Many leaders of the prolife movement regard 1986 as a banner year in their quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Former Moral Majority vice-president Cal Thomas, moderator at last month’s Americans United for Life (AUL) conference in Chicago, summarized the rising confidence of the prolife movement, stating that the “momentum is inexorably in the direction of the [prolife] side.”
AUL, the nation’s oldest prolife organization, met to review the year’s major developments. Fueling optimism among abortion opponents was President Reagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court of Antonin Scalia to replace Chief Justice Warren Burger, who resigned earlier this year. Prolifers were also impressed by the firmness with which dissenting justices in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists challenged the logic of Roe v. Wade.
Thomas said the outcome of another case, accepted recently by the high court, could well begin the “erosion of the other philosophical world view.” Zbaraz v. Hartigan tests the legality of a law requiring a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion is performed on a minor. The one-day period would begin from the time the girl’s parents are notified of her intentions. Maura Quinlan, senior staff counsel for AUL, drafted the model statute on which the law that is being tested is based.
Thomas predicted Roe v. Wade would be repealed by the year 2000. “Unfortunately,” he added, “many will die in the interim.”
A Broadening Base
Another reason for the prolife movement’s growing confidence is its broadening base of support. No longer can it be considered exclusively religious in motivation. In fact, two of the five major speakers at last month’s AUL conference, syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff and physician Bernard Nathanson, are avowed atheists. However, they are among an increasing number who see abortion not as a strictly moral issue, but as an issue of civil rights for unborn humans.
Surgeon General C. Everett Koop told AUL conferees there was a day when he and Nathanson “would not want to be in each other’s presence unless it was at our respective funerals.” Koop said Nathanson, formerly the president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, has “made the most beautiful 180-degree turn I’ve ever seen.”
In his conference address, Nathanson drew attention to some of the inconsistencies of prochoice thinking. He told of a California woman being prosecuted for child abuse because she did not report she was bleeding in the thirty-sixth week of her pregnancy. Her child was born brain-damaged and eventually died.
Nathanson stated that, had the woman gone to an abortionist after 36 weeks “complaining about her vericose veins,” she could have gotten an abortion and would merely have been “cited as having exercised her constitutional right.”
Nathanson said the medical technology will soon be available to preserve the lives of the unborn while granting the wishes of women who want to end their pregnancies. “I don’t doubt that in the next five years we will be able to take a fetus, an embryo, a baby, from the mother’s uterus … and transfer it either to someone else’s uterus or to a life-support system.”
“The interesting question,” Nathanson commented, is “what kind of an abortion will American women opt for.… This will be very revealing as to the moral tone of our society.”
Journalist Hentoff, in addition to addressing the conference, received from Koop the Surgeon General’s Medallion, the highest award Koop’s office can bestow on an individual. Hentoff, a staff writer for The Village Voice since 1958, was cited “for his eloquence on behalf of the civil rights of Baby Doe,” an infant with Down’s syndrome who died after his parents requested nutrition be withheld.
Hentoff said his stand against abortion has isolated him from some of his politically liberal colleagues. “The question I’m most often asked,” he said, “is, ‘How do you presume to have this kind of moral conception without belief in God?’ And the answer is, ‘It’s hard. But it’s not impossible.’ ”
Describing his transformation on the abortion issue, Hentoff said he came to realize the indivisibility of all life while reporting on “Baby Doe” regulations. He said he was startled to hear the head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s unit on reproductive freedom state that a woman’s right to control her own body could be extended to include dispensing with a handicapped baby.
After all, Hentoff said, having been born as persons under the Constitution, “[these infants] were entitled to at least the same rights as people on death row.”
Hentoff suggested that some political liberals are hesitant to oppose abortion because they disagree with almost all the other elements of the conservative agenda. Hentoff himself remains liberal on most issues; he said abortion opponents, to be consistent, should also oppose the arms race.
The Limits Of Law
In his conference address, Catholic priest James Burtchaell, theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, warned against the movement directing its efforts exclusively at changing the law. “We may wind up with too little to show for all our struggles,” he said. “It is only when people’s minds and hearts are touched and they undergo moral conversion that they can find within themselves the motivation to observe the law.”
Burtchaell estimated that recriminalizing abortion would save about one million American infants each year. “And that is a result of formidable proportion,” he said, “But is it enough?” Calling for an “insurrection of conscience,” Burtchaell said restoring legal protection for the unborn would merely be an “overture toward a real welcome for the young.”
Burtchaell observed that men and women who want to victimize their offspring are often themselves victims of some form of abuse or injustice. Stating that he was speaking as a Christian, Burtchaell urged his listeners to break the cycle of violence: “When you grasp the uplifted hand to prevent one injured person from striking out at another, you must do so in love, not in anger, for you are asking that person to absorb suffering rather than pass it on to another.”
By Randy Frame in Chicago
