Stewardship and the Consistent Life Ethic
Tom Taylor
by Tom Taylor
Alarming reports about climate change and ecological damage along with John Whitehead’s recent blog post on climate change have led me to thinking about stewardship. The principle of stewardship, it seems to me, is inherent in the Consistent Life Ethic (CLE), has great value as a positive expression of CLE in practice, and affirms the Consistent Life Network’s vision of connecting ways of thinking that promote peace and nonviolence.
Embedded in the idea of stewardship is protection of and reverence for all life. Good stewardship calls for the wise use of resources to counteract forces that lead to war, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, racism, poverty, and environmental destruction.
The concept of stewardship most obviously applies to care of the environment, and responsible use of land, water, energy, and all natural resources. But it also means allocating and stewarding sufficient resources to offer viable alternatives to violence and illustrate life-supporting approaches to all of the issues of consistent life concern:
- Resolving conflicts peacefully, and transferring resources currently devoted to war to peace initiatives and efforts that mitigate structural causes of war.
- Supporting women, families, and children through crisis or unplanned pregnancies and infancy, and even beyond, if needed.
- Allocating sufficient resources and services that reduce poverty and provide a strong safety net for low-income and vulnerable community members. Good stewardship in this area also includes offering opportunities for learning additional skills to strengthen economic security, develop full potential, increase a sense of self-sufficiency, and offer fuller possibilities for active participation in community life.
- Instituting programs that promote racial justice, understanding, connection, and reconciliation among diverse racial and ethnic groups. An example might be allocating significant funding for affordable housing capable of attracting a wide diversity of residents throughout neighborhoods in any given community.
- Initiating restorative justice practices and viable rehabilitation services as an alternative to the death penalty and mass incarceration.
- Offering quality palliative care, emotional support, and community connections to terminally ill individuals. This will obviate any tendency toward assisted suicide or euthanasia by reducing physical suffering, loneliness, isolation, and depression, and maintaining a strong sense of connection and value to the very end.
- Protecting the environment, conserving natural resources, reducing waste, and preserving land, soil, watersheds, wildlife, and habitat.
In these ways, consistent life values embody the idea of stewardship by honoring life in all the forms and stages it may have, by honoring the dignity of all persons, and by honoring all the interconnections that support human life along with the life-sustaining processes of earth. As such, stewardship can be seen as a foundational underpinning and affirmation of the consistent life ethic. It connects with all of the positive ways we can support peace and life-fulfilling activities in our daily community and personal lives as well as oppose threats to life. It affords us the opportunity to make life-affirming decisions in our daily choices concerning our habits of consuming, using resources, and supporting business enterprises and community programs.
As humans at top of the chain of life, perhaps our first and greatest responsibility is to be good stewards and caretakers of all that we are given – of life in all its stages, forms, processes, and capacities, whether its essence be human (at any stage), domestic animals and wildlife, or natural resource and habitat. This stance makes “do no harm” the highest human priority, and fully embodies the mantra of “reverence for all life” often cited in ecology writing.
The essays of Wendell Berry, a CLE endorser, inform and articulate this thinking in great depth. He writes:
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.” (The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, 1978, p. 14)
Berry gives this responsibility a broad scope that reflects the consistent life ethic when, in speaking of conservation, he defines it “to mean giving care to everything needing care: wilderness, all bodies of water, the air, farms and working forests, all the creatures (living and not-living), neighbors, families and communities, languages, cultures, minds, souls, freedom, democracy, the Constitution.” (The Way of Ignorance, 2005, p. 150)
This vision of consistent life stewardship offers a positive affirmation of the many things the consistent life movement supports in addition to the threats it opposes. Perhaps this vistion of stewardship can be helpful in spreading the consistent life idea by suggesting practical ways to work toward the societal changes that the movement envisions. The stewardship concept additionally establishes a strong connection between the consistent life ethic and current environmental issues, including climate change, that present further threats to life.
Stewardship also offers the opportunity in our individual, personal lives to model and practice life-honoring values in ways such as reducing our consumption, waste, and carbon footprint, and supporting consistent life efforts with contributions of our time or financial donations — in essence, being good stewards of all aspects of our lives and the goods available for our use.
As Berry states: “If we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things. (What Are People For?, 2010, p. 188)
Berry’s writing also recounts how violence results from lack of true stewardship:
“The great moral issue of our time, too much ignored by both sides of our present political division, is violence. From the colonialism that began with long-distance navigation to the present stage of industrialism, we of the so-called West have lived and gathered wealth increasingly by violence. This has been increasingly an age of fire…We run our factories, businesses, and households by means of fires or controlled explosions in furnaces and power plants. We fight our wars by controlled, and sometimes uncontrolled, explosions. Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain “removed” by strip mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight.” (The Way of Ignorance, pp. 145-146)
The principle of stewardship as part of the consistent life ethic also is supported in the thinking of Gandhi, whose statements and writings on duty and responsibility, trusteeship, village economy, and the Constructive Program all reflect a sense of stewardship that is key to his philosophy of nonviolence and ahimsa (harmlessness). This perhaps is summed up best in Gandhi’s famous statement: “The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed.”
In the essay, Gandhian Vision of Environment, C.S. Dharmadhikari states: “Gandhi was the first man to introduce the concept of service to nature in order to enrich nature… Gandhi visualized a non-violent economic order based on equality and justice. He advocated a simple life which fulfils basic necessities of life and is in tune with nature… His concept of non-violence was an all-encompassing and a positive one. It is not merely a ‘live and let live’ formula, but it involves a principle of ‘live and help others to live,’ and these others should include human beings, animals and nature.”
In closing this consideration of stewardship, there is perhaps no better summation than some words from Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in his writings on the consistent life ethic: “We are stewards, not sole owners, of all of our resources, human and material.” (The Seamless Garment: Writings on the Consistent Ethic of Life, 2008, p. 245)
East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution: Remembering the Berlin Wall’s Fall
by John Whitehead
The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this year, on November 9, 1989. This massive barrier that since the 1960s had effectively imprisoned the residents of Communist-ruled East Berlin was also a symbol of the larger Cold War division between Eastern and Western Europe and the Soviet Union and the United States. When Berliners broke down the Wall, this signaled the Cold War’s approaching end. The events that led to the Wall’s collapse and the Cold War’s end show how nonviolence resistance can resolve a conflict seemingly destined to be resolved only through catastrophic violence.
Cold War Tensions
To appreciate the full significance of the Wall falling, we must remember how bitter and seemingly entrenched the East-West divide was only a few years earlier. In the early 1980s, the mutual hostility and arms race between the hawkish Reagan administration and a hardline Soviet leadership made nuclear war seem the Cold War’s most likely outcome. Taylor Downing relates in his book 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink how precisely six years before the Wall came down, from November 9 to 11, 1983, the world came very close to nuclear holocaust.
