Inter-Faith Debate on Easing Abortion Laws

Legally, a pregnant woman can’t get an abortion in North America unless her life depends on it. The result: an estimated one million women yearly step outside the law and risk a felony charge (not to mention internal mutilation and even death) to rid themselves of an unwanted child.

But is it the women or the law that needs changing? Within recent months bills to revise abortion laws have popped up in at least fifteen legislatures.Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island; and Texas. The Canadian government is also proposing changes.

The debate over the issue has produced an open, often bitter, religious confrontation. Roman Catholics, with the solid backing of their church, oppose change. A number of prominent Protestants and Jews, mostly without such backing, give the revisions qualified support.

Generally the new proposals ask that abortion be legal if there is the possibility of “physical or mental” danger to the mother, if there is a chance that the child will be defective, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, as well as if the life of the mother is in danger—now the only legal reason for abortion.

Catholic opposition is based on the view that an unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception. Thus any act that wilfully ends that life is a violation of the sixth commandment and is equated with murder.

The Roman Catholic bishops of New York State put it flatly in a pastoral letter: “Laws which allow abortion violate the unborn child’s God-given right” to life. Carrying the point one step further, the bishops wrote that any liberalization of the law would invite a “new slaughter of innocents.”

To some Catholics the implications go even deeper. Bishop Russell J. Mc-Venney of Providence holds that once the principle that an unborn child’s life can be sacrificed to protect the mother is accepted, “it could be plausibly argued that if a middle-aged woman’s health is breaking down due to the strain of caring for an aged and infirmed parent, she may protect her health by killing her parent.”

Few Protestant or Jewish organizations will cross this clear-cut line Catholics draw. The broadly representative Synagogue Council of America, for example, like the National Council of Churches, has taken no stand. But the official silence has not altogether stilled support by important individuals.

Scoring the Catholic stand as a “harsh and unconvincing form of legalism,” Dr. John C. Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, warned against the “invoking of one law or principle in isolation and without regard for other human circumstances” by Catholics, an action he claims reveals a “blindly one-sided form of morality.”

Murray A. Gordon, chairman of the New York Council of the American Jewish Congress, focused on the point most often presented in favor of abortion law revision: “The time has come to bring the law into line with social reality.”

The difficulty for Jews is that while rabbinical law clearly endorses abortion when the well-being of the mother is involved, the law is silent on the other issues raised in the proposed revisions. While Orthodox Jews would tend to reject any move for which they could not find explicit support in their law, other Jews are not willing to be so arbitrary. New York’s branch of the AJC was able to support liberalization, according to chairman Gordon, “as a matter of good medicine, good sense, and simple humanity.”

The same can be said for a growing number of Protestants.

While acknowledging that many people “equate the giving of the soul with the moment of conception,” the Rev. William S. Van Meter of New York City’s Protestant Council said, “It seems reasonable to recognize that many religious groups don’t share this outlook.”

Many Protestants find it difficult to take a solid stand because they see no clear New Testament teaching on the subject. The Protestant Council, reflecting this lack of consensus, emphasized sociology over theology and supported liberalization “as an essential and significant step forward in the solution of this difficult and complex problem.”

One complexity is the inequity the present laws force on the lower levels of society. The rich have no problem with the law. Money can buy almost anyone an abortion. For the poor, however, the alternatives are grimmer: they can either simply accept parenthood, or take their chances with a fly-by-night “doctor” or self-induced abortion.

But for both rich and poor, illegal abortion carries its risks. By the conservative standard of public health reports, at least 400 women died last year at the hands of inept abortionists—the nation’s largest single cause of maternal deaths. In perhaps thousands of other cases—unreported anywhere—the women survived but sacrificed their biological ability to bear children.

Also, according to some doctors, it is becoming harder and harder for a woman to get an abortion even if she fulfills the legal requirements. Despite a growing population, the annual number of “therapeutic” abortions is shrinking—to a total last year of 8,000.

The trouble, according to Dr. William B. Ober, a New York pathologist, is that generally a hospital committee must certify the need for an abortion to make it legal, and these committees usually “pride themselves on how few abortions they sanction.”

While these hospital committees are retained in current revision proposals, the hope is that new legislation will give more leeway for approving abortions.

As the debate continues, most polls show public opinion inching more and more toward liberalization. In a recent survey by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, 71 per cent favored legal abortion when the mother’s health is in danger, 56 per cent when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, and 55 per cent when there is a strong possibility that the child will be born defective.

But how much this growing public mood will be reflected in the current political debate is still unclear. Three states (New York, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island) have killed their measures. Only Colorado’s legislature has approved one. Says New York Assemblyman Albert H. Blumenthal of Manhattan, who is the author of his state’s proposal and last month saw it defeated, “Apparently, the political rule of the day is to abort abortion.”

Personalia

Agitation is brewing over dismissal of John Pairman Brown as Christian ethics professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopal). Reasons were “sparse” enrollment in his classes and doubts about his “teaching all sides of the problem,” said Dean Sherman Johnson. But angry students think it was his anti-Viet Nam war activities.

Promotion of Professor Frederick Ship-pey to acting dean of Drew University’s theological school, to succeed the deposed Charles Ranson (see February 3 issue, page 43), was greeted by faculty and student protests, and demands for ouster of Drew President Robert Oxnam.

Donald H. Tippett of San Francisco is new president of the Methodist Council of Bishops. President-elect (to serve in 1968–69) is Eugene M. Frank of St. Louis.

Eugene Carson Blake, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, was named Churchman of the Year by Religious Heritage of America.

Pacifist candidate Albert Q. Perry, a Unitarian-Universalist minister, drew few votes in the special Rhode Island congressional election last month but may have caused the virtual tie between the other two candidates.

C. A. Roberts, pastor of the huge First Baptist Church, Tallahassee, Florida, and president of the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference, was elected head of the evangelism department at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Phillip Hook, chairman of Wheaton (Illinois) College’s Bible and philosophy department, will become dean of students, replacing Richard Gross, who was named dean of Gordon College.

Franz Cardinal Koenig of Vienna won a $30 libel judgment from the right-wing newspaper Salzburg Volksblatt, which said he was a Mason—grounds for ex-communication from the Roman Catholic Church.

International Items

The Christian Council of Rhodesia passed a resolution against “provisions for separate development of our various racial communities” in the nation’s new constitution. The churchmen said separation of racial groups is an offense to Christianity and is against Rhodesia’s best interests.

U. S. Southern Baptists are busy lining up 100 preachers for a crusade in South Africa, but the Capital Baptist, official paper for the District of Columbia, urges reconsideration of assent to the government requirement that nobody mention race relations.

Ecumenical Press Service says police in Rio de Janeiro arrested Presbyterian layman Waldo Cesar, editor of the new ecumenical monthly Paz e Terra, kept him in solitary confinment for a week, and questioned him about his participation in ecumenical meetings. His home was searched and various books and magazines were removed.

A U. S. Quaker Action Group boat with $10,000 in medical supplies landed safely at Haiphong, North Viet Nam, on March 29 (see April 14 issue, page 4), then returned to Hong Kong.

The Hungarian Reformed Church marks its 400th anniversary next month with the completion of a Bible translation in modern Hungarian and a five-volume church history.

The church relations committee of Britain’s 300,000-member Baptist Union Council has concluded that no church merger plan has been proposed “to which Baptists could unitedly, or near-unitedly, give assent.”

The Church of England named seventeen members of various theological stripe to a commission to consider revising or eliminating the Thirty-Nine Articles, the denomination’s doctrinal standard since 1562. Critics blame the Articles for the decline of ordination candidates and consider their stand against Rome an ecumenical offense.

A report of the Preparatory Committee for this fall’s 450th anniversary of the Reformation says that East Germany has approved a “generous allocation” of entry visas for visitors from abroad but that there seems to be little hope for Lutherans from West Germany.

Disbelief And Data

What do Unitarians and Universalists believe? Just about anything, in theory—since they have no requirements of belief—but an exhaustive survey of every fifteenth adult in the denomination shows an emerging orthodoxy of disbelief.

Less than 3 per cent now believe that God is a supernatural being who reveals himself in human history. Just under one-fourth believe God is real but not adequately describable, while 44.2 per cent think God is the natural processes in the universe.

The debate about Christ also seems to be dying out, with 59 per cent no longer considering themselves Christians and a majority believing we know next to nothing about Christ.

As might be expected, Unitarians and Universalists turn out to be individualists (but with pretty unitary liberal views on politics) and have education and income well above the national average.

Soviet children’s author Kornei Chukovsky has published a collection of “poetical legends taken from the Bible,” under the title The Tower of Babel. Chukovsky says students should get reacquainted with the Bible stories “because they are of high artistic value irrespective of their religious tendency, which naturally is absent in our book.”

Church Panorama

After a two-day discussion that they described as a “historic milestone” in U. S. ecumenism, representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the American Baptist Convention found considerable agreement on “the relation between believer’s baptism and the sacrament of confirmation; the nature of Christian freedom in relationship to ecclesiastical authority; and the role of the congregation in the total life of the church.”

Augsburg Publishing House, ruled tax-exempt as an agency of The American Lutheran Church, will make a voluntary payment of $6,700 to the City of Minneapolis for 1967, for fire, police, and other services.

Wisconsin voters approved a referendum to amend the state constitution and permit public busing for parochial students.

The Philadelphia Presbytery voted overwhelmingly this month to join those who question the constitutionality of deleting the Larger Catechism from the standards of the United Presbyterian Church (April 14 issue, p. 47).

The FBI is investigating a Maundy Thursday cross-burning at Mount Beulah, Mississippi, former college campus now used as headquarters for the National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry.

Blue Mountain College became the second of four Mississippi Baptist colleges to sign compliance with the Civil Rights Act so students can get federal loans. Still holdouts are Clarke College (a junior college) and Mississippi College, where President R. A. McLemore resigned in protest over the policy but decided last month to stay on another year.

After a year of study, a restructure of the Protestant Council of the City of New York—largest local council of churches in the nation—has been charted (see March 4, 1966, issue, page 50). With “Protestant” dropped to leave the door open to Roman Catholic and Orthodox participation, the new council would be governed by two bodies, one representing denominations and social agencies, the other representing ninety-four neighborhood councils.

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