“But I was Empty”: The Story of a Doctor Who Left Planned Parenthood
by Sarah Terzo
The pro-life group Live Action did an interview with former abortionist Patti Giebink, who did abortions at Planned Parenthood for three years after performing abortions in her residency. Giebink is now a pro-life activist.
Giebink entered medical school with strong pro-choice beliefs, which she now says she never questioned or really examined. She first did abortions at the Well Women’s Clinic. She describes one abortion she did on twins at 17 weeks. By 17 weeks, a preborn baby has all his or her parts and organs. He or she has a beating heart and brain waves, is already right or left-handed, responds to sound and touch, yawns, sucks her thumb, and has unique fingerprints different from those of anyone else who ever lived or ever will live.
Abortions at this stage are done by D&E, where the abortionist reaches into the womb with forceps and dismembers the child, pulling him or her out piece by piece. The last part to be removed is the head, which must be crushed to be extracted. Giebink recalls:
Probably the most difficult abortion that I had done – I had done quite a few up to that point – it was in the Well Women’s Clinic where there was no IV sedation, nothing other than a local block, a local paracervical block. And this was a woman who had twins at 17 weeks. And I just remember, it was just so physical ….to dilate the cervix, to get all the tissue out, body parts – make sure you have everything. … [W]e didn’t use ultrasound all the time. But in this case, I wanted to make sure that I had all the parts of two babies. The hardest part is the head, or the calvarium, because sometimes it just kind of rolls around and there’s different instruments, one’s called a Bierer forceps, to grab the head and make sure that you have that. … from my standpoint, it’s twice as hard as just doing a singleton. … And I thought, this is, this is a bit much.
The experience of aborting the twins, however, did not cause Giebink to question what she was doing. According to her, “I never really thought it was wrong. …to me it was embryology, it was science, it was surgery… I can’t say that I stopped and was thinking, when does life begin.”
Giebink describes her three years at Planned Parenthood as “very tumultuous. “There were no health department inspections of the facility while she was there. She says, “it wasn’t the cleanest clinic.” In fact, Giebink recalls:
[A]fter I left … the guy who had had the building actually built [Planned Parenthood] a new building about a mile west, right across from the new high school. … and so the old building was actually bought anonymously by some pro-life people and eventually [they] turned it into a pro-life resource center . . .
Leslie [who worked at the center] has become a good friend of mine, and she was talking about how filthy it was. And I said, “Yeah, I know.” It was small, it was – it was not a pleasant place to work.
At first, Giebink performed abortions one day a week at Planned Parenthood while maintaining her own practice. She later went to work for Planned Parenthood full-time. None of her private practice patients continued to see her. Other abortionists have spoken about the stigma of providing abortions and the fact that many standard OB/GYN patients don’t want to see an abortionist for routine care, or to deliver their own babies.
According to Giebink, Planned Parenthood provided no prenatal care and did ultrasounds only to date pregnancies before abortions. Planned Parenthood scheduled abortions as often as they had enough patients to make it profitable:
I remember that sort of the rule of thumb was that you had to have at least 8 to 10 abortions for a day to break even. And so of course, they wouldn’t do a day for less than considerably more than that. It seems to me about 14 or so was like max. Because you’d run out of time.
Giebink was discouraged from talking too much to the women. The “counseling” was done before she saw the patient. She says:
I think the thing that bothered me about Planned Parenthood is, they just expected me to be a technician. That they didn’t want me involved in any of the counseling, any other parts of it. And it was very difficult for me not to be involved. Often times, I would just get a few minutes with the patient, including the procedure time.
Giebink only spent a few minutes with her patients, despite the commonly repeated claim “abortion is between a woman and her doctor.”
Giebink sometimes encountered women who were reluctant or ambivalent about having abortions, and she encouraged them to reschedule. Planned Parenthood’s administration did not like this. Giebink says:
A number of times – apparently, it wasn’t very pleasing to Planned Parenthood – if I felt that the patient really wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, I’d say something like, “Well, why don’t we just reschedule?” You know, “I don’t think you’re ready to do this today. Why don’t we just put you – reschedule you?”
And I’ll never forget one woman, who was young, maybe early twenties, and she said, “I can’t reschedule.” And I thought she’d say, I can’t get off work, I’ve got to travel, this or that, and she said, “I already paid my $400 and I won’t get it back.”
And I said, “No, you will get your money back if you decide you want to reschedule.”
And she was so convinced she wasn’t going to get her money back that we just went ahead with the procedure. And there wasn’t really any follow-up, so I really don’t know what happened to her. But I was just the technician.
Giebink doesn’t know if the workers at her facility told women they would not get their money back if they left without having the abortion. But it seemed clear that they were not getting thorough counseling. She wrote of her time at Planned Parenthood, “That was not a good place to be. That was not an emotionally good place to be, because all the other things were out of my control.”
Giebink eventually left Planned Parenthood but remained pro-abortion. But the memory of what she had done weighed on her conscience. She felt “empty”:
I was kind of searching . . . I had achieved everything I thought was important in life. I had my private practice, you know, I had status and I was doing what I love doing. I was making money. But I was empty. I mean, I was a shopaholic, I would go buy stuff, and then, a couple weeks later I think, “oh, I have too many earrings, but what the heck, it’s so much fun to go and buy something.” Clothes and, you know, just stuff. . . . I could never have enough. I went through a horrible divorce. It’s kind of like God was getting me to the end of my rope.
She got involved in a small Christian church. But she had deeply buried her experience performing abortions. It wasn’t until she went to a church healing retreat that she spoke about her past for the first time. The people at the retreat were welcoming and kind, and she slowly gained the confidence to start speaking out against abortion and, with encouragement, to get involved in the pro-life movement.
Along the way, she had to cope with a great deal of grief and remorse, similar to that faced by former executioners and former drone operators.
Now she says:
We have to come to the right answer a different way. Why are there women in crisis pregnancies? Why are women thinking that abortion is their only alternative? How can we really help these women? … [W]e’ve seen enough women who’ve regretted their choice. They’ve regretted it, and they’ve said, if I only knew. If I only knew, I wouldn’t have done it. So why are they not having all the facts?
I was there. I mean, you only gave them enough information to get them to sign the forms and to do whatever the state told you to do, and then, boom, boom you’re done, you’re in recovery, you’re out the door. And there is no follow-up.
When asked what she would say to those performing abortions now, she responded, “What I would ask the person is, “How do you feel? How do you feel when you go home at night? How do you feel? Does taking a life give you peace?”
You can watch the entire interview and read the transcript here.
Author Sarah Terzo
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For similar posts by Sarah Terzo, see:
Abortion Doctor Says: We are the Executioners
Healing for the Perpetrators: The Psychological Damage from Different Types of Killing
For other of our posts by Sarah Terzo, see:
How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled
Different Ways of Looking at Issues
Specialization or Generalization? The Many Ways of Following the Consistent Life Ethic
John Whitehead at the White House
by John Whitehead
The Consistent Life Ethic (CLE) movement is very diverse. It includes people of different philosophical or partisan backgrounds, with different understandings of the CLE and different preferred activist strategies. One aspect of this diversity is varying approaches to specialization, that is, focusing on a particular life issue of the CLE.
