Americans have real differences on abortion but may not be as divided as we think we are. Many see themselves as being both ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life.’ Most Americans and most Christians are far more moderate and nuanced on this issue than their leaders admit.
Are you a vegetarian or a carnivore? If you are a vegetarian, do you eat eggs and milk products? Onions and other vegetables pulled up out of the ground? How do you feel about carnivores? If you eat meat, how do feel about those who do not?
Deer hunters and broccoli lovers seldom come to blows, but we do disagree. Some do not understand how a Christian can eat meat. It makes no sense to others that cattle or clams should have the same rights as people. Jains think that pulling onions or potatoes out of the ground is violence, which seems ludicrous to those who do not see vegetables or mites as endowed with feelings. Hunters believe “culling the herd is more compassionate than letting Bambi starve from overpopulation. Everyone has a point, but one that makes sense only to those who share their assumptions.
The US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is a clear victory for the leaders of the Catholic Church and evangelical Christian churches and a defeat for everyone else, roughly two-third of Americans. It allows states to restrict abortion based on a theological belief and more than half of the states are poised to take an extreme one, including the claim that a fertilized egg has the same rights as its mother. This is certain to inflame religious tensions across the land.
Those who see human personhood as beginning at conception are duty-bound to reject abortion and want it outlawed, but those who believe personhood is conferred with your first breath find it incomprehensible to call this medical procedure homicide or prohibit using discarded embryos to save lives.
It is wrong to condemn others’ intentions based on your own presuppositions. Onion-eaters do not wish to torture defenseless vegetables and deer hunters are not violating the rights of anyone they recognize as having them. Saying that Christians who support legal abortion “have little regard for human life” is a lie, since they do not recognize a fetus as a human being (or may oppose abortion personally but think banning it is bad public policy). It is equally unfair to claim that abortion opponents oppose women’s rights, since nobody believes we have a right to commit murder.
When we talk about abortion most of us “beg the question”—a deceptive tactic recognized by nearly every high school debater. We assume we are right about the key question: is a zygote a human being? In this, as in other matters of faith, your answer can be believed but not proven.
When Christians quote Scripture to support their position on this topic, they often do the same thing. They quote the “Thou shalt not kill” from the Ten Commandments (“thou shalt not murder,” to be precise), but unless the fetus is a person, ending a pregnancy is not murder. The Hebrew scriptures, I am told by those who know better than I, assume that you become a person when the nephesh (breath or spirit) enters your body. When pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, Jewish law not only permits abortion but requires it. The scriptures of other faiths sometimes condemn abortion and sometimes permit it.
Pro-choice Christians note that Jesus never said a word about this issue—he was far more interested in inequality than sexuality—and that the Bible does not explicitly prohibit abortion, in contrast to the laws of surrounding cultures, but an argument from silence is never a strong one. The Church Fathers weigh in on the life-begins-at-conception side, but their views are important only for some Christians, not others.
When we talk about abortion most of us “beg the question”—a deceptive tactic recognized by nearly every high school debater. We assume we are right about the key question: is a zygote a human being? In this, as in other matters of faith, your answer can be believed but not proven.
It may not be very convincing to argue, “If my assumption is right, then you are wrong,” but that is the most honest thing any of us can say. It would be foolish to expect either camp to stop fighting for its position, but we can and should expect ourselves to not lie about our differences.
A funny thing happened at the Long Island Council of Churches (LICC) when we were asked to endorse a proposed state law requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. I feared that those sponsoring the bill were making ill-informed assertions about what Catholic teaching, so before recommending anything to our committee, I called the local diocese’s Respect Life Office, the ethicist at Catholic Health Services (CHS), and a Catholic friend who works for Planned Parenthood. It seemed entirely plausible to me that a denomination that opposes artificial contraception might not provide it in their emergency rooms.
Feelings run high on any issue involving sex, and it proved difficult to get to the end of my report to the Public Issues Committee. We kept going off on tangents–the First Amendment and Medicaid funding, the pros and cons of the differing approaches taken by Protestants and Catholics in moral reasoning, why Protestants see pregnancy as beginning later than Catholics do, etc.–with everyone jumping in to criticize or defend what they assumed the position of Catholic hospitals to be.
Here’s the kicker: a study by Family Planning Advocates (FPA) of New York State, which regularly battles Catholic bishops, found that every Catholic hospital on Long Island provides the treatment for rape victims that the new law would mandate. Secular hospitals call this emergency contraception; Catholic ones call it hormone treatment, using the same drugs to prevent infection. This is perfectly acceptable under the Catholic doctrine of dual effect–you can do something to protect the health of a victim that has the secondary effect of preventing pregnancy, even if routine use of artificial contraception violates Church teaching. Failure to provide compassionate care, the FPA found, was more common at secular institutions.
Perhaps, as is the case with sausage, it is best not knowing how laws are made. Yours truly told the legislator that I couldn’t support his bill until its language condemning Catholic hospitals for something they did not do, was corrected. I also offered, repeatedly, to get him together with folks from Planned Parenthood and CHS who agreed on changes they would like to see in his proposed legislation. I never heard back from him. When politicians speak there is often less going on than meets the eye. And when we do not discuss our differences, we often leap to incorrect conclusions about others, creating problems where they may not exist.
