The pamphlet does not contain a position statement.
Quite the opposite, in fact. From the beginning, the authors explain
that such an agreement is impossible: ”Clearly there is no Christian
position on abortion, for here real values conflict with each other, and
Christian persons who seek honestly to be open to God’s call still find
themselves disagreeing profoundly.”
Some of the contents would come as little surprise
to anyone aware of today’s struggles over abortion ethics and rights.
For example, the Catholic Church pronounced that even when pregnancy
threatens a mother’s life, abortion “increases the overall tragedy.”
Catholicism has wavered over
the centuries about when a fetus becomes a person with a soul, but the
hierarchy has been consistent in its opposition to abortion after
ensoulment, which is now proclaimed to happen at conception.
Furthermore, the Catholic hierarchy has long sought to enforce its
ethical judgments via civic and criminal codes, and 1978 was no
exception: “A legal context in which abortion is presented as a
legitimate way of resolving tragic situations creates an atmosphere that
reduces respect for the value of life. Ultimately, such an atmosphere
dehumanizes the lives of all who live in it.”
What
might be surprising is how little the other denominations represented
in the 1978 study group agreed with them. Consider the following
statements:
Because Christ calls us to affirm the
freedom of persons and the sanctity of life, we recognize that abortion
should be a matter of personal decision. –American Baptist Churches
The
ALC recognizes the freedom and responsibility of individuals to make
their own choices in light of the best information available to them and
their understanding of God’s will for their lives, whether those
choices be in regard to family planning or any other life situations. –American Lutheran Church
The
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) believes that the mother has an
overwhelming stake in her own pregnancy, and to be forced to give birth
to a child against her will is a peculiarly personal violation of her
freedom . . . . The fetus is seen as a potential person, but not fully a
person in the same developed sense in which the mother is a person with
an ability to think, to feel, to make decisions, and choices concerning
her own life. . . . That prior right however, carries with it a
tremendous responsibility, for human life, even potential human life is
valued. –Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Abortion
should be accepted as an option only where all other possible
alternatives will lead to greater destruction of human life and spirit. .
. . We support persons who, after prayer and counseling, believe
abortion is the least destructive alternative available to them, that
they may make their decision openly, honestly, without the suffering
imposed by an uncompromising community. –Church of the Brethren
Christians
have a responsibility to limit the size of their families and to
practice responsible birth control. . . . .where there is substantial
reason to believe that the child would be deformed in mind or body, or
where the pregnancy has resulted from rape or incest . . . termination
of pregnancy is permissible. –Episcopal Church
The
status of the fetus is the key issue. That status is affected by
consideration of the fact that it is the organic beginning of human
life. Further, its status is defined by its stage of development, its
state of well-being, and its prospects for a meaningful life after its
birth.
–Lutheran Church in America
Human life
develops on a continuum from conception to birth. At some point it may
be regarded as more “personal” and higher in “quality.” At some
undesignated time, the value of this life may actually outweigh
competing factors; e.g., the vocational and social objectives of the
family, etc. –United Church of Christ
Our belief in the
sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion.
But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and
well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an
unacceptable pregnancy. In continuity with past Christian teaching, we
recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion. –United Methodist Church
The
artificial or induced termination of pregnancy is a matter of the
careful ethical decision of the patient, her physician, and her pastor
or other counselor and therefore should not be restricted by law . . . –United Presbyterian Church
Today
when we think of Christianity and abortion what comes to mind may be
clinic picket lines; or “personhood” zealots who insist that microscopic
fertilized eggs merit the same hard-won civil rights as walking,
talking, thinking, breathing men and women and children; or even the
fanatics who have now murdered eight doctors in the name of life.
The picture of Christianity revealed in the 1978 study document is
very different. Mind you, across the board we do see an ancient
religious tradition that treats life as sacred and human life as the
pinnacle of creation. Outside of Christianity, these are not points of
universal agreement. A secularist might treat the loss of early
embryonic life with pragmatic acceptance — more than half of fertilized
eggs self-abort; human reproduction is a funnel designed so that lots of
false starts produce a few healthy adult offspring.
Secular
ethics and law concern themselves with the well-being of persons who can
think and feel, who can actually desire life, liberty and happiness. A
secularist might work to reduce abortions primarily because they are
emotionally, financially or otherwise costly to conscious persons. By
contrast, the Protestant voices represented here give pregnancy some of
the same sacred weight it is given by their Catholic brethren, and so
they find the termination of pregnancy, even in early stages, to be
morally complex. Even so, they balance the value of embryonic life
against other values they hold sacred:
Humility:
“Philosophical uncertainties lasting over the centuries now appear in
the form of disagreements among Christians who yet revere God’s call to
life. . . . Our vision and understanding are limited, and Christ calls
us to see our differences as a call to larger vision.”
Freedom:
“Very near the center of the Christian life is Christ’s call to
freedom, both in the inward form of our lives and our outward social
structures.”
Justice: “Medical intervention
should be made available to all who desire and qualify for it, not just
to those who can afford preferential treatment.”
Balance:
“Instead of a single guide, we have recognized several guides, each of
which speaks with the others and balances the others where they become
one-sided. These are scripture, church tradition, reason, [and] personal
experience.”
Compassion: “The tragedies of
rape, incest, child abuse, the ‘unwanted’ child, as well as the special
difficulties of the poor in dealing with abortion all stand as signs
that we have not realized Christ’s call for community. “
Responsibility:
“We confess that we are part of a society that contributes to abortion
by denying parents the support and assistance they need.” “The Gospel
call to reverence for life challenges us to do all we can to change
those situations that make abortion necessary for some people.”
Anyone
who has ever found his or her own deeply held values in conflict will
recognize the tone of these quotes — the introspection, the reluctance,
the struggle with difficult decisions that force us to choose between
different kinds of good or different kinds of bad or some messy and
uncertain mix of both. It stands in stark contrast to the righteous
certitude of today’s culture warriors.
The Protestant
denominations involved in the ecumenical study group were mainline
traditions that today are considered theologically liberal. Most
continue to affirm quietly that abortion decisions are best trusted to a
woman and her understanding of God, with spiritual council and
community support. It may be more surprising to many people that at the
time many biblical literalists similarly saw abortion as a matter of individual decision. Jonathan Dudley, CNN commentator and author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, lays it out:
In 1968, Christianity Today published
a special issue on contraception and abortion, encapsulating the
consensus among evangelical thinkers at the time. In the leading
article, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas
Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life
begins at birth:
“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no
matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: ‘If a
man kills any human life he will be put to death’ (Lev. 24:17). But
according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a
capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is
not reckoned as a soul.”
The magazine Christian Life agreed,
insisting, “The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of
a fetus and an adult.” And the Southern Baptist Convention passed a
1971 resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect
the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well.
The
WAC members sought to discern God’s will through a combination of
scripture, tradition, reason and experience, but evangelical Christians
claim to speak from the authority of the Bible alone, a Reformation
principle known as “sola scriptura.”
Consequently, one striking feature of their shift on abortion is that
biblical authority now must be invoked to support an anti-abortion
stance. Rick Warren, whose book, The Purpose Driven Life, cherry-picks
from over 10 Bible translations to best underscore his points, said in
2008, “The reason I believe life begins at conception is because the
Bible says it.”
Ironically, as theology blogger Fred Clark has pointed out,
sometime between 1968 and 2008, biblical literalists became so sure God
opposed abortion that they actually changed the language of the Bible
to fit their new position on
God’s unchanging will. The passage cited by Bruce Waltke was the
sticking point because it is the only passage in the Bible that
explicitly addresses the legal status of a fetus. In 1977, the New
American Standard translation of Exodus 21:22-25 read as follows:
And
if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that
she has a miscarriage, yet there is not further injury, he shall surely
be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as
the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall
appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand
for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for
bruise.
By 1995, an updated version of the translation had changed the meaning.
If
men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she
gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be
fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the
judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall
appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand
for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for
bruise.
The original treats the death of a fetus
differently than the death of a person. By changing “so that she has a
miscarriage” to “so that she gives birth prematurely” this little
barrier to anti-abortion unity was removed. The change, however, is at
odds with centuries of church tradition, Jewish interpretations of the same passage, and the clear intent of earlier near Eastern legal codes in which the passage appears to have had its roots.
What
has happened? Why are those who so clearly asserted 30 or 40 years ago
that the biblical God was pro-choice now even more confident that he
wants us to protect fertilized eggs from the time of conception?
As
the pattern of history reveals, God changes his mind when we change
ours. In this case, God changed his mind for the reasons he typically
does: He responded to shifts in human power structures and culture that
in their turn were triggered by changes in technology. Much has been
written recently about the systematic way in which Republican
strategists courted once-diverse Evangelicals, how Falwell and his
colleagues worked to bring Evangelical views on conception and abortion
into line with those of Catholics in order to form a voting block (here, here, here, here).
In short, they effected a theological and cultural shift for political
reasons. But those same strategists could not have done what they did
without help from the current of history. They were swimming downstream
thanks to two waves of technology change and the way those new
technologies triggered hard-wired aspects of human psychology.
The
first wave was the advent of modern contraception. For the first time
since our species emerged, women had relatively reliable control over
their fertility. Futurist Sara Robinson describes the cataclysmic effect of the Pill on old cultural agreements:
Far
from being a mere 500-year event, we may have to go back to the
invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire to find something that’s
so completely disruptive to the way humans have lived for the entire
duration of our remembered history.
Until the condom, the
diaphragm, the Pill, the IUD, and all the subsequent variants of
hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny — and
all of the world’s societies were organized around that central fact. . .
. Our biology reduced us to a kind of chattel, subject to strictures
that owed more to property law than the more rights-based laws that
applied to men. . . . . Men, in return, thrived. The ego candy they
feasted on by virtue of automatically outranking half the world’s
population was only the start of it. They got full economic and social
control over our bodies, our labor, our affections, and our futures.
