A Controversial Issue
It is an understatement to say that abortion is a controversial issue. Debates around it create more heat than light.
My sense is that the vast majority of women who have had an abortion are not bad people. The vast majority are ordinary women who in most cases were abandoned by family and pressured into having an abortion by parents, husbands or boy friends.
I think I can also safely say that many good catholic women feel ambivalent about this issue. While they would say that they would never have an abortion themselves or at least hope they would never, they are not sure that they want to make it illegal for all women to have an abortion. While appreciating such ambivalence, we must ask: Would such women (or men) also say: “While I would never kill my two day old or two year old baby, I’m not sure whether I would want to take that right away from women who may want to kill their two day or two year old baby.” Would they want to say: “While I would never consent to owning slaves myself, I don’t know that I would want to impose my beliefs on those who may want to own slaves.” The life of an unborn child should be just as sacred to us as the life of a born child.
Some Good News about the Battle to Protect the Unborn Child
As pro-lifers, we may often feel that we are losing the battle to protect the lives of unborn children. The following article was written by Cathleen Cleaver, an attorney and the director of information and planning of the Committee for Pro-life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Cathleen writes:
After 30 years, the glory days of legal abortion are over. Roe v. Wade is no less the law of the land today than yesterday. But today, with the test of 30 years, even the hardest of hearts cannot fail to see the death and sorrow and turmoil left in its wake.
Legal abortion was said to promise an end to poverty and abuse and the advancement of women in society. Its promise was peace and freedom. But in 30 years, legal abortion has allowed 40 million human lives to be destroyed before birth. It has left countless women and men suffering deep grief and struggling for peace. Abortion has stolen the lives of our children and broken our hearts.
Signs of Hope
While abortion keeps its hold on virtually all of the institutions that influence our culture—the legal system, the entertainment industry, mainstream media, academia—it is loosing its grip on the culture itself. After 30 years, perhaps, in the words of Robert Browning, “Death has done all death can.”
The culture of death is waning. Fewer and fewer doctors are practicing abortion today, and increasingly they are declining to be trained in abortion methods.
In 1973, half of all hospitals were willing to associate themselves with abortion. That number has dropped to a small fraction today. Nurses are, also, coming around. In a recent study, 6 out of 10 hospital-based registered nurses said they would not work in an OB/GYN unit where abortions, of any kind, are performed..
The numbers and rates of abortions have steadily declined in the last decade. Abortion numbers peaked in the early 1990s at about 1.6 million for the year, but in recent years the number has dropped to about 1.3 million each year. This number is, no doubt, staggering, and one abortion is too many; but, 300,000 fewer abortions each year is a certain sign of hope.
Year after year, polls show that Americans are far more opposed to abortion than our law reflects. Roe v. Wade is widely misunderstood as creating a right to abortion with limits. But with the decision of Doe v. Bolton, decided the same day as Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court created a right to abortion, for any reason, at any time, throughout pregnancy. Most people are shocked to learn the truth about the abortion right, and only a small fraction agree with its reach.
More Americans identify themselves as pro-life today, while the number who call themselves “pro-choice” has significantly declined. For years, polls showed that a significant majority of Americans considered themselves pro-choice; but, today there are equal numbers of those who identify themselves as “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”
When one considers the stigma attached to the pro-life label, this shift is even more significant.
State legislatures have shown a trend toward laws that protect life. Most state legislatures have enacted measures to restrict abortion and reduce its incidence. Assisted suicide initiatives have been defeated time and again in many states, and others have adopted new laws against assisted suicide.
The Survivors
Despite opposition from powerful and well-funded sources, the pro-life movement remains one of the most vital and effective grassroots movements in the nation. Young people are swelling its ranks, and their commitment is inspiring.
Young people are the “survivors” of a legal regime that offered no protection for their lives before birth, and they bring a special enthusiasm and vitality to the movement. In fact, people under 30 support stronger legal protection for life and in greater numbers than almost any other age group.
On the other hand, the pro-choice movement is aging– the median age of Planned Parenthood’s members is now 50-something. The irony of a postmenopausal army of women fighting to terminate pregnancies, that they will never face, is hard to ignore.
The way the culture talks about abortion has, also, changed. A decade ago, the unborn child was said not to be human, or if human, not alive. But the rhetorical landscape has changed.
In 1995, feminist Naomi Wolf called abortion “a necessary evil,” and urged the “pro-choice” community, for the sake of their credibility, to start acknowledging the full humanity of the fetus. In short, the moral argument concerning the humanity of the unborn has been advanced, and even those who advocate abortion must acknowledge that it destroys a human life.
Our Story of Love
Death is conquered by love. Ours is a story of love and of hope. Programs and services for those facing difficult pregnancies, established in the years following Roe, have helped many thousands of women in need.
