De-funding Planned Parenthood?
by Rachel MacNair
The concept of the U.S. federal government removing all federal taxpayer dollars from going to Planned Parenthood has been a hot legislative topic recently. It seems to be set aside for now, but is bound to come up again and again. What is there to say from a consistent-life view?
First, withdrawing money from violent institutions is generally a good first step. Planned Parenthood is by far the largest chain of abortion clinics in the U.S., responsible for the direct committing of a large portion of feticides. It’s a major lobbyist in abortion political advocacy in many countries around the world. Whether or not they have illegally sold baby parts is a legal technicality, but that they are responsible for massive violence is clear. Taxpayers feeling revolted about having their money going to Planned Parenthood would, to our minds, be equivalent to taxpayers not wanting their money to go to nuclear weapons and imperial-oriented military expenditures, or to executions.
However, the federal money going to Planned Parenthood doesn’t directly fund abortions – there’s a strict legal prohibition on that – but to other services women of low income need. Much of these are Medicaid payments for perfectly legitimate services. So two objections arise to the above reasoning.
Objection #1: The idea that Planned Parenthood prevents more abortions than it causes because it provides contraception that prevents pregnancies.
In answer, I’m not discussing individual cases, where well-used contraception prevents abortions because the pregnancies never happened. Rather, I focus on what Planned Parenthood’s activity does.
We have a real-world test of this from the Texas panhandle, where Planned Parenthood facilities operated on a large scale. In 1999, five of its facilities closed; in 2001, seven more. Four more shut down later, so by 2008, none remained in the Texas Panhandle. Statistics on the teenage pregnancy rate in those counties show pregnancy rates among those aged 13-17 dropped dramatically. The average rate in the 16 counties started at 43.7 per 1,000 in 1996. By 2002, it was 28.6; by 2010, it had dropped to 24.1.
This isn’t what was predicted by those who admire Planned Parenthood’s work, but the explanation is in the academic literature: it’s called “risk compensation” or “behavioral adaptation.” It’s explained in an article relating condom use to, of all things, seat belts.
Seat belt laws succeeded in several countries in getting more people to wear seat belts – but without impacting the statistics on car injuries and fatalities. If someone who scrupulously follows the speed limit without a seat belt keeps do so after wearing one, then they’re safer. If that person feels because of the seat belt it’s now ok to go much faster, they could make up for the seat belt as far as injuries and fatalities are concerned. Authors of this paper suggest the same thing with condom use –efforts at pregnancy prevention could be “undermined by unintended changes in sexual risk perception and behavior.”
So while careful drivers with seat belts and careful couples with contraception can benefit, the impact of the programs Planned Parenthood offers for pregnancy prevention do not appear to be sufficiently accompanied by carefulness. Better approaches to pregnancy prevention are needed. Reality is more complicated.
Objection #2: Women in poverty need the non-abortion medical services that Planned Parenthood provides, and we shouldn’t to anything to deny them that.
Despite things they’ve said about mammograms, PP owns no mammogram machines and “provides the service” by referring women to other places. For contraception, pap smears, STD testing, and other much-needed services, CL member group Democrats for Life points out that there are thousands of community health centers that provide these, and a common point in advocating the de-funding of Planned Parenthood is that the money would go to those instead.
This is a fine argument in most places. The problem is, what about those pockets where Planned Parenthood is the only provider of these services available within a reasonable distance?
But this goes beyond the question of de-funding. Whenever there are such pockets, it’s telling those women in poverty they have no choice but to go to an organization that is startlingly callous about the lives of their prenatal children. Women should have the right to quality care, and quality care is best provided by people who are sensitive to all of human life and don’t make excuses for its destruction.
Two Strategies
One grassroots approach is to first get definite information on where all those pockets are, and then work with city or state legislatures to make alternatives available. So all women, no matter how poor or how isolated, have the ability to get quality care from community health centers rather than from an abortion advocacy organization.
This service to women in poverty is worthy in and of itself, empowering women who wish to have the alternative. But it also will undermine the argument that women need Planned Parenthood. The organization would become much more clearly redundant and unnecessary for legitimate health care.
This groundwork could make the federal legislation more likely to pass eventually. And it would be a worthwhile project even if the de-funding legislation never passes. Planned Parenthood could be weakened as a matter of noncooperation by the people who can now go elsewhere.
Another strategy is that those who have a goal of de-funding Planned Parenthood could get legislators to offer to double or triple the funds going to the community health centers specifically for women’s health, on the condition that none of the money goes to abortion-providing organizations.
Then the people insisting that money must go specifically to Planned Parenthood would be the ones whose actions were working to cut the funds for women’s health care as a whole.
============================================================
For more of our blog posts on nonviolent campaigns about Planned Parenthood, see:
Noncooperation with Planned Parenthood
Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood
For the campaign itself — Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood, see:
Difference This Time: Pro-Life Heroism
by Rachel MacNair
With the lethal shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs of November 27, 2015, we in Consistent Life first waited to hear if it were in fact connected to abortion. Once the news was that the shooter had rambled about “baby parts,” then recent news about undercover videos involving those did seem to be the motivation. Our issue of Peace & Life Connections that week went through an intense round of revisions as we grappled with what to say and what not to say.
