When Women Lead: The Pro-life Women’s Conference
by C.J. Williams
This year’s Pro-Life Women’s Conference had a theme: WHEN WOMEN LEAD. But what might just as well have been the unspoken theme was unity, and underlying all unity is consistency.
As the Consistent Life Network (CLN) set up to table in the enormous Pontchartrain Conference Center in New Orleans, we were surrounded by a sea of fellow advocates for life. Women poured in from as far away as California, as near as New Orleans itself, speaking more than one language and sporting more than one exterior style. Eight hundred plus registered this year, and we were excited to notice our fellow tablers focused on restoring resources and building a culture of peace consistently.
From Feminists Choosing Life of NY, whose executive director Michele Sterlace-Accorsi (who keynoted the event with verve and personal passion) to Sisters of Life, who spoke eloquently of developing our own interior silence and peace, the women spoke and heard consistency.
END WAR and STOP CALLING FEMINISM VIOLENCE FCLNY’s buttons stated boldly.
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL Rehumanize Intenational’s new stickers flashed in appropriate Spanish.
“[We are here] valuing life no matter what,” Sterlace-Accorsi rounded up her keynote, “We can cure diseases. . . but the only cure for despair, loneliness . . . and fear . . . is love.”
Within all this, Rachel MacNair and I mini-trained multiple conference goers on the peaceful but radically impactful Grassroots Defunding Planned Parenthood Campaign. Rerouting non-pregnancy healthcare needs away from PP and to the local federally qualified health clinics both aids men and women in local communities find the testing and treatment they need, and takes customers and funds away from clinics that kill, ultimately starving out PP centers across the nation.
“This is wonderful,” said one woman from Massachusetts, “I was at the huge public hearing on the abortion bill last week, but this is something I can do every day.”
Panels ran that unified and consistent gamut as well, pinpointing women’s power to lead in their communities. “Prolife? For the people at the border!” cried Fr. Craft, leading Sunday mass for the Catholics in attendance, “Are you leading with love?”
Cynthia J. Wood also addressed the #MeToo movement in her breakout, “Sexual Harrassment- A ProLife Issue Too.” A physicians’ panel, “Comprehensive Care” addressed healthcare needs and holistic nonviolent avenues for doctors also keyed in the consistent note.
A final highlight, the conference wrapped on Carrie Murray Nellis’s look at caring for and supporting birth mothers in the adoption process – and their lives going on.
“Nonviolence,” said Diane Lara from Texas, “I mean, caring about life and replacing violence. That’s why I sidewalk advocate. It’s also why I started a small organization here that works on, like, do no harm. Local agriculture and care for our environment and community. Vegan living – avoid harming animals. And never, never kill a preborn person.”
That’s unity. That’s consistency. And we were beyond pleased to participate this year – our table covered by two trailblazing women – in a conference lead by the feminine genius of unity and consistent compass
Note: This was the fourth annual conference; the 2020 conference will be June 26-28 in Indianapolis.
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For more of our posts on adventures at events, see:
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine 100th Anniversary Celebration
The Mirror-Image Counterpart of the Selfish Society
by Richard Stith
This 1978 article was originally entitled “What it Means to be Pro-Life: Toward a Political Theory for Our Movement.” It appeared in The New Human, Vol. VII No. 2, March–April 1978, a publication of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition.
It’s been lightly edited.
Does being “pro-life” mean something more than being against abortion? Every pro-lifer would, of course, answer “yes.” But exactly what else it means is not quite clear. Does it mean one is against all killing, and thus that one must also work against euthanasia, capital punishment, and war? Does it mean that one is searching for “positive alternatives” to killing, especially in the case of the unborn? Or does it mean that one is an all-around “pro-people” good guy, working to help everyone in every way?
Probably, it means all of these things to some extent. But I think it also means something more exact. I think that there’s a quite specific role that the pro-life movement has undertaken to perform. . . .
I want to argue that the specific role of our movement is to be an exact mirror-image counterpart of the “selfish society.” That is, our job is to be a kind of counterbalance to the selfish tendencies in human nature and in politics—so that we ought not to try to do all the good things, but rather only those things which we think selfishness is least likely to take care of.
In order to make my point clear, let me first outline a model of a selfish society and of the rights which it recognizes. The role of the pro-life movement will then be simply to further those rights which self-interest leaves unprotected. I’m not saying that modern society is entirely selfish, but only that it is to a large extent selfish. Therefore, we can expect it won’t ignore matters affecting self-interest. However, it may ignore matters of human dignity which it thinks not relevant to self-interest, and so it’s in these matters that the pro-life movement is most needed.
A Model of the Selfish Society
Even a totally egotistical and selfish person will grant some rights to other human beings. For example, he or she will agree in general that people shouldn’t kill each other. Why would the person agree? Simply because the person doesn’t want to be killed, and realizes that other selfish people won’t promise not to kill him or her unless he or she also promises not to kill them. Similarly, the selfish person will grant other people rights to property, because he or she wants them to respect his or her property. So even in a society made up of wholly selfish egoists, certain rights will be recognized (or at least public lip-service will be paid to them).
But will a rational selfish person extend these rights to all people? No. For if his or her motives are wholly selfish, he or she has no reason to grant any rights to someone who’s too weak to do him or her harm. Such a person will be interested in “making a deal” only with those who have something to offer to that person. For example, if someone else is too young or too weak to kill him or her, why should he or she agree not to kill that person? The selfish person has no reason at all to make such an agreement. A selfish person will recognize the rights only of those who are strong enough to hurt him or her.
We should add two additional points:
First, strength may be measured by group rather than by individual. So, for example, a selfish person will acknowledge the rights of even a very weak person, if the latter is a member of a group (say, racial, ethnic, family) which is strong enough to retaliate effectively. Or conversely, a selfish person will not grant rights even to a very strong individual, if the former belongs to a group which is strong enough to suppress the latter. So, for example, an individual slave may be very clever and strong and yet have no rights, if the combined group of selfish slave-owners is strong enough to crush any rebellion. [Editor’s note: the same applies to condemned prisoners.]
Second, even selfish people have their likes and dislikes, and they may like some other people. The can’t love these people (because love, as self-giving, is necessarily unselfish), but they might like having certain others around, because they’re pleasant or useful. Thus even selfish people, for example, may want to protect their own children, because they find them cute, or helpful, or a status symbol, or because of some other self-interested reason. Thus, even though young children are too weak to be a danger to their parents, their parents may protect them insofar as they’re “wanted” (have no handicaps which make them not pleasant or useful). Similarly, their parents may insist other adults not kill them, and in return they may agree not to kill the wanted children of other adults.