Some CLE activists are drawn to work primarily on one life issue while others take a more wide-ranging approach. Also, among those activists who focus on one issue, the chosen issue will vary. Like other differences, alternative approaches to specialization can be a source of tension within the CLE movement but can also, if handled properly, be a source of movement strength.
Specialization: Pros and Cons
People might be moved to focus their activism on one of the six life issues covered by the Consistent Life Network mission statement—abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, poverty, racism, and war—for any number of reasons. (For simplicity, I am treating these six as “the life issues” but of course many people include other issues under the CLE heading, such as protecting the environment, opposition to human trafficking, and so on.)
Their philosophies might lead them to conclude the focus issue has some significance or importance that sets it apart from the others. Their life experience might have made them unusually concerned about the focus issue. Their cast of mind or temperament might make the focus issue especially interesting. Or all these factors might influence them. For whatever reason, some people prefer to work on one life issue rather than others.
Such preferences have advantages and disadvantages.
An advantage is it allows an activist to do greater justice to the focus issue. Working on one issue allows for investing more time and energy than would be possible when working on six issues. A focused activist gains more experience and detailed knowledge on the focus issue, which further strengthens activism on it.
Another advantage is it can help sustain an activist’s commitment. This advantage should not be underrated. A common characteristic of activism is the need for a long-term effort. These six issues encompass threats to life people have been struggling against probably since the dawn of civilization. Even if we limit our perspective to contemporary history, work on these issues has been ongoing for decades. While progress is possible, work will likely require effort for a long time to come. A long-term activist commitment, in the face of inevitable resistance and disappointment, requires tremendous enthusiasm for the issue you are working on. Burning out is constant risk of activism, and I daresay one reliable path to burnout is having to invest time and energy in an issue that doesn’t really interest you.
These are specialization’s clear advantages. The disadvantages are equally clear. Focusing on one issue can easily lead to neglecting the others. Specialization can become the kind of narrowly single-issue activism that the CLE’s broader scope should correct. In several countries, life issue activism tends to be sadly divided across partisan lines, so specialized activism can foster strident partisanship for whichever party or faction champions an activist’s preferred issue. At worst, a specialized CLE activist can become indistinguishable from one who is not CLE at all.
Related is the risk of competitiveness. Specialized activists can become impatient with or critical of anyone who isn’t focusing on the same issues as they are. Competitiveness can be a particular problem if activists’ specialization springs from a conviction that their focus issue is somehow objectively more important than the other life issues.
Generalization: Pros and Cons
In contrast to specialized activists, some CLE adherents can be generalists who concern themselves with the array of life issues. Like specialists, generalists might have a variety of motivations. Their philosophies might lead them to believe all life issues are equally important and should receive equal attention. Their experiences, temperaments, and casts of mind can also play a role: some people find a specialized focus too limiting and are naturally drawn to take an interest in a wide array of issues.
An advantage of the generalized CLE approach is it avoids the dangers of single-issue activism, partisanship, and competitiveness that can be pitfalls of specialization. Instead, generalization unambiguously champions the holistic view of defending life that is essential to the CLE.
Moreover, by taking a wide-ranging view, generalized activists have an advantage in connecting the six life issues. Because they pay attention to all the issues, they more easily notice how different threats to life resemble each other: how they rely on the same kinds of justifications, for example, or use similar euphemisms. Generalization also allows activists to see how different threats to life reinforce each other: how racism contributes to the death penalty or how poverty contributes to abortion and vice versa.
A disadvantage of the generalized approach is that it limits how much time and energy activists devote to any given issue and how much knowledge and experience related to an issue they can gain. It’s a danger to be a jack of all trades, master of none.
Balancing the Approaches
Because of their advantages, the CLE movement needs all these different activist approaches. We need people who specialize in each of the six life issues as well as people who take a more generalized approach to these issues. To make this diversity a source of strength rather than weakness, I suggest a few broad guidelines:
- Recognize the legitimacy of different approaches. Specialized CLE activists should respect the approach of generalized CLE activists and vice versa. Further, specialized CLE activists need to respect each other’s different specializations. Insisting everyone adopt one’s own preferred approach should be rejected. This means that CLE activists will often need simply to agree to disagree on the contentious question of whether certain life issues are inherently “more important” than others.
- Specialized activists should not become exclusive. Focusing primarily on one issue is a legitimate form of CLE activism, but that focus should be qualified by attention to other issues. Everyone, no matter how committed to a specific cause, can take at least some time to work on behalf of another one. All activists can occasionally write a letter, attend a rally, donate money, or otherwise do something for life issues apart from their focus.
- Generalist activists should listen to specialized activists. Because they have more in-depth knowledge of a specific issue, specialized activists’ perspectives can be beneficial to generalists. Listening to those with experience focusing on a specific issue can fill in gaps in generalists’ knowledge and correct false impressions: perhaps the life issues are related in different ways than a generalist’s initial study might reveal.
Ask for, and provide, support. A good way to follow guidelines 1-3 while building up the CLE movement as a whole is to seek fellow CLE activists for support. Whether you’re organizing a clemency appeal for someone on death row, sending vital supplies to immigrants on the border, or raising funds for crisis pregnancy centers, asking other CLE activists for their support or endorsement can correct many of the problems arising from diverse approaches. Specialized activists get involved in issues outside their usual focus, generalized activists learn more about activism in a specific area, and collaboration fosters mutual respect within our diverse movement.
The CLE movement has tremendous potential to break down existing political divisions and promote the defense of life. Respecting our movement’s diversity and managing it productively can help us realize that potential.
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For posts on similar themes, see:
Pondering Justice / Carol Crossed
Win-Lose is a Mirage / Bill Samuel
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes / Julia Smucker
Different Ways of Looking at Issues / Sarah Terzo
Seeking Peaceful Coexistence:The Varied Ways of Supporting a Consistent Life Ethic / John Whitehead
Elections 2020: Three Consistent-Life Approaches
by Rachel MacNair
The Consistent Life Network takes no stand on specific candidates. This is my own personal take on how people who support the consistent life ethic view the U.S. presidential election of November 3, 2020.
Three Categories
Category 1: Trump is Out of the Question; Biden is Bearable
People in this category are so aghast at Trump that they regard his being in office as intolerable, for a long list of reasons. For example: he doesn’t understand any taboo against using nuclear weapons; he’s sabotaging the diplomacy in the State Department that might prevent war; he eagerly supports the death penalty and suggests it in cases where accusations of guilt are sloppy; his words and policies often have negative effects on minorities and refugees; his budget has drastic cuts in the social safety net for the poor; he’s sabotaging efforts to mitigate climate change; and most recently, his response to a pandemic has cost lives and increased poverty far more than would have happened under someone more competent.
His anti-abortion stand is one of the few good things about him, but even there, he doesn’t understand the issue well. He’s doing the opposite of life-affirming things – such as having decent health care available to the poor and avoiding cruelty to immigrants – that would help pregnant women choose life. He gives the pro-life cause a terrible public image, which is crucial to winning hearts and minds. He wouldn’t answer when asked if he’d ever paid for an abortion himself.