After all, militant people in the past spoke to the media to justify vigilante action after past shooting incidents. Violence as problem-solver is steeped in our society.
The peace movement in opposition to the American war in Vietnam had the same problem – big time. “Anti-war” bombings killed people. The civil rights movement had to deal with such militants, too, and major riots to boot. So did Gandhi.
When I was trying to adopt a special-needs child, I was initially blocked because a specific person told the social workers that I was inclined to bomb places to express my political views. I know she did this because she bragged about doing it to a friend of mine. So I had to inquire whether it was the peace-movement or prolife-movement activism that got to that stereotype. It was the pro-life. Even the local director of Planned Parenthood at the time knew me and told me she thought this was ridiculous. I was able to persuade the social workers that it was untrue, so I was technically still qualified – but I never did have a child placed with me. So my home is emptier now than it might have been because of this form of bigotry. I feel the injustice of it very personally.
Many of us have been facing the outrage from abortion defenders who want to call this “domestic terrorism,” and we feel a little intimidated about mentioning we’re pro-life. A handful of places in the media are highlighting people who’ve come out with violence-oriented signs; those signs fit their stereotypes.
Yet it’s been years since they found someone to articulate at length a vigilante perspective.
The pro-life involvement in this case was that a pro-life police officer gave his life in protection of the people at the clinic.
Garrett Swasey
Police Officer Garret Swasey, loving father of two and volunteer co-pastor of Hope Chapel in Colorado Springs, was murdered in this shooting spree. This is a case where a pro-lifer was murdered. Not for being pro-life, but because he was a police officer doing his job trying to protect people’s lives. An officer who worked with Swasey, Larry Darnell, reported that Swasey was not merely sent but volunteered to go when hearing news of the shooting.
He’s therefore, by definition, a hero. Thousands attended his funeral.
This is the exact opposite of “terrorism.” Since that term is questionable when no organization was involved, we can be more precise and say it was the exact opposite of being vigilante.
Since many abortion defenders are unaware of this point about Garrett Swasey, they don’t know how utterly inappropriate it is to use his death as a way of furthering bigotry against pro-lifers. We need to do more to communicate this.
If the case were being presented fairly, it would be a way of pointing out how admirable pro-lifers can be, putting their very lives on the line, in the face of horrific and senseless violence.
The Adventures of Prolifers for Survival — Scorned by Mobilization for Survival
Carol Crossed
by Carol Crossed
Mobilization for Survival
Mobilization For Survival (MFS) began in the 1970s and was a diverse network of peace organizations, principally to address nuclear concerns.
Groups were encouraged to join by paying a modest membership fee and agreeing to four principles:
1. Disarming countries of nuclear weapons;
2. Banning nuclear power;
3. Ending the arms race; and
4. Meeting human needs.
MFS grew to roughly 350 member groups, and in the Spring of 1980 they ginned up for a large demonstration
First Contact
Juli Loesch (now Julianne Wiley) called the MFS office to get information on how to join and participate in the demonstration. She spoke to a staff person at Mobilization for Survival named Stephen Zunes. Stephen was only 23 years old and a practicing Quaker when he began working at the national office of MFS in Philadelphia.
Juli Loesch in 1980s
(now Julianne Wiley)
Stephen’s responsibilities centered around organizing Survival Summer. It was modeled after Mississippi Summer (1964) and Vietnam Summer (1967). This is the gathering Juli requested information about from the MFS office. She recalls being sent a “pretty substantial” packet of information.
However, Juli was shocked by its contents. It included a couple of leaflets by “abortion rights” organizations. Juli characterized this as opportunistically exploiting a peace march. How? By promoting that the Three Mile Island nuclear energy accident and its dangers of radiation created a need for lots more abortions, free and on demand, especially for women living downstream in the Susquehanna River watershed.
Juli’s sense of humorous outrage and her passion for justice, coupled with this absurd misuse of peace, were quickly aroused. First, Juli argued, “It was manifestly incoherent thinking that the nuclear industry was wickedly responsible for endangering or damaging babies, but that at the same time, our righteous response was: let’s be sure they all get aborted.”
Secondly, Juli was in the midst of trying to organize a bus full of pro-lifers to come and support this no-nukes demonstration. “They would surely back off if one of our demands was supposed to be ‘yes on abortion, and lots of it’.”
Juli phoned the MFS headquarters and carefully and rationally (and she admits perhaps a tad hotly) voiced her objection to this conflation of incompatible issues.
Juli recalls the conversation:
“OK,” said the person on the other end of the line, “And what did you say your name is?”
“Juli Loesch.”
“And the group you represent is?”
Well, there wasn’t any group. It was just Juli. So on impulse she blurted, “We’re Pro-Lifers for Survival (PS).”