During those days, an elaborate NATO military exercise, which included forces in West Germany, rehearsed procedures for launching nuclear weapons. Fearing this rehearsal might be preparations for a genuine attack, the Soviet leadership reacted with alarm and heightened military readiness. The exercise ended without violence breaking out, but some further miscommunication or provocation could easily have led to a very different outcome.
Meanwhile, the Wall had served as an oppressive presence in East Germans’ lives for decades. One observer of the country’s affairs, writer Timothy Garton Ash, noted that an East Berlin doctor even wrote a book called The Wall Sickness, describing the Wall’s toll on people’s health, including contributing to suicides. The Wall also led to death more directly: more than 100 people were killed at the Wall while trying to escape or simply because of accidents.
The European tensions of the early 1980s began to ease by the decade’s end. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev established a friendlier relationship with the United States, while introducing greater political freedom, including freedom of expression, in the Soviet Union. Such changes were especially significant for Communist East Germany, which even more than most Eastern bloc states took its cue from the Soviets. In his book Magic Lantern, Garton Ash noted that East German youth were taught the slogan “To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn how to a win,” a phrase that took on a new meaning by the late 1980s.
Nonviolent Resistance & Crisis in East Germany
Grassroots political dissent in East Germany changed at this time. For years, activists in the city of Leipzig would meet in St. Nicholas’ Church to pray for peace. In 1988, these services grew to include silent marches through the city to protest restrictions on travel outside the country. Such marches were a radical act of defiance of the authorities. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall explain in their history of nonviolent resistance, A Force More Powerful, that while Communist regimes would tolerate a certain amount of dissent in private spaces such as churches,
when dissidents ventured out into city streets and public squares, they met with instant repression. Along with command over the mass media, control over the physical arena was a primary means by which communist rulers made sure that opposition was confined to intellectuals and activists, cut off from the larger public. (p. 429)
That the Leipzig protesters could publicly demonstrate, even silently, showed how the political situation was changing. By early 1989, they were no longer silent but chanted “We want out!” Public protest against the regime continued to grow in size and assertiveness.
The East German regime had originally built the Wall in 1961 to stem the flow of East Berliners into the freer and more prosperous West, a trend that threatened the regime’s legitimacy. A similar crisis had arisen by summer 1989. East Germans began seeking asylum in West German diplomatic missions in East Berlin and elsewhere. In September, neighboring Hungary, an Eastern bloc state where the Communist Party had agreed to end its monopoly on political power, decided to open its border with Austria. East Germans responded by fleeing to Hungary and then the west; perhaps 50,000 had fled by the end of October. Not all wanted to flee, however: in Leipzig, where public protests had now swelled to include thousands, the protesters had changed their chant to “We are staying.” Reforming East Germany from within was the goal.
Turning Point
That autumn, the protesters again received significant support from the leader of East Germany’s most significant ally. Gorbachev had already announced a reduction in Soviet military forces in Eastern Europe and allowed Hungary and Poland to reform their political systems significantly without Soviet interference. The likelihood that the East German regime would receive outside support in suppressing dissent dwindled. Gorbachev confirmed this non-interventionist attitude in an early October speech in East Germany, in which he urged reform while also saying that the country’s policy should be made “not in Moscow but Berlin.” He also privately ordered Soviet troops in East Germany to not get involved in any conflict within the country.
Conflict between the authorities and protesters grew. Police beat and arrested protesters in Leipzig, East Berlin, and elsewhere during the first week of October. A crucial turning point came when Kurt Masur, the conductor of the Leipzig orchestra, arranged an impromptu discussion involving the city’s Communist Party officials, Masur, another musician, and a clergyman. The private talk was meant to find a way of averting further violence and produced an appeal for nonviolence that was read in St. Nicholas’ Church and over the radio. The authorities opted not to employ riot police or the army, and tens of thousands of protesters marched in Leipzig on October 9.
Events moved quickly over the following month. The Communist Party leadership went through a shake-up, while protests in Leipzig and East Berlin grew to number hundreds of thousands. The final act, though, was essentially the result of an accident. The regime decided to relax restriction on travel to the west; when an official announced this decision on November 9, however, he garbled it and said incorrectly that East Germans could leave the country through Berlin or any other border crossing, effective immediately. When crowds gathered on the east side of the Berlin Wall, the guards decided on their initiative to let them through. The crowds not only poured into West Berlin but quickly took to standing and dancing on the Wall and eventually knocking it down with hammers.
These dramatic scenes were followed in the coming years by the Communist Party’s fall, the reunification of East and West Germany into a single country, and the Cold War’s end.
Looking Back
Remembered 30 years later, the Berlin Wall’s collapse seems more bittersweet than it did at the time. The 20th century’s Cold War has been succeeded by a new one between the United States and Russia, with the dividing line running through Ukraine rather than Germany. (The fact the line of conflict is now much further east than before should perhaps raise some questions about which side has been more expansionist over the past three decades.) Meanwhile, other nonviolent revolutions, such as Egypt’s in 2011, have been less successful than East Germany’s. Nonviolent resistance to oppression doesn’t always have happy results—although its track record is still better than violent resistance.
Even with these qualifications, the events leading to the Wall coming down should be celebrated for what, often contrary to conventional wisdom, they accomplished. The Cold War’s hostility was replaced with eased tensions, the Soviet Union reformed and reduced its influence in Eastern Europe, and nonviolent protest brought down highly repressive regimes such as those in East Germany and other Communist nations. While efforts against war and political repression do not always follow this pattern, we should remember that they sometimes do and take inspiration from that.
When the Wall fell, some Berliners drew historical connections and lessons about nonviolence prevailing over violence. Garton Ash reported that someone stuck a note to the Wall’s remains reading “Stalin is dead, Europe lives.” Another said “You see, it shows Lenin was wrong . . . Lenin said a revolution could succeed only with violence. But this was a peaceful revolution.”
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For more of our posts on historical nonviolence, see:
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
A Historical Success Story: Duels
For more of John Whitehead’s posts on history, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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
Will I be Treated the Same Way Now?
Due to giving medical details, the author wishes to remain anonymous.
I am a disabled woman with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a disease that attacks the joints. I use a walker or a wheelchair in my daily life.
I’m worried about where the medical field is heading. My home state of New Jersey has legalized assisted suicide, although there are currently legal battles over the law. The law is limited — but as we know, over time, they tend to expand the rules about who qualifies for assisted suicide. We’ve seen that in Canada, in the Netherlands; and in other countries.
RA is a progressive disease. I wonder what type of health care I’ll be getting as I get older and more severely disabled. RA can in fact become terminal, if it attacks the heart or other organs. I wonder if I’ll ever be pressured to accept assisted suicide.