In addition, there are conservative columnists (not consistent-lifers) who admirably articulate what’s wrong with abortion but who also regard Trump as unfit and dangerous, such as David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and George Will.
Category 2: Trump is Crucial; Biden is Impossible
The people in this category reason this way: First, if the most vulnerable of us don’t have the right to life, then nobody does. It’s foundational to everything. You can’t have good medical care if you’re not even allowed to live.
The huge numbers of abortions make it by far the most horrific bloodshed going on in the U.S. This in turn impacts abortion policy in other countries. Those numbers will be shockingly higher under any current Democrat’s abortion policies. Therefore, a vote for Biden is a vote for thousands more babies being killed right away, and bodes ill for the future.
Additionally, Trump has this difference from his predecessors: the pro-life movement has for decades dealt with Republicans who don’t really mean it. Reagan had right-to-lifers working hard for his election, and yet appointed two pro-Roe Supreme Court Justices, thus keeping Roe v. Wade in place all these decades. (I’ve worded this as a betrayal; most pro-lifers won’t use that term, but heaven knows they were frustrated). George W. Bush considered the Title X regulation that would keep family-planning money from going to abortion facilities, but he didn’t put it in place in 2006 because he didn’t want to risk alienating Congressional allies when he needed them for support of his war in Iraq. This delayed the regulation another 13 years.
Trump is the only one of the set who’s actually gotten the job done on Title X and several other abortion-focused policies. He’s the only president who addressed the March for Life in person.
Most important of all, he’s been more faithful in appointing Supreme Court judges who may be inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade, and would likely appoint more in a second term with probable upcoming vacancies.
Besides, do we really think that Biden will be better on keeping us out of war, given his past experience? It was the Obama-Biden administration that pushed a costly program of “modernizing” nuclear weapons.
Category 3: Not Willing to Choose Between Disasters
Those in this category won’t select either Trump or Biden. They may vote third party or independent. As my mother put it (my family has a long third-party tradition), she votes not for a selection, but for a direction. By voting for what she actually wants rather than what she merely finds not quite as objectionable, she communicates what she actually wants.
But there’s one obvious and glaring disadvantage to this approach: absent something weird and unpredictable, it’s only one of the candidates in the two major parties who will win. People in both the above two categories insist voting for anyone else is not really making a choice at all. You can feel cleaner, but you’ve helped the more objectionable candidate win by not voting for his or her opponent.
Putting the Blame in the Right Places
I fall in the third category, and with great trepidation I face an election year in which the many friends I have in both of the other categories are going to castigate me for not being in theirs. But in addition to the point that Category 3 is where my sympathies lie, I also know I would completely and entirely lose any shred of credibility with all my friends in either one of the first two categories if I selected the other one.
But here’s the point I most want to make:
While the logic of elections will have the people in each of the first two categories rebuking the people in the other, I don’t think this is where the rebuke best goes.
For people in Category 1, their actual opponents aren’t the people who use the reasoning of Category 2. Those in Category 2 are tender-hearted people with crucial concerns. The real problem is that Democrats are so extreme on abortion. They don’t merely have horrendous policy stands, but they constantly have words of contempt for people who think otherwise. Not mere disagreements, but disdain. They’re very deliberately chasing possible voters away.
I watched in a 2016 Clinton-Trump debate as Clinton justified late-term abortions using astonishing euphemisms. I watched in amazement that she didn’t understand that everyone that agreed with her was someone whose vote she already had, and the only thing she could possibly accomplish with that answer was to lose votes. Not people who would vote for Trump, necessarily, but people who she was discouraging from showing up to vote at all. Her answer was stomach-churning.
And for people in Category 2, their actual opponents aren’t the people who use the reasoning of Category 1. Those in Category 1 are tender-hearted people with crucial concerns. The problem is that while some Republicans are sincere, many candidates (including Trump) only give lip service on abortion because they know that’s where the votes are. In Trump’s case, he doesn’t have a hands-on approach to policy. He lets sincere people who do care handle the policy.
But he’s doing far more to keep pro-abortion resistance going than a president who was actually sincere and understood the issue would. The work of reaching hearts and minds has been made so very much harder because people who are rebelling against the cruelty he’s practiced put pro-life advocacy into that same category. We’re going to have a lot of trouble correcting the stereotypes he’s doing so much to bolster. Mere policy can only do so much, and we need to understand how much of an obstacle he’s setting up for us in years to come.
More Positively
For the future, we can have less of an election dilemma by having ranked-choice voting.
For this year, those of us in the U.S., or who have friends in the U.S., can at least work directly on anti-violence referendums this November.
But we also need to remember that elections aren’t what decide everything. While they have strong impacts, lots of other actions have strong impacts as well.
I’ve noticed over the decades that when the Democrats are in office, the pro-life movement seems much more visibly active; during Republican administrations, the peace movement has more and larger demonstrations. Too many people have a sense that when their preferred candidate gets elected, they can sit back and let that person take care of the policy.
It doesn’t work that way. It’s absolutely crucial that, whoever wins, we keep active at the grassroots. We’ll never achieve what we need to achieve if we just leave it to politicians.
Henry David Thoreau
Slavery in Massachusetts, 1854
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst [person] is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a [person] you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
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Stickers with the graphic on top are available from the Consistent Life Network’s shop.
Stickers and t-shirts with the second graphic are available from Rehumanize International’s shop.
For our posts on similar themes, see:
Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer / John Whitehead
My Difficulty in Voting: Identifying the Problem (about the American Solidarity Party) / Monica Sohler
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting / Rachel MacNair
See also our website on Peace & Life Referendums
To Know a Person is to Recognize a Human
by Julia Smucker
Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “My Uncle Charlie is not much of a person but he is still my Uncle Charlie.” This striking sentence introduced his argument on the limits of “personhood” language in medical contexts. Yet it also captures the power of having known a human being as a person, a subjective but universal human experience that belies attempts to categorize certain humans as nonpersons. It’s subjective not in the sense of being a mere matter of personal opinion, but of being rooted in personal experience (the experience of the subject). In Hauerwas’ example, I’ve experienced Uncle Charlie as a person because I’ve known him as a human individual with a name, a relationship to me, and human traits specific to him, and no ethical or philosophical abstraction can undo this.
That may be why children conceived but not yet born, especially in the abstract, are so easily dehumanized: they are not yet known in such a personal way, and so are easily depersonalized. On the other hand, this unknown-ness can be reduced, both through technology and through a welcoming attitude toward the child. One can see physical traits on an ultrasound and even catch early glimpses of personality by following fetal behavior, and one can name the baby before birth. It may even be possible, in the not-too-distant future, to use a human embryo’s unique DNA to predict what he or she may look like at a later stage in life.
Biologically speaking, a human is objectively human – at either end of the human lifespan or at any point in between – regardless of anyone’s personal experience of them. The significance of the subjective experience of knowing a human person, to put it in philosophical terms, is not metaphysical (pertaining to reality) but epistemological (pertaining to knowledge). That is, knowing someone as a person doesn’t make them human, but it’s how we know that they are.