So Juli hung up, cooled down a few degrees, and then thought, “Oh, Lord. Now I’ve got to organize a group.”
MFS Responds
Stephen Zunes
According to Stephen, the MFS Staff was fully aware of the diversity of the member organizations. Some were front groups for organizations whose belief in the four principles were suspect. For instance, the Communist Party rationalized Soviet nuclear weapons and other military policies. There were Jewish organizations that supported Israeli occupation. “The MFS staff were willing to tolerate those differences, but there were some staff and local chapters that wouldn’t tolerate allowing anti-abortion groups.”
The Boston chapter of Mobilization for Survival sent out a letter against PS, saying that all prolifers were “racist, classist, misogynist anti-choice reactionaries.”
Juli was more than miffed. “They had Presbyterians and Physicians for Survival and Polyamorists and Pagans for Survival. But Pro-Lifers for Survival they could not tolerate?”
Strange, she remembers. “MFS was glowing with the urgency to create the broadest grassroots coalition ever for the Survival of the Planet — nothing could be more important than that! But now there’s certain people, potentially certain tens of millions of people, they’d really rather not have in their coalition, the exclusion of whom was more important than the survival of the planet?”
Stephen sought to mediate. He called Juli Loesch to clarify where PS was coming from. Though broadly sympathetic with the consistent pro-life position himself, he didn’t dare push that perspective, but simply called for tolerance and inclusivity within MFS.
The seven member staff were almost evenly divided on the question, with the director, a Lutheran Minister open to accepting PS: “I have an intolerance for intolerance” he said. Given the divisions, however, they would have likely brought it to the full Board, if it could get that far.
A couple local and regional chapters of MFS had already gotten wind of the controversy. Boston, the largest and most active, threatened to pull out of MFS altogether if PS joined. Other groups wrote letters calling for tolerance and diversity.
It was clear that PS’s application was threatening to split the organization. Stephen recalls that not wanting to cause damage to an important peace coalition, Juli, to her credit, withdrew the PS application to join MFS. “It was a classic example of intolerance of Progressives towards those with a consistent pro-life perspective.”
Thus did Pro-Lifers for Survival begin and expand. By 1987, it morphed into The Seamless Garment Network, later renamed Consistent Life. Stephen Zunes is co-editor of our book published by Praeger:
Consistently Opposing Killing:
From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War
====================================================================
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
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece
Reminiscing on the Founding Meeting of the Consistent Life Network
Suffering and Injustice Concern Us All
by Vasu Murti
Vasu Murti
Do you feel like you’re being forced to practice Quakerism, because the government does not allow you to own a slave? Did the Quakers impose their morality on the rest of American society when slavery was abolished, or was it social and moral progress for all mankind?
Animal rights should not be solely aligned with a particular political party. Neither should they be tied to a particular religion.
In past decades, the stereotype of “religious vegetarians” was that they are all followers of Eastern religions, believing you might be reincarnated as a cow in your next life if you’re not careful. Now people are gradually becoming familiar with the strands of vegetarianism within Judaism, but many are unaware of the long history of animal advocacy, concern for animals, and vegetarianism in Christianity.
As I told Dr. Richard Schwartz (author, Judaism and Vegetarianism) via email in 1997: arguing as some Christians do that animal rights and vegetarianism are solely “Jewish” concerns is like saying, “It’s only wrong to own a slave if you’re a Quaker.”
No. Suffering and injustice concern us all. Like the abolition of slavery or the emancipation of women, animal rights and vegetarianism are moral absolutes and apply to everyone, including atheists and agnostics.
Richard agreed with me that churches should have animal issues at the top of their agenda as well.
The sad irony here is a lot of liberals see abortion as sectarian, too! They dismiss it as a “Catholic issue” or a fundamentalist Christian issue or say if you’re not born again, you don’t have to be pro-life.
If vegetarianism were solely about “fit” or following a peculiar set of “dietary laws” why would pro-lifers be offended by pro-choice vegetarians and vegans?
They’re offended because they know vegetarianism involves the animals’ right to life, and thus these pro-choicers appear to value animal life over human life under some circumstances.
And issues like animal experimentation, circuses, and fur have nothing to do with diet, eating, nor food, but do involve the animals’ right to life.
Sometimes being lighthearted gets the point across to Christians that vegetarianism is not about “dietary laws” but about the animals’ right to life, like Steve Martin in the ’70s asking, “How many polyesters did you have to kill to make that suit?”
Animal rights activist B.R. Boyd writes in The New Abolitionists (1987):
“Seventy to one hundred million, including lost and abandoned pets, are quite literally injected, infected, mutilated, driven insane, strapped immobile for years on end, blinded, concussed, burned, mechanically raped, dismembered, disemboweled, mutilated, and otherwise violated–often without adequate anesthesia–in order to test shampoos, oven cleaners, make-up, and scientific hypotheses; to advance medical science or personal careers; to develop and test nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional weapons; or for general scientific curiosity, and because public funding is available.
