On Abortion
This is not a treatise on the evils of abortion. Nor is it a political screed for or against Roe v. Wade. No, this is about a moral blindness that has arisen in the pro-life community, a strategic error that threatens to destroy the pro-life movement and take a piece of the Christian Church with it. I am referring to a number of religious leaders, particularly leaders in the Catholic Church — my Catholic Church — who insist that people who vote for pro-choice political candidates are committing a sin. Some, like former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke and Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas have outrightly said it. Others have been more subtle in their partisanship, such as Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has developed such a cozy relationship with Donald Trump and Fox News that the recommendation is all but implied.
“If you vote for a Democrat,” they say, “you are pro-abortion, and therefore anti-Christian.” Although some priests and bishops attempt to dodge the issue when asked directly, the message has been clearly received by hordes of orthodox Catholics, who flood the comment sections of Catholic websites, disrupt public forums, and generally turn every political or social discussion into an abortion food fight.
Let me begin my response with a declaration: I am anti-abortion. Always have been, always will be. I consider abortion killing. Not necessarily murder, but certainly killing. Even abortion rights activists will refer to an abortion as “terminating a pregnancy.” To terminate something is to bring it to an end, and thus, it is beyond debate that abortion is bringing some kind of life process to an end. Killing. But there is space between killing and murder, and a fair abortion debate also has to acknowledge this distinction just as clearly as it has to admit that abortion is killing.
We allow that when one human takes the life of another, it is not always murder. When a soldier kills an enemy soldier in a war, for example. Or when a homeowner kills a burglar in self-defense. If it is true that an adult can sometimes take the life of another adult without it being murder, then this should be true of abortion as well. So, abortion is always killing, but not necessarily always murder.
My ethical thinking (and at its heart, Judeo-Christian ethics) holds that people are responsible for their own moral actions. We have free will and as a consequence must take responsibility for what we do. If my neighbor murders his wife, I am not responsible. Even if I yelled at him for raking his leaves onto my lawn, and that anger contributed to the fight he later had with his wife, that doesn’t mean I killed his wife.
In the same way, just because I live in a country in which abortion is legal, and just because I am not working night and day to keep this from continuing, that does not make me directly responsible for abortions. I have never had an abortion or put a woman in a position where she would have to consider an abortion. I have never personally encouraged a woman to have one. In these areas my conscience is clear. To say that the way I vote encourages abortions implies that I have the power to impel women to have abortions. This is ridiculous. The decision to have an abortion lies with the woman who chooses to make it, and possibly with the people in her life who may push her to do it. But the voter? This is a stretch.
While it is true that citizens can create an environment conducive to abortion, to argue that voting for pro-choice candidates causes abortions is a cop out. It is a way for pro-lifers to absolve themselves of the responsibility of not being compassionate towards others, especially pregnant women. By voting pro-life reflexively and without concern from any other issue, they free themselves from having to think about the social and moral difficulties a pregnant woman faces and, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands of it. I don’t vote for it, not my problem.
Behind this washing of the hands is the urge to purify. If you drive away all people who disagree with you, you are left surrounded by people who are a hundred percent on your side. This makes you feel nice and cozy and comfortable. It also makes you feel morally safe. But if there is one moral error that looms above all others, one that more ruinous than any other, it is the belief in moral safety. There is no moral safety. We are all sinners.
No human can believe his way to moral superiority by adopting a Superior Dogma. Morality doesn’t work that way. You recognize that you are not perfect, and you use that sense of imperfection to extend to others a sense of compassion. Perfection, the Gospel teaches, is God’s alone. The rest of us struggle, and ask God for forgiveness.
We who realize we are imperfect try to engage others. We guide others and are guided by them. Religious skeptics may argue that religion is a crutch, but what they fail to understand is that for Christians, the crutch is not an object. It is not a list of dogmatic rules or a physical church. Our crutch is God, and each other. We do not divorce ourselves from those we have moral differences with, leaving them to find their way. We support each other, and point each other towards perfection. Those who seek moral purity are abandoning those struggling with their weaknesses, and all the while pretending that they have already overcome their own. What is Christian about that?
Spiritual safety is garbage. It is an act of moral superiority, arrogance, and ugliness. A faith that cuts itself off from the sinful other is a worthless faith. Faith is about compassion. Leave that out, and you have left God out as well.
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I vote for pro-life political candidates when I can. But I also recognize that politicians lie, and as a result, the pro-life position cannot be taken at face value. And I recognize that a politician who trumpets a pro-life position is useless to the cause if he or she is not in a position to do anything about abortion. A pro-life Senator is in a place to affect abortion policy. A pro-life candidate for dogcatcher can do nothing about abortion; for a dogcatcher candidate to proclaim such a value is political posturing and pandering, and need not guide my vote.
The ends don’t justify the means. Although abortion is an evil, this does not mean it is acceptable to cause another evil in the process of stopping it. For example, we could prevent abortions by forcing the sterilization of every woman who has had one or tried to obtain one. We could put abortion doctors to death. We could put women who have abortions to death. We could jail people who drive women to abortion clinics. We could blow up abortion clinics. Would this advance our understanding of the value of human life? Of course not. Degrading human life is no way to advance the sanctity of life. There are limits to what is acceptable in the fight against abortion.
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I would like to see a world where there are no abortions. I’d also like to see a world with no child abuse, rape, or genocide. But these crimes have been going on forever, and sadly, will probably continue to go on. All we can do is the best we can.