To avoid confusion, it’s worth noting that there are two senses of the word “know,” both of which were in fact used in the preceding sentence. Factual knowledge is knowing (being aware) that something is true. Acquaintance knowledge is knowing (being familiar with) something or someone. Speakers of Romance languages will recognize this distinction in, for example, the words savoir and connaître in French or saber and conocer in Spanish.
What may seem like a minor semantic digression actually makes a major difference in terms of our experience of fellow humans on a personal level. We can know, factually, that each human fetus is an individual member of the human species, but if we don’t experientially know a particular human fetus in a personal way, his or her humanity can be psychologically easier to dismiss. A similar distancing can be done in relation to unseen enemies in war, more easily dehumanized when they remain nameless and faceless, or to asylum-seekers and refugees envisioned as an indistinct invading mass, rather than people trying to survive.
Conversely, the formation of interpersonal relationships across international conflicts or political divides is a powerful peace-building tool. And who can look at an infant whose conception was unplanned and think glibly of his life being cut short before he’d been born? Or who can listen to an asylum-seeker tell her story and think glibly of her life being cut short before she’d made it to safety in her new host country? It becomes harder to be dismissive of a human life when, in the looking and listening and relationship-building, a person becomes known.
For purposes of dialogue – as Hauerwas and others have argued – defining humanness is certainly firmer ground scientifically, at least as a starting point, whereas defining personhood can be more easily dismissed as a matter of philosophical conjecture. And yet, it’s almost universally agreed that the categorization of certain humans as nonpersons or less than full persons has defined some of the ugliest parts of human history, and one would be hard pressed to find an example of it that wasn’t for the sake of dehumanizing certain humans and thereby justifying violence against them. The facts of human biology bear reminding in their own right, but it’s also worth raising the question, are there then any humans that don’t qualify as persons?
It’s through the experience of knowing human persons that the two terms are psychologically linked. That’s why war propaganda perpetuates dehumanizing stereotypes, and it’s why abortion advocates take pains to avoid letting pregnant women see ultrasounds of their babies: seeing the human is the beginning of knowing the person. And once one has some experience of another person with their own personal particularities, that person’s humanity – and value – becomes that much harder to dismiss.
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See other posts from Julia Smucker:
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter
What Does it Mean to be Inconsistent?
“Trust Landlords”: Pro-Choice Candidate Supports Eviction Rights
Satire by Richard Stith
Reporter: “I am so grateful for your willingness to answer a few questions about the eviction controversy. As I’m sure you know, in response to the “My Building, My Choice!” campaign, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed rules to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants. What’s your position on eviction rights?”
Candidate: “I think you’ll like the consistently deferential approach I take on this sort of issue. As I said at a recent Town Hall, I’m for trusting decisionmakers to draw their own lines. So here I say, ‘Trust landlords.’ I’m not personally pro-eviction or anti-eviction. But landlords’ eviction decisions are not going to improve just because the government dictates how they should be made.”
Reporter: “What do you tell people who believe that God wants them to protect tenants from unjust eviction?”
Candidate: “I respect and support those with pro-tenant religious beliefs, even though I don’t think that’s what the Bible says. But they may not use their private beliefs as a political weapon against a landlord’s freedom to choose what to do with his own building.”
Reporter: “Here’s a tough one for you: Suppose a particular landlord has already made a choice. He has invited a tenant in, clearly agreeing to shelter her for nine months, but later he changes his mind. Can he just kick the tenant out in the sixth month, even though she has no other place to go? Suppose it’s winter, even.”
Candidate: “I would trust that landlord to make the right decision.”
Reporter: “OK, but what if that landlord has a discriminatory motive? What if he has discovered in the sixth month of occupancy that the tenant has Down Syndrome, for example? Can she just be put out on the street, where she’s really not capable of surviving until the weather gets warmer in a few months?”
Candidate: “I’m against all discrimination, but we have to trust the landlord on this. The building is their private property. We can’t interfere with total control of one’s own building, even if the owner chooses to draw a line with which we may disagree.”
Reporter: “In late 2019, there was an article entitled “Reconsidering tenant pain” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The article concluded that a tenant may have settled in and feel quite pained by an eviction after just 12 weeks of occupancy. The authors’ research showed, in their own words, “Overall, the evidence, and a balanced reading of that evidence, points towards an immediate and unreflective pain experience . . . from as early as 12 weeks.” Do you think that, after she’s been living there 12 weeks, landlords should hire a doctor to give the tenant some sort of pain killer before evicting her? One of the two co-authors of the article is strongly pro-eviction, by the way, but he still supports their joint conclusion about tenant pain.”
Candidate: “The provision of a pre-eviction pain killer is something that a landlord might want to consider, if they wish. But it’s up to them, not me, to draw that line. It’s all a matter of trust, you see. I trust landlords to do what’s right.”
Reporter: “It looks like you, like your party, are against tenants’ rights at any stage of occupancy, but what if it’s the second to last day of the ninth month of the occupancy, so the tenant is going to move out tomorrow. Can the landlord refuse to wait and just hire a tough guy to grab her and toss her out today? What if she holds on, and the tough guy has to pull her out piece by piece?”
Candidate: “Your questions are getting pretty outrageous. Let me ask you one. Do you own a building with a room available for occupancy? If not, I don’t see how you even have a right to speak on this issue. It’s a basic American legal principle that we only trust the testimony, and then the decision, of somebody with a personal interest in a case. That’s why I say we should trust the landlord.”
Reporter: “Sorry. I’m not very up on our law. I thought I had heard that neither party should be the sole judge of a case — and that when rights are in conflict, that’s exactly when we need to find an outside perspective to mediate between them. Thanks for straightening me out on that.”
A version of this satire was first published on March 2, 2020 by MercatorNet
Richard comments: Here’s an old photo of me from the 1970s. Around my neck I have our National Youth Pro-Life Coalition emblem, the Wheel of Life, a Buddhist symbol we saw as pregnant with the usual peace symbol within.
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See more of our posts from Richard Stith:
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
The Mirror-Image Counterpart of the Selfish Society
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy
Most of his writings can be found here.
Sickness is the Health of the State? Civil Liberties and Conflict during a Pandemic
by John Whitehead
The COVID-19 pandemic has consumed the world’s attention during these early months of 2020. The virus’ health threat, especially to older people and other vulnerable groups, is correctly the primary concern right now, with the pandemic’s economic consequences perhaps being the second greatest concern. Both these aspects of the pandemic fully deserve the attention of policymakers and the media. Other, less prominent, threats from the COVID-19 crisis are worth noting, however. Peace activists and others concerned about the power of state security agencies should pay particular attention to these other threats.
Pandemics, wars, and other crises can become occasions for governments to restrict civil liberties and increase their repressive powers over their own people. Evidence suggests some governments around the world are doing this or are using the COVID-19 pandemic to justify pre-existing repression. Further, because COVID-19 originated in China before spreading to other countries including the United States, the pandemic has aggravated already tense China-US relations. The current crisis may contribute to the growing danger of conflict between the two countries.
Repression during the Pandemic
Dramatic government responses to a global public health crisis are certainly justified. Measures to keep people at home and prevent large gatherings, produce more medical supplies, or provide relief for those in economic need are all reasonable and appropriate. However, some measures have been more ominous.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that several governments have curtailed freedom of the press since the pandemic began. Turkey and Venezuela have detained or intimidated journalists because of COVID-19-related reporting or with COVID-19 used as a pretext. Egypt and Iran have reportedly restricted press coverage of COVID-19. Honduras responded to the crisis by declaring a temporary state of emergency that allowed for limiting press freedom.
South Africa has adopted regulations that make deceptive statements about COVID-19 or the government’s response to it punishable by fines or prison. While preventing the spread of misinformation is a worthy goal, giving the government the power to punish statements is easily open to abuse. Restrictions on freedom of the press might even interfere with an adequate response to the pandemic, if, for example, journalists cannot accurately report on the number or rate of infections or other crucial information.
In the United States, the Justice Department proposed to Congress measures that would allow certain judges to suspend regular judicial procedures during emergencies. Such suspension could allow for keeping people detained without trial. While Congress is currently unlikely to adopt these measures, their proposal is a sign of how a crisis can become an occasion for limiting civil liberties.
Moreover, even without new regulations, the federal government already has broadly defined powers to check the spread of illness by stopping and detaining people traveling to or within the United States. Meanwhile, the British Parliament recently rushed through legislation in response to the pandemic that may allow police and other government officials to detain people to prevent them from spreading COVID-19.
Even less intrusive measures, such as government surveillance, that are used for the good purpose of ensuring social distancing, have their alarming side. For example, the Chinese government has installed cameras outside the homes of people under quarantine, to make sure they don’t leave. In South Korea, the government uses CCTV video, smart phone location data, and other methods to track the movements of people confirmed to have COVID-19. Indian authorities monitor airline and train reservations to check if quarantined people are traveling. European countries have used cell phone data to track people’s movements, and the European Commission has requested similar data, covering hundreds of millions of people, from telecommunications companies.
Even if such surveillance measures are defensible during the current crisis, they demonstrate the alarming scope of government powers. These powers, whether they pre-date the COVID-19 pandemic or have been adopted in response to it, presumably will not go away when the pandemic recedes. This should be cause for concern for everyone concerned with checking the national security state’s power.
As the writer Bill Wirtz comments, “No matter what legitimacy we want to ascribe to these emergency measures, we ought to recognize that they usually outlast emergencies… Emergency rules are easily implemented, yet awfully hard to get rid of. This is particularly true if the threat has no expiration date.”
US-China Tension during Pandemic
The relationship between the world’s two most powerful nations, which was hardly cordial before 2020, has not been improved by the pandemic. Officials and policymakers in each nation have blamed the other for COVID-19 or made similar provocative comments. In March, US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien criticized China for its handling of the pandemic. Soon afterwards, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman insinuated that the US military was behind the virus. This claim was met by a diplomatic rebuke from the US State Department to Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, although Cui rejected the notion of US responsibility both before and after the Foreign Ministry spokesman’s claim. Meanwhile, President Trump sometimes has referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” although he has backed away from the term more recently.
In addition to this war of words, each country is putting pressure on the other’s media. In February, the US State Department imposed new requirements on Chinese state media outlets operating in the United States. The Chinese government responded by expelling three Wall Street Journal reporters from China. The United States then limited the number of visas available for Chinese state media employees. China then revoked the visas of 13 reporters for American media outlets and imposed other restrictions on such outlets.
At the grassroots, both people of Asian heritage in the United States, and Americans and other westerners in China, have faced discrimination and harassment. Asian Americans have been verbally and physically assaulted in recent months.
While hard data are not available, the number of racist incidents against Asian Americans appears to have risen. One man in Syracuse, New York, recalls someone yelling at him in a supermarket check-out line: “It’s you people who brought the disease.” One dramatic indicator was reported by a gun shop in Rockville, Maryland, a city with a large Asian American population: the number of Chinese Americans buying guns increased noticeably in early March. Meanwhile, westerners in China report increased police questioning of them and their employers, as well as restrictions on visits by non-Chinese.
Mutual hostility, at both the official and popular level, between two powerful nations is very dangerous. It has already led to episodes of people being harmed by xenophobia and if unchecked could lead to some larger conflict in the future.
Being Vigilant
Much of the world is concerned today with staying alive and healthy and preventing this terrible illness’ further spread. That is as it should be. Peace activists and others concerned about preventing war and abuses by state security forces should not lose sight of other trends, however. The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of governments’ extraordinary capacity for repression, as well as how crises can escalate tensions among nations. We should promote peace and protect civil liberties so that the present situation doesn’t lead to violence and injustices that last beyond the current pandemic.
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
by Rachel MacNair
With the initial theater release interrupted by the Covid-19 closing of theaters, this movie was offered online April 3, 2020.
The title of the movie, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is based on an intense scene in which the protagonist, Autumn, is being counseled at an abortion facility before her abortion. Those are the answers she’s to offer to the questions. The counselor asked if she had ever been hit, slapped, or physically hurt. Autumn hesitated, and never answered. When asked if she had sex when she didn’t want to, Autumn cried, but never answered. Then asked more bluntly: had she had forced sex ever, yes or no? She answered, “Yeah.”
Nobody but nobody could watch that scene and not understand that this 17-year-old had been abused. Yet the counselor simply scheduled her abortion and never did any follow-up at all. The facility cleaned her up (so to speak) and sent her back into the abusive situation.
That she’s emotionally numb and troubled about the abuse is clear throughout the entire movie – and especially in the final scene, after the abortion, on the bus on her way home. Looking at her face (pictured) we see a crushed spirit.
Empowerment?
Yet that’s not what the entire audience sees. Apparently, it’s not what the writer and director of the film, Eliza Hittman, sees. Reviewers refer to Autumn as on a brave journey, and being empowered.
This is my view of empowerment for a young woman in Autumn’s situation: she gathers evidence, turns the sexual assaulter in, and if the police and courts aren’t doing their job, rallies the press and public opinion behind her. If she already has reason to suspect the police will make things worse, she can come up with other nonviolent actions. Perhaps getting a group of her friends to picket the abuser’s house. Or she could find (if needed, create) organizations that can work through restorative justice so the abuser can understand the harm he’s doing and how intolerable it is.
An inspiring, empowering story is one in which a way is found to keep the abuser from going on to abuse others. If she’s empowered, she does it. But if that’s a lot to ask of a traumatized 17-year-old, at least have others around who can help her toward that goal.
That’s not what we have here. This is a story of a young woman acquiescing to her abuse, being resigned to it, and being emotionally numbed by it.
There was even a point where she was offered help in finding a place to stay overnight and turned it down. This led directly to the cousin who accompanied her having to put up with an intense-kissing predator in order for them to get money they needed. She sympathetically held the cousin’s hand, but offering sympathy for someone else who must succumb is so very inadequate. It was a weary resignation to their fates.
And once when Autumn was moping in the bus station, the cousin asked her, “What do you want me to do?” Her answer was, “Bug off!” They reconciled soon after, but the tension is palpable. Another time, when she has the laminaria in as the first step in her two-day abortion process, at one point she starts vaginal bleeding. Autumn calls the facility, but when the woman answers, Autumn doesn’t speak, and finally hangs up and leaves. These are not the marks of an empowered young woman driving her own fate.
