned Parenthood clinic. Red Rose Rescue was undertaking sidewalk advocacy. Participants offered the namesake flower to those going into the clinic, as a last effort to rescue them and their pre-born children from the abortion giant. The morning had been successful, with several patients turning away from the clinic to a life-affirming pregnancy resource center close by.
Since their actions were interpreted as an obstacle to Planned Parenthood’s business, workers summoned local police forces and a SWAT team to intervene. They forcibly attempted to remove the sidewalk advocates. One activist in particular, who still remains unnamed, did not want to comply with the orders. He successfully entered into the facility and locked himself in the men’s restroom. He was eventually arrested, but his entry closed the clinic for the whole day, halting all abortion appointments.
When I spoke with Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of Pro-Life San Francisco, who is an atheist and a staunch human rights advocate, she expressed how tense it was being on the scene that morning. The atmosphere was rife with anxious anticipation as to what was going to happen next. Planned Parenthood employees waited alongside sidewalk advocates, waiting to see what would happen, and if the facility would reopen that day. While there was some “heated discussion,” some productive conversation arose between the two camps.
Terrisa Bukovinac
Since that tumultuous Friday scene in Philadelphia, I waited to see if any media coverage would detail the event. I wasn’t surprised when I found only one local news article in response to the event, which didn’t cite the activist’s reason for entering the Planned Parenthood location, or acknowledge the fact that he posed no harm to anyone inside. What did stun me is the silence from most pro-life circles in response.
We should be celebrating! Several lives were saved that day, and parents were spared the pain of abortion. Employees confronted sidewalk advocates and were exposed to the truth. Planned Parenthood at large was reminded that their days will be numbered, as justice resets the recognition of all human life as having dignity in our country.
I decided to highlight this event, not only because of the good it accomplished, but as a reminder of what we as consistent life activists are meant to do. We are meant to intervene through civil disobedience, letting truth and human dignity guide our actions. Our advocacy is not just limited to an online presence or occasional conversation, but includes legitimate attempts in the public sphere to influence change.
May the efforts of the sidewalk advocates who were present at Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia inspire us on our continuous mission for the good of all human lives, and their protection from violence. Now, let’s move onwards in civil disobedience for the cause of civil rehumanization!
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For a post on a similar action, see:
For more posts about nonviolent action, see:
Making a Nonviolent Revolution: Review of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
Remembering Gandhi at 150: The Power of Nonviolence and Respect for Life
People Standing against Tanks: The Civil Resistance of August 1991 and Its Ambiguous Legacy
by John Whitehead
Nonviolent civil resistance helped change history 30 years ago this month. When a group of hardline communists within the Soviet Union attempted a coup in August 1991, they were met with significant resistance from other Soviet citizens, including both ordinary people and elites. The civil resisters ultimately prevailed over the coup plotters. The failed coup set the stage for the Soviet Union’s dissolution later that year.
The thwarted Soviet coup is an inspiring example of what nonviolent civil resistance achieved. Viewed three decades later, in light of subsequent, grimmer historical events, this episode also provides an occasion to reflect on what civil resistance failed to achieve.
A Fracturing Nation
The August 1991 coup and the resulting resistance were the climax of years of change in the historically repressive Soviet Union overseen by the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1989, elections to a national assembly took place in which candidates not affiliated with the ruling Communist Party could run for office. These non-establishment candidates won a significant minority of seats. The following year, the regime moved further away from one-party rule by allowing greater freedom for non-Communist political parties to operate. Later in 1990, multiparty local elections brought more non-establishment candidates to power, including reformist mayors of the major cities Moscow and Leningrad. In June 1991, 80 million Soviet voters elected a new president for the most important Soviet republic, Russia. The winner was Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist turned regime opponent.
These changes were accompanied by greater popular willingness to challenge the Soviet regime. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people participated in an anti-government demonstration in Moscow in February 1990, the largest such protest in Soviet history. The protest may have influenced that year’s decision to allow for greater electoral freedom. A similar demonstration took place in Moscow in March 1991, in open defiance of a government ban and despite the presence of police and troops on hand to repress demonstrators. However, the protest occurred without violence.