There is a significant problem with putting abortion in front of everything else in politics. Ethics is a complicated web of interdependent principles, not a rigid set of rules in which one principle overshadows all others. Suppose for instance, we chose the principle of truth-telling as the supreme principle that should never be violated. Sounds good — who doesn’t believe in telling the truth? Yet, telling the unvarnished truth all the time is not always a good thing. There is a thin distinction between telling the truth and being cruelly blunt. Consider these statements:
“That dress makes you look fat.”
“You are an ugly person.”
“You are paralyzed from the waist down, and we don’t want you working here because you make us uncomfortable.”
All are truth statements, and all are cruel. This same principle applies to all moral rules. Any attempt to place one moral value, no matter how good, above all others, can lead to moral problems. Regarding killing: If killing is always wrong, must a country that is invaded surrender rather than fight?
Ethics is about concern for others. All so-called moral principles must be in service to this point. And I am not breaking new ground here; Jesus said the first of the commandments is to love God, and then to love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, concern for others is the guiding light of ethics, not a strict adherence to any particular rule. Even a Jewish scribe who questioned Jesus about the law conceded that point (Mark 12:33). Or if you prefer the Old Testament, note that the first four of the Ten Commandments deal with honoring God and honoring one’s parents. Only after that do we get our first strict rule, “Thou shalt not kill.”
If you are going to say abortion is the worst crime that exists, you are saying that any other crime is justified to stop it. You are saying that the ethic of Do Not Kill must trump every other ethic, including concern for others, even though the Christian ethical system clearly teaches the opposite. According to this thinking, jailing pregnant woman, and even killing abortion doctors may be acceptable in the service of preventing the ultimate wrong of killing innocent children. It also means we should ignore more subtle problems, and feel free to elect racists, climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers to political office, as long as they are pro-life.
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There is value in books written by atheists. Even books that attack religion. I read them because I find that atheists are not always wrong, and because an atheist, free of any consideration for religious dogma, sometimes sees things I don’t. Sometimes atheists are, in a sense, closer to God than the faithful are. I have known churchgoers who are racist and sexist, for whom hate comes as easily and welcomed as a cool summer breeze, who are closed to new ideas, who will pass judgment on another person in an instant. And I know atheists who are against cruelty, reserve judgment until the facts are in, and are deeply concerned about the poor.
In the same way, I find pro-choice people have sensitivities different from pro-life people. Pro-choice people are concerned about personal freedom, about protection from invasive government, and about the equality of women. This is hardly the whole story of abortion, but it is part of it, and people who refuse to listen to this perspective (when it is sensitively expressed) are doing themselves a disservice. Just as the atheist sometimes comes closer to God than the faithful, so a thoughtful pro-choice individual sometimes comes closer to an understanding of life than a hard-core anti-abortionist.
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I will vote for pro-lifers when I can. I will vote for pro-choicers when I feel the pro-choice candidate’s sense of justice is closer to the truth than the pro-life candidate. This can happen when:
The pro-life candidate falls short of justice in a glaring way, such as being racist or sexist or in some other way having a reckless attitude towards human dignity. I include climate change deniers in this category.
The pro-choice candidate expresses a personal disgust for abortion, but feels it may be more cruel to impose morality through law than to encourage by example.
The pro-life candidate is lying.
The pro-life candidate is not in a position to stop abortion (running for dogcatcher or tax assessor, which have no impact on abortions)
The pro-life candidate not politically competent, and the pro-choice candidate is. You hire people to be effective at their jobs, after all.
The pro-life candidate is willing to create another injustice to remedy the injustice of abortion (the ends don’t justify the means).
The pro-choice candidate is more likely to reduce abortions through good policy than the pro-life candidate is.
This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it a strict set of criteria. Instead, it is a list of principles that outline my thinking on the matter. I am sure it is not satisfactory to the hard-core but it is an attempt to grapple with the issue as a reality, rather than as a sterile edict from heaven.
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One of the criticisms sometimes leveled at Christianity by atheists is Jesus’ seeming indifference to slavery in the Gospels. Jesus used servants — slaves — in his parables without moral comment. How could Jesus approve of slavery and be the Son of God?
The answer is complicated, but I think it boils down to this. Jesus would not have approved of slavery. But he saw it as a cultural fact in his world. If he had railed against slavery he would have been known as Abolitionist Jesus, instead of the Redeeming Jesus. This would have confused his primary message, which is that the Kingdom of God is open to everyone, woman or man, slave or free. Jesus taught that redemption belonged to the poorest and most miserable even more than to the rich. In teaching that, he was upholding the humanity of the slave. Rather than decrying slavery as an unjust law, he upheld the slave as a dignified human being. This idea — dignity over legalism — was the seed that one day grew into the abolition of slavery.
There is a parallel in the fight against abortion. The way to defeat abortion is to recognize all life as sacred and to treat all humans with Christian love. If everyone did this, abortion would be an impossible thought. The path to defeat abortion is to treat our enemies with respect, not to tell them they will burn in hell. Not to jail them, or to label them as murderers.
To tell people they cannot be Christian and vote Democratic is uncharitable, small-minded, and sinful. To tell pro-choice politicians that they cannot receive communion even if they have never been associated with an abortion themselves is to cast people out of the Church at a time when we need more faithful inside. There is a difference between believing abortion is morally right and believing the government cannot ban it without creating other injustices. The first is clearly wrong and not held by many people. The second position represents a concern that human society is complicated and that compassion needs to be expressed through more than just the brute force of law.
Compassion solves problems. Brutality never solved anything but the problem of empty cemeteries.