So how is it that the reviewers don’t see what seems so glaringly obvious to me? Because the idea that the abortion “choice” is empowerment is a premise, not a conclusion. They start looking at the situation that way, and all evidence to the contrary is dismissed. The foundation is unshakable.
A “Pro-Choice” Movie?
The view is that this promotes the pro-choice cause because it’s demonstrating what’s wrong with legal restrictions, by showing a young woman navigating obstacles:
- The initial pregnancy test was at a Pregnancy Resource Center. Autumn was shown a sonogram of her baby, with a positive message about hearing her baby’s heartbeat. The National Review reviewer reports that at his showing, a woman blurted out “Bitch!” at the mention of a beautiful baby. And then Autumn is shown an “anti-choice propaganda video” – again, showing the baby. And she gets cheerful offers of help, which are apparently seen as sinister since they’re trying to veer her away from abortion.
- Pennsylvania has a parental consent requirement. Hence, she goes by bus to New York City, where other dangers lurk
- She can’t use her insurance because then her parents will know. So she struggles with cash.
- They can’t take her until the next day, so she and her cousin stay up all night; the abortion facility had never offered her help with a place to stay at that point.
- It’s a two-day procedure. This time she’s offered overnight help and turns it down – hardly someone taking charge of her circumstances.
So here are my questions:
- If Pennsylvania had no parental consent law, how much better off would she have been? Sneaking to a nearby abortion facility would have saved her the trip to New York – but it would have left her every bit as much in the abusive situation and the distress it was causing.
- If New York did have a parental consent law, and there were no other place she could go that didn’t, how much better off would she have been? She would have had no trip to New York. If the reason she didn’t want parents to know is that her father was the source of the abuse, then perhaps she needed to get to some agency that could help her with that. But in this movie, she didn’t work that through; the trip and abortion allowed her to accommodate the situation. And maybe get back into the same trip to New York again.
- If nowhere offered abortions, and we had a society where feticide was held in the revulsion it deserves, how much better off would she have been? Would the sexual abuse still have occurred in a situation where pregnancy means the abuser is bound to get caught?
That last point does mean we’re hoping for a situation better than it was before Roe v. Wade, or the methods of abortion legalization in other countries, when women got clandestine abortions as part of letting their abusers off the hook. But back then there were several additional astonishingly sexist parts of letting abusers off the hook, and for the future, we need to cut all of them out.
Or a “Pro-Life” Movie?
I’d love to see this experiment, easily done in college classes once the Covid-19 crisis is lessened and we have those again: Show the movie in some classes and present it as a pro-choice movie. Show it in other classes and present it as a pro-life movie. In other classes, present it as an interesting story to make people think. Then give them a questionnaire, which includes asking the students their own position on abortion.
My prediction is that the pro-choice students would love it as a pro-choice movie and be utterly outraged by it as a pro-life film. And it could be presented as pro-life. It’s entirely believable that way.
In fact, I recommend that it (or pertinent clips from it) be used in training people working at Pregnancy Help Centers. The realism is notable, and it would make an excellent case study for discussing how to deal with a young woman whose own numbing at her victimization makes her impervious to the cheerful information about the baby and offers of options.
I think the movie helps the case against abortion even for those who don’t understand it that way. All assurances that abortion is an easy no-big-deal thing are out the window. I suspect no one watching this film is more likely to get one, and plenty of people who buy the writer’s premise that restrictions are a terrible thing are nevertheless less likely to think of getting one when it’s that much trouble. It’s a lengthy anti-advertisement.
This is a movie that would have much more of an anti-abortion impact if we pro-lifers were able to see how very much this realistic film documents one crucial aspect of how abortion is so very bad for women.
A Healing Metaphor: Pandemic as War
by Julia Smucker
The language is everywhere: we’re at war against an invisible enemy, adjusting to new realities of wartime living and expressing gratitude to the brave men and women fighting on the front lines to keep us safe. Except that the front in this war is in hospitals and labs, and the front-line fighters are healthcare providers, armed with medical equipment and armored with protective gowns and face shields. Most notably, they are fighting not to cause premature death but to prevent it. The war is not one of killing, but of healing.
Cartoon by Safaa Odah, Gaza artist (pictured). From her Instagram
If the problem were on a smaller scale, this might seem an aggressive metaphor, especially for an endeavor whose means and aims are so opposite to that of war. Yet, when describing the response to a global pandemic, the situation seems to beg for such language in order to convey an appropriate level of gravitas, a scale of organization and readiness akin to the preparation and implementation of military strategies. But with one major difference: whatever human casualties are suffered, they will not occur at human hands.
It’s not only the life-affirming mission of this “fight” that redeems the metaphorical language of being at war: some tools and mechanisms made for war are also being literally redirected toward strictly lifesaving ends as the concerns of public health and “national security” intersect. For example, the Defense Production Act, as its name suggests, was originally designed to shore up weapons production during the Korean War but has occasionally been used for disaster relief and has now been invoked to enable production of necessary medical supplies.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called for a reorientation from killing to healing on a global scale, pleading for a turn from hostilities among warring parties toward a united front against humanity’s “common enemy,” COVID-19. In a potent rhetorical turn, he applied the metaphor in both directions, first calling the virus the common enemy we must fight against, then calling war itself a sickness.
To be sure, the extent to which pleas like Guterres’ are heeded remains to be seen, and responses so far are predictably mixed, ranging from bilateral acquiescence to open defiance to more ambiguous scenarios in between. There also hasn’t been a complete turn from militarism to medicine in the U.S., as some manufacturers of military equipment disregard calls to close in order to prevent coronavirus spread, judging themselves essential.
The metaphor itself has its shortfalls, as all metaphors do. As a few have pointed out, there may be dangers in overly anthropomorphizing a virus by assigning it human attributes like intent or nationality, especially in ways that feed prejudice by associating certain categories of human beings with disease. And “wartime” policies can of course be both good and bad, lending themselves to mutual aid, solidarity and protection of the vulnerable, or to opportunistic power grabs by autocratic governments in the name of public safety.
Still, despite its limits, the seemingly violent language of a war against the pandemic contains some ironic potential for hope – if the metaphor is realized in a shift toward nonviolent practices. Public crises, whether they involve humans fighting each other or fighting a nonhuman entity such as a virus, have a way of bringing out the best and worst in humanity. If we as individuals and as societies allow the best in us to win out during and after the crisis we’re currently experiencing, that would be a war worth winning.
Julia Smucker
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See some of the other posts from Julia Smucker:
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
What Does it Mean to be Inconsistent?
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter
Why the Interfaith Approach is Important
by Rachel MacNair
This February in 2020 I went on a trip to Israel and Palestine with a group called In the Steps of Our Ancestors: an Interfaith Peace Pilgrimage. In addition to seeing the holy sites of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i, we spoke with several groups promoting peace in different ways.
(I went just in time – Israel stopped everyone from coming into the country just two weeks after I got home because of the Covid-19 crisis. While we heard of cases, nothing was closed until days after we had visited).
One major point that needs to be understood about the interfaith movement is that it’s most emphatically not asking people to water down their own religions by adding other religions. To the contrary, it helps you reflect more deeply on your own faith tradition and find more insights into it.