“Twenty million unwanted pets undergo euthanasia every year and countless others are abused by their owners. Spay-neuter clinics get little or no public funding, while the pet-breeding industry continues to enrich itself by pumping out living, disposable toys.
“Seventeen million wild fur-bearing animals (and twice as many ‘trash’ animals) are mangled in steel jaw traps and 17 million more factory farmed, then gassed or electrocuted, that we may wear furs.
“170 million animals are hunted down and shot to death in their habitats, mostly for sport, often leaving their offspring to die of exposure or starvation.
“Industrial pollution, habitat destruction, and our transportation system kill and maim untold millions, while we kidnap and imprison others for our entertainment in zoos.
“Ten billion animals are killed in America every year; 95 percent of them are killed for food. We force-breed, cage, brand, castrate, and over-milk them, cut off their beaks, horns, and tails, pump them full of antibiotics and growth stimulants, steal their eggs, and kill and eat them.”
“I have no doubt,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual development to leave off the eating of animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized.”
Like pacifists and/or pro-lifers, vegetarianism, in itself, is merely an ethic and not a religion. As an ethic, vegetarianism, like the pro-life ethic, has served as the basis for entire religious traditions: Buddhism, Jainism, Pythagoreanism, and possibly early Christianity all immediately come to mind. As an ethic, vegetarianism has attracted some of the greatest figures in history: Leonardo Da Vinci, Count Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, Sir Paul McCartney, Rosa Parks, etc.
At the end of 2007, shortly before moving to Israel, Pete Cohen of Veggie Jews in San Francisco said to me, “PETA’s not Jewish.”
When I told Jim Frey of Berkeley Pro-Life, a Catholic, that animal issues are secular and nonsectarian and thus applicable to everyone including atheists and agnostics, he said, “Well, just like with abortion.”
Pro-lifers must not play a sectarian game with animal activists. Saying, “your religion says it’s wrong to kill animals, mine doesn’t” is pointless when someone from a differing denomination could just as easily say, “Your religion says it’s wrong to kill the unborn, mine doesn’t.” There are pro-choice Protestant denominations, like the United Church of Christ.
As an animal advocate and a secularist, I’ve never understood the attempts of pro-life Christians to unsuccessfully deflect the issues of animal rights and vegetarianism by depicting them solely as someone else’s “religious belief” which they think doesn’t apply to them.
A lot of people look at abortion that way, too, you know!
Vasu Murti is the author of
The Liberal Case against Abortion
and
They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy: Animal Rights and Vegetarianism in the Western Religious Traditions
Violence Bolstered by Professional Contradictions
Rachel MacNair
by Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D.
Director of CL’s research arm, The Institute for Integrated Social Analysis
I’d like to regale you with my adventures in what ought to be a stuffy professional organization but is actually a prime field for countering the push for some kinds of violence.
In his classic book about how a war of words shows remarkable similarities against different targeted populations — Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives – William Brennan observes:
“Contrary to popular belief, although despicable language is often primarily associated with crazed individuals or mobs in the streets, it is far more likely to emanate from highly educated, respectable circles. Eminent people throughout history rank among the most steadfast purveyors of demeaning expressions. In The Republic, Plato’s advocacy of infanticide (book 5) proceeded from a perception of handicapped children as ‘inferior creatures.’ Louis Agassiz, founder of the Museum of Natural History at Harvard University and a leading nineteenth-century scientist, called black people a ‘degraded and degenerate race.’ . . . The successful waging of semantic warfare on the contemporary unwanted unborn can likewise be largely attributed to the heavy participation of influential and respectable individuals and organizations.”
Thus we come to two task forces of the U.S.’s largest professional association in psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA). Both started around 2005.
Foundations of Torture
The task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) was designed by its advocates to make interrogations “safe” and “effective,” but in fact was in collusion with the Bush administration’s push for “enhanced interrogation,” a euphemism for torture.
With this and with behind-the-scenes secret activities, the administration got the needed professional expertise for pretending it had legal authorization. The report was railroaded through without proper procedure from the representative Council. Several years of oppositional activism ensued, some of which was successful in getting reforms, including a membership referendum and a substitute policy that rescinded the original PENS report. Yet none of them took care of the entire problem.
There was a large rally in 2005 to protest the PENS task force at its beginning at the APA convention in San Francisco. I naturally attended as an active member of APA’s Division 48, which covers peace psychology. At that rally, I passed out a leaflet pointing out the PENS parallels to APA’s recently-established abortion task force. A major parallel was that rather than having a proper balance of views, the group was select for having a conclusion that favored the APA’s position.
I later became the peace psychology division’s membership chair and then served as president in 2013, so I was privy to the actions against the PENS report over the years.
Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion
I volunteered and was accepted to be one of 20 reviewers on the abortion task force’s report. I spent a good 30 to 40 hours working on explaining why one argument after another was not sound. The second draft was much improved, but never went through another review by experts (though a later updated version published in the APA’s main journal did). In many places, where I had offered alternative explanations, instead of offering both ways of looking at the evidence, the point was simply dropped. I was left with the impression that 
my job was to let them know which arguments for their position wouldn’t fly.