Even more so, I wonder whether I will get the same suicide prevention services as an able-bodied person if I need them.
Recently in New Zealand, there was a case where a young woman who was wheelchair bound and in chronic pain, in a similar situation to mine, attempted suicide and went into a mental hospital. She told the psychiatrist who was assigned to her that she wanted to die. Instead of treating this woman’s depression, and counseling her against suicide, the doctor suggested she travel to Switzerland to a suicide clinic and kill herself there.
Every able-bodied patient in that hospital was presumably being told not to kill themselves and getting therapy and medication to treat their suicidal feelings. But a person in a wheelchair was encouraged by her own doctor to kill herself.
Due to my bipolar disorder, I’ve sometimes struggled with suicidal feelings myself. In my 20s, I too spent time in a mental hospital. I was young and physically able-bodied then. (I developed RA in my 30s.) The doctors were determined to prevent my suicide and worked with me to overcome those thoughts and feelings.
I can’t help but wonder if I ever need to go into the hospital again, will I be treated the same way now that I’m in a wheelchair? Maybe I would today, but what about 10 years from now, when my disability is even more severe? What about 20 years from now?
Today, if a person is actively suicidal, they can be put in a mental hospital, even against their will, and given treatment. Or a person can voluntarily seek treatment for suicidal feelings. If I do seek it in the future, will doctors encourage me live or help me to die?
Every time I read a story about another disabled person who was euthanized in another country, it hurts me on a personal level. I see how little disabled lives are valued compared to able-bodied ones. As a disabled person, that makes my own struggle against suicidal feelings harder. Assisted suicide has an effect on disabled people just by being available to other disabled people.
I have to say, I’m very glad to have found a movement that values all lives, even disabled ones. I’m so glad that so many people are with me when I speak up for the value of my life and the value of other disabled people’s lives. We need to continue advocating for ourselves and others.
Photo from Not Dead Yet
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For more of our posts on this topic, see:
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life
Rehumanize International – 6th Annual Conference
The 6th annual conference of our member group, Rehumanize International, happened October 18-20, 2019, in New Orleans. Consistent Life Network was a co-sponsor, and several of us attended. Sessions offered from CLN officers included: “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, Moral Injury, & the CLE” (Rachel MacNair) and “Apocalypse Never: Why We Must Reject Nuclear Weapons” (John Whitehead). Some of us also participated in panels, mentioned below.
We asked participants to share stories and photos.
John Whitehead, CLN president
John Whitehead & Rachel MacNair at our lit table. Photo taken by Kelsey Hazzard.
The 2019 Rehumanize conference was filled with powerful, memorable presentations, and two I attended particularly stick in my memory. Greta Zarro of World Beyond War spoke about the practical details of activism, especially peace activism, in the aptly titled presentation “Grassroots Organizing 101.” Greta provided advice and insights on how to mobilize people and to organize campaigns to influence decision-makers, which I found very clear and helpful.
An important organizing principle is to give activists clear, achievable goals for the short- and long-term. These goals need not always be changes to law and policy but can include benchmarks such as gathering a certain number of signatures for a petition or letters for a letter-writing campaign. Such comprehensible goals are necessary not least because they can give activists the sense of progress and accomplishment necessary to staying motivated. Another important principle mentioned was to identify the crucial influences on decision-makers—funders of their political campaigns, for example, or even religious figures who command respect—and to try to bring them on board the cause. These and other recommendations were helpful, but the presentation’s impact went beyond specific advice. Simply meeting someone dedicated to the peace cause and to pursuing practical strategies for peace was very inspiring.
The other presentation was by the writer Jennifer Reeser, who spoke on “Confronting Violence against Indigenous Peoples.” In discussing the innumerable injustices, past and present, against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Jennifer focused on literature’s role in the accompanying process of dehumanizing Native Americans. She recounted how various writers, including respected and beloved ones such as William Cullen Bryant and L. Frank Baum, disparaged Native Americans and their language and culture (Baum used especially savage, bloodthirsty rhetoric). Such literary dehumanization accompanied and may have abetted the expulsion and murder of Native Americans going on at the same time.
In contrast to this dehumanization, Jennifer pointed to the positive influence of literature that has portrayed Native Americans respectfully. James Fenimore Cooper was notable in the 19th century for his unusually sympathetic portrayals, including of Native American language—for which Cooper received fierce criticism. More important, Jennifer’s own poetry honors her Cherokee heritage and its language especially. One striking poem she shared was written in English but used sounds only found in Cherokee. The presentation’s focus on how art with de-humanizing themes can be countered by better art seemed a perfect example of the conference’s central focus of re-humanization.
Rachel MacNair, CLN vice-president
Katrina Jackson
I heard chanting coming from another room, and found out later it was pro-abortion protesters who were interrupting Louisiana Democrat Rep. Katrina Jackson’s presentation. People thought it was funny, because Jackson was at the time making the most innocuous of points – how necessary it is that women have access to Medicaid. We had far more radically pro-life things to say that they could have interrupted. But then, the sign-holding protesters probably weren’t paying much attention to content. The chants were the normal run-of-the-mill my-body-my-choice chants.
But then mother Lauren came into the hall laughing hard, because she had been in the room. She said she had just been sitting when baby Finn had started fussing a bit. As is common in such situations, she stood up to sway him to get him to calm down – and as soon as she stood up, that’s when the protesters all stood up, lined the wall, and started chanting. So Lauren thinks maybe she triggered them to start — her standing up was taken as a signal by them that they were supposed to. How ironic.
Security removed the hecklers, and they went outside and protested on the lawn. Some of us went out and engaged them; see Richard’s story next.
Richard Stith, CLN board member
I was having a calm and mutually respectful conversation with various pro-abortion women protesters, outside on the lawn. One woman, however, did not join in our dialogue. Instead, she kept trying to shut us down with the comment that “this is not a fruitful conversation.” Finally a male came over and made the same point with seemingly greater authority. Then they all left with him.
Brian Carroll, American Solidarity Party:
This was my first Rehumanize Conference, and was well worth driving from California. I especially enjoyed two talks on restorative justice by Shareef Cousin, but the high point for me was the presentation by Louisiana Rep. Katrina Jackson.
Brian’s photo of part of the exhibits
Sarah Terzo, CLN board member
Panel: Countering Ableism in Medicine
Left to right: Beth Fox, Sarah Terzo, Sophie Trist, John “Frank” Stephens, Jamie Duplechine
Thad Crouch, producer, Choose Life Abort War Podcast for Peace
My biggest Rehumanize Conference 2019 takeaway is that the Dehumanizing System of Domination, Destruction, and Death employs 2-3 common tactics in all or most issues which contradict our values for life, dignity, justice, and peace:
1) Motivations of profit or convenience.
