Within Our Reach

A building consensus could at least put an end to abortion on demand.

An American consensus is shaping up on what to do about abortions. It is not what most evangelicals like. Rather, it poses a serious moral dilemma for them, and it calls for some hard decisions.

There is increasing evidence for this new consensus, which opposes abortion on demand, and especially all abortions of convenience. According to a current poll, its size has reached 58 percent. This is despite consistent support by public media of the prochoice movement’s view (90 percent, according to a study by Samuel Rothman and Robert Lichter).

This new consensus is formed primarily of conservative Roman Catholics, conservative evangelicals, a sprinkling of Mormons, conservative Jews, and a growing body of ethically conservative blacks (generally evangelical, though not sailing under that banner). It also includes not a few liberals concerned over the growing erosion in Western culture of any commitment to the sanctity of life, and also some others not identified with any of these groups.

The presence of this broad consensus sets the stage for a dilemma among conservative evangelicals because most of them (66 percent, according to a Gallup poll taken in fall 1984) hold an absolutist or near absolutist opposition to abortion. (They oppose all abortions, or all except those where the mother’s life is endangered, or, possibly, where rape or incest has occurred.) In this they have been able to count on traditional Roman Catholics and some others, but they have lacked the necessary support to secure a constitutional amendment for what they believe is right.

Their dilemma arises because, based on this broad national consensus, they could probably now get a stricter law than the one currently in force, but the new law would not be as strict as they believe to be morally justified. Can they honorably settle for less—on the ground that half a loaf is better than none?

The growing national consensus against abortion on demand rests in part on the broad heritage of Judeo-Christian values—still lively in Western culture and in America. The vast majority of Americans have always affirmed that their own personal and private conviction was opposed to abortion on demand, and a slight majority have gone on to state support for laws restricting it. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, writes: “If, given a choice between the present law of abortion-on-demand, up to and including viability, or a more restrictive law, … the majority of Americans polled consistently have supported the more limited option.” He acknowledges that “there is not a consensus in America for the absolute prohibition of abortion.” But “there is and was a moral consensus … for a stricter abortion law. A remarkably well-kept secret is that a minority is currently imposing its belief on a demonstrable majority.”

Before considering whether half a loaf is acceptable, we need to see the main factors leading to the rise of the prochoice movement in the sixties and seventies, and the subsequent resurgence of the prolife movement.

Prochoice Upsurge

We have to admit that many more Americans today than, say, half a century ago or even 20 years ago, will defend the morality of abortion on demand (though this does not mean a majority, since the view started with little support). The movement away from the more traditional view first gained wide acceptance during the sixties.

In 1962 the American Law Institute published a study advocating a change in abortion laws to allow for abortions before viability in cases of rape, incest, the mother’s health, or deformed and mentally retarded fetuses. (“Viability” occurs when the fetus can live outside the mother’s body.) Five years later the American Medical Association endorsed these recommendations and reversed a medical history reaching back to Hippocrates. Planned Parenthood, NOW (National Organization for Women), and the ACLU joined the chorus of approval.

State legislation kept pace with this new attitude toward abortion. California, Colorado, and North Carolina repealed their strict laws in 1967, and state after state followed in quick succession. Finally, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973 ruled unconstitutional most state laws that made abortions before viability a legal offense punishable in one way or another. This radical change in moral climate led many to conclude that, on moral grounds, Americans had generally come around to supporting abortion on demand.

Yet the result of this swift change in the law did not, in fact, mean this. Quite the contrary, most continued to affirm their own personal rejection of abortion except in extreme circumstances. But the will to support laws against abortion seemed to disappear.

At the same time, the church-state issue was heating up. Opposition to abortion is a private religious conviction, it was argued, which must not be written into a law that would violate the First Amendment with its guarantee of separation of church and state. Such a law would establish a religious viewpoint; further, it would deny the free exercise of religion to anyone who had no religious scruples against abortion, or whose religious convictions favored aborting children who would become a burden to society. Many Democrats in the election of 1984 objected strenuously to a plank in the Republican party platform demanding that appointed judges agree to the sanctity of human life. This, so they argued, was to make a religious viewpoint a requirement for office, and therefore violated our Constitution.

Further, many argued that it was unwise to pass such a law in present-day America because of the lack of a consensus supporting it. Unpopular laws cannot be enforced. In any case, it would affect only the poor and uneducated, and would inevitably, so it was said, lead to the scofflaw attitude of the latter days of Prohibition.

Gov. Mario Cuomo, in a speech at Notre Dame University, was typical of politicians taking this position. As a loyal Roman Catholic, he affirmed his own agreement with the traditional position of his church. But he said that as a responsible office holder representing the American people, he could not support laws the people did not want.

Finally, the most central argument supporting abortion on demand rested on the rights and freedom of women. No woman, it was felt, should be forced to go through an unwanted pregnancy. That would violate her inalienable right to privacy and her freedom as an independent citizen.

