Today while biochemists are bending every effort to develop a living cell that can reproduce itself, many clergymen and physicians routinely approve the destruction of life by abortion.
In five short years the long-taboo subject of abortion, once mainly catalogued with family disgrace or tragedy, has become a matter of mass media discussion and open conversation. Moreover, many states where abortion had been mainly limited to pregnancies involving danger to the mother’s life, have relaxed legal restrictions on the practice.
As a result abortion in America has changed from an abhorrent to a welcome alternative, for the sake of which many women gladly have themselves declared psychiatrically unstable. Numerous physicians, meanwhile, on the premise that existing laws are not only illiberal but unjust, seem to jeopardize their reputations for honest diagnosis.
Permissive Clergymen
In large Christian denominations certain churchmen seem more devoted to the elimination of unwanted fetuses than to introducing the existing multitudes to eternal life. How notably different was Dr. Luke the Evangelist. He sought not only to preserve and protect physical life, in accord with the Hippocratic oath, which even pagan medics scrupulously observed, but gave himself also to the mandated Christian mission of introducing unregenerate persons to new life in Christ.
In ancient times, a morally insensitive age when fathers left unwanted baby girls to die on the public garbage heaps, primitive Christianity sharply disapproved of infanticide. Even the Islamic Koran forbade the killing of infant girls. Are modern exponents of abortion-on-request any less barbaric than their Roman counterparts because they discard infant life instead with the medical trash?
We cannot gloss over the question whether modern sophistication in abortion techniques makes our age any less pagan. Paul Ramsey, a noted writer on Christian ethics, tellingly frames; the issues raised by abortion in terms of “Feticide! Infanticide upon request” (Religion in Life, Summer, 1970).
The obvious ease with which certain permissive clergymen offer situational solutions without Christian warrants should concern us deeply. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Joseph and Mary, were they to have visited some of our modern churchmen, and were they to relate some of Mary’s psychic visions, and insist that Joseph was not the father of Mary’s expected babe, A clergyman espousing lax views of sex and prophecy might suggest psychiatric care for the couple, raise the subject of abortion and name a referral service. It is God’s special providence indeed that Jesus of Nazareth was born in a time when Luke the physician had not memorized a medical manual based on modern misconceptions about sexuality. Churchmen for whom the reality of the supernatural has gone dead, and who suspect that Mary’s babe was fathered by a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine, and who see human life only as an evolutionary emergent, can only regard abortion as the elimination of an unwanted blob, at worst like the removal of a cancer, and at best like the removal of a tooth.
Christian warrants are clearly missing from permissive ecclesiastical views that support abortion-on-demand. Indeed, at a time when, under paganizing pressures, civil law accommodates discretionary infanticide, too many churchmen are prone to approve abortion as something outside the scope of Christian ethics. Their assumption of the amorality of abortion, however, merely echoes the superficial judgment of those outside the churches, and therefore lacks Christian credibility.
Loss of Biblical Sensitivity
When churches lose biblical sensitivity to these moral and spiritual considerations, the world will recognize their ministry only while they subscribe to the world’s own preferences and prejudices. Such acculturation makes churches merely an accommodating Sunday morning echo of the world’s Saturday night.
I am not contending that no alteration of abortion laws should he attempted or tolerated. But it would surely be serious and hazardous for society if we surrendered all legal regulations or control of abortion. I maintain that abortion is not a completely private medical problem, any more than pollution of the environment can be dismissed as a purely chemical problem.
But I am also convinced that the Church’s primary role, whether she disapproves or approves of abortion, is not to impose Christian morality on non-Christians. The Church is surely in no enviable position, whatever her attitude toward abortion, if she relies mainly upon legal measures to shape human conduct and lacks rational persuasion and moral example to challenge the mind and will of the masses to pursue what is right.
The overthrow of traditional abortion-attitudes is an embarrassment especially to Roman Catholicism; both its reliance on legal compulsion and its mingling of authentic moral concerns with regulations like fish-on-Friday were bound to leave multitudes confused about ‘revealed morality in toto when both ecclesiastical traditions and state laws were relaxed.
Ecclesiastical concern has focused so intently on the liberalization of state laws that the public is made to feel that the abortion-problem is best solved by getting rid of the laws which supposedly create it, a greater evil than abortion itself.
The Methodist Board of Social Concerns, for example, called upon “The United Methodist Church, its Boards and Agencies, and our common society to: Assist the states in removing the regulation of abortion from the criminal code…” (Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted October 8, 1969). We are being told more vigorous law enforcement is not the answer and is futile, in fact, when people consider a particular law obsolete. It goes without saying that widespread disregard for any law by otherwise law-abiding people not only drives them to illegal solutions with high risks, but also widens disrespect for the claim of law in general. But that does not carry us very far at all on the decisive issue of the morality or immorality of abortion. To blame the stringency of existing laws for the increased incidence of abortions, is much like blaming the principle of monogamous marriage for the rise of adultery. For those sufficiently aligned with the Bible to be Protestant evangelicals, Roman Catholics, the matter of abortion cannot be settled quite so simply; abortion, after all, is not only of physical and legal interest but equally a spiritual and moral concern.
Startling Statistics
In some circles abortion is already being hailed as the number one method of birth control. In Colombia, S.A., one abortion is said to take place for every two births. In Mexico a half million abortions are reportedly performed each year. In the United States, estimates now place the number of abortions at 200,000 to one million annually.
In seven months of operation the Metropolitan Detroit Unit of the Michigan Clergy for Problem Pregnancy Counseling had over 11,600 inquiries and counseled 3,500 women, 29 per cent of them Roman Catholics. After a newspaper article about” the organization, the Unit received 1,000 phone calls in a single week. In its first two years the Philadelphia Clergymen’s Consultation Service on Abortion referred some 6,000 women to licensed physicians for abortion. In New York, after that state’s liberalization of the abortion laws, one minister had over 50 calls in two days. Clergymen who may incur legal jeopardy under their own state laws often refer inquirers to Chicago, New York, and other areas.
Most inquirers, it is found, are women who have already decided to terminate pregnancy and who have little interest in considering alternatives such as marriage, placing the baby for adoption, or keeping it outside of wedlock. Some women prefer suicide as the alternative to abortion. Studies show that girls counseled by medical doctors are less prone to terminate pregnancies than those counseled by clergymen.
The minimum cost of an abortion is $600 to $700. At the non-profit clinic operated by Judson Baptist Church in New York City abortions are available within a price range of $200 to $1000; a $100 delayed payment can he arranged if necessary on the $200 medical scale. Because Judson’s clinic aborts by the vacuum system, a pregnant co-ed from the Midwest can arrange a morning flight to New York and with but minimal risk be back home that same evening. College girls fly on student rates, go to the clinic by cab, and within hours are ready for a new life without missing more than a single day’s classes. Doctors at Judson work at this job seven days a week from eight-to-five, and some evenings until nine.
Growing Approval
Numerous professional groups and conferences are coming out in favor of abortion. The clergy have become a vanguard among them. The committee report on sex accepted by the General Assembly for study in the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. recommends removing abortion from legal answerability and making it solely a matter of personal decision between the mother, her physician, and her pastor or counselor. By a narrow nine-vote margin the General Assembly ruled that adultery, prostitution, fornication and homosexuality are sin; it did not designate abortion under any circumstances to be such. The General Conference of the United Methodist Church of 1970 urged “that states remove the regulation of abortion from the criminal code, placing it instead under regulations relating to other procedures of standard medical practice.”
A Gallup Poll in 1967 reported that 21 per cent of Americans approved abortion on maternal preference; in 1969, 40 per cent considered it solely a matter between a mother and her physician.
Conditions under which abortion has previously been considered moral arc for the most part clearcut: when pregnancies are induced by rape or incest; when physicians, psychologists or psychiatrists approve abortion as therapeutic; and possibly when serious mental or physical deformity are in prospect for the fetus.
For Christian ethics a decision regarding the termination of a seriously defective fetus is not easy. But the arbitrary dictum that pre-natal life is prehuman is objectionably simplistic. Too many persons with congenital deformities have subsequently been grateful for life, and too many parents have accepted and loved a seriously defective child to classify abortion as a purely medical decision.
If abortion is completely and only a medical matter, as is now often claimed, it should nonetheless be obvious that most abortions today arc not really sought for exclusively medical reasons; sometimes no medical reason whatever is involved. Sound medical reasons were stipulated by the long-established laws that accommodated abortion. Precisely these laws, however, arc now under fire. The reasons for abortion increasingly turn out to be neither moral nor medical reasons at all, but are rather of the nature of social rationalization and private preference.
When the Fetus Becomes a Person
This is quite clear from the hurried way in which moderns dismiss the question of when the fetus becomes a person. When does life become human? The Methodist Board of Social Concerns has committed itself to the so-called “tissue theory” according to which “the fetus is not a person, but rather tissue with the potentiality, in most cases, for becoming a person” (Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted Oct. 8, 1969).
Such thinking is as far removed as it can possibly be from the traditional Roman Catholic view that human life exists from the moment of conception, and that abortion is therefore murder at any stage whatever at which life is forming within the mother’s body. The tissue theory, on the other hand, implies that a life becomes human only when viable outside the mother’s womb, and not before the doctor at delivery spanks the baby’s bottom.
Even if, according to some, life in the womb is not life as it exists after delivery, there are still reasons for considering it human life in some form. We now know that the fetus receives its total genetic potential of RNA and DNA at conception, is a unique and unrepeatable com hi nation of proteins, and is in some sense alive. By the end of four weeks—when the mother often first begins to suspect pregnancy—the heart has begun pumping. At eight weeks, the electrical activity of the fetal brain is already readable, and except for limbs, all essential organ formations are present. The fetus responds to external stimuli long before it is capable of spontaneous motion at ten weeks. Paul Ramsey asks, since breath-of-life and brain-activity are important considerations in deciding the exact moment of human death, why not, then, in deciding the human beginnings of life?
For surgeons concerned with the moral aspects of abortion, such issues arc not sophistries. At stake is the question whether a human life is being deliberately prematurely delivered in order to destroy it. If the fetus is prematurely taken from the womb, moreover, at a stage when its life could be nurtured for development into normal childhood, can such deliberate destruction of life be anything other than immoral?
To be sure, this issue is not the only moral or spiritual question involved in abortion; the question, however, whether we are tolerating the murder of a brother is one that no society interested in human and minority rights dare ignore. To say that a baby has no right to life if it is unwanted skirts the real issue from God’s point of view; does not the fetus have the right to be wanted? Has the fetus at no stage prior to delivery any rights of its own? Since the time of the classic Hippocratic oath, a doctor’s duty has been to preserve the life of mother and baby equally unless medical reasons dictate otherwise. Dr. Michael J. Halberstam contends that, whatever psychiatrists, social workers, social planners and population experts may decide—or some “crew of abortionists with no medical ethics”—medicine should continue to be devoted to life, and doctors should therefore not be expected to perform abortions (Redbook, April 1970).
Not a Purely Personal Decision
Abortion cannot be debated analogously to suicide as a purely personal decision. The life at stake is not the mother’s. She, moreover, is not the only source of that life, and what happens to that life has importance for society and for the state. If, as we often hear, abortion serves the cause of justice or compassion, then surely the rationale for it cannot be a matter of merely private persuasion. If social awareness and progress are to flourish, the public must understand the whys and wherefores of both private and community rights and responsibilities.
Can every termination of an unwanted pregnancy really be defended as either compassionate or just? Are there no circumstances under which the termination of an unwanted pregnancy would be non-compassionate and unjust, or possibly both?
In view of the public as well as personal implications of abortion, has the community no right to know of such acts, and to exercise moral or legal judgment? If the community has a right to know why a surgeon professionally committed to the preservation of life decides to save a pregnancy and to sacrifice the mother, has the community no right to know why he sacrifices a pregnancy?
If an act of abortion is answerable and accountable to society or to the state, then that act and its reasons should be made public. Tn the interest of both social righteousness and public justice counseling of the mother should include not simply medical and spiritual counsel, but legal advice as well.
Is compassion actually involved at all unless abortion consciously preserves or promotes a mother’s physical or mental health, or rescues a child from known imbicility or devastating deformity?
Also Dispose of Senile Parents?
Is the life of a helpless fetus forfeitable simply because the mother wills its death and the parent’s sense no Good Samaritan obligation to spare it? If so, do the mother and father in principle forfeit any rights of their own when they become senile and their children are disposed to put them out of the way? If the decision to preserve or destroy a living fetus lacking full human life rests upon a parent’s personal convenience or upon social considerations such as the population explosion, is not the case even stronger then for a child to dispose of parents when senility overtakes them? If we are free to destroy human life and to deny its dignity at one stage, why not at another?
If, on the other hand, the unborn child has personal rights even before delivery, and if its right to be born has public implications, then the human self is entitled to protection even when it cannot protect itself. The right of the weak and helpless to protection and mercy has always been a distinctive emphasis of Christian morality; reverence for life even at its despised frontiers and not merely at its most cherished horizons was an apostolic virtue.
With no persuasive reasons for considering abortion to be just or compassionate, how can we escape the verdict that abortion is in many, if not most, instances today Twentieth Century feticide or infanticide?
Abortion is being widely hailed as a hopeful contribution to mankind’s collective future; fetus destruction is rationalized and moralized as a more sensitive approach to family planning than birth control. If overpopulation were really the decisive issue, then a far less questionable and more natural programs of limiting family size could be encouraged.
A Grandiose Premise
Present-day discussion often assumes that disposal of an unwanted fetus makes all things well for mother, father, society and the nation. But the actual facts belie this grandiose premise.
While the medical problems surrounding abortion are now far less demanding and dangerous than once upon a time, complications are indeed possible and do occur, often where and when not expected. Abortions are not always complete—bleeding, infection, tissue damage and injury to vital organs are not infrequent and sometimes lead to infertility.
While case studies show that most women who undergo abortions experience no physical harm, these studies cannot confirm the presumption that bearing the child would have produced psychological aberration. Some counselors contend that mothers who abort have fewer emotional hang-ups than one would expect. But emotional factors do not usually assert or manifest themselves immediately. And how often are a mother’s secret guilt-feelings actually brought to light? Is there never a moment when she asks: “Did I kill my baby?” Do we know enough to say that an aborting mother may not be more suicide prone? If one child was considered dispensable, will other children in the family be unwitting victims of psychological harassment?
Easy Abortion and Sexual Promiscuity
The connection between easy abortion and sexual promiscuity is obvious. While married women seeking abortions once outnumbered unwed girls four to one, the ratio is now thought to be about equally balanced. About one in ten women wanting abortions blame birth control failure for their pregnancies; most such failures involve married women who are less sophisticated about contraceptive techniques than their unmarried sisters.
Yet for all their know-how, modern teen-agers face a rising problem of unwanted pregnancies. The ages at which premarital intercourse is ventured and at which unwanted pregnancies occur are falling lower and lower. The problem of the unwanted child is especially acute on college and university campuses, however, where intellectual criteria are presumed to count for something. One Texas university campus reports an average of one unwanted pregnancy a week. According to a campus chaplain in Michigan: “Kids are getting pregnant right and left—roommates, classmates, campus friends—despite the availability of the pill.” Christians are not insulated from the problem. Said a Christian co-ed at one of the state colleges: “Just try to get a decent night’s sleep with your roommate and her boyfriend in the top bunk.”
Even if an abortion is successful and the woman involved has no guilt-feelings, there is another problem to he faced. Adoption agencies tell us that most unwed mothers they serve have unconsciously wanted to become pregnant, only to discover that the relationship with the man involved was no longer meaningful. They often repeat this experience, unless they get married, or are encouraged to use contraceptive devices amid promiscuity. The real problem, therefore, is not the pregnancy, but something else and something deeper.
There is the problem, too, of venereal disease. According to some medical spokesmen, it is assuming epidemic proportions of national emergency. Once the dilemma faced by sexual delinquents was that of promiscuous intercourse without pregnancy; today in the post-contraceptive era, the dilemma is that of intercourse without venereal disease.
This wide span of abortion-related problems ol1ght certainly to emphasize one basic point. If a child is not wanted or unwanted in the present circumstances of life, then that decision, together with abstinence from pre-marital intercourse and continence or contraceptive sexuality within marriage, must be morally incorporated into the conscience of a prospective father and potential mother. No exposition of abortion that simply debunks guilt feelings about premarital or extra-marital intercourse, and that ignores the risks of contraceptive failure, can hope to provide an adequately moral rationale.
New Testament Morality
That may seem a hard cross in this Twentieth Century. But it is borne, and most readily and victoriously where New Testament morality and the joys of evangelical devotion to God are still alive, as indeed they are for multitudes of evangelical Protestants. That lax sexual mores leave their mark even upon the most dedicated church congregations today, is no secret, much as in apostolic times, as Paul’s letter to the Corinthians makes abundantly clear. Christian conversions, we must remember, are made from among those who once belonged to the world, and Christian living is a lifelong maturing in moral commitment.
Christian response to the abortion-crisis ought to encourage a new respect and sense of responsibility for the body and its use. The Bible throughout teaches that God owns our bodies, and the doctrine of sanctification has determinative bearing upon the life of sexuality.
A woman’s body, according to the Christian view, is not the domain and property of others. It is hers to control, and she alone is responsible to Cod and to society, for its use. When she yields that control, and through intercourse is involved in intrapersonal relationships with a second party, and through conception to a third party, and indeed to human society as a whole, it becomes too late for her to justify abortion on the basis of self-determination. The God of creation and redemption is also the guardian of the womb, however much abortion-on-demand would contradict or scorn such a conviction. In abortion-on-demand one’s own private decision determines the ordering of human life. Obviously such self-autonomy cannot be maximized, however, for even were suicide-on-demand to follow, there remains at last a final judgment by the Lord and Giver of Life.
Carl Henry is visiting professor of theology at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He serves also as Editor-at-Large for CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
In five short years the long-taboo subject of abortion, once mainly catalogued with family disgrace or tragedy, has become a matter of mass media discussion and open conversation. Moreover, many states where abortion had been mainly limited to pregnancies involving danger to the mother’s life, have relaxed legal restrictions on the practice.
As a result abortion in America has changed from an abhorrent to a welcome alternative, for the sake of which many women gladly have themselves declared psychiatrically unstable. Numerous physicians, meanwhile, on the premise that existing laws are not only illiberal but unjust, seem to jeopardize their reputations for honest diagnosis.
Permissive Clergymen
In large Christian denominations certain churchmen seem more devoted to the elimination of unwanted fetuses than to introducing the existing multitudes to eternal life. How notably different was Dr. Luke the Evangelist. He sought not only to preserve and protect physical life, in accord with the Hippocratic oath, which even pagan medics scrupulously observed, but gave himself also to the mandated Christian mission of introducing unregenerate persons to new life in Christ.
In ancient times, a morally insensitive age when fathers left unwanted baby girls to die on the public garbage heaps, primitive Christianity sharply disapproved of infanticide. Even the Islamic Koran forbade the killing of infant girls. Are modern exponents of abortion-on-request any less barbaric than their Roman counterparts because they discard infant life instead with the medical trash?
We cannot gloss over the question whether modern sophistication in abortion techniques makes our age any less pagan. Paul Ramsey, a noted writer on Christian ethics, tellingly frames; the issues raised by abortion in terms of “Feticide! Infanticide upon request” (Religion in Life, Summer, 1970).
The obvious ease with which certain permissive clergymen offer situational solutions without Christian warrants should concern us deeply. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Joseph and Mary, were they to have visited some of our modern churchmen, and were they to relate some of Mary’s psychic visions, and insist that Joseph was not the father of Mary’s expected babe, A clergyman espousing lax views of sex and prophecy might suggest psychiatric care for the couple, raise the subject of abortion and name a referral service. It is God’s special providence indeed that Jesus of Nazareth was born in a time when Luke the physician had not memorized a medical manual based on modern misconceptions about sexuality. Churchmen for whom the reality of the supernatural has gone dead, and who suspect that Mary’s babe was fathered by a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine, and who see human life only as an evolutionary emergent, can only regard abortion as the elimination of an unwanted blob, at worst like the removal of a cancer, and at best like the removal of a tooth.
Christian warrants are clearly missing from permissive ecclesiastical views that support abortion-on-demand. Indeed, at a time when, under paganizing pressures, civil law accommodates discretionary infanticide, too many churchmen are prone to approve abortion as something outside the scope of Christian ethics. Their assumption of the amorality of abortion, however, merely echoes the superficial judgment of those outside the churches, and therefore lacks Christian credibility.
Loss of Biblical Sensitivity
When churches lose biblical sensitivity to these moral and spiritual considerations, the world will recognize their ministry only while they subscribe to the world’s own preferences and prejudices. Such acculturation makes churches merely an accommodating Sunday morning echo of the world’s Saturday night.
I am not contending that no alteration of abortion laws should he attempted or tolerated. But it would surely be serious and hazardous for society if we surrendered all legal regulations or control of abortion. I maintain that abortion is not a completely private medical problem, any more than pollution of the environment can be dismissed as a purely chemical problem.
But I am also convinced that the Church’s primary role, whether she disapproves or approves of abortion, is not to impose Christian morality on non-Christians. The Church is surely in no enviable position, whatever her attitude toward abortion, if she relies mainly upon legal measures to shape human conduct and lacks rational persuasion and moral example to challenge the mind and will of the masses to pursue what is right.
The overthrow of traditional abortion-attitudes is an embarrassment especially to Roman Catholicism; both its reliance on legal compulsion and its mingling of authentic moral concerns with regulations like fish-on-Friday were bound to leave multitudes confused about ‘revealed morality in toto when both ecclesiastical traditions and state laws were relaxed.
Ecclesiastical concern has focused so intently on the liberalization of state laws that the public is made to feel that the abortion-problem is best solved by getting rid of the laws which supposedly create it, a greater evil than abortion itself.
The Methodist Board of Social Concerns, for example, called upon “The United Methodist Church, its Boards and Agencies, and our common society to: Assist the states in removing the regulation of abortion from the criminal code…” (Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted October 8, 1969). We are being told more vigorous law enforcement is not the answer and is futile, in fact, when people consider a particular law obsolete. It goes without saying that widespread disregard for any law by otherwise law-abiding people not only drives them to illegal solutions with high risks, but also widens disrespect for the claim of law in general. But that does not carry us very far at all on the decisive issue of the morality or immorality of abortion. To blame the stringency of existing laws for the increased incidence of abortions, is much like blaming the principle of monogamous marriage for the rise of adultery. For those sufficiently aligned with the Bible to be Protestant evangelicals, Roman Catholics, the matter of abortion cannot be settled quite so simply; abortion, after all, is not only of physical and legal interest but equally a spiritual and moral concern.
Startling Statistics
In some circles abortion is already being hailed as the number one method of birth control. In Colombia, S.A., one abortion is said to take place for every two births. In Mexico a half million abortions are reportedly performed each year. In the United States, estimates now place the number of abortions at 200,000 to one million annually.
In seven months of operation the Metropolitan Detroit Unit of the Michigan Clergy for Problem Pregnancy Counseling had over 11,600 inquiries and counseled 3,500 women, 29 per cent of them Roman Catholics. After a newspaper article about” the organization, the Unit received 1,000 phone calls in a single week. In its first two years the Philadelphia Clergymen’s Consultation Service on Abortion referred some 6,000 women to licensed physicians for abortion. In New York, after that state’s liberalization of the abortion laws, one minister had over 50 calls in two days. Clergymen who may incur legal jeopardy under their own state laws often refer inquirers to Chicago, New York, and other areas.
Most inquirers, it is found, are women who have already decided to terminate pregnancy and who have little interest in considering alternatives such as marriage, placing the baby for adoption, or keeping it outside of wedlock. Some women prefer suicide as the alternative to abortion. Studies show that girls counseled by medical doctors are less prone to terminate pregnancies than those counseled by clergymen.
The minimum cost of an abortion is $600 to $700. At the non-profit clinic operated by Judson Baptist Church in New York City abortions are available within a price range of $200 to $1000; a $100 delayed payment can he arranged if necessary on the $200 medical scale. Because Judson’s clinic aborts by the vacuum system, a pregnant co-ed from the Midwest can arrange a morning flight to New York and with but minimal risk be back home that same evening. College girls fly on student rates, go to the clinic by cab, and within hours are ready for a new life without missing more than a single day’s classes. Doctors at Judson work at this job seven days a week from eight-to-five, and some evenings until nine.
Growing Approval
Numerous professional groups and conferences are coming out in favor of abortion. The clergy have become a vanguard among them. The committee report on sex accepted by the General Assembly for study in the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. recommends removing abortion from legal answerability and making it solely a matter of personal decision between the mother, her physician, and her pastor or counselor. By a narrow nine-vote margin the General Assembly ruled that adultery, prostitution, fornication and homosexuality are sin; it did not designate abortion under any circumstances to be such. The General Conference of the United Methodist Church of 1970 urged “that states remove the regulation of abortion from the criminal code, placing it instead under regulations relating to other procedures of standard medical practice.”
A Gallup Poll in 1967 reported that 21 per cent of Americans approved abortion on maternal preference; in 1969, 40 per cent considered it solely a matter between a mother and her physician.
Conditions under which abortion has previously been considered moral arc for the most part clearcut: when pregnancies are induced by rape or incest; when physicians, psychologists or psychiatrists approve abortion as therapeutic; and possibly when serious mental or physical deformity are in prospect for the fetus.
For Christian ethics a decision regarding the termination of a seriously defective fetus is not easy. But the arbitrary dictum that pre-natal life is prehuman is objectionably simplistic. Too many persons with congenital deformities have subsequently been grateful for life, and too many parents have accepted and loved a seriously defective child to classify abortion as a purely medical decision.
If abortion is completely and only a medical matter, as is now often claimed, it should nonetheless be obvious that most abortions today arc not really sought for exclusively medical reasons; sometimes no medical reason whatever is involved. Sound medical reasons were stipulated by the long-established laws that accommodated abortion. Precisely these laws, however, arc now under fire. The reasons for abortion increasingly turn out to be neither moral nor medical reasons at all, but are rather of the nature of social rationalization and private preference.
When the Fetus Becomes a Person
This is quite clear from the hurried way in which moderns dismiss the question of when the fetus becomes a person. When does life become human? The Methodist Board of Social Concerns has committed itself to the so-called “tissue theory” according to which “the fetus is not a person, but rather tissue with the potentiality, in most cases, for becoming a person” (Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted Oct. 8, 1969).
Such thinking is as far removed as it can possibly be from the traditional Roman Catholic view that human life exists from the moment of conception, and that abortion is therefore murder at any stage whatever at which life is forming within the mother’s body. The tissue theory, on the other hand, implies that a life becomes human only when viable outside the mother’s womb, and not before the doctor at delivery spanks the baby’s bottom.
Even if, according to some, life in the womb is not life as it exists after delivery, there are still reasons for considering it human life in some form. We now know that the fetus receives its total genetic potential of RNA and DNA at conception, is a unique and unrepeatable com hi nation of proteins, and is in some sense alive. By the end of four weeks—when the mother often first begins to suspect pregnancy—the heart has begun pumping. At eight weeks, the electrical activity of the fetal brain is already readable, and except for limbs, all essential organ formations are present. The fetus responds to external stimuli long before it is capable of spontaneous motion at ten weeks. Paul Ramsey asks, since breath-of-life and brain-activity are important considerations in deciding the exact moment of human death, why not, then, in deciding the human beginnings of life?
For surgeons concerned with the moral aspects of abortion, such issues arc not sophistries. At stake is the question whether a human life is being deliberately prematurely delivered in order to destroy it. If the fetus is prematurely taken from the womb, moreover, at a stage when its life could be nurtured for development into normal childhood, can such deliberate destruction of life be anything other than immoral?
To be sure, this issue is not the only moral or spiritual question involved in abortion; the question, however, whether we are tolerating the murder of a brother is one that no society interested in human and minority rights dare ignore. To say that a baby has no right to life if it is unwanted skirts the real issue from God’s point of view; does not the fetus have the right to be wanted? Has the fetus at no stage prior to delivery any rights of its own? Since the time of the classic Hippocratic oath, a doctor’s duty has been to preserve the life of mother and baby equally unless medical reasons dictate otherwise. Dr. Michael J. Halberstam contends that, whatever psychiatrists, social workers, social planners and population experts may decide—or some “crew of abortionists with no medical ethics”—medicine should continue to be devoted to life, and doctors should therefore not be expected to perform abortions (Redbook, April 1970).
Not a Purely Personal Decision
Abortion cannot be debated analogously to suicide as a purely personal decision. The life at stake is not the mother’s. She, moreover, is not the only source of that life, and what happens to that life has importance for society and for the state. If, as we often hear, abortion serves the cause of justice or compassion, then surely the rationale for it cannot be a matter of merely private persuasion. If social awareness and progress are to flourish, the public must understand the whys and wherefores of both private and community rights and responsibilities.
Can every termination of an unwanted pregnancy really be defended as either compassionate or just? Are there no circumstances under which the termination of an unwanted pregnancy would be non-compassionate and unjust, or possibly both?
In view of the public as well as personal implications of abortion, has the community no right to know of such acts, and to exercise moral or legal judgment? If the community has a right to know why a surgeon professionally committed to the preservation of life decides to save a pregnancy and to sacrifice the mother, has the community no right to know why he sacrifices a pregnancy?
If an act of abortion is answerable and accountable to society or to the state, then that act and its reasons should be made public. Tn the interest of both social righteousness and public justice counseling of the mother should include not simply medical and spiritual counsel, but legal advice as well.
Is compassion actually involved at all unless abortion consciously preserves or promotes a mother’s physical or mental health, or rescues a child from known imbicility or devastating deformity?
Also Dispose of Senile Parents?
Is the life of a helpless fetus forfeitable simply because the mother wills its death and the parent’s sense no Good Samaritan obligation to spare it? If so, do the mother and father in principle forfeit any rights of their own when they become senile and their children are disposed to put them out of the way? If the decision to preserve or destroy a living fetus lacking full human life rests upon a parent’s personal convenience or upon social considerations such as the population explosion, is not the case even stronger then for a child to dispose of parents when senility overtakes them? If we are free to destroy human life and to deny its dignity at one stage, why not at another?
If, on the other hand, the unborn child has personal rights even before delivery, and if its right to be born has public implications, then the human self is entitled to protection even when it cannot protect itself. The right of the weak and helpless to protection and mercy has always been a distinctive emphasis of Christian morality; reverence for life even at its despised frontiers and not merely at its most cherished horizons was an apostolic virtue.
With no persuasive reasons for considering abortion to be just or compassionate, how can we escape the verdict that abortion is in many, if not most, instances today Twentieth Century feticide or infanticide?
Abortion is being widely hailed as a hopeful contribution to mankind’s collective future; fetus destruction is rationalized and moralized as a more sensitive approach to family planning than birth control. If overpopulation were really the decisive issue, then a far less questionable and more natural programs of limiting family size could be encouraged.
A Grandiose Premise
Present-day discussion often assumes that disposal of an unwanted fetus makes all things well for mother, father, society and the nation. But the actual facts belie this grandiose premise.
While the medical problems surrounding abortion are now far less demanding and dangerous than once upon a time, complications are indeed possible and do occur, often where and when not expected. Abortions are not always complete—bleeding, infection, tissue damage and injury to vital organs are not infrequent and sometimes lead to infertility.
While case studies show that most women who undergo abortions experience no physical harm, these studies cannot confirm the presumption that bearing the child would have produced psychological aberration. Some counselors contend that mothers who abort have fewer emotional hang-ups than one would expect. But emotional factors do not usually assert or manifest themselves immediately. And how often are a mother’s secret guilt-feelings actually brought to light? Is there never a moment when she asks: “Did I kill my baby?” Do we know enough to say that an aborting mother may not be more suicide prone? If one child was considered dispensable, will other children in the family be unwitting victims of psychological harassment?
Easy Abortion and Sexual Promiscuity
The connection between easy abortion and sexual promiscuity is obvious. While married women seeking abortions once outnumbered unwed girls four to one, the ratio is now thought to be about equally balanced. About one in ten women wanting abortions blame birth control failure for their pregnancies; most such failures involve married women who are less sophisticated about contraceptive techniques than their unmarried sisters.
Yet for all their know-how, modern teen-agers face a rising problem of unwanted pregnancies. The ages at which premarital intercourse is ventured and at which unwanted pregnancies occur are falling lower and lower. The problem of the unwanted child is especially acute on college and university campuses, however, where intellectual criteria are presumed to count for something. One Texas university campus reports an average of one unwanted pregnancy a week. According to a campus chaplain in Michigan: “Kids are getting pregnant right and left—roommates, classmates, campus friends—despite the availability of the pill.” Christians are not insulated from the problem. Said a Christian co-ed at one of the state colleges: “Just try to get a decent night’s sleep with your roommate and her boyfriend in the top bunk.”
Even if an abortion is successful and the woman involved has no guilt-feelings, there is another problem to he faced. Adoption agencies tell us that most unwed mothers they serve have unconsciously wanted to become pregnant, only to discover that the relationship with the man involved was no longer meaningful. They often repeat this experience, unless they get married, or are encouraged to use contraceptive devices amid promiscuity. The real problem, therefore, is not the pregnancy, but something else and something deeper.
There is the problem, too, of venereal disease. According to some medical spokesmen, it is assuming epidemic proportions of national emergency. Once the dilemma faced by sexual delinquents was that of promiscuous intercourse without pregnancy; today in the post-contraceptive era, the dilemma is that of intercourse without venereal disease.
This wide span of abortion-related problems ol1ght certainly to emphasize one basic point. If a child is not wanted or unwanted in the present circumstances of life, then that decision, together with abstinence from pre-marital intercourse and continence or contraceptive sexuality within marriage, must be morally incorporated into the conscience of a prospective father and potential mother. No exposition of abortion that simply debunks guilt feelings about premarital or extra-marital intercourse, and that ignores the risks of contraceptive failure, can hope to provide an adequately moral rationale.
New Testament Morality
That may seem a hard cross in this Twentieth Century. But it is borne, and most readily and victoriously where New Testament morality and the joys of evangelical devotion to God are still alive, as indeed they are for multitudes of evangelical Protestants. That lax sexual mores leave their mark even upon the most dedicated church congregations today, is no secret, much as in apostolic times, as Paul’s letter to the Corinthians makes abundantly clear. Christian conversions, we must remember, are made from among those who once belonged to the world, and Christian living is a lifelong maturing in moral commitment.
Christian response to the abortion-crisis ought to encourage a new respect and sense of responsibility for the body and its use. The Bible throughout teaches that God owns our bodies, and the doctrine of sanctification has determinative bearing upon the life of sexuality.
A woman’s body, according to the Christian view, is not the domain and property of others. It is hers to control, and she alone is responsible to Cod and to society, for its use. When she yields that control, and through intercourse is involved in intrapersonal relationships with a second party, and through conception to a third party, and indeed to human society as a whole, it becomes too late for her to justify abortion on the basis of self-determination. The God of creation and redemption is also the guardian of the womb, however much abortion-on-demand would contradict or scorn such a conviction. In abortion-on-demand one’s own private decision determines the ordering of human life. Obviously such self-autonomy cannot be maximized, however, for even were suicide-on-demand to follow, there remains at last a final judgment by the Lord and Giver of Life.
Carl Henry is visiting professor of theology at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He serves also as Editor-at-Large for CHRISTIANITY TODAY.