2) Dehumanizing names and messaging.
3) Nice-sounding bull crap justifications.
Abortion example:
1) Eugenics
2) “Products of conception/Clump of tissue”
3) Women’s liberation
Militarism example:
1) Political/economic gain
2) “Animals”/“gooks”
3) Democracy/Freedom
Facts unravel bull crap! We’ve seen the system get very aggressive with whistle-blowers and truth-tellers like Abby Johnson, Daniel Ellsberg, and Chelsea Manning when it comes to abortion and militarism.
Facts don’t always overcome biased minds. However, might we make headway with issues on which we disagree if together we first unravel the three tactics on 2-3 issues we share in common?
Top: Thad talks with Greta Zarro of World Beyond War
Bottom: Thad speaking on the panel – Leaving Violent Institutions
Left to right: Aimee Murphy at podium; Jerry Givens, former Virginia executioner; Toni Turner, former abortion clinic worker; Thad Crouch, Veterans for Peace
Julia Smucker, CLN board member
Artwork by Aimee Murphy. Photo taken by Julia Smucker
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For more or out posts about participating in events, see:
Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine 100th Anniversary Celebration
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
by Rachel MacNair
If there’s anything outside the purview of the Consistent Life Network, it’s the process we use for voting in government elections. Therefore, as with all posts with individual authors, this is my opinion, nothing official from the organization. The Consistent Life Network doesn’t endorse specific candidates or voting strategies.
What is RCV?
Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) means that instead of voting for one person, you rank the candidates. It could be limited to ranking a top three to five candidates, or ranking all candidates. But your ballot could look something like this:
Those who want the intricacies of how the instant run-off is done can visit this FairVote site. But the point from the voter’s end is: if your first choice doesn’t make it, your second choice counts; if your second choice doesn’t make it, your third choice counts.
RCV is currently being used in the U.S. state of Maine, and in several U.S. cities, and within various professional organizations. It will be used in some of the Democratic primaries in 2020, and Ballotpedia shows several U.S. states have citizens gathering signatures to put it on the ballot. It’s used to select Oscar winners.
So why would that matter to us?
When I’m making a pitch in peace-movement venues, I point out that RCV solves the “lesser evil” problem. You have a candidate who’s awful, warmongering, wants to increase military spending, “modernize” nuclear weapons – but you have to vote for that candidate because the other candidate is even worse.
With ranked-choice, you can vote for a good peace candidate you actually like as your first choice, perhaps another as your second choice, and then wait until your third of three choices to concede that you want the warmongering but less objectionable candidate rather than the more objectionable one. You haven’t “wasted” your vote, nor thrown the election to the worse candidate. You haven’t been compelled to simply endorse a warmongering candidate.
This can work for single-issue pro-life voters as well. Many of the candidates who aren’t as bad as their opponents on abortion are nevertheless not very good. They know how to say the right words to get votes, but they’re not sincere. These candidates don’t really have a clear understanding of the violence involved, and don’t desire to get that understanding. They’ll vote as desired on bills when they come up, but they won’t make them come up. And they may feel that tax policy is more important.
But while the pro-lifers will vote for them, just imagine we have a re-established “Right to Life Party” (with which Ellen McCormack ran for president in 1980; it disbanded in 2003). Then if you’re a single-issue pro-life voter, you can communicate what you really want before giving a lower-rank vote to the candidate that’s more likely to win.
Consistent lifers, of course, have always had the conundrum that the last-ranked, likely-to-win candidates for the pro-peace and the pro-life candidates tend to be opposing candidates (in the U.S. and several other countries). The few consistent-life candidates we can find to vote for are in lower offices – or outside the major parties for the higher offices.
Example of the problem
So let’s take as an example the 2020 U.S. election for president. The same principles apply in all years, all countries, and all offices, but I have specific names for this one.
I know of two consistent-life candidates running for U.S. president in 2020:
Mark Charles, running as an independent
Brian T. Carroll, nominee of the American Solidarity Party
How many people reading this have heard of either of these two, outside the things we’ve written about them?
Large portions of our readership won’t vote for either one next year, even if they like them better than the candidate they do vote for, because they won’t “waste their vote” by not giving that vote to one of the candidates likely to actually win.
Those that do defy the logic of the lesser evil will have to do a lot of defying. Friends and family and co-workers will constantly pressure them: they must vote for one of the top two. To do otherwise, they insist, would be irresponsible.
RCV to the rescue!
It won’t be to the rescue in 2020, of course, but here’s the illustration of what happens when RCV is put in place:
The person to whom the consistent life ethic is the most important concern in considering who to vote for selects one of the two above candidates for their first choice, and the other for their second choice. Then, if they have in mind voting for the less objectionable of the two candidates likely to win, they can do that as their bottom-ranked choice.
The danger of helping the worst candidate win by failing to vote for the next-to-worst candidate is gone, and the consistent-life voter still communicates what’s actually desired. The process is better for democracy.
Final question: might third-party or independent candidates actually win this way? It’s possible, since they’re getting the votes they’ve earned, instead of having them diverted to less desired but more prominent candidates. Really, it’s currently the only way it’s possible.
But even if they don’t win, if they get the votes of more people who want to vote for them, then we may find a lot more voters have strong concerns about nonviolence than we can know now. Currently, it’s being suppressed by the choose-between-only-two system.
And perhaps more consistent-life candidates would therefore be inspired to run.
Remembering Gandhi at 150: The Power of Nonviolence and Respect for Life
(compiled by John Whitehead)
The world just marked the 150th birthday anniversary of a famous advocate for nonviolent resistance and the consistent life ethic, Mohandas K. Gandhi. This lawyer who turned to advocating for India’s independence from Great Britain became famous for using civil disobedience against British imperial rule. His birthday of October 2nd is celebrated as the International Day of Nonviolence.
To remember this activist for peace and justice, we offer a few notable quotations from his writings and public remarks.
Gandhi and his wife Kasturbhai, 1902
Gandhi on Nonviolence
Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man. Destruction is not the law of the humans. Man lives freely by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him. Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity. (From All Men Are Brothers)
I…justify entire non-violence, and consider it possible in relations between man and man and nations and nations; but it is not “a resignation from all real fighting against wickedness”. On the contrary, the non-violence of my conception is a more active and more real fighting against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness. I contemplate a mental, and therefore a moral opposition to immoralities. I seek entirely to blunt the edge of the tyrant’s sword, not by putting up against it a sharper-edged weapon, but by disappointing his expectation that I would be offering physical resistance. The resistance of the soul that I should offer instead would elude him. It would at first dazzle him, and at last compel recognition from him, which recognition would not humiliate him but would uplift him. (From Non-violence in Peace and War)
Gandhi on Racism, Imperialism, and Civil Disobedience
Gandhi was imprisoned in 1922 for agitating against British rule in a series of newspaper articles. At his trial he offered the following comments:
I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England…that I should explain why from a staunch loyalist and cooperator I have become an uncompromising disaffectionist and Non-cooperator…
My first contact with British authority in [South Africa, where Gandhi’s political activism began] was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man, because I was an Indian…
I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connexion had made India more helpless that she ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him…She has become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent, India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources. The cottage industry, so vital for India’s existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness…No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye…
The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people…
I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in Non-cooperation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, Non-cooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent Non-cooperation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.
Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for Non-cooperation with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon men for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge, is either to resign your post and thus dissociate yourself from evil, if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent; or to inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country…
[He would be sentenced to six years in prison but serve less than two.]
Gandhi on Respect for Life
Ahimsa [rejection of killing or the desire to kill] means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering. Who but woman, the mother of man, shows this capacity in the largest measure? She shows it as she carries the infant and feeds it during nine months and derives joy in the suffering involved. What can beat the suffering caused by the pangs of labour? But she forgets them in the joy of creation. (From All Men Are Brothers)
Gandhi recounted once receiving a letter from a young man whose wife had had an affair with the man’s friend and was now pregnant. The letter writer had been advised by his father that his wife should have an abortion. Gandhi wrote in reply
It seems to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime. Countless husbands are guilty of the same lapse as this poor woman, but nobody ever questions them. Society not only excuses them but does not even censure them. Then, again, the woman cannot conceal her shame while man can successfully hide his sin.
The woman in question deserves to be pitied. It would be the sacred duty of the husband to bring up the baby with all the love and tenderness that he is capable of and to refuse to yield to the counsels of his father. (From All Men Are Brothers)
Gandhi, Hindus, and Muslims
Gandhi greatly desired peace between Hindus and Muslims, India’s major religious groups. In 1921, he wrote “If not during my life-time, I know that after my death both Hindus and [Muslims] will bear witness that I had never ceased to yearn after communal peace.” He decried sectarian strife and around the time of the partition between India and Pakistan noted “My one aim with respect to the Hindu-Muslim question is that the solution will be complete only when the minority, whether in the Indian Union or Pakistan, feels perfectly safe, even if they are in the minority of one.” (See Ishtiaq Ahmed, “The Gandhian Legacy of Hindu-Muslim Relations.”)
Conflict over the Kashmir region, which began during Gandhi’s lifetime, has led to continuing high tensions today between India and Pakistan. With war in South Asia—a war that could have catastrophic global consequences—a real threat, Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of nonviolence is much needed today.
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For some of our blog posts on notable individuals, see:
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams by Mary Krane Derr & others
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) by Julianne Wiley
Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: by Rob Arner
Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier (1844-1870): Restellism Exposed
How to Value People Like Mister Rogers by Andrew Hocking
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero by Julia Smucker
Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Mary Krane Derr & Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Difference this Time: Prolife Heroism (Garrett Swasey, the pro-life police officer killed in shootings at the Colorado Planned Parenthood] by Rachel MacNair
Climate Change and the Consistent Life Ethic: An Opportunity to Connect Issues
by John Whitehead
Climate change and how to counter it has been much in the news over the past few weeks, with these topics being raised in the United Nations and in the streets. Harm to our shared environment should concern all of us and should especially concern advocates of the consistent life ethic. We should consider how climate change connects to other threats to life we are committed to working against: how climate change worsens poverty; can harm children, including children in the womb; and may make war or other violent conflict more likely. Such connections should heighten our commitment to work against violence to the earth.
Climate Change and Poverty
A warming climate will hurt the poorest the most, especially through negative effects on food production. Global warming will reduce yields of staple crops such as rice and wheat. Regions such as Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are particularly vulnerable to climate change’s effects on crops. People with the fewest resources, who are most directly dependent on their own farming, will most likely bear the greatest burden of such effects.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes the possible effects of climate change on the world’s poorest people. The IPCC projects what an average global temperature increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the coming decades will mean. Such an increase
would disproportionately affect disadvantaged and vulnerable populations through food insecurity, higher food prices, income losses, lost livelihood opportunities, adverse health impacts and population displacements . . . Some of the worst impacts on sustainable development are expected to be felt among agricultural and coastal dependent livelihoods, indigenous people, children and the elderly, poor labourers, poor urban dwellers in African cities, and people and ecosystems in the Arctic and Small Island Developing States.
(IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, Chapter 5)
Further, a global temperature rise of only 1.5°C may prove unrealistically optimistic. If the increase is greater, perhaps reaching 2°C, the effects on the poor will be even more dire.
Climate Change and Children
The IPCC also warns of increased temperatures leading to health problems and disease. A warming climate leads to heat-related deaths, poorer air quality and hence respiratory illnesses, and the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Disruptions caused by extreme weather events can also lead to food and water supplies being contaminated, also leading to illnesses.
Children are especially vulnerable to these kinds of environmental dangers, given their developing immune systems; the quantity of outside material, relative to their size, they take in by breathing, eating, and drinking; and the amount of time they typically spend outside. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency reports that infectious diarrhea, a water- and food-borne illness, annually kills 1.5 million children, most of them in developing countries.
Climate change-related health risks extend to preborn children as well. In pregnant women, respiratory illnesses or dehydration from heat can contribute to pre-term birth or low birth weight. Moreover, if climate change and related extreme weather events worsen poverty or malnutrition, as noted above, that may also harm pregnant women and their children’s health. These effects of climate change concern those who wish to protect children, before and after birth.
Climate Change and War
Another feared result of higher temperatures is that the resulting damage to farming and food supplies will lead to violent conflict. Such conflict might arise from competition over scarcer resources, for example, or from civil unrest over governments’ failures to address scarcity.
Whether such a connection between climate change and violent conflict really exists has been a long-running controversy. Some research supports this connection. A 2013 survey of 50 studies on the topic found “strong support for a causal association between climatological changes and conflict across a range of geographies, a range of different time periods, a range of spatial scales and across climatic events of different duration.” One surveyed study found that the risk of conflict in tropical countries increases with the shift from the (relatively cooler and wetter) La Niña weather pattern to the (relatively hotter and drier) El Niño pattern. This finding suggests that an overall shift toward a hotter, drier world might increase the risk of conflict.
However, others argue against this supposed climate-conflict link, criticizing the methodology involved in reaching this conclusion as well as the neglect of other factors that lead to conflict. At worst, linking climate change to conflict might lead to a kind of fatalism that holds violence to be inevitable as long as climate change persists.
These criticisms are well taken and we should not automatically assume that climate change makes war or other conflict more likely. Nevertheless, we should not ignore or dismiss the possibility either. Even a critic of the climate change and conflict connection noted that “there’s no doubt that climate change can, on some occasions, be linked to violence and warfare.” A group of social scientists with various views on the climate change–conflict relationship recently, after various consultations, reached the tentative conclusion that climate change may have had only modest effects on conflict to date but, if left unchecked, could increase risks of future conflict.
Further, the notion that climate change could make conflict more likely makes sense simply on an intuitive level. If poverty, famine, and disease, as well as disruptive events such as extreme weather and mass migration, become more common or severe they could well strain political institutions’ ability to resolve conflicts peacefully. Certainly we would be naïve to expect climate change’s negative effects to decrease conflict or make the world a more peaceful place. Those concerned with peace building would do well to devote attention to countering climate change.
Conclusion
As two writers on climate change observed, this important topic can too often seem “abstract, uncertain, unfamiliar, impersonal, diffuse and seemingly distant.” Connecting climate change to its impacts on people’s lives can make the issue more vivid and the stakes clearer. For consistent life ethic advocates specifically, making these connections shows how protecting the environment connects with protecting human life against other threats that already concern us. Preventing further warming of the planet, by measures such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing renewable energy sources, should be pursued as a way to also prevent worsening poverty, increased illness, and perhaps even violent conflict. At the same time, responding to climate change requires aiding the world’s poor and those people, especially children, suffering from the health effects of a damaged environment. Building structures for managing the stresses of scarcer resources or extreme weather events in a peaceful, constructive way is also an important response to climate change—and a proactive form of peacemaking.
Prevention of Child Abuse
by Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D.
Excerpts of Chapter 13 in Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion. References are turned into links.
Abuse of children is among the most horrific forms of violence and is depressingly widespread world-wide. Therefore, it is important to know whether the impact of abortion on its prevalence is helpful, harmful, or neutral.
The reasoning that abortion availability helps reduce such abuse includes:
- Abuse can be caused when children were born unwanted and are therefore resented. Having them not be born at all should accordingly result in a drop in the child abuse rate.
- There may be fewer births in those groups most likely to engage in child maltreatment.
The thesis that abortion availability is harmful includes these ideas:
- It removes a taboo on hurting children, and because it allows violence to children prenatally, violence will then be greater to postnatal children as well.
- It leads to children being treated as consumer products, rather than as human beings, thereby adding a requirement of “wantedness” by parents that children should not be required to meet.
The neutral position is [that] abortion is not really under consideration when child abuse occurs.
The Rise and Fall of Child Abuse Rates
U.S. child abuse rates skyrocketed after Roe v Wade, the decision legalizing abortion in all 50 states, was decided in 1973 . . . The rate per 1,000 population went from 2.16 in 1973 to 11.59 in 1990 . . . This is consistent with the hypothesis that millions of abortions might act as other violence does, by serving as a model, and by desensitizing.
However, correlation is not causation, and those inclined to draw a conclusion only from the simple fact of upsurge need to use caution. A readily-available alternative explanation is that it was not that more child abuse was actually happening, but that people were more sensitive to it and more inclined to report it due to educational efforts and changing cultural mores about its acceptability. Additionally, different criteria have been used to determine and measure abuse. Therefore, figures and rates are not always comparable.
Then, around 1990, the child abuse rates in the United States started a downward trend Concurrently, so did the abortion rates.
The connection between the two may be coincidence, of course. The theory that abortion and child abuse are connected as two similar forms of violence would predict that lowering abortion would lower child abuse, but human behavior is not that simple.
Those of the abortion-as-option view have frequently proposed that greater contraception education and use grew over time and resulted in the abortion downturn. Effective campaigns against child abuse were growing at the same time, and becoming successful. Given the historical time period, with the rise of campaigns for human betterment, there were many additional positive social indicators at the same time.
When looking at outcomes for an entire society, innumerable variables could be explanations, and speculations as to why ranges broadly. We can never know whether the child abuse rates would not have been higher yet without abortion. Still, the evidence that abortion availability might have any kind of positive impact on child abuse rates requires more detailed study than merely the change in rates.
The Case that Abortion Helps Prevent Abuse
Marianne Bitler and Madeline Zavodny utilized the varying times at which abortion became legalized in different U.S. states before the 1973 court ruling that legalized it nation-wide. They then considered reports of child abuse by taking [the children’s] age into account so as to have a measure of whether abortion would have been available at the time they were conceived. With this method, results suggest legalization lowered the reported cases. Legal restrictions on abortion, however, showed unclear results. Carlos Seiglie similarly found abortion access at the time of the pregnancy lowered reports of neglect.
A more targeted approach was taken doing a longitudinal analysis of fatal injury to children in states that have passed regulations such as parental consent, informed consent, and waiting periods. With this approach, they found an association between such regulations and increased injury.
The Case that Abortion Helps Promote Abuse
If the abortion-as-violence hypothesis is correct, it suggests an even more targeted approach. Rather than a society-wide epidemiological investigation, the research question becomes more focused: “Are mothers who have abortions more likely to be abusive to their children?” This approach has been undertaken in several studies . . . In these peer-reviewed studies, the answer is yes.
For example, [Priscilla] Coleman [and colleagues] analyzed 518 women who had been identified by Baltimore Child Protective Services as having abused their children. Researchers compared women with no pregnancy loss, those whose loss was involuntary (miscarriage or stillbirth) and those with induced abortion. The women who had undergone at least one induced abortion were 114% more likely to be identified as having abused their children when compared to women with no loss. Those women who suffered involuntary loss were found to be no more likely to be identified as abusive than women with no pregnancy loss.
Additionally, there is the question of children who rather than being unwanted are super-wanted. Edward Lenoski, Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, conducted a study of 674 children who had suffered battering at the hands of one of their parents and compared them to 500 controls selected from the same emergency room. The comparison showed:
- 91% of the parents of abused children said they had wanted the pregnancy; 63% of the non-abused said so;
- 93% of the parents were married at the time of the birth of the abused child; 60% of the non-abused were;
- the mother of the abused children began wearing maternity clothes at an average of 114 days into the pregnancy, as compared to an average of 171 days for the mothers of the non-abused children;
- The child was named after a parent (usually, father’s name with “Jr.”) in 24% of the abused cases, but only 4% of the non-abused cases.
Source: Lenoski, E. (1980, Winter). A research study on child abuse. Heartbeat, 16-17.
Since these are children for whom abortion was never contemplated, the role of abortion is not covered in this study. The role of “wantedness,” however, is here reversed with the proposal that requiring wantedness of children may, in some cases, increase rather than reduce the risk of child abuse
In those cases where the child is super-wanted, the ready availability of abortion could make things worse by emphasizing the importance of the wantedness of children. Less abuse may accompany accepting children for who they are rather than for who their parents want them to be.
Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse is in a different category from neglect or physical and emotional abuse, since the problem is clearly not that the child is unwanted, but is wanted for the wrong reason. Seiglie, while reporting findings as mentioned above about abortion availability being associated with less neglect, also reported a positive association of abortion access with sexual abuse.
The pro-life movement is full of anecdotal cases of men who utilized the abortion clinic for the purpose of removing the evidence of their abuse (see, for example, from Feminists for Life). These cases include both adult men who impregnate minors and incest abuse.
In actuality, the law in several countries upholds mandatory reporting to authorities when there are signs of possible sexual abuse of children under a certain age by adults. Pregnancy would certainly qualify as a possible sign of sexual abuse. If medical personnel follow the legal requirement of reporting suspected abuse, then abortion providers are in a unique position to prevent child sexual abuse and allow for its prosecution. If perpetrators knew this would occur, then it could have a powerful deterrent effect on sexual abuse.
Conversely, if medical personnel do not report, then they facilitate the abuse. Adult men who expect non-reporting may be more likely to engage in such abuse.
Scholarly investigation on this point is currently inadequate. It is urgently needed for the prevention of sexual violence toward children.
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For more excerpts from the book, see:
Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion: Introduction
Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion: Wars Cause Abortion
Pro-Life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
A reminder: The Consistent Life Network doesn’t necessarily endorse everything said in its blog, since we encourage individual writers to express a variety of views. This is especially so when analyzing elections.
by John Whitehead
With a new electoral season looming before Americans, we’ll no doubt soon hear the latest round of a long-running debate: how should pro-lifers vote?
- Should they vote for candidates (usually Republicans) who express explicit opposition to abortion and may support efforts to restrict legal access to abortion?
- Or should they vote for candidates (usually Democrats) who might not oppose abortion as such but support policies more likely to alleviate the conditions that push women toward abortion?
Granted, in some rare but happy cases, we get candidates who both explicitly oppose abortion and also support policies to counter the pressures for abortion. See, for example, the work of member groups the American Solidarity Party and Democrats for Life and the presidential candidacy of Mark Charles.
These cases are sadly exceptional, however. I’ll therefore consider the more typical political options. Also, for consistent life ethic advocates, of course, many other issues apart from abortion influence voting decisions, but in this post I’ll focus just on abortion. I suspect some of these points are also relevant to other life issues, and of course are also relevant to elections in other countries.
Having heard the argument about pro-life voting strategy many times, I must conclude that while both sides make reasonable points, neither has a very compelling case overall. Voting for either type of candidate has serious limitations, and pro-lifers should recognize this.
Limitations of the Explicitly Anti-Abortion Strategy
The case for explicitly anti-abortion candidates is straightforward. These candidates say they’re opposed to abortion and intend to use legal prohibitions to stop it. Therefore, pro-lifers should vote for them. Such a voting strategy is broadly favored by more politically conservative pro-lifers.
More politically liberal pro-lifers have several criticisms of this approach: First, many politicians who claim to be opposed to abortion are insincere or opportunistically taking advantage of pro-lifers’ concerns to get elected. Once elected, they won’t do anything about abortion. Second, some argue that legally prohibiting abortion is so politically challenging as to be impractical; overturning Roe v. Wade by changing the composition of the Supreme Court is a long, tortuous process for which there’s little prospect of success. Third, some argue that even if it were possible, making abortion illegal is not the most effective way of stopping abortions. A law against abortion would likely be unenforceable and ineffective.
In contrast, these pro-lifers argue for public policies they believe will reduce abortion. These might include targeted efforts to support pregnant women and mothers (for example, countering pregnancy and parenting discrimination in the workforce or providing more and better childcare options) as well as efforts to lower poverty generally (by increasing the minimum wage, say, or expanding affordable healthcare access). They argue that voting for politicians who support these types of policies, regardless of those politicians’ attitudes about abortion as such, is the effective way to stop abortion.
These criticisms of the explicitly anti-abortion voting strategy have merit. The convictions of supposedly pro-life politicians are often questionable and their records often disappointing. Moreover, the persistence of Roe v. Wade after more than 45 years and numerous changes in the Supreme Court, as well as the strong resistance to anti-abortion legislation in many states, points toward the enormous practical challenge of restricting abortion access.
Update, October 20, 2022: A few years after I wrote this piece, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in its June 2022 Dobbs v Jackson case. I admit this decision came as a great surprise to me and certainly upended my 2019 doubts about Roe being overturned.
Granted, much of what I argued here I would still stand by. The commitment of allegedly “pro-life” politicians should often be viewed with skepticism. Legal efforts to restrict access to abortion may still prove very difficult even in a post-Roe country. Legal restrictions may also prove less effective in reducing abortion than public education and programs to support parents and children.
Nevertheless, recent events show that we never know for sure which direction history will go. Our seemingly confident predictions about the pro-life cause or other aspects of the consistent life ethic might well be proved wrong. Let’s keep an open mind about the future and be ready to adapt to changing circumstances.
Certain policies that address poverty and other pressures toward abortion probably do contribute to reducing abortions—and most liberal pro-lifers, especially those who are consistent life ethic advocates, would favor such policies regardless. These are all points in favor of this alternative voting strategy, which might be called an “abortion reduction” strategy.
Limitations of the Abortion Reduction Strategy
Nevertheless, the abortion reduction strategy has a very significant problem. Whatever else being pro-life does or does not mean, it ought to mean you support efforts to persuade people to recognize the right to life of preborn children and the injustice of killing these children through abortion.
Arguing for the humanity of children in the womb and advocating for their right to life so that a critical mass of people come to accept these views is essential to the pro-life position. Granted, not everyone who’s pro-life must necessarily become a full-time apologist for the preborn’s right to life—but they should support the people who are and not undermine their work.
This essential activity of persuading others to recognize the preborn’s right to life is not well served by supporting policymakers or other elites who refuse to recognize this right and condemn those who do. If politicians, officials, corporate heads, and prominent members of the media generally reject the notion that a preborn human has a right to life and endorse abortion as morally acceptable, then that’s a serious obstacle to ending abortion.
Elite support for abortion presents such an obstacle for two reasons:
First, elites can, through the messages they send and rhetoric they use, shape larger cultural attitudes. An elite that recognizes preborn humans’ right to life could promote such recognition in the larger society, perhaps educating the public on matters such as embryology and pre-natal development, what happens in an abortion, nonviolent alternatives to abortion, or the philosophy of pro-life feminism—and the consistent life ethic.
Second, while efforts to make abortion outright illegal may or may not be the best strategy for ending abortion, I can’t imagine how abortion could be ended without at least some public policies specifically targeted at reducing abortion. As mentioned above, these might include public educational campaigns, similar to those against smoking or other health hazards, to make people aware of abortion’s violence. They might also include an extension of measures already effect in some states, such as informed consent or counseling requirements before an abortion and the withholding of public funding of abortion, as through the Hyde Amendment.
Neither targeted policy measures meant to reduce abortion nor a more general effort to shape public opinion toward recognition of the preborn’s right to life seem likely in a society governed by ardently pro-abortion elites. Politicians who have no clear objections to abortion, who affirm “reproductive rights” without qualification, and who enjoy the endorsement of abortion advocates such as Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice America seem unlikely to promote greater respect for preborn life.
Such politicians might support policies that reduce poverty or otherwise lessen pressures for abortion. Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe that, without a genuine commitment to supporting the preborn’s right to life, these politicians would do all that’s necessary to reduce abortion to the lowest level possible. Even if some policies they support have a positive effect on the abortion rate, their overall approach is inadequate.
To claim that we can end or even radically reduce abortion without an elite commitment to doing so—to claim, in effect, that abortion will end as a purely unintended by-product of other policies undertaken for unrelated reasons—puts an intolerable strain on credulity. Has any other major social injustice been ended without elites and others in a society coming to recognize that an injustice is being committed?
A Few Practical Conclusions
I would judge both the supposedly pro-life politicians who claim to be pursuing a legal prohibition on abortion and the politicians who are supposedly pursuing policies that will reduce pressures for abortion to fall short of what committed pro-lifers need. Neither the explicitly anti-abortion nor abortion reduction voting strategy seems adequate to me.
For pro-lifers, a clear electoral strategy is lacking. This disappointing situation suggests a few modest but important practical conclusions:
- Pro-lifers should recognize the limitations of both voting strategies and not necessarily always adhere to either one, instead keeping an open mind to trying alternative approaches in different situations.
- For the same reason, we should be humble in arguing for a particular voting strategy and respectful toward our fellow pro-lifers who adopt a different strategy.
- Most important of all, we should direct our criticisms not toward other pro-lifers but toward politicians who fall short of an adequate pro-life stance in either of the ways I’ve identified. People in power are the ones who most need to be challenged when their defense of life is inadequate. And we can reach out to people with whom we agree on other issues and try to bring them to full support of a consistent ethic of life.
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For more of our blog posts on voting:
Elections 2020: Three Consistent-Life Approaches
Abortion on the Ballot (2022)
My Difficulty in Voting: Identifying the Problem
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
and see our website:
Win-Lose is a Mirage
by Bill Samuel, Consistent Life Network Board member
As I was taking a morning nature walk, I was thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s insight in Braiding Sweetgrass of people loving the land and the land loving us back. The reciprocity is vital regardless of whether you are comfortable with using the emotional term “love” to describe it. On my nature walks, I think about things like the trees providing us oxygen and the water being essential to our life. For this to continue, we need to exercise care for creation.
I thought about how some people see nature as something to be exploited, not something to be cared for. They look at life from a win-lose perspective. Their view of how to benefit from the earth’s resources is one where they win and the earth loses. As we can see from global climate change and the degradation of the environment, people don’t really win in this win-lose exploitation model. We suffer from our exploitation of the environment in many ways, such as the air being no longer safe to breathe, water becoming polluted and scarce, and climate change disrupting our lives. In the end, it’s not win-lose but lose-lose. The alternative is sustainably using the earth’s resources, which is a win-win proposition.
It occurs to me that this problem of a win-lose perspective applies across the board. In many different contexts, we may try to gain while others lose but it doesn’t work well. We’re interdependent, whether we recognize it or not. The consistent life ethic (CLE) inherently recognizes this interdependence. When we kill or injure another, we don’t win in the long run. We injure the whole, which includes us. The CLE rejects the idea of the “other” who is expendable for our gain.
War is a good example of a situation people see as win-lose when it’s really lose-lose. When we go to war, we’re seeking to win and make the other party lose. The result is an enormous loss of life and disruption on both sides. We can see in the wars waged by the U.S. in recent decades that the countries where they have been waged not only have suffered many deaths and injuries, but their infrastructure and the fabric of their societies has been torn apart. Terrorist organizations point to these effects in recruiting people to serve in their cause, resulting in our security being increasingly endangered. The U.S. has spent $6 trillion on the war on terror, resulting in our lacking the resource to meet our own human needs. These consequences of war affect us in the long-term, not just during the war itself. An objective look at war will not see it as win-lose but lose-lose. Our “victories” are almost always pyrrhic victories. Peaceful means of conflict resolution offer the opportunity for a better life in the long run for both (or more) parties, a win-win proposition.
Racism is another example. When those of one ethnicity seek to dominate those of another ethnicity, they see it as their group winning at the expense of the other group. However, racism has a dehumanizing effect on everyone, including those who are privileged by it. It is a very inefficient system, because it prevents society from benefiting from the full flowering of the gifts and talents of those oppressed. We have seen in our own country’s history other inefficiencies such as unnecessary duplication of systems- for example, separate drinking fountains – because the dominant group doesn’t want others to use the same systems they do. We also see the natural animosities racism produces, causing conflicts which reduce the safety of everyone. A racist system can never be a stable system.
In the U.S. and many other countries, the justice system – both criminal and civil – is based on an adversarial model. This is a binary system which in the criminal system labels a person charged with a crime as either guilty or not guilty and if found guilty, the offender is largely handled with punishment. In the civil system, the court generally rules for one party and against the other. Again, the system is basically win-lose. A restorative justice system, in contrast, looks at the needs of all those affected and finds a course of action which is best for the whole community. Such a system generally provides a much better outcome for the victim, as well as helping the offender to be restored to becoming a positive member of the community. In the civil system, it recognizes that sometimes both parties played a role in a bad outcome rather than it being a binary right-wrong situation. It can therefore address the needs in a more holistic manner.
Abortion is another instance of a win-lose perspective. The mother and her baby are assumed to have opposite interests, and the interests of one must be chosen over the other. However, in our society normally the mother-child bond is considered one of the strongest and most loving there is. What causes the reversal of this assumption in situations where the mother would consider aborting her child? Is the father abandoning them both, pressuring her to abort, or being abusive? Does her employer fail to provide for the needs of pregnant women and mothers? Are doctors or social workers pressuring her? Is she being abandoned or pressured by her birth family? Do childcare and other resources seem inadequate? Most of these factors show a heartlessness towards both mother and child. The rights and needs of both tend to go together, rather than compete with each other.
We can apply this principle to other areas of life. What we need is to recognize our interdependence and work together for the common good, rather than seeking to benefit ourselves through punishment and exploitation of others and the created world. The more people, governments, and institutions embrace this approach, the better off we all will be. This is the point of the CLE.
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For more of our posts from Bill Samuel, see:
Does the Consistent Life Ethic Water Down Life Issues?
Supporting the Dignity of Every Life
Brown v. Board of Education and Me