The meeting where the report was approved was a sight to see. I thought it resembled a pep rally more than a sober scientific assessment. I saw a smirk on the face of the person who mentioned the letters of concern from various organizations – Consistent Life was one of many.
I had heard from several individuals that they knew how biased the report was, but no one other than me was willing to get up to say so. One person told me I was brave for doing so. In a psychology crowd, that should bring flashing red lights of alarm for “groupthink.” As it was, because I wasn’t a councilmember I had to ask for permission to speak; I think I got it only because I was already at the microphone and had started talking.
In another sign this roomful of psychologists had forgotten Psychology 101, they actually took the vote by a show of hands in front of everyone. Experiments showing conformity where people will agree to clear factual errors that the whole group is making should have made those psychologists know better. In fact, APA’s President-Elect at the time admitted as much to me in a personal conversation after the meeting, saying that they were going to change that procedure. Later.
So here’s the main conclusion of the APA report on abortion:
“The best scientific evidence published indicates that among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy the relative risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single elective first-trimester abortion than if they deliver that pregnancy.”
My perception after reading the full report was that this was a foregone conclusion in search of a rationale, failing to find it, and asserting it anyway. 
There is plenty of evidence in the report itself that doesn’t fit it.
Note that they deliberately make no claims here about adolescent women, late-term abortions, or multiple abortions. And any claim that abortion would actually be beneficial to mental health has long since been abandoned.
I informed the APA Council that the press release announcing the Council’s decision to accept the report had already gone out the previous day. That’s how sure they were of the next day’s vote. No one said anything to indicate that they thought this was a problem.
Do we start to get a sense of the attitudes that allowed the collusion with torture to happen?
Down the Road
But here we go on divergent paths. In the case of the torture issue, reporter James Risen wrote a book called Pay any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War in 2014. It included a chapter on APA’s collusion with the Bush administration on torture.
Suddenly, the veneer of professionalism, of psychologists’ presence making the interrogations safer or more ethical, disappeared.
While those of us who had been paying attention knew of the problem, the bulk of the membership paid little attention, and some APA officials regarded the protesters as hotheads. But with this new publicity, APA knew it needed to protect its reputation quickly. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association had both refused to participate in Bush’s program; they’ve had scandals in the past and so they knew better from bitter experience.
APA decided it would fund an independent investigation. Staff was sure this would clear APA of any charges of wrongdoing, and that would settle down any influence the hotheads had.
It didn’t work out that way. David Hoffman was hired, and so last July offered the Hoffman Report. It was explosive throughout the whole organization, with discussion lasting for months. People who were assertive about APA having done the right thing before are more defensive now, offering apologies and assuring us that the board of directors had been kept in the dark and didn’t know all this was going on. Various actions are being pursued to remedy this scandal and see to it that it can’t happen again.
Meanwhile, the APA’s report on abortion is still be cited in the media as evidence that the women’s voices that were precluded from a seat on the task force do in fact not count. That women grieve or are traumatized by abortion is still denied with the use of this professional report.
A more detailed chapter on the APA abortion report is in Achieving Peace in the Abortion War, a book in which Rachel MacNair applies peace psychology principles to the current abortion situation in the United States.
Available from the publisher, Barnes & Noble, and amazon
Spice things up with the Consistent Life Ethic
Carol Crossed
By Carol Crossed, Consistent Life Board Member
The consistent life ethic is like salt. You don’t need a whole lot to be effective. But it’s essential to have it present…spread out here and there to spice up politics, to add a little flavor to dull single-issue groups.
But it stings, like when you wash out your mouth to cure a canker sore. It smarts on the wound. It makes you sit up straight and take notice that something’s different here. And then it heals if you leave it there long enough. The “liberals” need it to cure contradictions and the “conservatives” need it for incongruities. And we all need it to cleanse and purify us from self-righteousness. Yes, consistency is good for what ails the Left and the Right.
Salt forms new compositions and breaks up ice. Like the consistent life ethic it warms cold and hardened opinions and makes slush…soft and malleable. The fragile unborn child becomes the person on death row. We abandon our stale ideologies that leave somebody out. The homeless on the war torn streets of Baghdad become the homeless unwanted child in the womb. Home. That’s where the consistent life ethic brings us. No hidden agendas. It allows us to be whole, to be ourselves again.
Originally published in Harmony, December 1991
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
by Rob Arner, CL Board member
Adjunct Professor of Religion at Reformed Episcopal Seminary and Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, PA
Rob Arner with kids Grace, Josh, and Luke
When measured against the standard of the ancient Christian church, contemporary American and European Christianity is in a moral mess. When it comes to what have been called the “life issues,” Christians are no less sharply divided than members of secular society. Some Christians, called “conservative” by conventional narratives, believe abortion is a grave moral evil. Yet often these same Christians will fall in line to support the latest war proposed by the nation’s chief executive. Other Christians tend not to view abortion as such an intrinsic evil, but rather a tragic “choice” for mothers in difficult circumstances. These Christians, sometimes called “liberal,” are more concerned with systemic and social evils, such as poverty, and are critical of the ready recourse to war. These two groups far too often find themselves talking past one another at best, and actively working against one another at worst, so significant progress isn’t made toward addressing either group’s moral concerns.
But imagine if this were not so. Imagine the impact if there were instead a united witness, an ecumenical consensus surrounding the thorny question of whether and in what circumstances a disciple of Jesus might take a human life.
Such a consensus actually existed in the ancient Christian church, stretching from the time of the apostles until the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the conversion of the emperor Constantine.
In my investigation into the ethics of the ancient Christian church, I read every surviving orthodox Christian sermon, treatise, letter, and apology from that period (about 90-314 C.E.) and discovered a startling consensus on this issue. As diverse as the ancient Christian church may have been on wealth and poverty, sexuality, church governance, theology, and a host of other issues, when it comes to the subject of killing other human persons, the ancient Christian writers were startlingly in accord with one another. Without exception, the church strongly condemned the taking of human life in any form whatsoever.
Neither homicide, nor feticide, nor infanticide, nor suicide, nor capital punishment, nor killing in war were considered acceptable. Put more precisely, no surviving orthodox Christian writing dating from before Constantine ever approves of Christian participation in human bloodshed.
In the Roman Empire, life was cheap. Not only was the “peace” of the empire secured and maintained through brutal conquest, but everyday life for Roman citizens, even during times of “peace,” was filled with violence. Killing was sport in the gladiatorial conquests and chariot races.
The value of individual human persons was deemed subordinate to the good of Rome. This was true at both the upper levels of society — witness how many Roman emperors met with violent deaths at the hands of their rivals (or loved ones!) — as well as at the bottom strata, as the life of a slave was all but worthless to his or her master, and unwanted children of the poor were either aborted or abandoned in the countryside to die of exposure. The glory of Rome was built on the broken backs of enslaved peoples and the blood of those deemed expendable. It’s into this milieu the ancient church brought its message that was decidedly on the side of life— in every case.
Both abortions of unborn children and the killings of unwanted or disabled born children were widely practiced in ancient Rome. The early Christians stood forcefully against these practices. For instance, the ancient discipleship manual commonly known as the Didache, which dates from around the turn of the second century CE, and therefore may actually have been written at the same time as some of the New Testament, contains an explicit prohibition of infanticide and abortion: “A further commandment of the Teaching: Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not practice pederasty; do not fornicate; do not steal; do not deal in magic; do not practice sorcery; do not kill a fetus by abortion, or commit infanticide” (Didache 2.1–2).
Another explicit statement:
But with us, murder is forbidden once for all. We are not permitted to destroy even the fetus in the womb, as long as blood is still being drawn to form a human being. To prevent the birth of a child is a quicker way to murder. It makes no difference whether one destroys a soul already born or interferes with its coming to birth. It is a human being and one who is to be [an adult], for the whole fruit is already present in the seed. (Tertullian, Apology, 9)
Just as with “private” issues of abortion and infanticide, the early church offered an adamant “no” on the most “public” kinds of killing. The early Christian discussions on killing in war, and on military service more broadly, are so numerous and multifaceted that I can only scratch the surface.
The church’s broad condemnation of killing made the military profession deeply problematic. In the Apostolic Tradition, how the church prepared new initiates for baptism:
(9.) A soldier in command must be told not to kill people; if he is ordered so to do, he shall not carry it out. Nor shall he take the oath. If he will not agree, he should be rejected [from the baptism preparation].
(10.) Anyone who has the power of the sword, or who is a civil magistrate wearing the purple, should desist, or he should be rejected.
(11.) If a catechumen or a believer wishes to become a soldier they should be rejected, for they have despised God. (Apostolic Tradition, 16.9–11)
For many soldiers, quitting the army before their terms expired would entail an almost certain death sentence. Therefore, those who were already soldiers at the time of their conversion could stay in their posts as long as they did not swear the military oath or kill anyone.
Military imagery of discipline and order was converted to positive imagery of peace, as in this example:
But when the shrilling trumpet blows, it assembles the soldiers and proclaims war; and shall not Christ, think you, having breathed to the ends of the earth a song of peace, assemble the soldiers of peace that are his? Yes, and He did assemble, O man, by blood and by word His bloodless army, and to them He entrusted the kingdom of heaven. (Exhortation to the Greeks, 11)
Numerous ancient Christian writers go on record as opposing all killing period. Their words express a strict ethic that was pervasive across the church of that era, not just isolated to one city or region. Origen, for example, said of Jesus:
He taught that it was never right for his disciples to go so far against a man, even if he should be very wicked; for he did not consider it compatible with his inspired legislation to allow the taking of human life in any form at all. (Against Celsus, 3.7)
Lactantius wrote:
So, neither will it be permitted a just man, whose service is justice herself, to enter military service, nor can he accuse anyone of a capital crime, because there is no difference whether you kill a man with a sword or a word, since the killing itself is prohibited. Therefore, in this command of God, no exception whatsoever must be made. It is always wrong to kill a man whom God has intended to be a sacrosanct creature. (Lactantius, Divine Institutes 6.20)
The church before Constantine consistently rejected killing—whether in the womb, in the arena, on the battlefield, or anywhere else.