So our conclusion must be that pure self-interest will do a good job of recognizing the rights of the strong or the wanted (individually or by group). But selfish persons won’t care at all about those individuals or groups who’re both weak and unwanted.
Caring without Selfishness
Just as selfish persons are concerned about others the more they are strong or wanted, so pro-lifers ought to care about others the more they are weak and unwanted. Now, there’s no other class of human beings weaker than the unborn, and so whenever these children are also unwanted, they are totally ignored by our selfish society. It’s for this reason, I think, that pro-lifers have rightly concentrated so much on protecting the unwanted unborn child. That child is the underest of underdogs, so to speak, and so is both the most defenseless and the most oppressed (no other person today being totally killable on demand).
Pro-lifers, in other words, don’t think the unborn are more valuable than other persons are. Unlike the pro-abortion people, who give no rights to the unborn, we believe that all persons’ lives are equally worthy of reverence and protection. However, self-interest will and does take care of the rights of the strong or wanted, and so the help of the pro-life movement is less needed.
Now, with this model as a guide, I think the special vocation of our movement can be truly discerned. We’re called upon to help those who would otherwise be without help—not those who already have plenty of help.
For example, I don’t think the pro-life movement should be involved in trying to stop recombinant DNA research, even though this research, in my opinion, is a clear danger to the survival of the human race—because of the simple fact that the rights of the strong are here as menaced as are those of the weak. The strong don’t want to be wiped out, and so we can assume they’ll do a good job of limiting such research for the sake of their own self-interest—without the help of the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers shouldn’t fight against all dangers to life. They should mainly oppose the killing of the weak and unwanted.
But we must go beyond protecting the right to life of the victims of selfishness and aim at protecting all their human rights. So, for example, pro-lifers should protect not only the right of Down Syndrome kids to survive, but also their right not to be purposely or accidentally neglected—insofar as selfish adults don’t give a dam.
Obviously, this is all a matter of degree rather than of absolutes. There’s a kind of social spectrum along which we all fit. At one end are those of us who are both very strong and very wanted. These are not the concern of the pro-life movement. At the other extreme are those both very weak and very unwanted. These are our chief concern. But we ought to be more concerned to fight for others as they near the point where they have no significant defenses against more powerful individuals and groups.
Popularity?
One last crucial point: If such is our vocation we can’t ever expect to be popular. For we shall always be found on the side of the unwanted—the “niggers” or “fetuses” of every age. Even if, for example, we succeed in getting selfish persons to “like” unborn kids (say, by showing pictures of them cutely sucking their thumbs) or in getting them to see their own self-interest at stake (because, say, of a declining population or of a growing disrespect for all human life) we won’t become “socially acceptable.” For to the extent that the unborn become wanted, they become no longer our chief concern; and we must struggle in defense of those individuals and groups who have now become the most oppressed victims of a selfish society. As soon as our work is approved, it’s finished, and we are called to struggle elsewhere.
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More of our posts from Richard Stith:
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
by Rob Arner
As anyone who has embraced the consistent life ethic (CLE) will tell you, the sense of isolation, of not fitting in can be paralyzing. This is all the more true when it comes to the traditional American political spectrum, with its the left-right/conservative-progressive dichotomy. CLE political positions, linked as they are by the underlying conviction that all human beings possess inherent dignity and worth, are at odds with the standard narratives of left and right and lead to a sense of alienation from both.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, knew this sense of isolation better than most.
Day and the Poor
As a radical left-wing journalist in her young adulthood, Day developed a social conscience that led her to side consistently with the workers, the poor, and other marginalized people:
[W]hat I read made me particularly class-conscious. I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over West through slum districts, and watch the slatternly women and the unkempt children and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were. I wanted to do something toward making a “new earth wherein justice dwelleth.”
Union Square to Rome, 37
Or as she would put it in a diary entry from 1945, Day “became converted to the poor, to a love for and desire to be always with the poor and suffering— the workers of the world.” This progressive social conscience led her for a time in her youth to identify with a variety of anarchist, socialist, and communist organizations who shared her social vision for a more just society.
Day and Abortion
But as an adult convert to Catholicism, she came to marry this progressivism with a deeply-rooted traditionalist Christian faith that reinforced in her the conviction that every human life is priceless and irreplaceable. Her conversion experience prompted her to reflect on some of the earlier tragedies and mistakes of her life, especially the painful experience of having an abortion in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain her relationship with the baby’s philandering father. In 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade was decided, Day reflected on the pain abortion had caused for many women, as well as for herself:
Suddenly the thought came into my mind of abortion and even then though our entire [Protestant] pop has been taught that it was not “taking life”—“Life only began at 4 ½ months.” Legal restrictions alone made women guilt ridden. Does the changing of laws— the Supreme Court decision—do away with this instinctive feeling of guilt? My own longing for a child.
Diary entry dated April 13, 1973
Most deeply disturbing for Day was the way that many of her collaborators in the 1960s anti-war movement didn’t share her reverence for human life, lamenting how “those in this peace crowd do not hesitate to have abortions” (November 12, 1962 letter to Thomas Merton). She elaborated in another letter: “Here we are as pacifists seemingly on the side of life, and so many in the peace movement denying life” (March 3, 1967 letter to Jim Forest).
Rejecting Left and Right
Thus, Day and the Catholic Worker don’t fit neatly into the usual left/right dichotomy. Like socialist radicals, she made the cause of the poor and workers central to her vision of a just world. But like conservative traditionalists, she was deeply grieved by the prevalence of abortion in society. As this icon of Day communicates,
she combined traditionally “conservative” methods and emphases, such as charity, the works of mercy, and an emphasis on personal responsibility to address social needs, with traditionally “liberal/progressive” methods of social change, such as protest and nonviolent civil disobedience.
As a Catholic Worker from Philadelphia once explained to me, the Catholic Worker isn’t a “liberal” or “conservative” organization, but rather a radical one. While conservatives are generally happy with “the system” with only minor tweaks, and “liberals” would focus on making structural changes within the system in order to make it work, a radical organization such as the Catholic Worker is convinced that the system doesn’t work and is so fundamentally flawed and corrupted by sin that it can’t.
Personalism
For Dorothy Day, the philosophy that best expressed these seemingly divergent convictions in a coherent and intellectually satisfying manner was “personalism,” a philosophy imported from French Catholicism by her mentor and Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. At its root, personalism stresses three things:
(1) The invaluable worth and dignity of the individual person;
(2) The fundamentally social nature of the person (that is, persons are always “persons-in-community”); and
(3) the moral imperative of personal responsibility, which stressed persons, rather than institutions or ideologies or rulers, as primary moral agents and the essential subjects of history.