Journalist Vitaly Korotich described the change taking place: “The people in this country have always been afraid of power . . . Now, maybe, the powerful are becoming a little afraid of the people.” (quoted in David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 222)
Popular resistance was met with violence elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Non-Russian Soviet republics that defied the Russia-dominated regime became flashpoints for conflict. In 1989, troops attacked a crowd of nationalists in Georgia, killing 19 people. In early 1991, government forces responded to independence movements in Lithuania and Latvia with violent crackdowns that left 20 people dead.
Faced with an increasingly rebellious, divided nation, Gorbachev compromised. He agreed to a new structure for the Soviet Union, in which the various Soviet republics would have more autonomy and those republics who wished to leave the Union altogether could more easily do so. A treaty establishing this new structure was scheduled to be signed on August 20, 1991. Then the coup intervened.
Coup and Resistance
Members of Gorbachev’s inner circle such as Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov formed a plan to take power before the new Union Treaty could be signed. Gorbachev was then away from Moscow on vacation; on August 18, the conspirators cut off his communication with the outside world and placed the Soviet leader under house arrest. Early the following morning, the conspirators broadcast a TV announcement of a state of emergency in the country. On Yazov’s orders, military units occupied Moscow, taking positions around the parliament, city hall, and TV and radio stations.
Resistance to the coup swiftly took shape, helped by the conspirators’ failure either to arrest all potential opponents or to gain control of all communications and media outlets. Yeltsin rushed to the Moscow parliament building and, together with other Russian politicians, issued an appeal denouncing the coup and calling for a country-wide strike. Yeltsin was even bold enough to venture outside, stand on one of the hostile tanks around the parliament, and declare “[W]e proclaim all decisions and decrees of [the conspirators] to be illegal…We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.” (Lenin’s Tomb, p. 466]
Russians of all kinds joined in the resistance. Tens of thousands of people gradually converged around the parliament, setting up barricades made out of debris. A printer’s strike at the newspaper Izvestia forced the paper’s management to print Yeltsin’s appeal. Some military units sent by the conspirators were met by people shouting “Don’t shoot your own people! Turn against your officers!” People brought soldiers food, flowers, and resistance leaflets.
The resistance wasn’t philosophically nonviolent. Many of those who defended the parliament carried weapons. Yet in practice the civil resisters remained largely nonviolent. (One notable exception was when a clash between demonstrators and a tank led to three protestors being killed; other protestors then set fire to tanks.) A line of women protected the parliament while holding a sign reading: “Soviet Soldiers: Don’t Shoot Your Mothers.”
Nadezhda Kudinova, a seamstress who joined the protestors, later commented, “The people in the [parliament] ordered us to step aside, not to jump on the tanks if they came . . . But we knew that if the tanks came, we would step in front of them.” Another woman protestor, Regina Bogachova, said simply, “I am ready to die right here, right on this spot. I will not move.” (Lenin’s Tomb, pp. 478, 481-482)
The stand-off dragged on for days. The conspirators faced the problem that they could prevail only by violently overrunning the resistance at the parliament. However, they couldn’t count on general support for such action: military commanders and even KGB officials expressed skepticism about the coup. They eventually decided to quit: on August 21, Yazov and the military commanders sent the troops in Moscow back to barracks. In the early morning hours, Kryuchkov called the parliament to say, “It’s okay now . . . You can go to sleep.” (Lenin’s Tomb, pp. 484-485)
Unhappy Epilogue
Most of the coup conspirators went to prison. By December 1991, most Soviet republics had agreed to bypass any new Union Treaty and simply become independent nations. The Soviet Union ceased to exist by the year’s end.
At the time, all these events seemed a near-miraculous triumph for freedom and democracy over repression. Viewed 30 years later, the August 1991 coup and its defeat seem more bittersweet.