Might this ethical and moral clarity be relevant today, in our time of polarizing culture wars? Might it have the power to bridge the gap between “conservatives” and the life-issues dear to their hearts, and “liberal/progressives” and the peace and justice issues dear to theirs?
I submit that the way of Jesus Christ as lived by the early Christian church is decidedly a “third-way” that defies these two conventional categories and has tremendous potential for healing a broken world by uniting ideological opponents in common cause with one another— to work alongside, rather than against one another. At this hour of history, it may be the most effective and necessary means by which we can become ambassadors of reconciliation and protect the vulnerable persons in our world today.
Editor’s note: For a book-length version and extensive documentation of this thesis, see
Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity.
====================================================================
For more blog posts on the history of the consistent life ethic, see:
First Stirrings in Connecting the Life Issues
Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece
The Adventures of Prolifers for Survival: Scorned by Mobilization for Survival
Reminiscing on the Founding Meeting of the Consistent Life Network
Adventures of Organizing as a Consistent Lifer
by Lisa Stiller (written September 10, 2015)
In the past month and a half, one of the many things I’ve been busy with is helping to organize rallies on issues as divergent as “Defunding Planned Parenthood” and “Support Diplomacy for Iran.” I’ve been sending press releases for organizations such as Students for Life of America/SFLA (the Woman Betrayed rally organizers in Portland, OR) and MoveOn.org (the Iran diplomacy rallies).
Left: Constance Cooper & daughter Fia Ewing with Lisa
Right: Lisa with Peg Wills
Do I feel kind of schizophrenic?
Well, yes. Today I just finished sending out a revised press release for the MoveOn rally, which has now morphed into one that will thank our Oregon Senators for voting for diplomacy. And tomorrow I’m working with another member of Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) to put together a press release about a quiet protest we’ll hold outside of an event where a top Oregon Planned Parenthood official will be speaking. I’m waiting for someone in the media who gets these press releases to ask me how I support both causes.
A few of my friends get it. Most don’t.
They say, “How can you claim to be a liberal and advocate defunding Planned Parenthood?” I say, “How can I not?”
As a “liberal”, or someone on the “Left” (I’m really growing to hate these labels), I believe in providing the funding and support for whatever it takes to help people and families out of poverty. I support those things that work to promote the dignity of all life, peace, and an end to violence.
Abortion defeats all these. It does nothing to address the root causes. Why do so many women feel they need to turn to abortion, why do so many women end up with unintended pregnancies? We’re supporting the quick fix, rather than tackling the larger problem.
Same with Iran. It’s much simpler to explain about promoting policies that lead to war and the use of aggression. The Iran deal was in no way a quick fix, and implementation will be complex.
So I will continue to stand up for life, in every form, with a Consistent Life Ethic. Hopefully my friends will someday “get it.”
Photos:
Top Left: Bill Samuel and Lisa at Wild Goose Festival
Top Right: Lisa, Richard Stith and John Whitehead at March for Life table
Middle Left: Lisa at West Coast Walk for Life
Middle Center: Lisa and Tony Masalonis at Call to Action conference
Middle Right: Lisa and John Whitehead at Cardinal O’Connor conference
Bottom Left: Lisa opposing war with Syria (sign reads: Syria – Let’s seek a nonviolent peaceful solution)
Bottom Right: Lisa protesting in the Trayvon Martin case
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
By Karen Swallow Prior
from Sojourners, August 2015
I WAS SITTING IN the wrong end of a police wagon the first time I questioned nuclear weapons. Technically, it was a school bus, but it served the same purpose: hauling scores of protesters to the county holding center where we would await booking for our trespasses.
We had been protesting abortion. I was thinking about nuclear weapons because a couple of those in the bus were peace activists who had long rap sheets from years of anti-war protests. I, on the other hand, was a Republican-voting, independent Baptist church-attending, conservative-leaning, law-abiding (well, until now) kind of Christian. I was awed—and grateful—that these peaceniks would join the likes of me in common cause against another kind of violence.
My new friends adhered to the “seamless garment” philosophy, also called the consistent life ethic, one committed to the protection of all human life, whether from war, poverty, racism, capital punishment, euthanasia, or abortion. One of them gave me a button that read “Peace begins in the womb,” and I pinned it to the bottom of the black leather motorcycle jacket I used to wear in those days.
A few years and many more abortion protests later, I was starting a local chapter of Feminists for Life, attending an Episcopal church, heading up a small private school in the inner city, teaching at a Jesuit college, and reading the poetry of Father Daniel Berrigan, the famous Vietnam-era anti-war activist who was now being arrested for protesting abortion.
– See more at: https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2015/nukes-and-pro-life-christian#sthash.URc7MaLr.dpuf
Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., is the author most recently of Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. She is also a Consistent Life endorser.
===========================================================
Another blog post on a conservative look at issues of violence:
Why Conservatives Should Oppose the Death Penalty
For more blog posts on personal journeys, see:
Supporting the Dignity of Every Life (Bill Samuel)
Coming to Peace and Living a Consistent Life After Military Service
Off the Fence and Taking My Stand on Abortion (Mary Liepold)
Sharon Long: My Personal Pro-life Journey
On Being a Consistent Chimera (Rob Arner)
The Myth of Sexual Autonomy
Julianne Wiley
by Julianne Wiley
Note: Julianne Wiley (aka Juli Loesch) was the founder of Prolifers for Survival, the predecessor group of Consistent Life (CL). This is an updated version of an article published in the Spring 1987 version of Sisterlife, then newsletter of CL member group Feminists for Life.
Occasionally on the web we find abortion defenders compelled to admit that the Left and the media are more likely to be won over by the “seamless garment” approach, which includes opposition to abortion in the context of opposition to other kinds of sanctioned killing. Or that prolife feminists have grasped some “essential feminist truths” which make their arguments against abortion more compelling.
With the game beginning to go against them, some will fold the rest of their hand and slap their highest card on the table: sexual autonomy.
No matter what else happens, and no matter what “utopian” changes may come, there will always be the vagaries of sexual passion and the failures of contraception. Thus, come what may, abortion will always be “necessary” if we are to be free to live “sexually autonomous” lives.
Ellen Willis in the Village Voice hurled the following challenge: “I have yet to hear any right-to-lifers take full responsibility for that fact or deal seriously with its political implications.”
On the contrary. I think that it’s the advocates of sexual autonomy who have failed to recognize its political implications.
The opposite of sexual autonomy, or independence, is sexual bondedness, or interdependence. What the autonomous wish to enjoy is precisely unbondedness; and one of the bonds to be rejected is a bond to offspring who were conceived without deliberate choice.
To the defenders of such autonomy I would like to post these questions: Is there such a thing as parental obligation? If so, when and how, and for whom, does this obligation arise?
In the past, people assumed that simply by engaging in heterosexual relations with each other they acquired parental obligations if and when pregnancy resulted. But now, this is to be seen as a denial of sexual autonomy. Obligations now arise, not from the decision to have sex, but from the strictly separate decision to bear the child.
But please note: The decision to have sex is a decision made by both partners. The decision to bear the child is made by only one of them: namely, the woman.
Thus, the woman’s responsibility corresponds to her choice, made at some point during the pregnancy. If she doesn’t want to assume any obligation, she can choose abortion and any question of parental responsibility is foreclosed.
But for the man, parental obligation supposedly arises from the woman’s choices: her choice to bear the baby, and her choice to name him as the father and even to bring legal action to compel his support, if it comes to that.
The problem here is obvious. You can expect increasingly to hear the sexually autonomous male’s just complaint: “How is it that she gets a choice, but I don’t? She chose to be a mother. I didn’t choose to be a father. I just chose to have sex!”
There will always be men who, at any given moment, want sex but don’t want a child; some of these men will get women pregnant. But sexual intercourse now implies for each of them – exactly nothing, no responsibility.
It’s only the woman’s subsequent and separate option that determines everything. That being the case, why should any man feel he’s acquired an obligation if the woman decides to give birth? Because he deposited sperm in the woman’s vagina? Don’t be medieval.
Am I predicting that the elevation of sexual autonomy to the status of a “right,” coupled with the availability of abortion, will cut men loose entirely? That paternal responsibility will sink to zero? That men are not only going to take off, but feel justified about it?
Hell, no. I’m not predicting that. I’m reporting it. I’ve done my share of women’s shelter work. I saw it all the time. A couple has a child. Three years down the line he decides he isn’t cut out to be a father. “But you can’t just walk out. This is your child too!”
“Sure, sure. But it was your choice.”
Well, the gentleman is right, given that the availability of abortion has made procreation a unilateral female decision.
Most male commitment to the long-term responsibility of child rearing is not obtained through court order. It is obtained voluntarily through a man’s sense, bolstered by society, that it’s right and fair. Why? Because the choice that obliges both him and the woman is the choice they made together, in the act that made the child.
The vast majority of women and children in this world rely upon webs of interrelation predicated upon a sexually connected man: a man whose sexuality makes him the husband of this woman, the father of this child. It’s sex that binds him, obliges him to another gender and another generation.
If the act of generation loses this weight, this significance—and the abortion culture simply blows it away—then you end up with fathering that never makes a father, mating that never makes a mate, short-circuited sex that dreams of nothing more than being plugged into its own sockets.
Autonomy—in this sense—is as pro-woman as poverty and as pro-sex as an amputation. And abortion—the dismembered offspring—is not only its program, but its most perfect and fitting image.