Personalism means that persons, rather than ideas, agendas, or any other abstraction, are what ultimately matter. All other issues are subordinated to the needs of the person standing before you. Personalism for Day was also an authentic third way between the twin dangers of liberal capitalist individualism and person-negating communist collectivism. Both, she felt, in different ways, devalue the person or make the person’s importance subordinate to some greater cause or conflict.
This synthesis of the individual and the social was so novel in American society that it aroused great suspicion from both the right and the left. Robert Ellsberg observes that personalism was so outside the American experience that “readers from both the left and the right often found it difficult to locate the movement along the conventional political spectrum… To many seasoned observers, the very idiosyncrasy of these positions suggested a smokescreen, designed to obscure the true intentions of its proponents.” Indeed the FBI maintained a surveillance file on Day for her entire career as a Catholic Worker, and her resolute pacifism lost the Catholic Worker newspaper over a third of its subscriber base during World War II.
Day came to understand that adopting a personalist outlook on life meant losing a lot of friends who didn’t share her same core values. As she wrote in a 1943 letter to a fellow Catholic Worker, “Personalism isolates you in this mad world!” But it also offered her a radically open view toward others, which, for her as a Christian, meant seeing Jesus equally in all people.
Reflecting on an upcoming trip to Cuba, which was fresh off Fidel Castro’s communist revolutionary takeover, she wrote: “I go to see Christ in my brother the Cuban, and that means Christ in the revolution[ary], [and] Christ in the counter-revolutionary. But to both sides, being violently partisan, such an attitude will be considered reasonable by neither” (Diary entry, September 2, 1962). Nevertheless, she clung to the belief that personalism offered the best – indeed the only – just and humane way to create “a new social order wherein justice dwelleth, which is neither capitalist nor communist nor totalitarian in any way” (February 7, 1969 letter to Karl Meyer).
Personalism and the CLE
Because of her personalism, Day was an early adopter of what came to be the consistent life ethic. The infinite value of the person, Day believed, meant that something eternal and irreplaceable was lost when a person is killed through neglect or belligerence, and she took a solid stand for her entire life against all killing of human persons. As Daniel Berrigan put it in the foreword to Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, “What held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars— into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.”
Day herself would connect the issues in a way that is now so familiar to those of us who embrace the CLE. “We are aghast at the continuing and spreading warfare in the world— the waste of human life, and at home too with abortion used to save the resulting consequences of our acts from suffering, from the cross we impose upon them” (1971 letter to Daniel and Philip Berrigan).
Dorothy Day’s long career as a Catholic Worker stands as a testament to the possibilities that can open up when we reject the boxes forced upon us by the prevailing society. The CLE is a personalist outlook, one which embraces the inestimable value of each and every human life and stands in ready defense against any threat that would destroy it or force it to exist in poverty and degradation. It combines the best of the progressive social vision of justice and equity for all people with what is good from the conservative esteem for and defense of every life, “from womb to tomb.” Only such visions that can bridge the divides and make common cause toward a better world can ever come close to achieving Day’s goal of creating “a new society from within the shell of the old.”
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For similar posts, see:
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)
Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
Abby Johnson Remembers Dan Berrigan
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero
For more of our posts from Rob Arner, see:
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
The Real Meaning of Mother’s Day
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
by Rachel MacNair
The recent live-action version of the movie Aladdin didn’t deal much with specific consistent life issues. The only one brought up was war, and that was only because the villain wanted it, though never got beyond planning. Yet the fleshing out of the characters, compared to the 1992 cartoon version, led to a theme about power. The movie uses the theory of power that nonviolence has always been based on. And of course nonviolence has always connected all of our issues.
Hungry for Magical Power
We can start with how startled the genie was to discover that his new “master” wasn’t a greedy power-hungry person, as the genie was accustomed to. His first words to Aladdin were, “Oh Great One who summons me,” a line that would be more expected by the kind of people who try to find the genie’s lamp. As part of the more realistic plot lines that go into live-action movies, as opposed to cartoons, people who seek out the lamp would be those kinds of characters.
It seems funny to refer to a story with a genie doing magic as “more realistic.” But it’s common in live action films based on previous animation that the implications of the story are better thought out.
Instead, the genie finds in Aladdin a young man who actually asks the genie what he, the genie, would wish for – a whole new idea. And what the genie wanted was his freedom. Naturally. And for the first time, he found a man who wasn’t quite so power-hungry, who said that for his third wish he would give the genie his freedom.
Yet the genie had seen what power of the magical kind does to people. He clearly had bitter experience. He was cynical enough to expect this would happen with Aladdin as well. When it came time for that third wish, the genie turned out to be correct: Aladdin had gotten a taste of power, and couldn’t let it go. In the original cartoon, the issue was that Aladdin was lying to everybody. In this version, the idea that power had gone to his head was more to the point.
Aladdin’s first wish was to be a prince. This wasn’t for the sake of being a prince, but for the sake of impressing a specific woman, Princess Jasmine. He’d fallen in love with her, but she was legally obligated to marry only a prince. Therefore, he needed to be a prince.
In the original cartoon version, Aladdin got “dolled up” and then, by golly, he was a prince. The live-action version paid a little more attention to what that means: where was his country? Ababwa was made up, of course, so the question of whether he was actually a prince, simply because he had such impressive riches, was asked.
This becomes all the more important when the villain, Jafar, steals the lamp he originally sent Aladdin to get, and uses it in the very way that the genie feared. And while in the cartoon version the genie was clearly unhappy about having to fulfill Jafar’s demands, in this version, there was more: you could see in the genie’s face how very much it pains him to have to do this yet again.
The Nonviolent Rebellion
Jafar wished to be sultan. And the genie took the royal clothes off the Sultan and put them on Jafar, put Jafar on the Sultan’s throne, and stood by ready for enforcement. So the guards concluded that their loyalties must now shift, because the magic had happened.
But here is where the nonviolence theory of power comes in: Princess Jasmine made a direct appeal to the guards. Where was their loyalty really? Was it not up to the people to determine a ruler, and not up to someone who managed to find a genie and make a wish?
The guards realized this was so. Who was wearing the clothes didn’t matter. Who was sitting on the throne didn’t matter. They had loyalty to the same man they had pledged loyalty to before.
Neither Aladdin nor Jafar were able to become a prince or a sultan by magic. Magic isn’t how power works.
Power works because people cooperate with those in power – primarily, because they understand the power to be legitimate. Tyrants can strike fear in people, but that’s a very difficult way to maintain people’s cooperation. Only an understanding of legitimacy keeps power without tremendous and unsustainable inputs of violence over time.
