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
When Linking Abortion with Other Violence Comes Naturally to Pro-lifers
(compiled by Rachel MacNair)
Part 1: Connections
Show Importance
One common criticism of the consistent life ethic is the idea that, when opposing abortion, adding other issues is intended to be a way of watering down abortion, and giving politicians (especially Catholic politicians) a pass by letting them proclaim themselves good on other issues even if they’re bad on abortion.
Consistent lifers have responded that declaring abortion to be an issue of violence to be treated like other issues of violence strengthens the case against abortion. Instead of giving a pass, we’re challenging the politicians: if you’re good on other issues, why aren’t you consistent by opposing abortion as well?
But there’s another important point: independent of considering the consistent life ethic, right-to-lifers themselves often find it natural to use other issues of violence to explain how very important it is to oppose abortion. Here we offer a few examples.
Carol Tobias
President, National Right to Life Committee
Societies that have come down on the side of life have generally thrived, their citizens enjoying a better chance of living good and fulfilling lives. Societies that have chosen to disregard the basic right to life have almost universally broken down into chaos and cynicism. Chaos like the kind we’ve seen in recent acts of senseless mass violence . . .
The fight for the right to life is so much bigger than the media will admit . . . it’s also about what kind of society we and our children will spend our lives in.Can we trust that our laws and customs and popular culture will nurture the value of each of the people we care about – young and old? Or are we just disposable “products,” liable to be killed or left to die because an abortionist, or a terrorist, or a bureaucrat trying to cut costs in a national health care program wants us dead?
E-mail message, April 16, 2013 – “Every Human Life is Precious”
We also understand that the fight for the Right to Life follows certain historical patterns of other great causes before us.
So we understand that when we pass a law to ban late abortions in one of the states, we are paralleling our historical cousins who passed laws to end slavery in their states. When we see abortion numbers fall sharply, we know we are saving lives just as other noble charitable projects worked to reduce life-stealing hunger and disease.
E-mail message, February 2, 2016
Mark Crutcher
Life Dynamics
In a roundtable conversation, Mark is discussing Republicans who think the abortion issue should be toned down.
These guys say we ought to separate the “moral” issues from the “economic” issues . . . [Prochoicers] don’t have the moral foundation to make these economic decisions . . . What these guys ought to be saying is, even if we don’t care about abortion . . . we ought to be willing to at least use that as a barometer for what kind of economic decisions they’ll make. . . The military. If you think that going to war doesn’t have moral components to it, you’re nuts. And if we say we don’t want to deal with these moral issues, we want to deal with the money and the military and the terrorism – if you don’t apply morals to those issues, you’ve lost your mind.
LifeTalk News, October 1, 2010
Life Talk News: Troy Newman, Rev. Johnny Hunter, Fr. Frank Pavone, Jill Stanek, Mark Crutcher.
Mark has criticized the consistent life ethic, but Johnny and Frank are supporters.
Richard M. Doerflinger
Former Director, Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Where did we get this corrosive climate, in which people can ignore contrary arguments about any issue simply by asserting the worthlessness of any human being who gets in the way of their own goals and desires? Theories will differ. Personally I would offer this: We have had one of the world’s most extreme policies allowing the destruction of unexpected or inconvenient unborn children for over four decades now. . . We are the only Western nation that still regularly uses the death penalty as a response to crime. In recent decades there have been powerful and well-funded campaigns, successful in five states and the District of Columbia, to have society declare that a good way to get rid of the problems of terminally ill patients is to assist them in getting rid of themselves . . . . Isn’t it likely that these developments have led some people to think they have a right to treat inconvenient other people as worthless compared to themselves?
A Distinctive Catholic Vision for Politics
Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life
Peace is more than the absence of war. The foundation of peace is justice, that everyone’s rights are protected and everyone’s dignity is recognized. . . . To fight abortion, therefore, is one of the ways that we work for peace. Abortion completely oppresses and diminishes the rights of the child who is killed. Rather than fostering right relationships, it destroys them, starting with the most basic relationship between a mother and her own child.
William Brennan
Author
From Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives
(The second edition has a different sub-title: The War of Words Against the Victims)
A remarkable strain of consistency permeates the language employed to highlight the human and spiritual nature of individuals and groups subjected to massive victimization. The contemporary opponents of abortion and euthanasia rely on the same range of positive expressions to defend the unwanted unborn and born of today that were used to defend Native Americans, African Americans, Soviet people, Jews, women, and other targets of past oppression.
From Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives
(The second edition has a different sub-title: The War of Words Against the Victims)
Added 09.30.25:
Lila Rose
Yale Political Union tightening security after Kirk assassination
by Orion Kim, Staff Reporter,, Yale News, Sep 17, 2025 quoting Lila Rose of Live Action in a debate at Yale University
In a claim that drew many hisses from the audience, [Lila Rose] compared abortion to historical examples of people being deemed “subhuman,” including Jews during the Holocaust, slavery, and Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
“When you strip people of their humanity, you open the door to every kind of violence,” she declared.
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Part 2: Consistency, focuses on the other direction: how opposing other kinds of violence strengthens the case against abortion.
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
Recognizing Humanity: Orwell and the Consistent Life Ethic
by John Whitehead
We’re 70 years from the publication of one of the 20th century’s most influential books: 1984. George Orwell’s 1949 novel about future life under an extremely repressive regime has shaped political debate and popular culture for decades. The novel’s anniversary will doubtless prompt further reflections. I reflect on Orwell’s concern for defending human dignity against many threats—a concern that resembled the consistent ethic of life.
George Orwell didn’t accept the ethic as the Consistent Life Network understands it, since he supported war, even serving in the 1930s as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. While Orwell’s views on war were complex (and deserve separate treatment), he wasn’t a peace advocate.
Nevertheless, his writings criticize other threats to life. The book 1984 is famous for its portrayal of cruelty and misery inflicted by government tyranny. Orwell’s other writings also criticize abortion, the death penalty, racism, and poverty.
A recurring motif in Orwell’s writings is a moment when, amid conditions that de-humanize victims of oppression and violence, someone recognizes the victim’s humanity. As our member group Rehumanize International might put it, these are moments of re-humanization in unlikely situations. Such vivid moments turn up repeatedly in Orwell’s writing.
The Humanity of the Poor
Being a democratic socialist who spent significant periods living among and observing poor people, poverty was probably Orwell’s greatest concern. His book The Road to Wigan Pier documents the lives of coal miners and other working-class people in northern England. A famous passage describes Orwell’s sight, from a passing train, of one woman:
As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us”, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
The Humanity of the Colonized
Orwell opposed British imperialism partly because he had once helped serve it. During 1922-1927, he was a police officer in the British colony of Burma (present-day Myanmar). These first-hand experiences of Empire contributed to his anti-imperialism in later writings. During a trip to Morocco (then a French colony), Orwell described how a person’s humanity can be obscured by racism—and cross-examines his own attitudes:
When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in—when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces—besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood…and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing—that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight.
“Marrakech,” 1939
The Humanity of the Condemned
The 1931 essay “A Hanging” describes an execution Orwell allegedly witnessed. Some dispute the story’s accuracy, but even if fiction, it still evokes horror at capital punishment and empathy for the person executed.
Walking with the condemned to the gallows, Orwell writes
I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me…And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery…His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.
The Humanity of the Preborn
Pro-lifers are stereotypically viewed in the United States as political conservatives, strongly religious, and usually Catholic. Orwell matched none of these stereotypes, being a socialist who wasn’t religious (and who intensely disliked Catholicism). Nevertheless, an early, lesser-known novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, conveys the humanity of the preborn as powerfully as any pro-life leaflet.
The protagonist, Gordon, and his girlfriend Rosemary are confronted with her unexpected pregnancy. As they discuss whether to marry, she mentions “another way,” saying it could be “done for only five pounds.”
That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words “a baby” took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers…Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together—as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating—a blasphemy, if that word has any meaning.
Gordon goes to the public library and looks up fetal development. He tries to calculate how old the child would be and find the corresponding pictures:
He came on a print of a nine weeks foetus. It gave him a shock to see it, for he had not expected it to look in the least like that. It was a deformed, gnomelike thing, a sort of clumsy caricature of a human being, with a huge domed head as big as the rest of its body. In the middle of the great blank expanse of head there was a tiny button of an ear. The thing was in profile; its boneless arm was bent, and one hand, crude as a seal’s flipper, covered its face—fortunately, perhaps…It was a monstrous thing, and yet strangely human. It surprised him that they should begin looking human so soon. He had pictured something much more rudimentary; a mere blob with a nucleus, like a bubble of frog spawn. But it must be very tiny, of course.
Thinking the child might be younger, he turns to a six-weeks picture:
A really dreadful thing this time—a thing he could hardly even bear to look at. Strange that our beginnings and endings are so ugly—the unborn as ugly as the dead…Its huge head, as though too heavy to hold upright, was bent over at right angles at the place where its neck ought to have been. There was nothing you could call a face, only a wrinkle representing the eye—or was it the mouth?…
He pored for a long time over the two pictures. Their ugliness made them more credible and therefore more moving. His baby had seemed real to him from the moment when Rosemary spoke of abortion; but it had been a reality without visual shape—something that happened in the dark and was only important after it had happened. But here was the actual process taking place. Here was the poor ugly thing, no bigger than a gooseberry, that he had created by his heedless act. Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him. Besides, it was a bit of himself—it was himself. Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?
Gordon and Rosemary marry and establish a household together. The novel ends with Rosemary first feeling the child move; Gordon contemplates how “Somewhere in there, in the safe, warm, cushioned darkness, it was alive and stirring.”
Conclusion
Orwell was a great writer who expressed himself with brutal clarity, and without the jargon and euphemisms which so often hide violence. His assertions of people’s humanity in the face of threats from tyranny to poverty, imperialism to abortion, are worth reading and remembering today.
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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?
An Example of Why the Peace Movement is in Deep Trouble
by Rachel MacNair
Ego and Anger
Richard Rohr, OFM, is a Franciscan Friar, a prolific author, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), a CLN member group. One major point made by CAC is that if we take action on nonviolence without contemplation, there’s a danger we’ll bring in ego-centered thoughts and unconstructive anger – which could end up doing more harm than good.
Richard has also been for many years an endorser of our Consistent Life Mission Statement. As he put it:
If we do not have a seamless garment of justice that applies to all of our relationships and all of society, we will not be taken seriously on any individual hot-button issue. If we do not seek and pursue justice across the board, then any concerns for or against issues of abortion, homosexuality, immigration, women’s rights, prison reform, opposition to war, etc., should and will be seen as a small rag that has been torn from any clean or consistent cloth of thinking. It is seen as mere self-interest or angry moralizing.
Daily Meditation, November 19, 2010
Rachel at the CAC conference with a cardboard cut-out of Richard Rohr
The “Action” Part
I went to a CAC conference, “The Universal Christ,” on March 28-31, 2019. I expected there would be, as is normal with 2,300 attenders, a variety of opinions on the consistent life ethic, including people who’d never heard of it. Richard Rohr expounded on the contemplation aspect. Most of the comment on action and specific issues of inclusion came from the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, and she did an excellent job. Except for just a few deadly minutes.
In her first talk, she selected five areas of concern where people are being badly mistreated, and the first concerns that she mentioned I share.
Suddenly, she made a remark about how maybe government ought to more vigorously regulate Viagra and vasectomies – and said we knew where she was going with this.
Oh, yes. I knew. Her point was that if there are abortion regulations for women, then shouldn’t we also regulate medicine specific to men?
I’ve heard this astonishing non-sequitur many times. I’ve seen speakers think it was clever. Yet it completely ignores the actual point in contention. Given how thoughtful and well-reasoned the presentation had been up to this point, this sudden turn to sarcasm was by itself jarring to me.
She quoted Jim Wallis of Sojourners as saying he thought Trump was so bad that Christians couldn’t justify voting for him even for the sake of a set of issues he listed, one of which was abortion. This left a one-sided impression of what Jim thinks.
Jim is another endorser of our Mission Statement, and Sojourners is a member group. And Jim has indeed been quite exercised about Trump, as has Richard Rohr, along with several others of our endorsers (and me). But he also said, in a piece called Politically Homeless:
Moral issues of intrinsic concern to the faith community are often disregarded or disrespected by Democratic Party orthodoxy, which often takes extreme or overly strident views on issues like abortion. Many of us in the faith community regard abortion as a moral issue and part of a consistent ethic of life and seamless garment of concern for the many threats to human life and dignity. . . we find the Democrats even reluctant to make a commitment to reducing abortion by supporting women with health care, nutrition, and social services. Many in Democratic leadership don’t seem to want to talk about or even being willing to use the word “reduction” as a positive term in relation to abortion. . . . While a younger generation in the faith community is indeed more welcoming of LGBTQ people than their parents have been, they are not so welcoming of abortion as the Democratic elites seem to be, and the Democratic Party needs to figure that out.
Sojourners, January 4, 2018
Jacqui went on with the normal over-simplified rhetoric about how government shouldn’t have control over women’s bodies. As is customary, she was totally oblivious to what that assertion means: women who’ve felt traumatized by their abortions should be denied the right to petition their legislatures for a redress of their grievances. Their voices are discounted and excluded.
But then came the assertion that set my heart to pounding and put tears in my eyes: she said while she’d never had an abortion herself, if she had ever gotten pregnant and been told there was a disability, she’d want to talk to her pastor about it and didn’t want government interfering.
Dropped into the middle of a presentation stressing the importance of being inclusive of everybody, she expressed intense bigotry against people with disabilities. I’d say one can’t get much more bigoted than proclaiming it’s acceptable to chop a child into pieces just because she has an unspecified disability. And this was her only mention of people with disabilities.
Oh, but it’s worse. When she said this, she got applause from the crowd.
I was suddenly struck with this fear: Trump may win re-election because so many anti-Trump people are deliberately making themselves unattractive to tender-hearted people who are grieved over massive violence to millions of babies.
In a speech on inclusiveness, she had also deliberately excluded, by not even acknowledging that they exist, an entire category of human beings: unborn children. This is a category that every human being ever born has once fit into.
I fear greatly that the practical effect of this kind of inconsistency, shared by many in the crowd and in the country, will benefit Trump. I think a good case could be made that Trump would never have won the first election without it.
The Apology
There were no literature tables, no leafleting allowed (I put a handful of our leaflets on one table where others had put theirs), and in the one short Q & A I was never able to get to the microphone in that huge crowd. I did have lengthy conversations with a staff person, who was sympathetic but couldn’t offer me any method of redress beyond one-on-one conversations, and he accepted the two books I offered to donate for CAC’s staff library.
In Jacqui’s second session, she apologized if she had offended anybody. This at least had the advantage of communicating lack of unanimity.
But she wanted to clarify her position. Her position was stated more humbly this time. But the apology was thereby turned into an opportunity to have yet more stage time for a “pro-choice” position. Unchallenged.
Genetic testing was mentioned, but the bulk was the normal argument about how women need a choice.
The case I’d make (if I had a chance) is that this assertion actually helps patriarchy, by implying the absurd idea that only women who freely choose abortions are having them. It lets off the hook men who are pressuring, threatening, dictating, or withdrawing support. It helps them to do so self-righteously.
I think the crowd was full of people who hadn’t thought about that point, and would benefit greatly from having it brought to their attention. Instead, we had a bandwagon.
This leads to another observation: the stark contrast between her abortion comments and the rest of what she said. She was normally speaking her own words, well thought out and innovative. Not words you’d expect from just anybody, but what she herself says. Yet on abortion, she was using other people’s words. I know because I’ve heard them. Over and over. For decades. With such oversimplification, she struck me as stepping out of character.
Without Contemplation
Without contemplation – either individual reflection or group discussion – there’s a danger of ego-centered thoughts and unconstructive anger.
Is it ego-centered to declare the right not to give birth to a child with disabilities? What does this do to inclusiveness for born children and adults with disabilities? What does it say to the millions of people worldwide who regard being female as a disability?
Is it unconstructive anger to demand that tender-hearted people vote differently, scolding them for regarding their concern as most important, when one hasn’t spent time to understand where their angst is coming from?
Of course, I also fall prey to the ego-and-anger problem – I think we all do. But CAC is right to point out the dangers are very real.
I’m also not implying that the Democrats would be OK if only their abortion position changed. After all, Obama presided over modernizing nuclear weapons and civilian-killing drones. But Trump is on people’s minds now as a major threat to peace, justice, and inclusion.
One word I’d use for a small bit of something toxic in a large positive set of justice proposals is poison. For so long, the abortion issue has been poison in the midst of peace advocacy. I think this incident is yet another illustration of this.
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Dr. Lewis Responds
Editor’s Note: Dr. Lewis was sent a pre-publication copy of this post and asked if she wished to offer thoughts. Here is her response in full:
“Rachel, it seems you disagree with me. I am pro-life and pro-choice and here is my talk: https://www.facebook.com/CenterforActionandContemplation/videos/427055894770821/. Thank you.”
Explaining Belligerency
by Rachel MacNair
Why did U.S. slaveholders insist on expanding slavery into new territories, despite existing political wisdom that keeping the practice out of places where it might encounter stronger opposition would be more practical? Why are there advocates for war, or for abortion and euthanasia, who can’t stand the idea of conscientious objection, even by few enough people that it has no impact on the practices? Why do people act so very belligerently that they end up harming rather than helping the violent institution they wish to promote?
The key to understanding this is a theory from psychology that fits right in to the way consistent-lifers think.
Consistency is a Psychological Need
Human beings seem to have a basic psychological need to have consistency, stability, and order in how they see the world. When information threatens their previous views, they feel uneasy. They resort to defensive maneuvers: screening out upsetting experiences, denying obvious facts, or – most importantly here – reinforcing beliefs by making aggressive and belligerent declarations.
In 1957, Leon Festinger introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance, and it helps explain a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Hundreds of studies have backed this up: people with ideas in conflict, or ideas and behavior in conflict, feel a tension. They’ll search for ways – sometimes markedly innovative ways – to avoid the discomfort of inconsistency.
That some wish to screen out unpleasant facts or ideas is hardly surprising. The reason cognitive dissonance has been widely accepted as an explanation for what would otherwise be bewildering behavior is that it explains dogmatic insistence on something that’s been proven wrong – and taking actions to reinforce the belief by getting other people to share it.
Irrational Behavior: U.S. Slavery
When slavery started to be criticized by a handful of people, and then by larger numbers, the slaveholders could have just ignored this. Instead, they insisted on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This aggressively expanded slavery. Northerners now had the spectacle of manacled blacks being led back into bondage. Slavery was harder to ignore – and seeing its reality was more effective than mere words from abolitionists.
Slaveholders’ biggest triumph, and biggest downfall, was the Dred Scott decision in which a slaveholding Supreme Court majority gave slaveholders everything they wanted. A lot of non-slaveholding people who would have been happy to just leave the whole thing alone were pushed into action. The distinction between slave states and free states became unclear, and indifference wasn’t possible anymore. The dynamics of the slaveholders’ drive had generated an opposition.
John Noonan comments:
Why did the slaveholders act as if driven by the Furies to their own destruction? . . . Why did they take such risks, why did they persist beyond prudent calculation? The answer must be that in a moral question of this kind, turning on basic concepts of humanity, you cannot be content that your critics are feeble and ineffective, you cannot be content with their practical tolerance of your activities. You want, in a sense you need, actual acceptance, open approval. If you cannot convert your critics by argument, at least by law you can make them recognize that your course is the course of the country.
A Private Choice, New York: The Free Press, 1979, p.82
Abraham Lincoln recognized this dynamic in his famous speech at Cooper Institute in 1860. He was asked what would convince the slaveholders that his party had no designs on their property or the Constitution. He replied, “This, and this only: Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
Irrational Behavior: War
A common problem in wars is “effort justification”: the belief that if one has put resources and energy into achieving a certain outcome, that outcome must be valuable. More effort needs to be put in to protect and justify the effort already made. When the only alternative is to admit all the effort was wasted, especially to admit stupid behavior or poor judgment, then the effort must continue. The continuation of the American war in Vietnam for years after it seemed clear to many that the effort would not achieve the desired result is one of the most cited examples. Currently, we see this in the various parts of the “War on Terror” – especially America’s longest war in Afghanistan.
An emotionally gripping form of effort justification is the idea that we can only honor the bravery of those soldiers who died or suffered serious injuries by sending more soldiers to suffer the same fate. This argument distracts from looking honestly at whether the war can be rationally justified.
Irrational Behavior: Weaponizing Medicine
The sweeping nature of Roe v. Wade has been likened to Dred Scott. A gradual approach of opening up abortion was working, and may have continued to work. Roe brought a backlash which is still going strong about five decades later.
There was an initially successful attack on “informed consent” or “right-to-know” legislation, letting women know of fetal development and possible complications. In one of the many follow-up cases from Roe in the U.S. Supreme Court, the 1987 Thornburgh decision, which overturned the legislation, Justice Blackmun said the information wasn’t “always relevant to a woman’s decision, and may serve only to confuse her, and heighten her anxiety.”(Thornburgh, 476 U.S. at 762.)
Legally protecting people from getting information just because some think it might not be relevant is unprecedented. This established a constitutional right to ignorance for women. This case was explicitly overturned in the Casey decision of 1992.
On the startling idea that anyone with scruples about abortion or euthanasia shouldn’t even be allowed in the health field, Wesley Smith put it well in Pro-lifers: Get Out of Medicine!:
There is a reason that moral diversity is under attack in health care. When doctors refuse to abort a fetus, participate in assisted suicide, excise healthy organs, or otherwise follow their consciences about morally contentious matters, they send a powerful message: Just because a medical act is legal doesn’t make it right. Such a clarion witness is intolerable to those who want to weaponize medicine.
First Things, May 12, 2017
Having no pro-lifers in medicine would, of course, deprive those of us who prefer a doctor who won’t kill people to be the medical person touching intimate parts of our bodies. This attacks our right to choose our own medical care. But this is beside the point, because “choice” isn’t the point. To the intolerant, the very fact that we hold that opinion means we’re to be discounted.
Conclusion
We understand that belligerence and high intolerance best if we understand its origin. It’s not merely that people feel something strongly. It’s that deep down, they know there’s inconsistency in their thoughts and behaviors, and they can’t stand it. It’s too much tension. In general, the human mind has severe trouble tolerating inconsistency – and so it will practice inconsistency more belligerently, in order to pretend it isn’t there.
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For more of our blog posts on psychological aspects of nonviolence, see:
The Mind’s Drive for Consistency
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
by John Whitehead
Activists seeking to end or radically reduce nuclear weapons’ threat may find it difficult to get public attention. Despite the high stakes involved—the lives of millions and even humanity’s survival—the nuclear threat frequently seems distant and abstract. The danger is future and hypothetical, in contrast to current, actual situations of people dying or suffering from other injustices.
Anti-nuclear peace activists should recall how the struggle against nuclear weapons has been connected to other struggles: for gender and racial equality, against poverty, and for the protection of preborn humans. These connections between the nuclear disarmament cause and other causes have a long history.
“No Nukes” and Feminism
Women’s rights and peace have long between intertwined, a connection embodied in contemporary history by organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP) (see the recent Consistent Life blog post on WILPF member and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams). Both these groups participated in struggles against nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, proclaiming “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race,” WSP organized demonstrations involving thousands to protest nuclear weapons.
One of WSP’s most famous members, Coretta Scott King (also involved in WILPF), traveled to Geneva in 1962 to attend, on behalf of WSP, a 17-nation conference on disarmament. These and other efforts by peace activists contributed to a significant victory in 1963 with the international treaty limiting testing of nuclear weapons.
Another significant trip was taken by Erna Harris, a WILPF member and one of the first black women to get a degree in journalism. Harris participated in the 1964 Soviet-American Women’s Conference of 12 Soviet women and 12 American women in Moscow. Upon returning to the United States, Harris traveled around the nation speaking out on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
One aspect of feminist opposition to nuclear weapons is radiation’s disproportionate negative effects on women. Evidence from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear weapons tests, and nuclear accidents suggest women are more likely than men to develop cancer from radiation exposure. A 2006 National Academy of Sciences report found the cancer incidence and deaths were 40-50% higher among women than among men exposed to comparable doses of radiation. For pregnant women, exposure to radiation risks harming or killing their children in the womb—a danger that should especially concern pro-lifers
Another aspect of feminist critiques of nuclear weapons is how stereotypical notions of masculinity—aggression or “toughness”—can influence policy makers. Concern over nuclear weapons’ devastating human costs or hopes for a more peaceful world without these weapons, are dismissed as weak, naïve, or “soft,” similar to how women’s perspectives are dismissed.
Ray Acheson, an activist with WILPF and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—who spoke at the Consistent Life-cosponsored “Two Minutes to Midnight” conference—has written on both these aspects of nuclear disarmament as a feminist issue. Commenting on reactions to the recent United Nations Treaty banning nuclear weapons, Acheson wrote “Those who want to elevate the voices and perspectives of those affected, are dismissed as ‘emotional.’”
Acheson cites a story of a nuclear strategist who expressed horror at the millions of deaths nuclear weapons would cause, only to then feel ashamed and “like a woman.” She comments,
The association of caring about the murder of thirty million people with “being a woman” is all about seeing that position – and that sex – as being weak, caring about wrong things, letting your “emotions” get the better of you, and focusing on human beings when you should be focused on “strategy.” Caring about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons is feminine, weak, and not relevant to the job that “real men” have to do to “protect” their countries. It not only suggests that caring about the use of nuclear weapons is spineless and silly, but also makes the pursuit of disarmament seem unrealistic and irrational.
A humanitarian and gender-sensitive analysis of nuclear weapons offers an alternative to this kind of thinking.
“No Nukes” and Racial Justice
Black Americans and other people of color have connected the struggle for racial justice with peace, including nuclear disarmament. Historian Vincent Intondi, who also spoke at the “Two Minutes to Midnight” conference, chronicled this activism in African Americans against the Bomb. Crucial connections between racism and nuclear weapons include how nuclear weapons could serve as tools of colonialism and how spending on weapons took resources away from the poor, especially people of color.
Racial justice and peace were linked in a dramatic demonstration against both colonialism and nuclear weapons in the winter of 1959-1960. Following the French government’s decision to test nuclear weapons in the Sahara, a group of peace activists, including American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, resolved to travel to the nuclear test site in a nonviolent attempt to stop the test. The activists received support from Ghana, which had recently hosted a conference of African states which resolved that “nuclear testing should be suspended and means taken to reduce the arms race.”
The peace activists traveled overland from Ghana to French-controlled Africa. French authorities stopped them and, despite repeated attempts, the peace activists never reached the site of the early 1960 tests. Nevertheless, the nonviolent witness attracted international media attention, in African nations and the United States, and led to protests outside French embassies. One African who observed the activists’ journey connected the issues concisely: “If [the bomb tests are so] harmless, why not hold it in the country outside Paris, so all the French people can see the wonder?”
U.S. Civil rights activists protested nuclear weapons over the following decades. Martin Luther King repeatedly denounced these weapons throughout his public career. In 1964, a group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) visited Harlem and met with Malcolm X. During their meeting, he observed “You have been scarred by the atom bomb.” Then, referring to the poor living conditions the hibakusha had seen in Harlem, he added “You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.”
Combining the struggles against racism and nuclear weapons continued during the intensified arms race of the 1980s. Librarian Greg Johnson and his wife formed Blacks Against Nukes (BAN) to raise black Americans’ awareness of nuclear weapons’ dangers. For years, they gave talks at schools, colleges, and churches. Johnson recalled how he aimed to bring different issues together: “Black and poor people in this country are suffering in the name of national security, which has to do with people who are educated, fed, and clothed, not with how many weapons you have in your arsenal…We saw a pattern of colonialism to subjugate nonwhites. And the bomb was part of it. It was all connected.”
“No Nukes” and Pro-Lifers
Some activists have defended human life from both nuclear weapons and abortion. Activist and comedian Dick Gregory participated not only in the civil rights struggle but was a frequent presence in anti-nuclear activities and denounced abortion as a tool of racist population control.
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry is best remembered for her critique of racism, but her work also included pro-life and pro-peace themes. Bernadette Waterman Ward, in an essay reprinted in ProLife Feminism: Yesterday & Today, observed how a crucial dramatic moment in Hansberry’s play Raisin in the Sun is Mama’s outrage over her daughter-in-law seeking an abortion and her son’s failure to stop this: “Your wife say she going to destroy your child. And I’m waiting to hear you talk like [your father] and say we a people who give children life, not who destroy them,” she says. Hansberry was also a long-time opponent of the nuclear bombing of Japan and of nuclear weapons in general. One of her final plays was What Use Are Flowers?, about survivors of a nuclear war and their struggle to build a new world.
An activist who explicitly connected both these causes was Julianne Wiley. An anti-nuclear activist who highlighted nuclear radiation’s negative effect on preborn children, Wiley recounts in Consistently Opposing Killing how she was moved to reconsider her attitudes toward abortion when another woman pointed out how abortion also killed children in the womb. Her activism then expanded to include combined opposition to nuclear weapons and abortion and led to the foundation of Pro-Lifers for Survival—the predecessor organization to the Consistent Life Network. Almost 40 years later, the danger nuclear radiation poses to the preborn remains an important connection between the pro-peace and pro-life causes.
Conclusion
Opposition to nuclear weapons has drawn a wide variety of activists and been combined with an array of other causes. The common thread is that while nuclear weapons, in one sense, kill “indiscriminately,” in another sense they’re quite discriminating by inflicting greater harm on vulnerable groups and reinforcing social injustice. Highlighting nuclear disarmament’s importance for social justice clarifies the peace cause’s full significance and may attract more people to the peace movement.
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams
Jane Addams is a notable follower of the consistent life ethic (before the term was coined). We offer a lengthy book excerpt, a shorter book excerpt, and a note from the exhibits at Hull House Museum.
Condensed excerpt from ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today, pp. 120-126
The Nonviolent Power of the Maternal Body Politic: Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Hull House (founded 1889)
by Mary Krane Derr
Jane Addams’ astoundingly fruitful life included a Nobel Peace Prize—the first ever to an American woman—and founding or early leadership roles in the professions of sociology and social work, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was the guiding spirit of Hull House, Chicago’s globally famous settlement. . . . .
Hull House – outside and inside
Around the turn of the twentieth century, death penalty proponents argued for electrocution as a supposedly instantaneous, painless, humane alternative to hanging. Electrical shock had already been used as an abortion technique . . . Despite his professed personal opposition to the death penalty, Thomas Edison oversaw the invention of the electric chair for Westinghouse, selling the press on it by lethally shocking dogs and cats. In 1903, he filmed his electrocution, billed as an “execution,” of Topsy, a Coney Island elephant, before a crowd of 1,500. The neglected, abused animal had rampaged and killed three men, including a trainer who deliberately threw a lit cigarette into her mouth.
The same year, a Michigan legislator and businessman proposed electrocution upon birth for disabled babies—as an amendment to the budget for the state’s home for the “feebleminded.” Addams, a death penalty abolitionist, responded:
The suggestion is horrible. It is not in line with the march of civilization nor with the principles of humanity. The Spartans destroyed children physically infirm. Are we to go back to the days of Sparta? Feebleminded children are one of the cares of a community. It is our duty to care for them.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life, p. 161
Against the growing push for permanent mass institutionalization, Addams argued for what the disability rights movement now calls independent living. . . . Above all, it was necessary to “consider the problem of the special child . . . from the point of view of the child,” or, as present-day disability advocates would say, “Nothing about us, without us.” To overwhelmed parents, Addams offered,
You think you have a child unlike other children; you are anxious that your neighbor not find it out; it makes you secretive; it makes you singularly sensitive; it places you and the normal children in your family in a curious relation to the rest of the community; but if you find out there are many other such children in your city and in . . . the United States, and that a whole concourse of people are studying to help these children, considering them not at all queer and outrageous, but simply a type of child which occurs from time to time and can be enormously helped, you come out of that particularly sensitive attitude and the whole family is lifted with you into a surprising degree of hopefulness and normality.
The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain
In 1908, Hull House and the Chicago Medical Society (CMS) formed the Joint Committee on Midwives . . . Previously, as heads of the CMS Committee on Criminal Abortion, [Dr. Rudolf ] Holmes and [Dr. Charles] Bacon had assisted public officials in prosecuting those who performed “the crime of feticide,” temporarily persuaded newspapers to ban “criminal advertisements,” and discovered “the relatively great frequency of the crime of abortion among midwives . . .” The midwifery committee was charged to explore these problems further with Hull House promising “to defray all cost.” Jane Addams’ commitment of Hull House’s hard-won, always precarious funds evinced her personal support of the study’s goals . . .
In the decades following the investigation, Addams and all four committee physicians dedicated themselves even more deeply to the very social measures that got at the root causes of abortion. . . . In addition to its day nursery, infant care clinic, mothers’ club, and other maternal-child programs, Jane Addams involved Hull House in sex education and the direct provision of family planning. For her international readership, Addams wrote more than once of the need, at the personal and policy levels, for compassionate acceptance and aid of all those involved in non-marital pregnancy. . . .
Addams’ vision of the maternal body politic, with its “form of power that doesn’t have as its means violence and doesn’t have as its end total control and command,” remains one that could bring peace to the abortion war today, with its forced and lethal pitting of disempowered women against their own unborn children, not to mention other, related wars.
Excerpt from Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, by Rachel MacNair, p. 2
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jane Addams noted aftereffects of having killed. Known for her innovations in social work, the reports from her investigations were anecdotal and primarily aimed at social change advocacy work rather than academic review. While she did publish some work in academic journals, such as the American Journal of Sociology, most of her writing is for the popular audience. Of the early builders of sociological theory, she was the only one who addressed and described PTSD [Posttraumatic Stress Disorder] directly. Though she did not have the terminology or contemporary concept yet, she was studying World War I, at a time when the concept was beginning to form.
After documentation of men who refused to shoot to kill even in the trenches, she talked of insanity among the soldiers in various places, and of their being dazed after participating in attacks. She talks of hearing “from hospital nurses who said that delirious soldiers are again and again possessed by the same hallucination — that they are in the act of pulling their bayonets out of the bodies of men they have killed.”
Hull House Museum Exhibit Sign (viewed March 13, 2012)
Against Eugenics –
Eugenics, the study and practice of selective breeding with the goal of improving the human species, was very popular in the early decades of the 20th century. The American eugenics movement gained traction among Progressive era reformers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, and scores of prominent figures, but Jane Addams and several of her peers resisted it. While Hull-House reformers believed they could improve the lives of their impoverished neighbors by introducing them to new modes of hygiene, nutrition, and healthcare, they vehemently opposed the notion of the intrinsically lesser value of different races, the poor, mentally ill, and disabled.
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For more of our blog posts on notable historical women, see:
Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier (1844-1870): Restellism Exposed