Turning Of The Tide

Yet the traditional support even for laws against abortion was by no means completely eroded. In fact, the prolife forces, especially among evangelicals, began to gain momentum. In 1975, as a result of a meeting in the home of evangelist Billy Graham, the Christian Action Council was formed to combat the trend. Right-to-life organizations sprang up in almost every state. In seeking to bring America back to its moral heritage, Moral Majority made abortion a primary concern. Writers like Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (The Right to Live: the Right to Die) and the film by Dr. Koop and Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, aroused many lethargic evangelicals to active support of the prolife position.

Roman Catholic opposition to abortion was also stepped up. In a widely advertised position paper, the American bishops linked abortion on demand with nuclear war as a primary moral issue of our day.

Archbishop John O’Connor of New York has been especially outspoken for more stringent abortion laws; he has called Roman Catholics to act consistently with their faith. In what some felt was a direct attack on vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, he pointedly expressed his disagreement with statements made by her and other Roman Catholics on the matter of abortion. He believed it was impossible to be a consistent Catholic and prochoice.

The influence of Roman Catholic leaders and the newly active evangelicals has significantly buttressed the prolife position. Their antiabortion stand is well thought out, and it obviously stems from the deep moral and religious conviction of people who care. No doubt the growing consensus occasionally received a temporary reversal from irresponsible extremists who bombed hospitals, or, drifting at the fringe of moral responsibility, seemed more concerned to gain headlines than to advance the prolife cause. Yet such setbacks were momentary, and the consensus is still growing.

Statistics Of Mayhem

Undoubtedly, however, the greatest impact on the attitude of the American public did not come directly from these traditional sources. Rather, it arose from the growing awareness of what is really going on. From 8,000 legal abortions in the United States in 1966, the number grew to 400,000 in 1971 and has now soared to 1.6 million annually—about half as many abortions as live births. At least 14 major cities scattered across the United States are recording more abortions than live births, and the total number of abortions for the last decade has reached well over 15 million—two to three times the number of deaths in the ovens at Hitler’s Auschwitz.

As the awesome statistics came bit by bit to public attention, many Americans, though not willing to identify themselves either as conservative Roman Catholics or evangelicals, became appalled. What originally they had seen as part of a broad movement toward freedom they now saw to have gotten completely out of hand.

What further disturbed those who were neither Roman Catholic nor evangelical concerned the increasingly trivial reasons for abortion. John Brown III, president of John Brown University, writes: “Abortions have become a matter of convenience, not of conscience. A pastor told me of a couple who chose to have an abortion because the unexpected pregnancy interferred with vacation plans.” The life of an unborn child is all too often reckoned to have little intrinsic value, and to be disposable at the convenience of the mother. But the twisted morality that leads to such a conclusion has become revolting to many Americans.

On To Infanticide?

The killing of unborn infants, moreover, is by no means the end of the matter. The logic that leads to abortion on demand also leads straight to infanticide. Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, a medical team writing in the New York Review of Books, declared: “The Prolife groups were right about one thing: the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make such a moral difference. We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus the week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive.” Mary Tedeschi, writing in Commentary, points out where this leads: “Thus, infanticide presents the champions of abortion on demand with an uncomfortable choice. They can either describe events that seem increasingly arbitrary—like ‘viability’ or birth—as the points at which a fetus or baby attains its rights, or they can allow, as the more outspoken ‘ethicists’ already have done, that infanticide, or at least certain instances of it, is as justifiable as abortion.”

In this regard, Joseph Fletcher, the liberal who has long favored situation ethics, writes, “Why stop with the unborn? The only difference between the infant and the fetus is that the infant breathes with its lungs.… If through ignorance or neglect or sheer chance … the damage has not been ended prenatally, why should it not be accordingly ended neo-natally?”

Probably the most famous American case of infanticide is “Baby Doe” of Bloomington, Indiana. He was born with Down’s syndrome, and with a detached esophagus (the latter easily remedied by a simple operation). Lawyer Carl Horn III notes that though many parents petitioned to pay for the necessary medical care and to adopt him, the baby’s parents and the courts rejected all offers. As a result, Baby Doe starved to death.

So the logic that leads to prenatal abortions leads also to freedom to kill newborn babies. It will, in fact, lead to the right to put to death any human being of whatever age if that person becomes a burden to society.

Further, science is more and more making nonsense of the Roe v. Wade guideline on abortion, which many accepted as the enlightened standard for the future. That decision was predicated on the right of the mother to choose to abort up to the time of viability—the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. But as Sandra Day O’Connor in a dissenting opinion (Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health) notes, “The Roe framework … is clearly on a collision course with itself.” Medical progress is pushing farther and farther back into pregnancy the time at which the fetus is viable. Eighteen-week-old fetuses frequently live outside the womb today, and University of Tennessee researchers predict that in several years they will have perfected an artificial womb capable of sustaining a fetus only a few weeks old. Accordingly, the mother’s freedom to choose whether to bring her child to birth or to kill it is shrinking. Her choice based on the Roe v. Wade principle could soon be practically eliminated.