In this case, the withdrawal of power happened right away. But then, the illegitimacy of the power grab was quite blatant; in real life, clearly stolen elections are common triggers for nonviolent uprisings. In front of Jafar, Jasmine pointed this problem out to the guards. They could see it immediately, and responded accordingly.
Jasmine
The figure of Jasmine herself has become quite a bit more powerful in the recent version. The new song for this movie, Speechless, is a passionate song in which she declares that she will not be speechless. (See a clip or full lyrics)
But her power doesn’t come from a desire to lord it over others. It comes from a compassionate desire to help others. Her power, using compassion, would be seen as more legitimate, and therefore easier to sustain in a willing population.
Her father, the Sultan, sees this. Earlier when she had proposed that as his only child she should be the next sultan, and that she had the needed skills, he had responded that a woman wouldn’t be sultan. While not illegal, it was against tradition. Yet after she demonstrated how courageous and effective she was, in the face of a magical onslaught, he saw that she would in fact make a very good sultan. He told her she would be the next one.
The Third Wish
As for Aladdin, he realized the danger of leaving a genie with magical powers that the genie himself would rather not use. He also realized that he’d been slipping into a power-grabbing mindset, and Jafar had just given him a model of how horrific that road could be. So he did keep his promise and he used his third wish to free the genie.
This was the same plot point in both the cartoon and live-action movies. Yet in the recent version, the genie was stunned because he wasn’t expecting it. He thought Aladdin had become like the other “masters” he had had, since Aladdin had pretty much said so earlier. At least, the genie would have thought, what Aladdin wanted was relatively benign. And Aladdin’s desires were a huge relief after dealing with Jafar (a problem solved through a trick from Aladdin that took advantage of Jafar’s blind power hunger).
Aladdin sacrificed using his third wish for himself and instead used it to free the genie. This showed his compassion. He went back out on the street in his street clothes; a sacrifice for a friend is what he intended to do.
And of course it was that compassion that was a major appeal to Princess Jasmine.
That and his knowledge of what things were like on the street would be a tremendous help in her work as sultan. She was the one qualifid to do the work, and he recognized that (another major appeal for her), but he had a contribution to make as someone not in the upper class.
Conclusion: Hollywood
The feminist sensibilities in Disney movies are improving considerably over what they used to be. While Snow White in the 1930s sang “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” the cartoon Jasmine didn’t want to be pushed into marriage with a pompous man. With this latest movie, she developed into a Jasmine who wanted and deserved a leadership role.
Yet it’s still common in Hollywood that women gain equality by becoming as violent as men. Rather than catching on that violence is bad for the men committing it, along with everyone else, the penchant in many movies to use fantasy violence as a fantasy problem-solver is still strong, and shoving women into that same mold isn’t really feminist progress.
It was refreshing to see a strong woman leader who wasn’t merely nonviolent in the sense of not being violent, but who assertively used nonviolence principles to solve the violent problem in front of her.
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For more of our posts on movie and TV reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
Life-Affirming Doctors
Part 1: Let Everybody be Able to Find a Safe Doctor
The author prefers to remain anonymous because, as she indicates, she doesn’t want her medical condition known to her family.
My primary care physician retired, so I have to find a new one. This is an opportunity for me to pick a new one who will be safer with regard to my wish to stay alive until my body dies naturally. My state is going to impose “assisted suicide” within two years, everybody concedes, so it’s not too soon to line up a doctor who will not recommend I submit to it and who does not write fatal prescriptions for anybody.
Non-religious people like me will be especially vulnerable. Everybody faces the prospect of health care people and social workers telling us: “For people in your condition, our business is to help you die. If you are so irrational you want to commit the personal irresponsibility of living until your body dies naturally, speak to your priest.” Well, I don’t have a priest.
On the other hand, when I told a state secular right-to-life organization about my challenge described in the first paragraph, the only direction they knew to point me in was to the Catholic Medical Association. But I’m not a Catholic. I might contact that organization out of desperation (after first seeing whether the so-called reactionary branch of my own nominal religion has its own medical association), but I don’t want my “advisors” to see me as conversion material. In addition, some people are turned off by certain religious affiliations, some by all religious affiliations.
Furthermore, what opportunity is there for people who aren’t in a specific religious denomination to find out about a service run by that denomination? Has the idea of an overall directory of safe doctors never occurred to many people in pro-life offices because their own religion already provides an equivalent service? Do any of them provide such a service? By considering religious medical associations sufficient, one is cutting out many people; one is reducing the chance that more people who want to continue living after being declared death-eligible will do so. One is also reducing the chance that people who want to carry a pre-born child with a terminal illness to term or sustain the life of a severely disabled family member will actually do so.
Moreover, unfortunately, religiously-oriented pro-life people I’ve had experience with sometimes inadvertently include in their statements things that alienate me.
I have a cancer that was removed by operation but is considered likely to recur in someone my age. However, its rate of growth is not set. I hope that if it grows again, it will do so extremely slowly and take pauses of dormancy. Right now I can function normally, though I must see doctors more frequently than I had to before my diagnosis.
I have told neither my blood relatives nor most of my friends about my disease, and a major reason is that all indications point to them having the mainstream attitude that “suffering” is a capital crime and “once you start suffering, we plan to start hoping that you’ll quickly die.” Imagine one’s loved ones wishing one dead!
I certainly haven’t knowingly told clergy people of my native denomination. It has embraced death-hastening and abortion so thoroughly that I might no longer have the right to call myself a member of it. Imagine one’s clergy person telling an ill or handicapped person that it is a sin to stay alive!
Needed is a set up where everybody can find a safe doctor, clandestinely if necessary. Even if the number of safe doctors diminishes, people should be able to find the ones that remain.
Needed is a national database of life-respecting medical practitioners. Even if most of its input comes from religious organizations, it should not be identified with any one denomination, and should accept input from religiously “unaffiliated” doctors as well. It should not replace the religious directories; it should be in addition to them. It should be available in every pro-life organization’s, doctor’s, and volunteer’s office. But also, its existence should be disseminated to the general public.
Part 2: Let Everybody have a Conscience
by Richard Stith, commenting on the court decision in Ontario, Canada, to compel doctors to participate in euthanasia.
Patients’ rights as well as doctors’ rights are at stake. Patients have a right to what they consider to be a good doctor, one whose conscience does not permit him or her to participate in what the patient considers to be a heinous crime. The Ontario decision deeply undermines the doctor-patient relationship of trust.