Rachel adds a stone to the growing peace mosaic on the Gaza Strip wall, which can be seen at one spot by the people stuck inside. Since they know each stone was placed by a different person, this communicates widespread concern for their plight.
Peace and Social Justice Goals
When people of different religions have violent conflicts, being in greater harmony over religious matters is crucial.
Of course, religion is often actually a stand-in for ethnic conflicts, or used as an excuse for what’s really a leadership struggle or territory grab. This is because people engaged in violence like to think of themselves as virtuous rather than thinking of themselves as people engaged in violence.
Nevertheless, there’s often religious content to brutal conflicts, which turns off onlookers who don’t share the religious views. That’s one reason an interfaith approach helps with conflict resolution or transformation.
Another reason is that social justice movements wanting to convince as large a number of people as possible to support their specific goals do well to have respect for religious traditions. They can use persuasion that takes those different traditions into account.
Expressions and Essentials
One of the basic concepts of the interfaith approach is to make a distinction between what’s essential, and what would be just different expressions. In philosophy they call the different expressions “accidentals,” but since people don’t regard their beliefs system as accidental, it’s probably better to just use the word expression.
Some people pray by bowing their head and folding their hands and closing their eyes. Other people lift their arms up and look to the heavens. Some people bow on a prayer rug with specified motions, some use prayer beads, or prayer wheels, or elaborate set-ups that take 15 minutes to arrange. Others say quick prayers quietly inside their heads. All of these things are different expressions. The essential: prayer.
The things that religions most have in common are the essentials. Many of the differing expressions can be celebrated as a matter of diversity, when people are able to look at their own religion with what’s most important in mind. And we can be entirely pleased with how different people express it differently. Disagreements on specifics remain, but a focus on the essential enriches even those disagreements.
Top: Rachel takes a selfie at Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Islam
Bottom: Rachel at House of Justice in Haifa, Baha’i
Applied to Abortion
As is common in peace groups, on this pilgrimage I felt free to bring up my position on all issues except for the one on feticide. The one time it came up was when one of the tour guides explained that Sister Kelly, our guide at the Magdala museum, had commented to him about what a problem abortion is. He complained that she didn’t know how he felt about it. A member of our group vigorously agreed with him that Sister Kelly hadn’t ought to have brought it up.
In one way, that was rather odd, inasmuch as a devout nun expressing that opinion was clearly practicing her own religion. And we had a custom that people were to be free to express their own religions, with other people being accepting of it rather than being critical. On the other hand, they were treating the issue as a political one, rather than a religious one, which of course is exactly what we want. But I stayed silent for the sake of harmony. As did everyone else.
But the interfaith movement is beneficial to the pro-life movement in the same way that it benefits other social justice movements: we need to make the case to people in terms that they understand.
So, for example, many years ago I was talking to a pro-life woman who was speaking of the importance of the Judeo-Christian ethic. I said to her “you know, every Buddhist that’s a friend of mine is pro-life on abortion.” I could see the wheels going on in her head, and she finally said “Oh, OK. It’s bad karma to kill a baby.” And I said “yes, that’s right.” So she said that she didn’t mean to put down other religions, she just thought that it was a struggle against secular humanism.
Yet the secular case against abortion is also quite important. The National Right to Life Committee recently had a full workshop at its national conference with Kelsey Hazzard of our member group Secular Prolife. We need to be able to make the case everywhere.
But another reason why I think this is important is that too many people think opposition to abortion is nothing more than a religious expression – some kind of rigid rule, which some religions have and others don’t have. If their religion doesn’t have this rule, why are people from other religions trying to impose their rule on them? We need to get across instead that our opposition is an essential value having to do with compassion to all human beings, a value shared across religions and ethical atheism.
I remember years ago when I was speaking to a college group and they asked me about contraception. I gave them this answer: “If you’re fertile, and have genital contact intercourse with a fertile member of the opposite gender, you might make a baby. If you use contraception, you cut your chances. But you don’t cut them out, you only cut them down. If you make a baby, you’re a parent. Conduct your sex life accordingly.” The students later said they were pleased I hadn’t lectured them on morality. I found that interesting, since I kind of thought that I actually had. But of course it wasn’t expressing a religious rule. It was laying out the obvious principles – that is to say, the essential.
Concluding from Religious Sources
Taken from a story in the Talmud (Shabbat 31a)
A gentile said he would accept Judaism only if a rabbi would teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one foot. First he went to Rabbi Shammai, who was insulted by this ridiculous request and chased him off with a stick. The man then went to Rabbi Hillel, who accepted the challenge, and said:
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary – go and study!”
Qur’an 49:13 – English translation
[God speaking] People, We have created you all male and female and have made you nations and tribes so that you may know one another. The most honorable among you in the sight of God is the best in conduct. God is All-knowing and All-aware.
At the Church of the Beatitudes on the Sea of Galilee where the Sermon on the Mount was supposed to have happened
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For our posts with differing 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
Hinduism
Abortion and War are the Karma for Killing Animals / Vasu Murti
Islam
Breaking Stereotypes in Fearful Times / John Whitehead
Paganism
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece / Mary Krane Derr
Is Abortion Different from Other Violence?
by Julia Smucker
Four Ways of Isolating One Issue
Any advocate of the consistent life ethic (CLE) can expect to encounter people who share their pro-nonviolence position on certain issues but depart from it on others. And among those working on various peace and life issues, including those of us who adhere to the CLE, there are many who feel compelled for various reasons to focus their energies on some issues more than others.
Yet I’ve often been puzzled to notice that abortion, more than any other such issue, is frequently singled out from the rest, and from starkly different perspectives. Whether friendly or hostile to the CLE, whether seeking to prioritize or deprioritize opposition to abortion, it seems the one thing many ideologically divergent people can agree on is that abortion is somehow different.
Julia Smucker
I’ve observed at least four ways this differentiation is made:
On one end of the spectrum is abortion as exception to nonviolence. Those who hold this view may connect certain nonviolence issues but reject the inclusion of abortion as a form of violence, sometimes even purging would-be allies who do include it.
At the other extreme are the purely single-issue, to whom any focus on life issues other than abortion represents an unconscionable moral compromise – at best a misguided distraction from what really matters, at worst a deliberate scheme to preserve abortion.
While the above groups are often sources of open and visceral hostility toward the CLE, there are also more mitigated forms of these positions, which may share their ideological leanings while displaying at least a grudging openness to connecting issues across the conventional ideological boundaries.
Closest to the abortion-as-exception position, without condoning abortion, is a view I call anti-anti-abortion, whose adherents may oppose abortion in principle but take pains to distance themselves from traditional abortion opponents. Those holding this view may identify as pro-life, but in a way that overcorrects from what they see as disproportionate emphasis on abortion, to the point of avoiding the issue, downplaying its gravity, or even disproportionately investing their own energies in overgeneralized complaints about those working against abortion.
Others are quasi-single-issue, conceding that other worthy life issues exist, but rarely doing so without insisting on the inherent, objective preeminence of opposing abortion. Even while allowing for some degree of multi-issue connections or granting that some may legitimately focus on other things, the idea of considering abortion as one life issue among many seems almost as anathema to many of these people as to the purely single-issue.