As president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin proved far less devoted to democracy and nonviolence than he had been as a rebel. A little over two years after facing down tanks in Moscow, Yeltsin would send tanks against the Russian parliament building he had once defended, now to crush his own political opposition. The 1990s brought terrible political and economic chaos to Russia. Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, moved early in his tenure to curtail independent Russian TV media. Putin’s 20-plus-year career as president reached a culmination of sorts earlier this year when he amended Russian law to allow him to continue as president until 2036.
Does this dismal history mean that the nonviolent civil resistance of 1991 was a failure? In one sense, the answer is clearly “no.” The civil resisters succeeded in their primary, immediate goal of thwarting the attempted coup. Their nonviolent resistance was likely far more effective, and certainly less bloody, than violent resistance to the coup would have been. Further, the persistence of repressive politics in the region indicates that more civil resistance, not less, is needed in post-Soviet nations.
Nevertheless, what recent history also suggests is that civil resistance by itself is not sufficient to bring justice and peace to a society. The possibilities that civil resistance opens up must be used wisely to build a new, stable, non-repressive political system. This requires activists to cultivate an additional set of political skills beyond mastery of resistance. In nonviolent resistance as much as violent resistance, one can “win the war but lose the peace.” The resistance of August 1991 thus is both an inspirational and cautionary tale for activists today.
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For similar posts from John Whitehead, see:
Making a Nonviolent Revolution: Review of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution: Remembering the Berlin Wall’s Fall
Finding Common Ground on and Learning from World War II
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
Hollywood Movie Insights II
by Rachel MacNair
See our previous Hollywood Movie Insights post, offering comments on several movies.
Never Look Away
An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of other awards, the story spans the life of an artist as a boy in Nazi Germany and a man in East Germany. He flees to West Germany right before the Berlin Wall was built. It’s of interest to history buffs and/or people interested in how art can be therapeutic to traumatized lives.
For consistent-lifers, its highly personal portrayal of the Nazi euthanasia program is shown as historically connected to war.
It’s also another film in which an abortion is inflicted on a woman who’s devastated about it. The abortion is performed by her formerly Nazi father, an ob/gyn, for eugenic reasons. He doesn’t think the baby’s father is worthy for his bloodline.
This theme of a coerced abortion as part of a sea of violence isn’t a common one in award-winning films or in Hollywood movies. But another example of a major studio film in which abortion was inflicted by men who see the woman as having no say is the Ides of March (see the third movie commented on in our previous post).
The Report
This is the story behind the official report on torture of prisoners of war under the Bush administration, with the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” One point made crystal clear is how utterly wrong is the idea that violence, while regrettable, may be necessary to prevent greater violence in some circumstances. Building rapport with prisoners sometimes works as a way of getting information. Torture, on the other hand, always gets information that was false or already known.
Therefore, to make the case against torture as a war tactic, we need not rely entirely on the assertion that it’s wrong. It’s also demonstrated to be entirely useless.
Dark Waters
A large company is poisoning the waters in the county where their employees work. The hero is a corporate lawyer who – knowing them as the neighbors he grew up with – takes the side of the poisoned.
That the poisoning is injuring unborn children is one of the shocking details of the callousness of the corporation. It has their pregnant mothers continue working in dangerous conditions. The mothers, of course, don’t know of the danger, but the corporate bosses do.
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For more of our posts with movie reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
A Consistent Day in the Neighborhood
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
Justice Littered with Injustice: Viewing Just Mercy in a Charged Moment
No Combat Experience, No Opinion: Parallels in Pro-bombing and Pro-choice Rhetoric
by John Whitehead
Paul Fussell, a literary critic and World War II veteran, wrote an essay in the 1980s with the arresting title “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” A passionate defense of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fussell’s essay is still sometimes invoked today by bombing supporters.
However, Fussell’s argument is seriously flawed—and notably similar to one used by advocates for abortion access.