Furthermore, not only is conscience needed in order to resist the oppression of evil societal orders, like those of the Nazis, but it also functions to undergird the legitimacy of law in daily life in a just society. Without conscience to provide deep legitimacy, all law becomes just a set of technical requirements to be ignored whenever you won’t get caught.
Why would the Ontario Court not recognize that it’s encouraging sociopathic behavior by its decision? This for me is the most interesting political and philosophical question.
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For another of our blog posts on defending one’s self against euthanasia, see:
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill: The Connection between Lethal Injection and Assisted Suicide
Jacqueline H. Abernathy
by Jacqueline H. Abernathy, Ph.D., MSSW
In a recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, comedian and host John Oliver offered a scathing (albeit profane) rebuke of lethal injection as a means of execution in U.S. states with capital punishment. He detailed the issues with the drugs employed and how ineffective they are at killing: essentially torturing the condemned with a prolonged death intended to make the process appear more palatable for everyone else. With each point he made, he always came back to his premise: the lethal means are irrelevant because capital punishment is simply wrong.
I agree completely.
But then he said something quite disturbing: He claimed that assisted suicide is somehow different because terminally ill people are easier to kill.
I’ll give you a moment to try to reconcile that with his larger point. That moment is over, because it doesn’t matter how much time you have. One simply cannot reconcile the two.
Lethal injection supplies the same class of drugs as assisted suicide does. It uses the same means toward the same end: premature and imposed death. How then is killing an ill person any different from killing anyone else?
Since he brought it up, let’s clear up the confusion about how assisted suicide works. He detailed how lethal injections are inhumane, but what distinguishes assisted suicide from traditional euthanasia is that traditional euthanasia is a lethal injection whereas assisted suicide is self-administered oral ingestion of these same drugs. Hence the drugs used in assisted suicide — which have included pentobarbital, the same one that has been used in lethal injection — are an okay option when self-administered by someone who’s dying; just not for those sentenced to death. Because it’s faster or more effective at killing, says Oliver. Only there is one big problem: it’s not.
Oliver mentioned assisted suicide only to demonstrate that it supposedly offers a more humane alternative to lethal injection, which he decried as barbaric and cruel. The show presented harrowing details about how the condemned may remain conscious during their executions since the drug responsible for inducing a coma can often fail. He explained how limited availability of certain lethal drugs can inspire the use of creative alternatives with horrific consequences. Finally, he lamented how long and torturous the process was, lasting not just a few minutes as intended but in one case, nearly two hours.
What Oliver apparently does not know is that every one of his points also apply to assisted suicide.
I can concede the logic that ill people are more fragile than healthy ones, but it doesn’t take a medical degree to know that intravenous delivery of any drug is more effective than oral intake.
Reports indicate that some people who choose assisted suicide vomit their bitter lethal dose before it can be absorbed, which is why anti-nausea drugs often accompany the barbiturate overdose. People do sometimes regain consciousness just like during an execution. Just as drug makers don’t want to be involved in executions, many of them have also inflated their prices to discourage use in assisted suicide. This practice leads many people to choose cheaper drugs with consequences akin to those experienced when the state looks for more readily-available drugs for lethal injections. In both cases, death takes far longer. And while I cringe that executions have taken up to 2 hours, assisted suicide can take up to 4 days.
Oliver mentioned assisted suicide only to make his point, while failing to recognize assisted suicide’s own inhumanity. He also mentioned alternatives to lethal injection like opioid overdose and the problems associated with that. His goal was not to defend any means of killing in executions, as he always circled back to his premise: there is no right way to do a wrong thing. So how then is assisted suicide not also a very wrong thing?
Oliver’s obliviousness is typical of the mental gymnastics required for justifying other forms of legal violence: that the violence he supports is not comparable to what he condemns. So let’s make it comparable. Would he withdraw his opposition to lethal injection if the death row inmates were as ill as those who choose assisted suicide?
The answer is clearly no. It doesn’t become okay to kill a person simply because they’re sick and therefore easier to kill. This suggests a double standard between ill people and inmates, when we actually have mechanisms to treat terminally ill inmates with dignity. This is called compassionate release, and exists at the federal level and in most U.S. states.
There’s hope that the horror stories Oliver highlighted will result in judges ruling that lethal injection is unconstitutional on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual punishment. But explain this: how is what deemed to be inhumane for convicted murderers somehow acceptable for the ill and dying? It clearly isn’t. Oliver was right when he said humane society doesn’t purposefully kill. Yet medical fragility is an exception? If anything, a humane society treats those more vulnerable with greater care rather than using their illness to justify their violent and unnatural end.
Oliver said it best when he concluded: “there is no perfect way for the government to kill people.” What he fails to mention is that there’s also no perfect way for people to kill themselves. I hope John Oliver will rethink his defense of violence toward the terminally ill and extend to them the same concern he has for human beings sentenced to die by execution. Assisted suicide is just as macabre as lethal injection, but less effective at killing. Just as in capital punishment, the means are irrelevant. Killing humans is wrong even if the human is terminally ill. Even if that human is yourself.
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For more of our blog posts against euthanasia, see:
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled by Sarah Terzo
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life by Richard Stith
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean? by Rachel MacNair
Brown v. Board of Education and Me
by Bill Samuel
The Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, against racial segregation in public schools, will reach its 65th anniversary on May 17. Consistent Life Network Board member and former President Bill Samuel marks the anniversary with this personal reminiscence.
I was born in 1947 in northern New Jersey, the youngest of four children (in a white family). My father was a Methodist pastor at the time. The Church’s bishop expelled him from the local Conference when I was still a baby due to my father’s participation in an interracial prayer group. Subsequently, my father pastored a church in North Dakota for a year, and then in South Dakota for a year.
In 1953, my parents felt a call from God to go to the Deep South. They got an old truck, packed our belongings, and headed South. They had no jobs lined up but had a contact – Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia. Koinonia had been founded in 1942 by two Baptist couples who had been missionaries from an interracial intentional Christian community committed to racial equality, pacifism, and economic sharing.
We stayed at Koinonia until we moved to a farm outside of Plains, Georgia. The farm had a primitive house which lacked indoor toilet facilities and other modern amenities.
My parents erected a sign outside our home that said “Brotherhood Acres.” We heard that one local white person said about our sign, “they mean everybody” which was correct, albeit not a common understanding of the term among local whites. This realization resulted in some local whites harassing us, including the Ku Klux Klan threatening to burn us out.
We four children went to Plains Elementary School, the white elementary school for the area. I was in first grade. We found it a somewhat dangerous environment, as we were known as “n*****-lovers” and “damn Yankees,” which resulted in considerable hostility towards us, including sometimes being beaten up. Sometimes we would walk the four miles to school, as that seemed safer than braving the school bus ride.