The former two positions are irreconcilable with the CLE, and their adherents are often overtly antagonistic toward it. The latter two may be marginally compatible with the CLE, but in a lopsided way, prone to zero-sum thinking that assumes the importance of one thing can only be stressed at the expense of another, even when dealing with life-and-death issues.
Common Explanations
But why does the divide in this zero-sum dichotomy so frequently fall between abortion and everything else?
The most immediate, though superficial, answer that occurs to me is political: for reasons that have never made sense to me, opposition to abortion has become associated with the political right, and most other opposition to violence with the political left. Arbitrary as these categories may be, political loyalties do seem to have strong pulls in both directions on the weight given to different life issues. But this still doesn’t explain why opposition to euthanasia, also typically associated with the right and often mentioned alongside abortion, isn’t set apart from other issues as frequently or emphatically.
Adherents of the four positions I’ve outlined will offer their own reasons for the differentiation. All of these are real claims I’ve heard from real people, and while I hope to represent them fairly, I haven’t found any of them convincing.
Holders of the “abortion-as-exception” view and maybe even the “anti-anti-abortion” view would claim that in contrast to their altruistic advocacy on behalf of oppressed groups, abortion opposition is all about controlling and oppressing women. This oversimplified narrative fails to account for pro-life women’s perspectives, dismissing them as internalized misogyny or ignoring them altogether. Furthermore, it ignores the ways abortion contributes to gender-based injustice by masking pregnancy discrimination and sexual abuse, facilitating gendercide, and enabling men who feel entitled to unlimited access to women’s bodies.
Those who are “purely single-issue” or “quasi-single-issue” may agree that abortion opposition is differently motivated from other issues, but in the opposite way. In their narrative, it’s pro-life activists who have more purely altruistic motives: they simply love babies and are concerned for the weakest and most vulnerable human beings, even at personal cost, whereas concern for more popular issues might be at least partly to do with scoring political points or signaling membership in an in-group. This assumption relies on a larger narrative of one-sided persecution, ignoring how point-scoring and virtue-signaling cut in multiple directions, sometimes including a perceived need to prove one’s pro-life bona fides.
Aside from questions of motive, the same people often stress the absolute vulnerability of the preborn as a reason abortion deserves pride of place among life issues, to which those who are “anti-anti-abortion” may respond that women considering abortion are often in vulnerable positions themselves and can’t simply be cast as villains in the attack against life. On its face, this is a worthy point (and generally better understood by the “quasi-single-issue” than the “purely single-issue”). This is why the best pro-life groups consider the empowerment of women integral and indispensable to the protection of their unborn children. It’s important to consider when offering pregnancy support or dialoguing with pro-choice people. The vulnerability of children in the womb and women in crisis pregnancies is always worth considering – but using either to rank abortion as of greater or lesser importance than other threats to life is counterproductive.
Another reason offered for prioritizing abortion is that life is a foundational right, without which other rights are meaningless. But why would this not equally apply to other forms of killing? In particular, a similar point could be made about the nuclear danger: if a full-scale nuclear war obliterated all human life on the planet, all the work against other threats to life, including abortion, would come to naught. This point rightly underscores the urgency of averting such a catastrophe, but it wouldn’t be a good reason to deemphasize other threats to life that are occurring now.
Similarly, the fact that abortion happens earlier in the human lifespan than other violence doesn’t make the killing of humans post-birth any less grave, nor the threats to those vulnerable to other violence any less real, nor their lives any less valuable – just as prenatal lives are no less valuable or vulnerable for being less visible.
Dealing with Limits
At this point, it becomes necessary to differentiate between two types of critiques often made of pro-life activists which, though similar, have differing degrees of merit. One critique would seem to require every pro-lifer to spread themselves evenly across all possible issues as proof of authenticity, expressed in statements such as, “Don’t call yourself pro-life unless you’re also doing x, y and z,” or, “If you’re pro-life and not willing to adopt all the unwanted babies, you’re a hypocrite.” People whose most visible work is against abortion are justified in complaining of such impossible demands, which often simply serve as an excuse to dismiss pro-life activism as a whole.
Sometimes, however, the politicization of life issues does lead to genuine inconsistencies in the application of stated values such as reverence for life and concern for the vulnerable, in the form of tacit acceptance or even outright endorsement of violence against certain human lives besides those in danger of abortion. Though far from being true of all pro-life activists, such inconsistencies belie those stated values and give pro-life activism a bad name. Confusing matters further, these two critiques are often conflated, making it easy for those who want to discredit the pro-life cause to dismiss all pro-lifers as inconsistent on the basis of the worst examples, and for those focusing primarily on opposing abortion to in turn dismiss even valid critiques of inconsistency as holding them to an unfair all-or-nothing standard.
If this standard is disproportionately applied to pro-life activism, it’s due not to any unique virtues or vices of pro-lifers but to broad acceptance – from either side – of the dichotomy between abortion and other life issues. The CLE, of course, rejects this dichotomy. But even those who fully embrace the CLE must inevitably deal with practical limits to what they can do.
Some attempt to reconcile this dilemma by advocating equal concern for human beings but unequal concern for human issues. But when the issues under discussion all deal with threats to human life or other particularly grave offenses against human dignity, this distinction contains an implicit contradiction: if certain threats to life are inherently less important because of the life stage or other circumstances in which they occur, then so by extension are the lives that are under threat. Human lives and human life issues are not so easily separated.
This doesn’t mean that all who care about life issues must give equal attention to every one, nor even that all possible issues one could give attention to necessarily have the same moral weight. But these are separate questions. A more helpful distinction, then, is between the question of inherent worthiness of issues and that of practical necessity. Nobody can work full-time on every issue, but whatever one chooses to prioritize should never become an excuse to give other forms of violence a pass, or to insist that the issues one feels most compelled to focus on are objectively worthier than all others.
Even if working on one or two issues more intensely, it’s not difficult to let our passion for protecting human beings from violence show on other things from time to time. Indeed, it should come naturally, if protecting human beings from violence is our driving concern.
Often it’s a simple matter of showing up. I’ve personally attended public events opposing various forms of violence including abortion, war, the death penalty, gun violence, anti-immigrant violence and police brutality, knowing that these events by themselves – let alone my presence there – are not enough to stop these things, but also knowing that showing up sends a message, all the more powerfully if the same people show up for different issues across the expected ideological lines.
One can write about these and other life issues, speak about them in public forums and private conversations, support nonprofits, sign petitions, and share information as the occasion arises, whatever one’s other commitments may be. With inevitable limits on time and resources and the subjectivity of personal experiences, influences and callings, it’s understandable for individuals and organizations not to expend equal effort on every issue. But ultimately, if all human lives at all stages are objectively worthy of respect, then all threats to human lives at all stages must be objectively worthy of opposition. It can only detract from this message to argue what – or who – is worthier.
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See other posts from Julia Smucker:
The Price of Violence: When Dehumanizing the Vulnerable Hurts One’s Own Causes
What Does it Mean to be Inconsistent?
Defining Reproductive Justice: An Encounter
Amnesty International’s Blind Spot
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero