The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion
Graciela Olivarez
by Graciela Olivarez, 1972
Commissioner appointed by US President Richard Nixon
from the “Separate Statement of Graciela Olivarez”
in Report of the President’s Commission on Population and the American Future
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972
To brush aside a separate statement on the issue of abortion on the grounds that it is based on religious or denominational “hang-ups” is to equate abortion—a matter of life and death—with simpler matters of religion such as observance of the Sabbath, dietary restrictions, abstention from coffee and alcoholic beverages, or other similar religious observances. I believe that even nonreligious persons should be concerned with the issue of life and death as it pertains to the unborn. . . .
Advocacy by women for legalized abortion on a national scale is so anti-women’s liberation that it flies in the face of what some of us are trying to accomplish through the women’s movement, namely, equality—equality means an equal sharing of responsibilities by and as men and women. With women already bearing the major burden for the reproductive process, men have never had it so good. Women alone must suffer the consequences of an imperfect contraceptive pill—the blood clots, severe headaches, nausea, edema, etc. Women alone endure the cramping and hemorrhaging from an intrauterine device. No man ever died from an abortion.
[What] kind of future [do] we all have to look forward to if men are excused either morally or legally from their responsibility for participation in the creation of life?
Women should be working to bring men into the camp of responsible parenthood, a responsibility that women have had to shoulder almost alone. Perhaps in our eagerness for equality, we have, in part, contributed to the existing irresponsible attitude some men have toward their relationship to women and to their offspring. Legalized abortion will free those men from worrying about whether they should bear some responsibility for the consequences of sexual experience. In the matter of divorce where children are involved, for instance, very few men fight or even ask for custody of their children. It is customary to measure male responsibility in terms of dollars and cents, rather than in terms of affection, attention, companionship, supervision and warmth.
And laymen are not the only ones who reflect this attitude. Blame must also be placed on churchmen, who throughout the tumult and controversy surrounding legalized abortion, have expressed their concern only as abortion affects the moral and psychological problems of women, adroitly avoiding the issue of man’s responsibility to decisions connected with his role in the reproductive process. . . .
To talk about the “wanted” and the “unwanted” child smacks too much of bigotry and prejudice. Many of us have experienced the sting of being “unwanted” by certain segments of our society. Blacks were “wanted” when they could be kept in slavery. When that ceased, blacks became “unwanted”—in white suburbia, in white schools, in employment. Mexican- American (Chicano) farm laborers were “wanted” when they could be exploited by agribusiness. One usually wants objects and if they turn out to be unsatisfactory, they are returnable. How often have ethnic minorities heard the statement: “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?” Human beings are not returnable items. Every individual has his/her rights, not the least of which is the right to life, whether born or unborn. Those with power in our society cannot be allowed to “want” and “unwant” people at will.
I am not impressed or persuaded by those who express concern for the low-income woman who may find herself carrying an unplanned pregnancy and for the future of the unplanned child who may be deprived of the benefits of a full life as a result of the parents’ poverty, because the fact remains that in this affluent nation of ours, pregnant cattle and horses receive better health care than pregnant poor women.
The poor cry out for justice and we respond with legalized abortion. The Commission heard enough expert testimony to the effect that increased education and increased earnings result in lower fertility rates. In the developed countries of the world, declining fertility rates are correlated with growing prosperity, improved educational facilities, and, in general, overall improvement in the standard of living.
But it is not necessary to go beyond our own borders to verify this contention. Current data indicate that the same holds true for minority groups in this country. The higher the education attained by minorities and the broader the opportunities, the lower the fertility rate. . . .
Infant mortality rates are not reduced by killing an unborn child. How sad and incriminating that quality health facilities and services, denied to the poor for lack of money, are being used for performing abortions instead of being utilized for healing of the sick poor. But then, one represents a profit and the other an expense. It is all a matter of values. . . .
If Men Could Get Pregnant
by Rachel MacNair
The “Sacrament”
We’ve recently had the idea of what would happen with abortion if men could get pregnant come up twice. In last week’s blog, Mary Liepold said:
“I still agree with blessed, angry Florynce Kennedy, may she rest in peace, that if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament. That’s consistent with the history of patriarchy in the church and the world.”
In a movie fantasy of male pregnancy, the man yells “My body, my choice” to escape an attempt to abort his pregnancy
But Mary Krane Derr was quoted in the Quotation of the Week for Peace and Life Connections just a few weeks ago:
“It’s been said that if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. On the contrary: if men got pregnant, pregnancy would be treated as the sacrament; abortion would be considered blasphemy against their sacred bodies and lives and those of their children; and pregnant humans would finally, finally receive the alternatives they deserve instead of what one social activist calls, from bitter experience, the ‘choice’ between ‘abortion or else.’”
(“Pro-Every Life, Pro-Nonviolent Choice”; ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today, second edition, p. 375)
I’ll say what my first thought was about the if-men-could-get-pregnant question: of course abortion would then be a sacrament. Men treat war as a sacrament. In days of yore, human sacrifice was literally treated as a sacrament. The perversion of applying sacredness to killing has long been one of the ways such violence has been sustained.
Then, of course, there’s the obvious point that if men could get pregnant, they would be women and not men anymore. The ability to get pregnant is a major part of the definition of what makes each gender each. This has been part of the dynamic of male domination throughout history.
Indeed, men have been regarding women’s abortions as part of men’s own privilege for a long time. Rodney Stark in his book Discovering God discusses the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of the Christian era:
Once married, pagan girls had a substantially lower life expectancy, much of the difference being due to the great prevalence of abortion, which involved barbaric methods in an age without soap, let alone antibiotics. Given the very significant threat to life and the agony of the procedure, one might wonder why pagan women took such risks. They didn’t do so voluntarily. It was men – husbands, lovers, and fathers – who made the decision to abort. It isn’t surprising that a world that gave husbands the right to demand that infant girls be done away with would also give men the right to order their wives, mistresses, or daughters to abort. (p. 321)
An Entirely Different Tack
Yet all of these views take male domination as a starting point. They don’t consider the vision of a world where such domineering is no longer prevalent.
One of the strong links among the many life/peace issues is that domination of any group by any other should cease. We should treat each other as equals. We need to be sensitive to one another. In this case, we must move beyond male domination, and recognize where it’s already fading.
My own son is the soul of gentleness. And check out the tenderness in the photo of my father with me as a baby:
Then multiply that by the millions.
So here I want to make an entirely different answer to the point:
Men do “get” pregnant.
Biologically, the part they do is to help get the pregnancy started. Their contribution there is indispensable, and you can’t get more important than indispensable. And while they’re physically capable of running off and abandoning the pregnancy, and many do, they’re still a psychological hook there. The best men know the value of this.
I had a friend once who, in referring to himself and his wife, talked about the time when “we” were pregnant. My first thought was to be bemused. She was clearly doing all the biological part, everything connected with having the child inside her body. But as I thought more about it, I decided it made perfect sense. He was fully participating.
Some men have had sympathetic physical symptoms. Men have certainly been intimately involved in all kinds of aspects of nurturing and nourishing. While women are capable of doing a pregnancy alone and men aren’t, when the two of them do their pregnancy together, beauty results.
I think this positive vision is the best of all the answers to the “if-men-were-pregnant” idea.
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For more on men and abortion, see:
What do Men Have to Say on Abortion?
No Combat Experience, No Opinion: Parallels in Pro-bombing and Pro-choice Rhetoric
“The Daily Show” Doesn’t Do Its Homework
Off the Fence and Taking My Stand on Abortion
by Mary Liston Liepold, OSF, Ph.D.
Mary Liepold
I’d been saying for decades that I straddled the fence on the abortion issue. I’m a middle-ground Catholic―definitely not “recovering,” but also not Rome’s most docile daughter. You’d never catch me at a rally for or against. Though I’m a true-blue liberal and I make plenty of donations, I’ve steered clear of Emily’s List and other organizations that take “pro-choice” stands because that single issue just didn’t sit right. It was all fairly abstract for me, though, until one March a few years ago.
All at once abortion became personal, as an option affecting two people I’m very close to. I told them both I’d support them no matter what decision they made, and blessedly, both issues were soon peacefully resolved. But the itch at the back of my brain was still there. I signed up for emails from Consistent Life, a forum for some rare individuals who are passionately pro-life across the life course, opposing both war and abortion. Once in a while I even read one. I know a handful of smart people who occupy that ground. I was still lurking, though―still on the fence.
Then I happened to see the lovely 2011 Canadian film Monsieur Lazhar. M. Lazhar is an Algerian refugee hired by an elementary school principal to replace a teacher who committed suicide―in her classroom during recess. We focus on two of the children, a boy whose childish fib may have fuelled the teacher’s despair and a girl, formerly his friend, who blames the boy. Both children saw the teacher hanging. The principal provides counseling sessions for the whole class, but these children, at least, are still haunted. Lazhar knows that what they need to hear is what none of the adults are willing to tell them: that their former teacher did something wrong.
The children had loved their gentle, troubled teacher. Out of love for her, the counselor and the others refuse to label her despairing act. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that they can call it wrong without dishonoring her. So the boy is left to bear the burden until the little girl, and then Lazhar, insists on clarity. He loses his job but she regains her friend.
And watching the movie, my mind was suddenly clear. A dictum flashed back from my catechism days: “Hate the sin and love the sinner.”
Thank you, Lord! I can hate the war and love the warriors, with Paul Chappell and my friend Debbie and many other peace-loving friends and parents and partners and children of soldiers. I can embrace the individual who chooses (or considers) suicide or abortion and leave judgment to a merciful God, while still being clear that a precious and unique life is involved.
Now, having reached this conclusion, I would no more harass women who seek abortions than I would bomb Boeing or spit at a returned soldier. With war and abortion both, my interest is all in education and prevention. Spare me the angels-on-pins arguments about weeks of gestation. I still agree with blessed, angry Florynce Kennedy, may she rest in peace, that if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament. That’s consistent with the history of patriarchy in the church and the world.
I’m going to be a strange, crabby pro-lifer. I will not promise not to scream the next time someone calls fetuses “innocent life,” as though passing through the birth canal destroys innocence and children murdered by our drone attacks are guilty. Come to think of it, I may do a lot of screaming when I meet my new fold, but I’ll make them at least as crazy as they make me. It’s high time we start talking to each other.
Will I be joining the March for Life next year, alongside all those Catholic school kids giddy with the excitement of a day out of class? It seems unlikely, but I won’t rule it out. If I march, I’ll be with Consistent Life, behind a banner that says Life Belongs to God or Life & Dignity for All―No Exceptions. I’ll expect to see the same people on another day vigiling for peace or the environment and against fracking, mourning the victims of the last drone attack, reaching out to the parents of children with severe disabilities and the parents of the next well-armed, mentally ill person who carries out a domestic terror attack. No blame, and no exceptions. I’ll bring my very best listening skills, and we’ll all learn something new.
I’m a pro-lifer for peace and a peacenik for life, and I’m in good company. Get used to it! I don’t have all the answers. And I don’t know where this road will lead. But the ground finally feels firm under my feet.
Bio sketch: Mary Liepold is a Secular Franciscan, a wife, mother, & grandmother, a writer and editor, an avid reader, and an activist. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.
Mary says about this blog entry: “It has an interesting history. A few years ago I paid several hundred dollars for a one-day workshop with an organization dedicated to increasing the roughly 15% share of the public conversation that women’s voices occupy. Their promise was to assign each participant a mentor who would help place a piece on Huffington Post or something of the sort. So I got one, worked up a version of this, and sent it to her. Dead silence, no matter how many times I followed up. I had violated feminist orthodoxy, and she wouldn’t touch it.”
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For more blog posts on personal journeys, see:
Supporting the Dignity of Every Life (Bill Samuel)
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons (Karen Swallow Prior)
Coming to Peace and Living a Consistent Life After Military Service
Sharon Long: My Personal Pro-life Journey
On Being a Consistent Chimera (Rob Arner)
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life
by Richard Stith
Consistent Life Network board member and Research (non-teaching) Professor of Law
Editor’s note: these ideas are more fully developed in a 2011 paper available for sale, entitled Her Choice, Her Problem: How Having a Choice Can Diminish Family Solidarity.
Here’s a question about “choice” and abortion, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia: Could the very existence of these options have a negative impact on the legally-authorized choosers, no matter what they choose?
Consider that women who refuse legal abortion may be blamed for their choice by boyfriends, families, employers, and others. Infirm or dying people may find family and other caregivers upset by their refusal to agree to assisted suicide, if it’s available as a legal option.
These are the sorts of overlooked consequences of choice that this blog is about.
How Choice Harms the Chooser
Society sometimes limits choice to stop a choice that’s harmful to the chooser. For example, we might not permit people to sell their organs because they might seriously harm themselves by preferring money to health.
But there’s a second kind of harm that could befall voluntary organ sellers, not from what they choose but from their having been able to choose in the first place. Simply because they had a choice, they may lose support among friends, family, and employers.
Compare the plight of someone who needs expensive and time-consuming special care because of an operation forced on her by an illness – say, cancer surgery – with a person having the same health needs resulting from her free and deliberate choice (not extreme economic necessity) to excise and sell part of her body. Cheerfully-given help for the post-surgery care of the voluntary seller will be less forthcoming, for her sad situation will be said to be her own fault.
This is separate from any evaluation of which choices are good and which are bad. If the sale of one’s organs were legal, someone who refused to sell them could also be blamed for her own voluntary impoverishment. (“Don’t ask me for a loan. You could have a lot more money if you wouldn’t insist on keeping both your kidneys!”) She incurs this blame simply because of having a choice. If organ sale had remained illegal, others would have been more sympathetic to her economic needs.
Even if she made a wise choice in not selling a kidney, her having a choice to sell or not to sell may make some people less sympathetic to her financial plight. This has nothing to do with the paternalistic notion that society should intervene to save people from making unwise choices. Here we (society, the law) cause her harm simply by leaving this choice open. She may be blamed by some no matter what she does.
Care for the most vulnerable among us, those at the beginning of life and those who may be nearing the end of life, requires solidarity. Truly single parenting is nearly impossible; the help of others is needed to bear and raise a child, and solidarity with the child is needed as well. Likewise, the afflictions of age and illness are often too much to bear without family or friends standing in solidarity.
Yet autonomous choices are now being proposed for human life in its initial and final stages. Those choices concern the existence of life itself: “Should I choose abortion or birth?” and “Should I choose assisted suicide?”
But the ability to choose – to undergo or to refuse abortion or suicide – may isolate the chooser. It may leave her without the solidarity she needs to implement her choices. That undercuts real autonomy.
Throughout human history, children have been known to be the consequence of sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children. Contraception didn’t change this; it makes fertilization and birth less likely, but mother and father are still equally responsible if fertilization and birth nevertheless occur.
Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman’s free choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception. It matters little that the man involved may have insisted on having unprotected intercourse when the woman didn’t want it. It is she and she alone who finally decides whether the child is to be born.
A grandmother’s “right” to assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia means that she has been given a way out. So her suffering seems no longer to call for as much family compassion or social support. In choosing to continue living in great dependency, a grandmother may be felt to be deeply selfish, preferring to benefit herself at a heavy cost to her family.
Similarly, social policy planners may reason that the option of voluntary death diminishes any public duty to regulate toxic industries, or to secure health insurance benefits, to decrease the risk of suffering. Even if governmental acts or omissions cause suffering, it may be thought, no duty of solidarity arises where the victim has refused an accessible option of suicide.
How Choice Harms the Life Chosen
Here’s another question: can a life chosen as an option ever have the dignity of a life simply accepted? Does a child a mother once chose not to abort suffer from her having been able to choose otherwise? Does the severely disabled but suicide-rejecting person suffer from having an existence that needs to be justified? Does making choice possible bring a profound change to our perception of the life that is made optional?
Choosing to let a being live confirms a radical domination over that being, like the upraised thumb of a Roman emperor in the Coliseum – when thumbs-down was always possible.
“Pollice Verso” by Jean- Léon Gérôme, 1872; goriest part cropped out.
Public domain in a source country on January 1, 1996 and in the US.
That makes the chooser – and others – less likely to respect the object of choice.
Even if someone ends up being evaluated so highly that one would never choose her death, when an evaluation was required rather than the person simply being accepted for who she is, something very valuable has been lost.
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For more blog posts from Richard Stith, see:
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)
by Julianne Wiley (a.k.a. Juli Loesch)
Anscombe as a young woman
In the fall of 1939, shortly after Great Britain declared war on Germany, the Royal Air Force was openly promoting a counter-city bombing strategy against Germany. They were preparing to carpet bomb entire cities. Their first target in each city would be the city water-pumping stations, and then they would wipe out, not just the military assets, but all its civilian inhabitants. The cities of Dresden, Cologne, and Hamburg were to be bombed in this way. Elizabeth Anscombe and a fellow student, barely out of their teens, wrote, printed, and started distributing a brief, powerful essay entitled “The Justice of the Present War Examined.” Not on the basis of pacifism, but by the application of traditional Just War principles, she argued that the British government’s plan to incinerate large numbers of civilians by means of indiscriminate obliteration bombing was not an act of Just War but an act of murder.
But before Anscombe’s essay could be widely disseminated, her own bishop, the Bishop of Birmingham, told her to withdraw it from publication. He said it was not the job of undergraduates to judge their nation’s military policy, and that she had a lot of learning to do before she could make complex judgments. She agreed that she had much learning to do, and she withdrew the pamphlet. But it is her words, rather than those of her bishop, which remain in our memory and were later echoed by the Second Vatican Council.
Anscombe’s responsibilities as a philosophy professor at Oxford in the 1950s did not include teaching ethics, which was covered by her friend Philippa Foot. But at one point Foot took a sabbatical and asked Anscombe to fill in for her. When Anscombe started to organize her thoughts by reading the usual texts of modern moral philosophy she was flabbergasted.
Despite the differences between them, all the 20th century authors she encountered shared one thing in common: they had no moral absolutes. None. There were no actions that could be ruled out if you were aiming at a good enough result. Not rape, not torture, not abortion, not murder. They said it could all be justified by circumstances. And this was an absolute break with 20 centuries of Western Civilization, with its basis in Judeo-Christian moral teaching, and even a break from the teachings of Aristotle and the greats of pagan Greek and Roman civilization.
Anscombe knew this was wrong. Two years previously, in 1956, Oxford University had decided to grant an honorary degree to Harry Truman, who, as President of the United States, had been responsible for the deliberate massacre of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She contested this honorary degree, but she was told that she was the only one who found it objectionable. She forced a vote, but only four faculty members were willing to say that a man who authorized the deliberate killing of innocent human beings ought not to be given public honors.
Anscombe’s reflections on moral absolutes developed into her 1958 paper “On Modern Moral Philosophy.” She boldly challenged the sheer relativism of almost all 20th century moral philosophers. Standing practically alone against the entire academic philosophical establishment, she defined, described, and pulled apart “consequentialism,” the view that there are no acts, no matter how evil, which cannot be justified if one is aiming for good consequences.
Although Oxford was still, in the 1960s, a place of considerable outward conventionality, it was inwardly shaken by the moral confusion of the Sexual Revolution. Undergraduate women often got pregnant, but never had babies, if you catch my meaning.
Once Professor Anscombe was sought out by a young woman who was pregnant by a professor 30 years older than she. This young student was quite upset and unsure what to do about it. She confided that this professor, the father of the baby, thought abortion would be the obvious solution. “And why does he think that?” asked Anscombe. The girl replied, ‘Well, the first problem is, he doesn’t entirely accept the full humanity of the un-born.” “No,” Anscombe shot back, “His first problem is that he doesn’t even accept the full humanity of the undergraduate.”
Professor Elizabeth Anscombe
Although Anscombe’s stand against the atomic bomb had been widely reported at the time, when she decided to personally and nonviolently intervene to stop the dismemberment of living babies, the coverage was practically zero. A newspaper photograph that her family cherishes shows her being hauled away from the abortion clinic doorway by two policemen, but she is not even identified in the caption or in the article. This, despite the fact that at the time she was arguably the world’s most prominent living philosopher.
In 1970, Elizabeth Anscombe was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge. She spent the next 10 years doing more original work in philosophy, writing, speaking, and striving to empower women – particularly young women – with the intellectual strength to resist conformism, to seek and love the truth, and to accept no substitutes.
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Where Violence Begins
by Rachel MacNair
The planetarium presentation, as usual, was beautiful. Yet there was a disquieting aspect to the language used.
Stars were “dying.” Why not “being transformed”?
These stars did something in a “desperate” attempt to prevent this. How can an inanimate object be desperate?
One star taking material from another star was “cannibalizing.”
Artist’s impression. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser
The animation of the solar ray was as wonderfully dramatic as fireworks. Yet it was described as violent. It was doing what it was supposed to, and not hurting anyone. In fact, it was most definitely doing the opposite – it was life-giving. We couldn’t be alive if the sun didn’t do this.
Why all the battle language? It’s a violent perspective on what are not violent phenomena.
Why not an analogy to cooking instead? They could be “giving the recipe for making a black hole.”
We could suggest this is a male vs. female way of looking at it, but that’s unfair to men. Most men spend more time cooking than battling.
It reminded me of the Babylonian creation myth in which the god Marduk kills the dragon Tianmut, she being his own mother or grandmother, and divided her body to make the earth and sky.
This violence is a common feature of the mythologies of imperial cultures. When violence is entangled in the very core of governing, with war and execution, torture and genocide, infanticide and feticide, plus cruelty to animals, then violence is also entangled in the very creation of the universe. It’s natural. It need not be avoided. Instead, it’s celebrated as glorious and heroic.
We don’t generally see stars as gods in our culture, but the planetarium show was treating them as beings with feelings and intentions just the same. Creation of new things was narrated with the language of destruction. This would be expected from a philosophy that sees the world through a violent lens.
This is not science. Giving such a lens a scientific topic doesn’t turn it into science.
The Babylonian myth was the one I thought of out of the many that could also illustrate the point because it was countered by a group of the empire’s conquered people. They came up with a story of creation where gods didn’t battle each other because there was only one God. The stars were not gods, but useful items. The process was orderly, logical, and peaceful.
The story told by the rebels is the one most familiar to people nowadays; millions of people have it in their homes and it’s recited frequently all over the world as the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible. The Babylonian empire, on the other hand, is long gone, its myths only known to some. Ancient nonviolent activism made an enduring change.
Yet the impetus of seeing things through a lens of the idea that violence is at the core of the universe is still with us, and academics who themselves spend more time cooking than battling nevertheless find erudite ways of using violent metaphors.
If all the lethal violence we oppose starts in the thinking process before it makes its way to gory reality, we need to pay attention to opposing it even at the stage of simple language.
Adventures as a Delegate to the Democratic Party Convention
by Lisa Stiller
Reminder: The Consistent Life Network’s blog is for the airing of a wide variety of views connected to the consistent life ethic. Therefore, the views are those of the author and not necessarily of the organization. Political elections are especially likely to elicit sharply differing perspectives from consistent-lifers.
Lisa Stiller
It was quite a challenge, as a Consistent Life Ethic supporter, to become a delegate to the national Democratic convention. And in so many ways, it was also a challenge to be there. But looking back, I think the whole experience was probably worth the effort it took to get there.
So, why did I even bother to do it?
One of the biggest challenges for us Consistent Life people is election time. There are so few candidates out there that are really CL. Former Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey and Former US Senator (OR) Mark Hatfield are two of the most well-known leading elected officials who came close to a consistent ethic of life. Today, it is almost impossible to get elected to any office if you are CL: it’s that opposition to abortion snag.
And along with this, it’s almost impossible to become an active member of a local Democratic party if you even breathe the idea that you oppose the sacred cow of the “right to choose.” Especially if you are from the west coast or the northeast.
But believing strongly that I cannot just sit around and not vote at all, I try to go for the candidates who come closest to a Consistent Life Ethic stand. So when Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for president, I was pretty excited. Yes, he is pro-choice. I wish there had been a chance at some point for some CL people to have a talk with him. But his economic policies would do the most to drive down the abortion rate — look at countries that have universal health care and better social supports than we have, and their abortion rates are considerably lower. And Bernie opposes the death penalty, does not believe we need to rush to war, and supports measures which would bring down poverty rates.
So, for the first time in about 27 years, I got involved in a presidential campaign. I had my sights set on going to Philadelphia from the beginning. I wanted to support Bernie’s message of peace; caring for the poor; opposing the death penalty; and taking a big step out of the box to try to make single payer health care, a $15 minimum wage, and free public higher education a reality. And I wanted to use that opportunity to begin discussions about CL with other Bernie supporters and the media.
Working with the Bernie people was the easy part. I even met a few other people who opposed abortion, and supported Bernie because his economic policies would drive down abortion rates. Fortunately, abortion never became a big issue in this campaign. And when I spoke about it terms of a consistent life ethic to people, I didn’t get ostracized. Of course most people did not agree, but some did say they got being opposed to abortion from the opposition to violence perspective and appreciated the consistency of the CL viewpoint, even if they were pro-choice.
I campaigned hard, had my name out there, and was incredibly shocked when I received the highest number of votes in my congressional district to become a Bernie Sanders delegate!
At Democrats for Life Luncheon, Democratic Convention: Rob Arner, Lisa Stiller, Rosemary Vorel
So I got to Philadelphia, and realized I had some work to do. And some real challenges. There were endless speeches, with many speakers throwing in their support for the “right to choose.” There were three that were chosen specifically for their support for abortion, including speakers from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. I took that opportunity to try to walk around the lobby area where the media was hanging out to try to interest reporters in a different view, and to talk to them about the fact that yes, there were Democrats who opposed abortion. Most that I managed to have a conversation with were surprised. Very surprised. A few gave me cards, or took mine, and one finally agreed to interview me for a talk show to be aired at some future date. We have our work cut out for us in educating the media about “pro-life liberals.”
The other challenge was trying to talk to other delegates I met. Conversations got started anywhere and everywhere; the phone charging station, food lines, and at the after convention parties that went until after 2am (and were the major cause of all that sleep deprivation). And when the subject of abortion came up, or even when asked why I supported Bernie, if I felt comfortable with the person, I started talking about the consistent life ethic. And no one turned away from me. Of course, most did not agree, and I returned to subjects we had common ground on. I can only hope I planted some seeds.
Perhaps the most challenging task I took on was was talking to all of the Planned Parenthood volunteers who swarmed throughout the convention center every morning, and approached just about everyone. Some actually engaged in a conversation. Many did not realize that opposing abortion was a cause for being closed out of involvement in local and state Democratic Party involvement. And with most we were able to end the conversation agreeing to disagree about abortion but agreeing that we needed to do more to support those resources that women and families need to thrive. Yes, some walked away when I told them how I felt. But it was those other conversations that seemed to make the effort worth the time.
I guess that is why I decided going to Philadelphia was so important. The challenge of talking about CL to other delegates, and the chance I knew I would have to talk to people such as those Planned Parenthood volunteers. It’s about planting seeds, starting a dialogue, and putting a human face on “the opposition.”
Now that it’s over, I am trying to decide if I want to stay so actively involved with the local Democrats. I have built some good relationships. Met some pretty good people, who I might even want to have as friends. If I continue, I will be taking on the challenge of promoting the Consistent Life Ethic in a tough environment. But I have come to believe that so much of our work is about relationships. Build on those first, and keep planting those seeds. You never know where they will fall.
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
For more of our blog posts on Actions and Adventures, see:
The Adventures of Organizing as a Consistent Lifer
Violence Bolstered by Professional Contradictions
Mourning After & Hoping for the Future, We Call for a Consistent Life Texas!
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion
Excerpt from the Introduction to Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion
by Rachel M. MacNair
Understanding Perspectives
Back when I was in college, pursuing a major in Peace and Conflict Studies at Earlham (a Quaker college, I being a Quaker), several of us activists put together a program to educate about what was wrong with nuclear energy. Once done, we had done so well that a student asked how it could possibly be that anyone would support it. I immediately offered a three-minute pro-nuclear diatribe. My fellow activists started getting uncomfortable, wanting me to explain what was wrong with what I was saying.
I regard this as a crucial skill for all those interested in peace and therefore in conflict resolution. For effective debating, for proper listening, for the opportunity to fashion creative solutions not otherwise thought of, for the ability to get along with people with whom one disagrees, it is important to be able to understand and articulate a view different from one’s own.
In another incident from college days, we were preparing for a program arguing against nuclear weapons. A friend said these were so horrid and dangerous that we only needed to explain this, with no further information needed. When the program came, I watched as an audience member asked this simple question: “What about the Soviets? How can we give up nuclear weapons as long as they still have them?” This was not an unusual question and should have been anticipated. Yet my friend had no answer. It is indeed important to be familiar with all points of view when the goal is to be effective in presenting one’s own. . . .
Abortion: Option, Violence, or Tragedy
The philosophical perspectives on abortion in contemporary controversies can be understood on a continuum from support to opposition, and as with most continuums more people are likely somewhere along the middle rather than at either extreme. Here we will call the two extremes abortion-as-option and abortion-as-violence, with the continuum between called abortion-as-tragic-necessity.
The term “pro-choice” is commonly used for abortion-as-option, and is insisted upon by any peace advocates who favor abortion availability. Their reasoning is for the liberation of women and perhaps also for the alleviation of poverty. Groups that favor this view include the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the War Resister’s League, and magazines of wide circulation and long history such as The Progressive and Mother Jones.
However, this extreme is also occupied by men who wish the women they impregnate to take this option whether or not the women themselves actually desire it. Similarly, there are those interested in eugenics or who take a racist attitude. For purposes of this book, we are only interested in aspects of interest to peace psychology, and therefore will not be considering the views of those whose reasoning is not for women’s benefit.
Similarly, the term “pro-life” is commonly used for the abortion-as-violence perspective, but this view is held by many for whom sensitivity to a right-to-life concern is narrow and does not extend to opposing war or capital punishment or favoring effective anti-poverty programs. This has been particularly true in recent partisan politics in several countries.
In the same way, this book is only considering the views of those who oppose all these forms of violence across the board, in what is commonly called the “consistent life ethic”. . . This view is officially held by many Catholic documents and the Mennonite church (Mennonites are a traditionally pacifist church) as well as a large number of people of varying religions and of secular orientation in the peace movement. . . .
Why the Difference?
The fact that peace advocates can be found on both sides and in the middle of the continuum has much to do with understanding the status of the human embryo and fetus.
- If the status is one of “products of conception” or tissue, then removing the growth is nothing more than ending an unwanted pregnancy, and the understanding that this is entirely a decision for the pregnant woman would be determinative; this goes with the “abortion-as-option” view.
- If the embryo or fetus has the status of a baby, a human being entitled to the rights all human beings have to be protected from being killed, then abortion is an act of violence subject to all the problems that using violence as a problem-solver commonly has, as would be understood in the “abortion-as-violence” view.
- If the embryo or fetus is understood to be a living organism but one with a status similar to an animal, then killing an animal is to be avoided when possible but allowed when really needed. Persuasive abortion reduction programs are a good idea, but not legal bans; hence, abortion-as-tragic-necessity. . . .
Left: 6-week embryo. Right: Rachel MacNair in 1985
To illustrate how these different perspectives lead to different discussions, take the impact on women’s equality. To the abortion-as-option view, it is exceedingly obvious that women having control of their own reproductive lives is foundational for women’s equality. From the abortion-as-violence perspective, telling women we must have surgery to be treated equally is disparaging female biology, and therefore a form of privileging male characteristics. From the abortion-as-option view, forcing women to continue pregnancies is itself a form of gender discrimination. From the abortion-as-violence perspective, when pregnancies are regarded as optional rather than a condition to be accommodated, then those employers and schools who understand themselves to be inconvenienced are more likely to discriminate against pregnant women.
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For more excerpts of this book as blog posts, see:
Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion: Wars Cause Abortion
Excerpt – Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion: Child Abuse
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece
by Mary Krane Derr
Mary Krane Derr
The ancient Greek mathematician, musician, vegetarian, and spiritual teacher Pythagoras (580? BCE-??) taught a nonviolence ethic rooted in the kinship of all living beings. Pythagoras’ ethic did not exclude or denigrate women. Most unconventionally, Pythagoras defined only sexual misconduct, not intercourse itself, as polluting. He accepted women equally as his students.
Women originally created the Eleusinian Mysteries, and today these rituals deeply fascinate feminist goddess spirituality devotees. According to local custom, celebrants did not sacrifice a victim to the goddess, but offered her grapes, other cultivated fruits, honeycombs, and wool. The women had a special feast of grains, with perhaps a little fish. Although today’s vegetarians or vegans may find fault here, these rituals were certainly more peaceful and life-affirming than those added on following the Athenian occupation. The Mysteries were changed to begin in Athens with pig and other animal sacrifices.
These changes suited Athens’ ruling elite, who regularly devoured multi-course flesh meals, considering sow’s womb after (induced?) miscarriage to be a delicacy. They ranked women as little better than animals.
Although his legacy has literally come down to us in fragments, one direct contribution of the Pythagorean ethic does remain a cultural presence: the Hippocratic Oath. Some life-respecting provisions of the Oath are still widely held up as integral values of medical practice. For example, the commitments to “do no harm;” to observe confidentiality; and to refrain from sexual abuse of patients, even one’s social “inferiors.”
A single provision, however, has in recent decades occasioned fierce controversy: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”
The controversy refers little or not at all to the expansively life-revering ethic in which this provision originated. Some right-to-lifers treat it as an ahistorical mandate requiring instant, uncritical obedience. Thus they do not apply it to physician-assisted state-sponsored execution.
Some pro-choicers seem similarly unaware of the Pythagorean source ethic’s character, let alone its resonance with present-day values and norms they may aspire to themselves. Thus they find this provision at best irrelevant today, and at worst hostile to sick or disabled persons, and women.