Nationally, the most significant event that school year was on May 17, 1954, when a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregated schools were “inherently unequal.” I saw that when our family visited a local black school. It had very primitive facilities and an inadequate number of very old textbooks in extremely poor condition.
The Brown decision was a great shock to local whites, who mostly believed strongly in segregation of the races. After the decision, our friends at Koinonia Farm faced greatly increased hostility from the local white community, which had never been friendly to them. The KKK and other local whites tried—unsuccessfully—to force Koinonia Farm out through bullets, a bomb, and a boycott.
During the year we were in Plains, my parents were unemployed except for occasional day labor. However, facing adversity together brought us closer together as a family. Because of my parents’ inability to earn a living in that environment, we moved out after a year.
During the next nine years, we lived in different communities, on a farm or in a small town, in the rural Midwest. My father and the Church parted ways, and both my parents became high school teachers. None of the counties in which we lived had any African American residents, so all the schools were 100% white.
This was the era of “sundown towns”—towns with a policy of forbidding African Americans and sometimes other minorities from being inside the town limits after sundown, coupled with other racial restrictions. The communities we lived in or near weren’t formal sundown towns with signs at the town limits, but informally some of these restrictions were imposed by residents. We found this in the community of Winterset, Iowa, where my parents taught high school for five years.
One evening when my parents were coming back from a school meeting in town to our home 12 miles outside town, they came across an African American couple with their baby walking along the side of the road. They stopped to talk. The man was in the Air Force and returning to base in Omaha after being on leave. Their car had broken down on the other side of town. They walked into town and inquired whether the bus stopped there. Although Greyhound stopped in town, they were told it didn’t stop there, and they would have to go to the next town, which they were told was 5 miles away although in reality it was 25 miles away. My parents took them home to spend the night and to the bus in the morning.
My oldest sister worked for a time as a waitress in Winterset. One time, a friend from college visited with her boyfriend, who was African American. They stopped to eat lunch, and my sister served them. The owner kicked the couple out and fired my sister. She went to work for another restaurant, where the owner welcomed the business of anyone. One day, a bus full of migrant farm workers came through town and stopped at the restaurant for lunch. The owner was happy for the business, but the Sheriff came and ordered them all out of town.
After nine years in all-white communities, we went to Urbana, Illinois, where my father studied at the University of Illinois. I went to the only high school in town, which did include African Americans. This was my first year in an integrated school. That year I became involved in the civil rights movement, and I was arrested at an open housing protest in Urbana’s twin city of Champaign, said to have the most segregated housing in the country—African Americans literally lived across the tracks.
This was the 1963-64 school year, so segregation in public facilities was still common. African Americans had trouble finding hotels or motels that would accept them when traveling, so they resorted to informal networks. Some friends of my parents asked my parents whether an African American family they knew could stay with us while traveling through. Of course, we said yes. They had a boy about my age, who asked if I could take him to get a haircut. We walked to the nearest barber shop, but they said they didn’t know how to cut his hair. The next barber shop said the same. The third barber shop did agree to cut his hair, but did a poor job.
The next year my father got a job teaching at a black college, now defunct, in Lawrenceville, Virginia. Virginia responded to the Brown decision with an official campaign of massive resistance. While the courts rather quickly overturned these laws, it took a long time for many Virginia schools to begin desegregation. For this school district, 10 years after the Brown decision, it was the first year of token desegregation – the “freedom of choice” system in which students could be registered in the school of their choice. Most African American families were afraid to register in formerly all-white schools for fear of losing their jobs, but a dozen registered for the formerly white high school where I registered.
The school district didn’t decide until the last day how to handle transportation. They informed students of their bus assignments by phone. Because the local phone company refused us service on the grounds we were “n*****-lovers,” they could not notify us. I went with a neighbor who was one of the school’s first African American students. The district decided on segregated buses, so the driver was surprised to see me but let me on. Our bus got to school late each day and left early, because it had to first serve the black high school.
When we got to school, they were having an opening assembly. They read a list of names of students to go to a separate assembly — all the others on my bus. In the main assembly they stated, “Normally it is our policy to welcome new students. This year, it is our policy to ostracize new students.” At lunch time, I sat with others from my bus. I think that’s when the school decided to classify me as a “Negro” student. There was only one white student in the school who would talk to me (other than to insult me).
On May 10, 2019, civil rights projects at two universities issued a report assessing the situation 65 years after the Brown decision. It found that “intense levels of segregation…are on the rise once again.” My home state of Maryland is one of four states in which the majority of African American students attend intensely segregated schools (schools at least 90% non-white). A major factor is housing segregation.
White supremacy is deeply embedded in our culture in the USA. It will take sustained effort over the long haul involving people from all ethnic groups to uproot it. We all need to do our part.
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Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which is one of the cases we cover in Our Experience with Overturning Terrible Court Decisions
For more of our posts from Bill Samuel, see:
Does the Consistent Life Ethic Water Down Life Issues?
Supporting the Dignity of Every Life
A Way Beyond the Abortion Wars? (book review)
For some of our posts focused primarily on racism, see:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
“Somewhere Else When the Trigger Is Pulled”: Orwell and War
by John Whitehead
This is a follow-up to our post Recognizing Humanity: Orwell and the Consistent Life Ethic, in which John stated that Orwell’s position on war needed to be treated separately. This year is the 70th anniversary of Orwell’s most famous book, 1984.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
As an opponent of capitalism, imperialism, and tyranny, George Orwell filled his writings with fierce condemnations of various de-humanizing injustices. War was harder for him to condemn, though. Sometimes Orwell supported war—occasionally with shocking callousness. Other times he criticized war’s violence in ways peace advocates would appreciate.
What psychologists call “distancing” may have played a role in Orwell’s ambivalent attitudes toward war. When circumstances forced him to encounter the target of wartime violence up close, his support for violence faltered. He displayed more of his characteristic humanity. This pattern confirms a major theme of his work: how injustice frequently relies on obscuring facts, and how important seeing injustice’s victims clearly is. Advocates for a consistent life ethic can learn a lesson from this.
Orwell’s Embrace of War
Orwell volunteered to fight on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and almost died when he was shot in the throat. Later, after initially opposing a prospective war with Germany, he came to support the British war effort in World War II. He tried to enlist in the military but was rejected because of respiratory health problems (which would ultimately kill him at 46). Orwell instead served in the civil defense militia, the Home Guard, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC.
In writing about both these wars, Orwell could be extremely savage. Reflecting on the Spanish war, he draws the bleak conclusion “if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother.”
The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.