Fussell’s argument resembles the standard defense: dropping atomic bombs on two cities forced Japan to surrender without a costly US invasion of Japan and thus ultimately saved more American and Japanese lives than were lost in the bombings. Bombing supporters emphasize the extreme violence of the US-Japanese war, US plans to invade Japan in late 1945, and the invasion’s probable high casualties. Many aspects of this defense are unsound, such as claims that more lives were saved in the long run and that this justifies indiscriminate bombing.
However, Fussell’s defense is fundamentally quite different from the standard version. The heart of his essay isn’t the total number of lives saved versus those lost but the experiences and attitudes of American troops. Fussell’s theme is the role of “experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views.”
For those combat troops who would have been involved in an invasion of Japan—and Fussell was one—the atomic bombings and war’s subsequent end seemed a reprieve from near-certain death.
Fussell quotes various combat veterans, but the essay’s most powerful passage is on his own reaction:
My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu… I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, p. 28)
Fussell contrasts his and other veterans’ combat experience with the lack of such experience among various critics of the bombings. Journalist Bruce Page was only nine years old in 1945, while historian Michael Sherry was “going on eight months old, in danger only of falling out of his pram.”
Even contemporaries who served in the military Fussell deems inadequately experienced, if they didn’t see combat. Historian David Joravsky “came into no deadly contact with the Japanese”; and veteran J. Glenn Gray “experienced the war at [headquarters] level.” The economist and bombing critic John Kenneth Galbraith “worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington” during the war, Fussell observes. He adds, “I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.”
The Experiences Left Out
The attitude toward the atomic bombings among veterans such as Fussell, who had already been through the horror of combat, is entirely natural and understandable. Had I been in their situation, I’m sure I would’ve had the same relieved reaction. I don’t condemn Fussell or other combat veterans, as people, for being glad for the war’s end and, by extension, for the atomic bombings.
However, I will critique Fussell’s essay for not being persuasive. I see three crucial problems with his argument:
First, Fussell assumes, almost without question, that the only options available for ending the Pacific War were either an invasion of Japan or atomic bombing. He largely doesn’t consider the option of the United States and Japan reaching some kind of negotiated truce.
Second, Fussell doesn’t consider that the combat troops’ understandable personal concern about what happened next in the Pacific in 1945 didn’t necessarily make them the best judges of the situation. Desperate, often traumatized, people with a significant personal stake in a situation don’t necessarily make the kind of careful, far-seeing decisions that should ideally shape foreign policy.
Third, and most important, Fussell’s argument from personal experience ignores a crucial set of personal experiences: those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s residents. For those tens of thousands of Japanese whom the bombings killed, maimed, or forever deprived of family members, “sheer, vulgar experience” provided a very different conclusion about the correctness of dropping the bombs. As one commentator observed, the “experience thing cuts both ways.”
I see no reason why the experience of Allied combat troops slated to invade Japan should trump that of the men, women, and children killed in the atomic bombings. Fussell laments that combat veterans who support the bombings “have remained silent about what they know.” Yet the voices of at least 100,000 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also been silenced, in a far more definitive way.
Granted, a bombing advocate could respond by arguing that a diplomatic resolution to the war was unrealistic; that a government’s first responsibility is to take care of its own people, including its troops; or that the bombings ultimately saved more lives than were lost. Whatever one thinks of such arguments, though, they make Fussell’s appeal to personal experience irrelevant. These arguments involve a dispassionate assessment of the situation, the kind of armchair theorizing that Fussell scorns when done by bombing opponents. The personal experiences of combat veterans, powerful though they are, don’t prove anything by themselves.
“No Uterus, No Opinion”
Fussell’s claim that only one group of people, those directly affected by an act of violence, can credibly make judgments on this act is similar to claims made by advocates for abortion access. While Fussell argues that only combat troops slated to invade Japan can speak with authority on the atomic bombings, pro-choice advocates sometimes argue that only women can speak with authority on abortion.