In his Roe v. Wade ruling, Harry Blackmun states that Pythagoreans, in a “spirit of uncompromising austerity,” “frowned upon” suicide and opposed abortion as “a matter of dogma,” the “dogma” that “the embryo was animate from the moment of conception, and abortion meant destruction of a living being.” He notes the commonplace practice and advocacy of abortion and suicide in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Thus the Oath’s Pythagorean values represent not “an absolute standard for medical conduct,” but a minority, sectarian, largely unpersuasive view that survived only because Christians adopted it. Blackmun staunchly defended Roe for the rest of his life, despite his famous announcement in a capital punishment case that he was done “tinkering with the machinery of death.”
“Frowned upon,” “dogma,” “uncompromising austerity”: might not Blackmun be projecting a late 20th century stereotype of grim, rigid moralizers with peculiar opinions onto people it probably does not fit? And even if a position is in the minority – why and how should that in and of itself invalidate it?
Large numbers of Americans have looked with disfavor on death penalty abolitionists like the later Blackmun – yet that by no means invalidates his decision to take up their cause.
But what makes Blackmun’s concern for life on death row qualitatively different from Pythagorean or present-day concern for fetal life? What if he had known that Pythagoreans – and other abortion opponents from antiquity to the present – aspired to respect for all lives, including women’s?
Curiously, Blackmun then concludes “ancient religion did not bar abortion.” Did he mean the state religions of Greece and Rome? These also did not bar – and even outright approved – many practices that today’s pro-life and pro-choice persons alike would likely agree were oppressive and undesirable of repetition.
For example, the Roman paterfamilias, or oldest male in the household, legally claimed not only all its property, but vitae necisque potestas, the power of life and death over its members, “free” and slave. He could force a woman to undergo an abortion, or her baby to undergo infanticide.
Disability, female gender, or non-marital birth usually doomed newborns. He could sell displeasing older children into slavery or have them executed. The state made regular public entertainment spectacles of violent mass human and animal killings.
Small wonder that Martin Luther King, Jr. offered early Christian resistance to officially sanctioned violence in ancient Rome as a model for the African-American civil rights movement.
Editor’s Note: Mary Krane Derr was a leading scholar on pro-life feminism and related nonviolence advocacy of yesteryear. She co-edited the book ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today. The above is an excerpt of a section from “Activism Throughout the Centuries,” Chapter 13 of Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War.
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For more blog posts on the history of the consistent life ethic, see:
First Stirrings in Connecting the Life Issues
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
The Adventures of Prolifers for Survival: Scorned by Mobilization for Survival
Reminiscing on the Founding Meeting of the Consistent Life Network
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Deb Kosak & Rob Arner outside DN
by Rob Arner
I got to the Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) luncheon just in time to hear John Bel Edwards, governor of Louisiana, speak. I liked him a lot. He had a humble demeanor and was ardent about both being a Democrat and being pro-life. He made the point, familiar to us all, about how there is a difference between being pro-life and anti-abortion. I’d estimate about 50-60 people there, but there was press. The Life Matters Journal (LMJ) contingent was there, as was CL board member Lisa Stiller, along with Rev. Pat Mahoney and Rev. Rob Schenk, and two or three other people I’d met at the Life/Peace/Justice conference at Villanova this last spring.
I met Fr. Ed Bell, a priest in the archdiocese of Philadelphia and pastor of a church in Media, PA. He is ardently for the consistent life ethic (CLE) and maintains a literature table at his parish in which he includes our material. He had our yard signs (pictured with him below).
Father Ed Bell
After connecting with Christina Healy with the LMJ group, Ed and I went down to FDR park, across from the convention site. This was where the Bernie Sanders folks were gathering and the protest site was. It was surrounded by an 8-9 foot high metal fence. Though there were all kinds of security barriers ringing the convention site, I would not say it felt militarized. The police did not wear riot gear, and were mingling with the convention-goers, many on bikes.
But the striking thing was how deflated everything felt. There were 40 or so tents set up for Bernie supporters camping there, and plenty of those supporters, but not the thousands I had been expecting. For the most part they were just sitting in their camp playing guitars under trees and talking about the unfairness of the convention. It actually felt anticlimactic and deflating that there weren’t more people.
We found a few folks to converse with and distribute cards to. When I summarized our stance by saying we were against killing people, one young woman around the fringe of the Sanders group told me “We just disagree on who counts as people!” Another young lady, who was acting quite morose and seemed depressed to me, said “Some people just need to die. I feel like the world would be a better place if Trump were gone.”
Eventually we quit approaching people and just set up with our signs displayed. At this point the Life Matters Journal contingent joined us, adding to our witness. They were energetic and magnetic. More and more people began coming up to us for conversation, attracted by my sign, with many expressing sympathy and taking our cards. I was interviewed by three members of the media, one from the local paper and the other from the Christian Science Monitor and another freelance writer.
Rob’s sign
In all, I probably only gave out 100 cards or so, less than I would have liked, but I gained some very valuable skills. This was my first time leafleting (for anything!) I’m not usually an especially outgoing person in crowds, but I learned the groove and felt very confident by the time I needed to go home. I can do it.