Anti-Abortionists Face Ethical Dilemmas

Twelve years after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling established the legal right to abortions, most religious Americans still struggle for a consistent ethical stance on the issue.

Instinctively supportive of the sanctity of budding life, many church people nevertheless have felt that the “hard cases”--when the mother is a victim of rape or incest or when her life is in danger--compel a compassionate response from the law.

But some large mainstream Protestant denominations, especially Presbyterians and Episcopalians, are under pressure from the pews this year to reconsider the essentially “pro-choice” positions adopted in recent years by their national conventions.

For some time now, the anti-abortion movement has been on the ethical offensive in the abortion debate. Religious moderates took notice when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin last year defined the U.S. bishops’ position against abortion as part of a “seamless garment” of consistent ethical stances against capital punishment, euthanasia, the nuclear arms buildup, poverty and human rights violations.

More recently, however, the anti-abortion movement--which describes itself as “pro-life”--has had to wrestle with the ethical dilemma of how to respond to the wave of bombings of abortion clinics. Obviously, such actions could potentially result in death, although no lives have been lost in the 30 bombing incidents since 1982. Some of those arrested have said they planted the bombs out of a sense of Christian outrage because 1.5 million abortions are performed in this country each year.

And the movement has always been confronted with the challenge of whether it is merely against something--eager to prohibit legal abortions--but unwilling to give substantial help to girls and women facing hardships because of their pregnancies. Last week, Archbishop Bernard Law of Boston, following the example set by other Catholic and Protestant leaders, announced a program to aid women with hardship pregnancies.

Ethical consistency can be an elusive goal, subject to interpretation and emotion.

“It is very difficult to get our ideals to come out straight and be utterly consistent,” said Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a think tank specializing in ethical issues in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. “People read a lot of symbolic meaning into the abortion debate: It stands for family, women, society. . . . It makes it difficult to compromise,” said Callahan’s wife Sidney, who teaches psychology at Catholic-run Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Among the most frequently cited writers on abortion ethics, the Callahans have been unable to budge each other from their respective pro-choice (Daniel) and anti-abortion (Sidney) positions.

Nor have activists on either side come up with compelling arguments to win over the large middle ground of public opinion, says University of California, San Diego, sociologist Kristin Luker, author of “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.”

Even before the landmark Jan. 22, 1973, Supreme Court decision, Roe vs. Wade, opinion polls showed that Americans favor abortion for the hardest cases of pregnancy resulting from rape, incest or physical danger, Luker said.

(An ABC Television news poll released this week found that 52% were in favor of abortion on demand, 36% approved of abortion for health reasons and 11% were against it completely. Catholics gave almost identical responses.)

Luker said poll results over the years show the public “has been willing to live with a very deep ambiguity about the embryo.”

“They think women should have abortions that they need but not abortions they (merely) want. The problem is that there is no public policy that can capture that ambivalence,” she said.

The Supreme Court ruled that a state may bar abortions only in the last trimester of pregnancy. In the first trimester, when about 90% of abortions are performed, the private right of choice prevails, without regard to reasons.

Religious tradition alone is not a sufficient guide to a person’s position on abortion. Catholic, Protestant and Jewish organizations have advocates in both camps. The differences fall more along liberal-conservative lines within those religious bodies, but even there some surprises occur. For example, there are some avowed feminists in the anti-abortion fold.

Speaking for most feminists in a 1983 book, “Our Right to Choose,” ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison of the Protestant-run Union Theological Seminary in New York argued that making the fetus the starting point of discussion is intrinsically sexist. She contended that women must gain control over their procreative power as a first step in freeing themselves of male domination.

To anti-abortionists who ask “What if your own mother had decided on an abortion?” Harrison concurs first of all with the response of religious philosopher Charles Hartshorne that an abortion would have meant that no “I” would experience the loss.

“Furthermore,” she wrote, “the ‘I’ who was born into the world exists, in large part, out of the freely given, active caring of a woman who was willing both to take a genuine risk in bearing me and my siblings and to struggle to provide for us after the premature death of our father. . . . In the absence of such tenderness and care, born not of instinct but of moral freedom, it would have been better for me, or for anyone else, not to have been born.”

Some Catholic feminists, however, take a different view.

‘Can Buy His Way’

Catholic writer Mary Meehan, previously active in anti-war and civil rights issues, said abortion “exploits” women. “Many women are pressured by spouses, lovers or parents into having abortions they do not want,” Meehan said. Another feminist, Juli Loesch, has contended that legal abortions have become a male’s convenience for escaping responsibility. “He can buy his way out of accountability,” she has contended.

Sidney Callahan, who wonders why other women do not see preserving the unborn as a feminist concern, said in an interview that she believes the strongest argument (though not insurmountable, in her opinion) for legal access to abortion lies in the “hard cases.”

By contrast, her husband, Daniel, believes that the strongest argument for legal abortion is the moral uncertainty about when life begins. “The moral status of the fetus is in doubt. In such cases we ought to leave the choice up to individuals and not try to legislate on matters that profoundly affect private lives,” said Daniel Callahan, a former associate editor of Catholic-oriented Commonweal magazine.

Although official Catholic teaching treats abortion as morally wrong and the developing life in the womb as an innocent party with intrinsic rights, the independent Washington-based Catholics for a Free Choice has represented the most active dissent in the nation’s largest church body.

Daniel C. Maguire, a theology professor at Marquette University, and his wife, Marjorie Reiley Maguire, also a theologian, wrote a step-by-step guide to making ethical choices on abortion for Catholics that has been widely used by the “pro-choice” advocates.

If one believes the fetus is a person, the Maguires concede, one “will need serious overriding reasons to morally support a decision to have an abortion.” They note that many people believe the fetus becomes a person when it is “viable” and could survive outside the mother’s body.

But even if a fetus is considered a “person,” the Maguires said, if a woman’s life or values “are seriously threatened by continuing the pregnancy, then you can justify ending the pregnancy.” For the undecided, the Maguires advised that “to rule out abortion on the chance that what is in the womb is a person is to ignore the needs and rights of a being (you!) whose personhood is not in doubt and may be seriously harmed in mind or body if forced to carry the pregnancy to term.”

At a conference of religion scholars in Chicago last month, Daniel Maguire decried “this rhapsodic love for embryos,” the heated defense of “the civil rights of embryos, fetuses and Baby Does when children are dying of malnutrition.”

Within large mainline Protestant denominations--which may have liberal-to-moderate leadership but a strong conservative presence in their rank and file--abortion remains an unsettling issue.

The Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention this September in Anaheim is expected to face challenges to its 1979 statement on abortion. Anticipating the discussion, the church’s House of Bishops last fall approved a 16-page study paper that essentially echoes the 1979 statement.

“Abortion is always a tragedy,” the paper said, “but rape, incest, deformity or a family strained in nurturing too many children and now faced with another pregnancy--these also are tragedies. In such instances, abortion may be seen as a lesser tragedy.”

Study Characteristics

Bishop Scott Field Bailey of San Antonio, Tex., secretary of the House of Bishops, characterized the study paper as “neither ‘pro-life’ nor ‘pro-choice.’ ”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) also is likely to have a renewed debate this year over the General Assembly’s 1983 statement that abortion is not only a right but sometimes an “act of faithfulness before God.” But the dissent was strong enough to call for a study document on abortion to be sent to the church’s 12,000 churches for comments.

The influence of Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” ethic against abortion and nuclear armament, articulated in late 1983, can be seen in Presbyterian circles. “Abortion is a peacemaking issue, like nuclear war and hunger,” the Rev. Ben Sheldon, president of Presbyterians Pro-Life, told the Presbyterian Congress on Renewal this month in Dallas.

It remains to be seen, however, whether Episcopal and Presbyterian anti-abortion advocates will have any more effect on the official position of their denominations than their counterparts in the United Methodist Church did at that denomination’s quadrennial meeting last year. To its general support of the “legal option on abortion under proper medical procedures,” the Methodist conference added language limiting support to the “tragic conflicts of life that may justify abortion.”

While the Catholic Church has been the most visible opponent of abortion, the movement has long had the support of many conservative Protestants. The vast majority have engaged in nonviolent protest, but the recent bombings appear to have been the work of independent fundamentalists.

Convicted bomber Don Benny Anderson, imprisoned in Oxford, Wis., said the incidents so far were just warning blasts. “We are in the embryonic stages of civil war, holy war,” Anderson told a reporter this month.

A longtime anti-abortion activist, Father Edwin Arentsen of Addieville, Ill., wrote in a letter printed in last Sunday’s National Catholic Register that he does not see the bombings as “an evil sickness,” as described by another letter writer.

“I believe that those who undertake such efforts may have a more keen sense of what is really happening there than the rest of us,” the priest wrote. “We have had 12 years of abortion. What have we accomplished?”

Editors of the Los Angeles-based weekly disagreed, saying such bombings are “not only politically unwise and morally wrong, but they also unfairly discredit the overwhelmingly peaceful labors of pro-lifers.” In the same issue, columnist Juli Loesch said arson sends the wrong message:

“You see, abortion is violent, but it doesn’t look it. It looks clean and clinical, as if it were a bona fide medical procedure. But clinic burning looks violent, even if it isn’t. “

The anti-abortion fight needs to stay within the confines of the law while working to change law, according to Harold Lindsell of Laguna Hills, an influential fundamentalist on biblical interpretation issues and editor emeritus of Christianity Today.

‘Very Small Minority’

Lindsell said only “a very, very small minority” of anti-abortionists are disposed to take violent action against abortion clinics. But he acknowledged that stark portrayals of abortion procedures and calls to end the “genocide”--however necessary to stir people from their lethargy--pose the danger that some people will go too far.

Anti-abortionists are being urged to other kinds of action, such as picketing and confrontations with medical staff and would-be patients at abortion facilities. They are also being encouraged to aid women who might give birth if given needed support.

Archbishop Law’s announcement that his Boston archdiocese would provide health services, counseling and financial aid for any woman who chooses to have her baby rather than an abortion is the latest manifestation of the recent trend to aid pregnant women. Such programs have already been established by the Los Angeles archdiocese, while Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell’s “Save-a-Baby” project, begun in 1983, has spawned nearly 200 other similar programs sponsored by conservative Protestant churches.

Falwell’s Save-a-Baby Family Life Services claims to counsel more than 2,000 women in an average month at its Lynchburg, Va., office. Director Jim Savley said women with a problem pregnancy are offered medical and dental care, maternity clothing, counseling and a temporary home and adoption with Christian parents.

Father Dave Cousineau of the Los Angeles archdiocese’s Catholic Social Services said lately women in increasing numbers have asked the agency to help them persuade family members to support their decision to go through with a pregnancy.

“Many cases we get are women from other areas, like the Midwest, who are afraid to go back,” he said. “I can call my counterpart in another diocese to act as an advocate with her family. In effect, it’s a national network of counselors.”

Patricia L. Brown of the Times editorial library assisted in researching this article.