This is reflected in the slogan “No Uterus, No Opinion.” It’s reflected in the (highly questionable) claim that most pro-life leaders are men who will never be pregnant. Alesha Doan, a pro-choice public-affairs professor at the University of Kansas, comments that “I think [abortion] has been defined as exclusively a women’s-rights issue that therefore has to only be dealt with by women.” (Doan and other pro-choicers have even expressed concern about this attitude, in some cases because it alienates potential pro-choice male allies.)
Moreover, this pro-choice emphasis on experience could be taken a step further to exclude anyone who hasn’t been through a crisis pregnancy—much as Fussell rejects the perspective of troops who didn’t experience combat. The cartoonist Lynda Barry, who writes powerfully about getting an abortion amid dire personal circumstances, sounds a similar note as Fussell, writing of anti-abortion protesters, “Those people out there, they come from another world. They’ll never know what it means to come from our street.” (Harper’s Magazine, November 1992, p. 46)
However, the position that only women or only those who have faced crisis pregnancies can speak credibly on abortion has the same fundamental problem as Fussell’s position. This stance excludes the interests of other people centrally concerned with abortion: the children in the womb who are killed by it. Again, the experience thing cuts both ways. One could turn around the familiar slogan to say “No Threat of Death by Dismemberment, No Opinion.”
Pro-choice advocates could respond that a human organism in the womb doesn’t have the same rights as a pregnant woman. Or they could argue that the woman’s rights trump whatever rights the child in the womb might have. However, as with the atomic bombings, raising these types of arguments again moves us away from direct personal experience and into larger abstract issues that someone can analyze without having “sheer, vulgar experience.”
Personal experience certainly matters, especially in situations as serious as war or crisis pregnancies. People who face such situations deserve our utmost sympathy and support. Those of us who haven’t faced these situations – and never will – should be exceedingly humble and shouldn’t condemn people in these situations.
We also shouldn’t let our lack of experience lead us to abandon our own judgment or concern for the lives of all the people involved. Rather, we should apply ourselves to finding nonviolent responses to situations that are all too often dealt with through violence, whether from a suction machine or an atom bomb.
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For more of our posts on the theme of men’s say in abortion policy, see:
What Do Men Have to Say on Abortion?
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
For more of our posts on the theme on the atomic bombings and their aftermath, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan
Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
“Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ‘Em Dying”: War and Racism in the Pacific
“Everybody Else in the World Was Dead”: Hiroshima’s Legacy
My Christian CLE Perspective: Absolute Nonviolence Across the Issues
by Julia Smucker
Editor’s Note: There are of course a wide variety of Christian perspectives, and we had a different one last week. We also welcome perspectives from a variety of religions, as listed at the bottom, and invite people to share theirs with us.
I am a baptized Mennonite and confirmed Catholic, and my thinking cannot be fully understood without reference to both traditions. I was raised with the strongest possible grounding in gospel nonviolence within the Anabaptist tradition (albeit its more culturally assimilated strain), and it’s still primarily from that perspective that I come to the CLE. I believed in the CLE long before I ever heard the term and would express bewilderment at different political camps being pro-life on some issues but pro-death on others. The full CLE in its broadest, most absolute sense has always been my understanding of what nonviolence means, as the full logical and moral extent of Christian pacifism. I love defying political stereotypes by telling people that I’m pro-life because I’m a pacifist.
The way I was taught nonviolence growing up tended to center opposition to war, largely for historical reasons, with opposition to all other violence as a natural extension. But I’ve always understood pacifism (especially in the Christian nonviolence tradition) as encompassing much more than opposition to war, just as being pro-life encompasses much more than opposition to abortion, neither of which by any means lessens opposition to both. I recognize a certain degree of subjectivity in what is emphasized and how, which may make me inclined to point out (despite my strong resistance to the ranking of issues) certain unique features of war: in particular, that it’s mass killing, the type of violence that kills by far the most people in a single occurrence – including unborn, elderly, and all stages in between – while other forms of killing such as abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty also kill large numbers of people in totality, but one at a time.