They got to make the rules, name the gods we would worship, and dictate
the terms we would live under. In most cultures, they had the right to
sex on demand within the marriage, and also to break their marriage vows
with impunity — a luxury that would get women banished or killed. As
long as pregnancy remained the defining fact of our lives, they got to
run the whole show. The world was their party, and they had a fabulous
time.
Even when the world isn’t their party, humans
tend to have a love-hate relationship with change. Family systems
therapists talk about patients receiving indirect “change back” messages
from husbands or wives or parents who genuinely want them to get well
but who also have habituated to the status quo. In the case of modern
contraceptives, women had a lot to gain. Men had a lot to lose. The
sexual property ethic that Robinson mentions has ugly implications that I
laid out in a recent article, “The Bible Says Yes to Legitimate Rape and Rape Babies.” But dependency also has its privileges, and some retrogressive religious institutions have
been able to tap both male and female yearnings for a mythical past in
which all was right with the world because women knew their place under
men who knew their place under God. The Tea Party, which was largely a
rekindling of the old Moral Majority, tapped the same yearnings for a
fantasy past, the same anxiety about an uncertain future, and the same
anger about privilege lost. Outrage over abortion, now narrated as
outrage over the murder of helpless little unborn babies, was a natural
fit.
Aid for the “unborn baby” framing came from another
technology sector that has become a silent game-changer in the
reproductive rights conversation: fetal imaging. Eager prospective
parents now watch video screens as ultrasound technicians check the
development of internal organs and closure of the neural tube. Little
arms and legs appear on the screen, maybe a penis. Maybe even a face. At
baby showers the same parents are given colorful books of exquisite
photography that trace fetal development and the passage through the
birth canal. In 1978, pregnancy was largely a black box. It is no
longer.
One hallmark of human information processing is that
vision is our dominant sense. When it comes to the status of a fetus, a
visual array that looks in the slightest like an infant may have the
power to trigger an instinctive person-reaction. In particular, we
appear to have a specialized module in our brains that reacts to
anything remotely like a human face. The instinct is so hard-wired that
human infants preferentially attend to two black dots with a slash
underneath. For a rabbit, whether something smells like a baby might be
key to activating maternal instincts. A mole might be uninterested
unless something feels like a baby mole. But for us, curving white lines
co-mingled with static on a dark screen are sufficient.
When an
image or object activates the brain systems that are designed to store
and analyze information about other people, we ourselves fill in the
gaps. Children lend their voices to spun polyester bears and molded
plastic dolls. Facebookers send around captioned pictures of big-eyed
cats. None of this requires that the bear or doll or cat actually have
any of the attributes of philosophical personhood that
would generate the words: consciousness, sentience, the ability to feel
pleasure and pain, preferences or intentions, the ability to form
attachments, or to value existence. But in the presence of certain kinds
of visual input we react as-if they did. We almost can’t help
ourselves. Better said, it takes a conscious effort to over-ride impulse
and instinct and ask ourselves to differentiate what we see from what
we know. The kind of deep, thoughtful wrestling that went into that old
1978 study document requires another level of exertion altogether.
Culture
warriors who think they speak for God — the new God, the one who hates
abortion in any form at any point in gestation for any reason — are
hoping that young American Christians won’t go to the trouble. That is
why, even as they keep the focus visual, they carefully avoid images of
early abortions, in which the actual tissue removed may look downright boring. They avoid indicating size,
since at six weeks, the gestational sac is about the size of a dime.
They also avoid images of fetal anomalies, which could remind viewers
that occasionally a fetus has no viable path to becoming a person and
might even raise questions about whether God guides pregnancy more than
any other natural process.
To date this strategy has worked, but
technology may be changing the conversation once again. As the
evangelical consensus against abortion has grown, the procedure itself
has become a shrinking target. With both pregnancy and fetal anomalies
diagnosed earlier, more than 60 percent of abortions now are done before
the ninth week and 90 percent before the 12th. A contraceptive revolution is causing a steep drop in abortion rates through
better prevention. It is also ramping up the economic justice aspect of
the abortion fight, because women who can afford the up-front cost of
long acting contraceptives rarely need abortions.
As these factors converge, it may become hard to sustain the current
level of horror about an “abortion holocaust.” On top of this, women who
have terminated pregnancies are using social media to tell their
stories and connect with each other, undermining the community advantage
once held by churches. The culture warriors may soon find that a new
technology nexus has once again changed the cultural dynamic.
What God will think at that point, only heaven knows.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/17/right_wing_christians_didnt_always_hate_women/
(Credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com)
In the autumn of 1978 the Washington Association of Churches and the Washington State Catholic Conference jointly published a six-page pamphlet they
called “Abortion: An Ecumenical Study Document.” Their work offers a
fascinating snapshot of Christian thinking at the time and raises some
equally fascinating questions about what, exactly, has happened in the
last 35 years.
Is Yoga a religion?
- futureshock
on Nov. 18, 2012 at 8:08 PM