Politics And Morality

Finally, a conviction is growing on the part of many that it is, indeed, morally right and truly American to make certain moral demands on politicians. A separation between church and state is assuredly guaranteed by our Constitution. But for the good of the state as well as of religion, that separation must never become complete. “Thou shalt not murder” is a religious conviction of all Christians, but it is not wrong to impose it on society. It is the moral duty of conscientious religious citizens to seek to impose certain moral requirements on society—to advance not their own personal religious viewpoint, but the good of society as a whole.

During the last presidential election, Archbishop O’Connor argued for the right of citizens to question a candidate about his stand on abortion, and for the right of a candidate to state his opposition to abortion and his intent to work within the law to bring about a change in the law. There is nothing either un-American or unconstitutional about that. O’Connor asserted: “You have to uphold the law, the Constitutions says. It does not say that you must agree with the law, or that you cannot work to change the law.” He called on Roman Catholics to ask candidates to state that they opposed abortion on demand and were committed to work to modify the permissive interpretations of the Supreme Court.

So the renewed opposition of conservatives and the growing reaction against the excesses of proabortionists have created a significant change of attitude toward abortion and the freedom-of-choice movement that grew so rapidly in the sixties and seventies. A sense of moral outrage is emerging. Things have gone too far too fast. Matters have gotten out of hand. Something must be done.

Denominational Second Thoughts

Consequently, many Protestant groups are taking another look. The Southern Baptist Convention had in 1974 supported the prochoice arguments. But in 1980 it reversed itself, and in June 1984 it passed a resolution opposing abortions even in cases of rape and incest.

In the late sixties and early seventies the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Protestant Episcopal Church all passed resolutions favoring a freer attitude toward abortions. But in 1983 the Presbyterian Church (USA) sent study materials to its member congregations urging a review of a statement that had earlier called abortions not only a right but sometimes an “act of faithfulness before God.” In May 1984 the United Methodist Church voted to tighten its previous statement on abortion. This year the Episcopal Church faces a convention battle over abortion; leading the fight will be a new body calling itself the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL). Last summer the African Methodist Episcopal Church reaffirmed its opposition to abortions except in cases of rape and incest; and in August 1984 the Lutheran World Federation passed a resolution deploring abortions of “preborn children.”

In May 1984 the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod published an official report (Abortion in Perspective) calling Lutherans back to their biblical moorings against abortion, as reflected in writings of the early church fathers and in the Reformation heritage.

A Question Of Strategy

This new stirring in the older mainline denominations indicates their growing realization that the Christian moral sense extending across the centuries may have been right after all. It may now be possible to reverse the position that has developed over the last two decades. A new consensus is forming. It is clearly against abortions for convenience, and all abortions on demand. There is even some evidence from polls, as President Hesburgh has noted, that the consensus might include laws against abortion except for rape, incest, and serious danger to the mother’s life. (It is estimated that these exceptions account for only ½ of 1 percent of all abortions.)

But there is also abundant evidence that the American people are unprepared to approve any constitutional amendment or any law banning all abortions.

This poses a serious dilemma in strategy for all fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and traditional Roman Catholics—that is, for all antiabortion absolutists or near absolutists. Such conservatives agree that most—if not all—abortions are wrong. And so they fear, and rightly so, that any law insufficiently strict will be taken as approval of many morally offensive abortions. In fact, they suspect that such a law might preclude eventual passage of a more just law barring almost all abortions.

Yet Americans now clearly have it in their power to pass legislation outlawing the vast majority of abortions. Meanwhile, the deaths of over a million-and-a-half unborn children take place every year. In this case there appears literally to be a “moral majority” of antiabortionists. If they could agree on a course of action, much of this moral curse on our nation would be removed immediately.

Surely the path of moral and spiritual wisdom would dictate support for a second best. We would refuse to compromise moral conviction, however, because we would still hold our more stringent prolife views. But we would support a less-than-the-best law for the present since it is all that can now be passed. And we would pledge to work for a better law. Not only is this a legitimate area for immediate Christian action, but it would seem a moral imperative for evangelicals in view of the lives hanging in the balance. Accordingly, on more than one occasion the Reverend Jerry Falwell has publicly maintained his willingness to support any law that will reverse the abortion-on-demand, prochoice position now enforced by our courts. We applaud his strategy and warmly commend it to all evangelicals who are more interested in saving lives than in winning a point.

In summary, careful appraisal of the American scene makes evident that no absolutist law or constitutional amendment has the remotest chance of passing in the near future—certainly not in the next four years. But some sort of law that would at least eliminate one of the most frightening issues of our day in its most extreme form—abortion on demand—is within our reach.

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