But every form of violence has certain features that are unique to it. So while my own personal commitment to the CLE arises most fundamentally from a broadly understood commitment to peace, I ultimately cannot believe any one form of violence is objectively worse or worthier of attention than all others. If every human life is truly inherently sacred, then the lives of those killed individually cannot be less worthy, nor their killings less a desecration of the divine image, than those killed en masse; the lives of those killed at any point after birth cannot be less worthy, nor their killings less a desecration of the divine image, than those killed by being torn from their mothers’ wombs; and so on.
I’ve had my share of frustration with some modernized Mennonites and politicized Catholic peace activists getting wishy-washy about abortion. The problem, though, isn’t people considering other life issues equally as important as abortion; the problem is people not considering abortion an important issue in the first place. There is no reason for its importance to be in any way diminished by the importance (yes, even the equal importance) of other life-and-death issues. On the contrary, reverence for life should be the rising tide that lifts the boats of all life issues together, all of them enhancing, not threatening, each other’s importance.
I also support the efforts of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative to nudge official Catholic teaching further along its trajectory toward embracing nonviolence more fully. But my greatest frustration has been just trying to get many lay Catholics on board with where the official teaching actually is.
Catholic social teaching (CST) includes a basic presumption against taking life, based on the principle of human dignity inherent in the imago Dei, with some fairly stringent (in theory, if not in practice) exceptions to that presumption, which have gradually narrowed throughout the development of CST. My hope is for those exceptions to continue to narrow to the point of disappearing altogether – ideally, even to the point that the Catholic Church becomes as well known for being a peace church as for being a pro-life church (without becoming any less well known for its pro-life stance, nor weakening it in any way; in fact, I believe a more robust and well publicized peace teaching would only strengthen the Catholic Church’s pro-life teaching).
A problem with exceptions for violence is that they easily become a de facto norm. Hence there are practicing Catholics taking active-duty military positions and training to kill on command with little or no room for moral discretion (despite that even just war theory makes clear that not all war killing is justified), or even being in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal for that matter, without any apparent sense of moral conflict. We sometimes hear prayers at the very altar of Christ’s sacrifice – the only sacrifice from which Christians of all nationalities truly derive their freedom – referring to the military as “protecting our freedoms,” without any sense of contradiction. I’ve expressed concerns in my parish about how prayers for the military are worded, which seemed to move the needle a bit, but those quasi-messianic tropes are tenacious creatures and will keep popping up like weeds without some badly needed catechetical pesticide soaking deeply and broadly into the soil of the Church Universal.
Julia Smucker at a protest of police violence
There will always be a need for particular people to focus on particular projects at particular times and places. Much good and necessary work is done by individuals and groups dedicated to promoting alternatives to abortion, war, euthanasia, the death penalty, gun violence, domestic violence, police violence, xenophobic violence and whatever other violence rears its head. It’s true that none of us can do everything, but that doesn’t mean each of us is limited to only one thing. We can all contribute time and talent to a particular project for which we see a particular local need, or for which we are recruited and/or have relevant skills to contribute, and then do the same for a different project as needs and possibilities arise. As long as various human needs and anti-human violence abound, various people will be needed personally prioritizing various kinds of work at any given time – and, hopefully, consistently opposing all violence, whatever they happen to be working on.
Just showing up to advocate on multiple issues can give us credibility across the board. A couple of years ago I attended a protest against the separation of families at the US-Mexico border, where I politely approached a woman who held a sign saying, “Where is the pro-life outrage?” I told her that I was part of the pro-life outrage (which her sign assumed would be absent), and she thanked me for being there.