Thousands of pregnancy centers across the nation provide mothers with clothing, medical expenses, and even a place to stay at no charge, and often at considerable personal sacrifice to those who help them. This is selfless love defined.
The Church has reached out in love, also, to those suffering the effects of abortion. For almost 20 years the Church’s post-abortion ministry, Project Rachel, has provided solace and healing to women whose lives have been town apart by abortion.
Through one-on-one spiritual and psychological care, women are able to overcome their grief and hopelessness, and find healing for their deep spiritual wounds. This is life-saving and soul-saving work.
Abortion is the most common surgical procedure performed on women today. Everyone is touched by it. Women who have had abortions suffer terrible grief; but, society pushes them to stay entrenched, to defend what they have done.
Family members are driven by their natural instincts to defend and protect their loved one, and that often takes the shape of defending her abortion. The defenses are not trifling. They fill a deep need to make sense of something that is so insensible.
To those who are suffering, we must speak of the possibility of healing and forgiveness. We might feel a reluctance to discuss abortion out of a desire not to hurt women who have had one. This is understandable, but it is a mistake. It is a mistake because our silence can be understood to mean that we do not understand their suffering, or do not care.
Our silence might confirm their feelings of hopelessness. Those in the pain of abortion are not helped by silence.
We are called to a “radical solidarity with the woman in need,” Pope John Paul II said in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. We must make that radical solidarity evident in what we do and what we say.
The glory days of abortion are over, but Roe v. Wade must still be reversed. Legal abortion is a violation of human rights of incomparable magnitude, and atrocity for the whole human family. It coarsens a society that sanctions it. As Catholics, we must stand in solidarity with the weak, the oppressed, the invisible.
We are called to live the gospel of life, not only as a matter of personal piety, but in the public square. Indeed, “American Catholics must live it vigorously and publicly, as a matter of national leadership and witness, or we will not live it at all”.
It is our task and our privilege to bring to bear our faith’s constant witness that life must be protected at every stage, so that each and every human being is a welcomed member of the human family.
Responses to Four Tough Questions
In his book, The Silent Holocaust, Jesuit priest, Fr. John Powell, responds in the following way to four questions frequently asked about this controversial issue.
Q 1) Aren’t Pro-life people trying to impose their conscience on the rest of society?
Response: If your neighbor next door was killing off her kids because her conscience told her this was the right thing to do, do you think you would be imposing your conscience on her if you tried to stop her?
Q 2) Do you want women to go back to the “butcher shops?’
Response: Obviously not. But my sympathy for the women with the unwanted pregnancy doesn’t cause me to set up a hygienic “killing center” where human life can be killed with surgical precision. As one person remarked, “Let’s not kill the children of the poor and then tell them we have done them a favor.”
Q 3) Isn’t an abortion better than an unwanted child?
Response: This question implies that the child has no value in itself. The logic is that my wanting you to live is what confers upon you, human worth. Do we really think we are helping a woman solve a problem by urging her to kill her baby?
Q 4) Surely in the case of rape and incest, abortion can be justified?
Response: Pregnancy from rape seems to be an extremely rare thing. But on occasion, it does happen. Though the rapist experience is a horrible one for the woman’ nevertheless, a child is conceived and that child is innocent. If we perform an abortion, we are certainly not helping the baby and how can we be so sure we are helping the mother? The memory that I aborted my baby is a horrible nightmare for most people. As one young woman said after having an abortion, “I’m going to have to live with that.” Another woman said, “They didn’t tell me about the small ghost that would enter my life after the abortion.” Statements like these show that the real victims of abortion are not only the babies, the holy innocents, but also those whose lives are brutalized because of an abortion experience.
Fr. Powell also relates visiting the Nazi War Camps in Germany. He said that without trying to be an ugly American he would ask German people: “Did you know that this was happening?” “If so, did you speak up?” “If not, why not?” Powell said the answer was always the same; heads would drop. But then, he was reminded that those who did speak up also ended up in the war camps.
When the history of these decades is written what will historians say of us who allowed about 4,400 holy innocents to be killed each day. Will people also ask us: “Did you know? If so, did you speak up? If not, why not? Did you think that the “killing centers” were just the termination of pregnancies?”
As I write the above, I am aware that some of you reading this article may have had an abortion or paid for one or pressured a woman into having one. My aim is not to pour guilt on you, but to speak to an issue that has destroyed millions of innocent lives, an issue that has left thousands of women psychologically and spiritually damaged, an issue that has wounded the soul of our nation.
If you were directly or indirectly involved in an abortion and repented of it, I hope that you have been able to experience the mercy of God. In my 30 years as a priest, some of my most cherished pastoral experiences have been helping women and men to forgive themselves for their direct or indirect role in the abortion of an unborn child. Today, many of our most ardent pro-life activists are women and men who have been directly or indirectly involved with an abortion.