Review of Koestler’s Spanish Testament, 1938
During World War II, Orwell defended the British bombing of German cities and resulting civilian deaths. Allowing that “no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust,” he nevertheless insisted that “there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features…all talk of ‘limiting’ or ‘humanising’ war is sheer humbug” (“As I Please” column, May 19, 1944).
Yet Orwell clearly felt uneasy about indiscriminate killing, qualifying his endorsement of bombing with “Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable” but arguing that relatively few children died in bombing.
These and similar statements show a man who not only accepted war but believed war’s inherent violence justified abandoning even relatively mild restraints.
Orwell and War’s Horrors
Other statements offer a very different picture, though. During his Spanish war experience, Orwell had the opportunity to kill another man—not by dropping a bomb from a plane but by shooting him at relatively close range:
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through a gap in the parapet.
As the sunrise threatened to expose them, Orwell and his comrade prepared to leave their position
when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran.
I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist,” he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” 1942
Orwell draws no lesson from the incident. Perhaps one lesson, though, is that a man who balks at killing an enemy soldier given the soldier’s obvious humanity would balk at killing countless civilians–if he had to do it personally, at close range. That Orwell could write so callously about bombing suggests he was helped by his distance, as a civilian back in Britain, from the actual killing, which was already being conducted by long-range means.
Elsewhere Orwell criticized such psychological distancing from violence. He condemned the poet W. H. Auden for cavalierly referring to politics involving “necessary murder.” The term
could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is “liquidation,” or some other soothing phrase. Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.
“Inside the Whale,” 1940
One might apply Orwell’s own principles to say that to endorse actions that “burn holes in children” is only possible for someone who is elsewhere when the burning is done.
When visiting Allied-occupied Germany as a war correspondent, Orwell witnessed another journalist undergo a change that could, in different circumstances, have been Orwell’s. The man was Belgian and, having had his country invaded by Nazi Germany, had reason to hate the enemy. Entering a town, he and Orwell saw
A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blossoming everywhere.
The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he confided in me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty-five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio. For several days after this his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier. He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliations the Germans were undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of looting.
“Revenge Is Sour,” 1945
Dresden 1945
Such sights did not change Orwell’s attitude toward the war and bombing. Perhaps, though, if the full reality of the violence he had been advocating could somehow have been made more vivid to him he might have undergone a similar change.
Orwell’s Challenge
That someone as decent as Orwell could callously endorse total war, contrary to his tendency to recognize the humanity of so many—the poor, the preborn, even Fascist soldiers—is deeply troubling. Many influences doubtless shaped his attitudes, but the role that psychological distancing can play in someone accepting violence is worth close attention.
Consistent-life-ethic advocates must constantly struggle against such distancing. The victims of violence and their suffering need to be seen clearly, despite technologies or euphemisms (“collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “termination of pregnancy”) that might obscure them. The author of “Politics and the English Language” would have appreciated such efforts.
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See the previous post on George Orwell
For more of our posts on literature, see:
Right-to-Life Issues in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Literature
Dickens (Christmas literature)
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Abby Johnson Remembers Dan Berrigan
Both Abby Johnson and Dan Berrigan are Consistent Life endorsers.
Abby Johnson ministers to abortion clinic workers to help them leave the industry and heal through her organization And Then There Were None and her book, Unplanned, recently adapted as a feature film, which tells the story of her conversion from Planned Parenthood Clinic Director to pro-life advocate. The movie did very well, coming in fourth at the box office in the U.S. the weekend it was released in March.
The original version of this was written immediately after Dan Berrigan died, in unfulfilled hopes of being published in a Catholic publication. We’ve updated it for the third anniversary of his death.
Religious and secular media outlets, blogs, and religious news stories were filled three years ago this week with news about Fr. Dan Berrigan, S.J., who died of natural causes on April 30th, 2016, at the age of 94. Few know that this noted international anti-war activist also embraced other issues of justice, including abortion.
Many of us, including me, were too young to have read about his anti-Vietnam war activism in the 1960s and 1970s, and his arrest protesting nuclear weapons in the 1980s. Fr. Berrigan’s nonviolence was radically rooted in the Gospel of Life, and that led him to also protest abortion. In the late 1980’s and early 90’s, Fr. Berrigan participated in Faith and Resistance retreats in Rochester, New York. In 1989, after he presided at a mass outside an Army Depot in Seneca County, he joined protestors trespassing over a fence into the depot and was arrested. Immediately after being booked and released, he and other consistent life demonstrators sat for three hours at the Ob-Gyn clinic in the Highland Hospital of Rochester, New York, convincing several women not to have abortions. The clinic closed three hours early that day.
Again in 1991, he was arrested for peacefully trespassing at the Rochester Planned Parenthood. Hours before, he had participated with other consistent life ethic activists in erecting a cross at the federal building, protesting US support for UN sanctions in Iraq that were killing children.
Fr. Berrigan saw “an interlocking directorate of death that binds the whole culture . . . an unspoken agreement that we will solve our problems by killing people . . . that certain people are expendable. . . . We need to cherish and embrace and foster life in all areas that from womb to old age.”
The Culture of Death lies to us. It tells us that abortion should be categorized as human rights, women’s rights, or reproductive rights. The Consistent Life Ethic categorizes abortion where it belongs, as an issue of violence alongside euthanasia, war, and the death penalty.
When Amnesty International began promoting “abortion rights” in 2007, Fr. Berrigan said, “One cannot support an organization financially or even individually that is contravening something very serious in our ethic.” Even though Fr. Berrigan strongly supported international human rights and the abolition of torture, some of his fans in the peace movement were pro-choice and criticized him for not supporting Amnesty International.
Fr. Berrigan remained faithful. His faithfulness challenged everyone to look at the connections of all life issues under the Consistent Life Ethic. Because it was challenging, he faced criticism from both some people in the peace movement and also some in the pro-life movement.
It can be hard sometimes to accept all the Church’s teachings on life when our own minds and hearts haven’t taken the leap of acceptance. Once we accept it, it can be hard to stay faithful. We might hear harsh words or rude social media comments because we stand for one or more life issues when people in our lives strongly disagree.
That’s okay. They are imperfect sinners just like us.
Every time I post something on Facebook about ending the death penalty, I receive some nasty comments and lose some Facebook followers that I thought were truly pro-life. I’m not surprised anymore. When we are persecuted for standing up for God’s truth, we are blessed.
So if you struggle with maintaining a belief in the Consistent Life Ethic, stay with the struggle in prayer. Be willing to keep your heart open to what God has to show you.