My experiences and deep foundational beliefs lead me to consider all human lives as inherently worthy of protection, and all attacks against human life and dignity as equally worthy of opposing wherever they arise. For those who insist on separating one issue from all others – which seems to happen most often with abortion, whatever the reasons – I don’t know if my reasoning will be convincing. My conversations with people who take this view often leave me with the impression that they won’t be satisfied that I take the moral weight of abortion seriously enough unless I give all other life issues less moral weight in relation to it, and that saddens me. It saddens me because, while my mind has changed on large and small matters during my life so far, I can’t imagine changing it in the direction of becoming more favorable to violence. And since I am already absolutely, categorically opposed to abortion as a form of violence, the only way for me to give it preeminence among my own values over all other life issues would be to become less strongly opposed to other forms of violence. And that, for me, would be unthinkable.
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For more of our posts from Julia Smucker, see:
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
What Does it Mean to be Inconsistent?
Is Abortion Different from Other Violence?
To Know a Person is to Recognize a Human
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter
For more of our posts from various religious perspectives, see
Atheism
The Vital Need for Diversity / Sarah Terzo
Christianity
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity / Rob Arner
The Early Christian Tradition / Rob Arner
Fratelli Tutti – Consistent-Life Excerpts
The Consistent Life Ethic: My Christian Perspective / Jim Hewes
Hinduism
Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals / Vasu Murti
Interfaith
Why the Interfaith Approach is Important / Rachel MacNair
Islam
Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times / John Whitehead
Paganism
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece / Mary Krane Derr
The Consistent Life Ethic: My Christian Perspective
by Father Jim Hewes
Editor’s Note: There are of course a wide variety of Christian perspectives, and we have a different one coming up for next week’s post. We also welcome perspectives from a variety of religions, as listed at the bottom, and invite people to share theirs with us.
I understand the Consistent Life Network as a whole prides itself on religious diversity, including atheists. In that spirit, I share this piece from my journey of faith. I know I’m in good company: Francis of Assisi, Franz Jagerstatter, Ben Salmon, Martin Luther King Jr., Dan Berrigan, Mother Teresa, and even Mohandas Gandhi, who was influenced by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
During the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, one of my classmates in the seminary asked me: “Being a follower of the Lord, how do you find the justification for killing in Jesus’ life and his teaching?” This question troubled me. So I began to search the scriptures and was confronted by what I read.
I found these scripture passages quite challenging to my previous views. I began to think. “if you kill someone, how is it loving them or doing good to them, since you’re ending any chance they may have forever finding conversion and forgiveness?” If Jesus never harmed anyone (nor did his followers for the first three centuries of Christianity), how could I kill as one of His followers? Because life is God’s alone, each one made in the image and likeness of God. (Genesis 1:26-27)
Jesus was steeped in the Jewish tradition; so in the Hebrew scriptures the prophets are constantly calling on the people of God to care for the widow, the orphan, and the alien. The prophets’ voice doesn’t prioritize the farmer, the small-business merchant, nor even a single parent or elderly couple, although each of them is still made in God’s image and likeness and are infinitely precious to God. Rather, it’s the widow. who was vulnerable because she didn’t have a husband to protect her and provide for her in such a precarious time (since there was no safety net then). At the present time, pre-born children don’t have men to protect them and provide for them; since the Roe v. Wade ruling, men have been totally eliminated from the abortion decision. Aliens are that way because they’re not in their own terrain, but in a foreign place. Today pre-born children are not on their own “land” either, but in someone else’s territory, the most dangerous place on the planet, the mother’s womb. Orphans (mentioned over 35 times in the scriptures) are children who don’t have their mothers and fathers. Currently, pre-born children scheduled for an abortion have no mothers and fathers. They have been abandoned by them.
So, the widow, the alien and the orphan, because of their vulnerability, were continually given a special priority of care by God, through the prophets’ voice. This didn’t mean other sons and daughters of God weren’t loved deeply by God. God didn’t lessen the value of the lives of other human beings; God just made sure those who were the most unprotected and the most neglected were given extra special consideration and focus, so they weren’t ever overlooked by the faith community. Today no one is more at risk than pre-born children, so they deserve to have focus of paramount importance of concern. At the same time, they must be given care for their lives after being born.
More importantly, the Christian scriptures proclaim that Jesus is the “Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jesus is a clear way to navigate any dilemma we face. Jesus responded to the Pharisees when they tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to them, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 2:34-40) Jesus reiterates this linked order when he states: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”(Matthew 10:37)
In other words, there is no doubt Jesus puts the love of God first, even over one’s closest loved ones, one’s family (in my words a “preeminent priority”). But the love of neighbor is always linked to love of God and also a priority, which can’t be separated from the first commandment. John puts in this way: “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (I John 4:19-21)
Jesus is not making the second commandment in competition with the first commandment, nor teaching that the second commandment takes a back-seat to the first. This is why God became human, to show God’s love for each and every one of us, especially the sinner, one’s enemy and the most vulnerable.
That’s why Jesus states the second commandment is like the first (but still is second). It also follows because of the linked connection: if abortion is truly a preeminent priority for a follower of Christ, one won’t really be credible if one doesn’t work against the other threats to those same lives outside the womb.
Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…… For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:12-13). Jesus seems to be prioritizing one group of people, but that didn’t mean that the healthy and the righteous weren’t loved, nor were they disvalued by Jesus. Jesus came to redeem everyone for all time, willing to leave the 99 to find the one lost sheep.
In another place Jesus (who made the journey from conception to birth) states: “Anyone who welcomes one child like this for my sake is welcoming me. But if anyone abuses one of these little ones who believes in me, it would be better for him to have a heavy boulder tied around his neck and be hurled into the deepest sea than to face the punishment he deserves (Matthew 18:5-6, emphasis added). Jesus doesn’t say this about older teens or adults or the elderly, (who are also of infinite worth) but about those most defenseless. Today, those are pre-born children, who aren’t welcomed to live in the world for even one second.
Jesus words of the last judgement:
Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me. Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:41-45, emphasis added)
This teaching of Jesus states clearly there’s a difference or hierarchy in lives in those who are least and other human lives (some refer to this as a “Preferential Option for the Poor”).
I’ve been trying to make the case that pre-born children, although so precious to God (Psalm 139:13-14) for many years have been treated as the least ones because of their vulnerability, powerlessness, invisibility, lack of any voice, foundation for all other rights, heart of the family, enormous numbers killed. They’re also the poorest: no food, no drink, no welcome, no clothing, etc. ever given to them. They never see the light of day, not even for a brief moment.
It’s an undeniable fact that each day in our world 125,000 powerless pre-born children are killed, year after year This figure indicates protecting pre-born children from abortion is obviously not in any way or almost any place actually lived as a preeminent priority.
God’s ultimate revelation of all of this was the Word made flesh, Jesus becoming human. This is the infinite affirmation of each person’s worth (John 1:1-4). The very Word of God made that journey from conception to a zygote, to an embryo, to a fetus, to a neonate; each of these natural human transitions of life was an affirmation of the dignity every stage of our human journey, both before and after birth, because each human being’s origin and destiny is God (Jeremiah 1:5).
This fact alone makes us priceless, of infinite worth. In Jesus, God has given an absolute yes to the dignity and value of all human life. (John 10:10), from the beginning until the end (Romans 14: 7-8), because of our relationship to our creator, who gives each of us our very life (Matthew 10:30-31).
So it is my faith, through prayer and discernment, that draws me to the Consistent Ethic of Life. Jesus is the fullest and clearest revelation of not only who God is, but who we are meant to be, especially as voices for the helpless, voiceless, invisible pre-born children. It also means that after 52 years of working in this area, I’m still convinced that Jesus shows us the Way of non-violent love, where the most vulnerable are recognized as needing special attention, and at the same time, no one is ever excluded.
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For more posts from Jim Hewes, see:
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
Consistent Life History: Being Across the Board
Reflections from My Decades of Consistent Life Experience
The Case for Abortion as the “Preeminent Priority”
For more posts on a variety of religious perspectives, see:
Atheism
Christianity
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
Fratelli Tutti – Consistent-Life Excerpts
Hinduism
Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals
Interfaith
Why the Interfaith Approach is Important
Islam
Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times