When the LICC and the Diocese started an interreligious dialogue on abortion, the “pro-life” side was surprised to hear how much the “pro-choice” side appreciates the support Catholics give to women who carry their pregnancies to term. Some “crisis pregnancy centers” are deceptive and do little for pregnant women once they have convinced them not to have an abortion, but the Catholic Church offers a great deal of support to those who struggle to raise children.
There may be abortion clinics somewhere that rush their clients into surgery, but the “all-options” counseling training that Planned Parenthood provides insists that women not be pressured by parents, husbands, or boyfriends into having an abortion, or any other procedure. The purpose of the counseling is to help women arrive at their own carefully considered, freely made choices. Those who are “pro-life” may think of Planned Parenthood as the enemy, but Planned Parenthood offers prenatal care and prepares teens and women for a healthy pregnancy, a successful birth, and good parenting. They refer their clients to a number of Catholic agencies. At least locally, about 80% of their clients are Catholic, as are most of their staff and a great many of those who send clients to them for birth control or prenatal care.
Wherever you find yourself in the controversy, give thanks for the good work done by your adversaries.
Americans have real differences on abortion but may not be as divided as we think we are. Many Americans see themselves as being both “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
Most Americans and most Christians are far more moderate and nuanced on this issue than their leaders admit. Some abortion opponents object to this procedure even in cases of rape or risk to the mother’s life, for example, but Catholic teaching has always allowed for the termination of an ectopic pregnancy to save the life of the mother. As with most Catholic moral reasoning, intent matters: if the intent is saving a woman’s life, the secondary effect of terminating the pregnancy is acceptable. Catholic Health Services emergency rooms on Long Island, according to one study, are more likely than secular ones to provide the standard hormone treatments for rape victims: the fact that this may prevent implantation is an acceptable, secondary effect of giving the best possible care to a traumatized and potentially infected victim. Catholic leaders sometimes get denounced by others in the right-to-life movement because the church has a nuanced approach to some complicated situations.
I am skeptical of any single survey, but opinion polls consistently find that there is not a single state where more than a quarter of the population wants abortion to be illegal in all circumstances. Even in Alabama and Missouri, where state legislatures have enacted prohibitions with almost no exceptions, fewer than one-fifth of the population agrees. Likewise, people in states that have enacted the most progressive pro-choice laws are more conflicted about the issue than their elected representatives appear to be. Ryan Burge surveys the available data and concludes that public opinion on this issue has changed little over the past half-century and most Americans do not take extreme positions either for or against abortion. And those in the pews are less divided than are the leaders of their denominations: A Gallup Poll found almost no difference between Catholics and non-Catholics on embryonic stem cell research, for example, which is “morally acceptable” to about 60% of both groups.
Most pro-choice Christians oppose legal restrictions on abortion but urge pregnant women to tell their parents, make sure they are not being pressured into an abortion, and so on. They may insist on each woman’s right to choose abortion but are troubled by casual use of this or any other medical procedure. Some are anti-abortion but pro-choice: opposing abortion but believing bans to be counterproductive, just as most teetotalers concluded that the Prohibition was a mistake. And there is some evidence that there are more abortions in nations that outlaw it than in those that allow it. One can defend a woman’s legal right to choose how to handle her pregnancy but nonetheless want abortion to be “legal, safe, and rare.” Nearly everyone I know who is pro-choice seeks this, even if few who are anti-abortion believe them.
Many people who are “pro-life” believe this requires them to support women who find themselves in desperate situations. Eugene Cho, an evangelical pastor who heads Bread for the World, a nonpartisan Christian organization that lobbies for policies to alleviate hunger, explains:
“I want to be about life from womb to tomb…. I continue to have significant ethical concerns about abortion, and always will, but how much more could we reduce the incidence of abortion if we invested in the resources to make young women more financially stable?… I cannot shame a woman for a decision I cannot fathom, and I don’t support the criminalization of women.”
As Rabbi Brad Hisrshfield observes, “Both the pro-life and pro-choice sides share a deep belief in the value of human life… the mother’s in the case of the pro-choice movement and the baby’s in the case of the pro-life movement. That is probably why most people in this country consistently report being both pro-choice and anti-abortion… holding the truth of both sides at the same time is not only possible, but it might also actually get us to a healthier debate and better policy around this most divisive of issues.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we held politicians accountable not only for what position they take on abortion but also for doing something to overcome poverty and injustice?
Excerpted from the book, ‘Many Names For God’, that the author is writing.
Photo courtesy: Maria Oswalt for Unsplash
- Adelle M. Banks, “Survey: Less than 25% in Any US State Approves Total Ban on Abortion,” Religion News Service August 13, 2019, https://religionnews.com/2019/08/13/survey-less-than-25-in-any-us-state-approves-total-ban-on-abortion/
- Ryan P. Burge, 20 Myths about Religion and Politics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022, 38-39; The New Yorker May 18, 2009, 22.
- Harper’s Index, Harper’s July 2016, 9.
- Eugene Cho, Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk: A Christian’s Guide to Engaging Politics, Colorado Sprints: David C. Cook, 2020, chapter 4.
- Brad Hirschfield, You Don’t Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right, 199.