I like to say that we are consistently pro-life because we’re consistently pro-love. We try to love even those who persecute us. Respect for life and nonviolence come from love. Love is of God. I once thought my pro-choice opinion correct and I often said unkind things about pro-life activists until God showed me the truth. A local Coalition for Life group loved and prayed for me while I worked at Planned Parenthood, even though I at times harshly criticized them and their work. Now I’m transformed and some of them are my closest friends.
I urge all of us not to close our hearts. All hearts can be converted.
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For our commemoration of Daniel Berrigan at the time of his death, see Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
For a poem he wrote, see “Seamless Garment” – Poem by Daniel Berrigan
For more of our posts on notable people, see:
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) / Julianne Wiley
Is it Too Late? 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer
Valentine Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass / Carol Crossed
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic? / Rob Arner
How to Value People Like Mister Rogers / Andrew Hocking
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero / Julia Smucker
Elizabeth Cady Stanton / Mary Krane Derr & Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier (1844-1870): Restellism Exposed
Remembering Rep. Walter B. Jones, Jr. / Patrick O’Neill
When Linking Abortion with Other Violence Comes Naturally to Pro-lifers
Part 2: Consistency
Strengthens the Case
Part 1: Connections focuses on how opposing abortion using a broad right-to-life principle strengthens the case against other kinds of violence. Here, we do the reverse, and focus on how opposing other kinds of violence strengthens the case against abortion.
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Editor-at-Large, National Review
Symposium: Whole Life vs. Pro-Life?
I frequently write about abortion and assisted suicide. Travesties of justice, each hurts the most vulnerable among us, ending innocent lives and leaving trails of misery to poison the lives of those directly involved—and Heaven knows how many others… I also have been wearing a relic of Mother Cabrini—the saint who is the patroness of immigrants—and praying for peace and progress and a humane approach to immigration policies. There are myriad issues, affecting every stage of life, that need to be urgently addressed. Start somewhere.
Jack Hunter
Pro-life Means Anti-drone, The American Conservative, October 25, 2012
For pro-lifers, there must be a question: If life is sacred, how can we justify killing so many innocent children? Some might say, “Well, that’s just war. We make mistakes.”
Yet, I don’t know a single pro-lifer who would agree with rectifying the mistake of an unplanned pregnancy by making yet another mistake in terminating that pregnancy. If we justify the killing of innocent children abroad because their lives are somehow worth less, how is this different from liberals who dehumanize the personhood of a fetus?
Richard A. Viguerie
When Governments Kill: A Conservative Argues for Abolishing the Death Penalty,Sojourners, 2009
Conservatives have every reason to believe the death penalty system is no different from any politicized, costly, inefficient, bureaucratic, government-run operation . . . But here the end result is the end of someone’s life. In other words, it’s a government system that kills people. Those of us who oppose abortion believe that it is perhaps the greatest immorality to take an innocent life. While the death penalty is supposed to take the life of the guilty, we know that is not always the case. It should have shocked the consciences of conservatives when various government prosecutors withheld exculpatory, or opposed allowing DNA-tested, evidence in death row cases. To conservatives, that should be deemed as immoral as abortion . . . But even when guilt is certain, there are many downsides to the death penalty system.
Sam Brownback
as Republican United States Senator
U.S. News and World Report,
April 11, 2005. p. 34
If we’re trying to establish a culture of life, it’s difficult to have the state sponsoring executions.
as Governor of Kansas when a bill was being debated
Topeka Capital Journal, March 17, 2014, online
[Brownback] did say in an interview . . . that anti-abortion activists had increasingly been drawn into the capital punishment conversation. “You hear it being connected,” Brownback said. “You hear it more frequently now.”
Tom Neuville
leading Republican on the Minnesota’s Senate Judiciary Committee
speaking on Governor Pawlenty’s efforts to reinstate the death penalty
Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 7, 2003
Life is a gift from God. It isn’t up to us to take it away. Whether you take an innocent life of a baby, or of a person who has committed a heinous act, it is still an act at our hands, and it makes us a less caring and less sensitive society.
Christian Josi
Former Executive Director, American Conservative Union
Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty
My fundamental problems with the death penalty began as a result of my personal concern, echoed by many on all sides of the political spectrum, that it was inconsistent for one to be “pro-life” on the one hand and condone government execution on the other. . .
How can a conservative who rejects the culture of death draw much of a distinction between a government employee administering death to an incarcerated individual and an abortionist ending the life of an unborn child? Of course, the unborn are innocent while those sentenced to death are in most cases guilty. Still, a life is a life.
Colby Coash
Nebraska state senator
instrumental in the legislature’s temporary repeal of death penalty, final vote May 27, 2015
quoted in Time Magazine, May 20, 2015
I’m a pro-life guy. I couldn’t reconcile my pro-life beliefs regarding the unborn with doing something different with the condemned.
Laura Peredo
president of Ravens Respect Life
at Benedictine College, March 17, 2015,at a press conference supporting a law to repeal the death penalty in the U.S. state of Kansas
No crime can change the fundamental truth that every human life possesses dignity from the moment of conception until natural death. I am one of a growing number of young people who support repealing the death penalty—a reform that demonstrates our unwavering commitment to safeguarding life at all stages, without exceptions.
Christopher O. Tollefsen
On the Dangers of Thanking God for the Atom Bomb, Public Discourse, August 5, 2015
Each August I am rather struck by the vociferous support for the atomic bombings, often expressed by those with whom I share what I take to be basic pro-life commitments to the inviolability of human life. . . .
There can be no doubt . . . that the bombings were carried out with the intention of inflicting massive civilian casualties in order to demoralize Japan and break its leadership’s will. These civilians included the aged and infirm, women and children, all of whom were innocent in the relevant sense of just war doctrine—they posed no threat—and the last of whom were categorically innocent in every way. . . .
Its proponents even now justify it primarily . . . not by denying the intention of killing the innocent, but by reference to casualties prevented . . . [thus passing over] the subsequent history of our nation, a history that includes further acts of indiscriminate killing during the Vietnam War, a standing resolution to destroy the Soviet Union if it were first to attack us with nuclear weapons, and the eventual adoption by the nation in its domestic affairs of death as a solution to be embraced for its consequences—before birth, as in abortion or human embryo destructive research—or at the end of life, in [Physician-Assisted Suicide] and euthanasia. These are, sadly, natural choices for a country swayed by consequentialist justifications; the way to those choices was paved by the literally catastrophic choice to destroy Japanese cities (as before them, German cities) for the sake of military gain.
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For a set of quotations from abortion doctors, nurses, and sympathizers that link abortion to war (as a way of justifying abortion), see Is Abortion Against Peace Principles?
See our blog posts for more sets of quotations:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills