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The abortion controversy has polarized Americans like no other national issue since the Vietnam War and Watergate. The divisions cut across regional, ethnic, and religious lines, and are evident at the personal, political, and ecclesiastical levels. At times even women who defend their right to an abortion, and have had one, display deeply ambivalent feelings on the subject. Linda Bird Francke, a general editor for Newsweek, reflects on her own abortion in her book, The Ambivalence of Abortion:
There was no doubt, when I became pregnant, that life was right there, in my womb. Left undisturbed, that blob of cells and tissue would have grown into a baby. The process was beginning, and I chose to end it......I was totally unprepared for my mounting ambivalence as the time for the abortion came closer, an ambivalence that turned into grief and guilt for a period after the abortion was over. The little ghost haunted me for about six months before it disappeared, and after it was gone, I even missed it a bit. But as my children grow and take up more and more of my time and energy, I realize emphaticallyEnd of Page 1 - Begin Page 2
that the addition of another child for me would have been negative rather than positive. [1]
The ambivalence of Linda Bird Francke typifies that of countless American
women who have had abortions. Traditional values about prenatal life and
childbearing are thought increasingly to conflict with personal goals and
career plans.
Ambivalence and divisions appear also at the political level.
Each year the Congress engages in protracted debates on whether the federal
government should subsidize abortions. Some senators and congressmen argue
adamantly that fairness requires giving the poor as much access to abortion
as the more affluent. Others argue with equal adamance that abortion constitutes
the unwarranted taking of human life. Both sides are lobbied heavily by
"pro-life" and "pro-choice" groups.
At the state and local levels, legislatures and city councils
have had to wrestle with the issue. Most state legislators have debated whether
the state should subsidize abortions through its welfare programs. By 1978,
some 33 states had imposed restrictions of one sort or another on such funding.
[2] City councils have faced the issues of whether zoning
ordinances can be used to restrict the location of abortion clinics, and
whether local ordinances can place restrictions on their operation. The most
widely known instance involved ordinances passed by the city council of Akron,
Ohio, which placed the following restrictions on abortion clinics: (1) informed
consent (i.e., requiring the clinic to give the woman a description of the
fetus); (2) performance of all second-trimester abortions in a hospital;
(3) parental consent or court order for minors 15 years or younger; (4) a
24-hour waiting period. The ordinance, scheduled to go into effect on May
1, 1978, was challenged in court by attorneys for the American Civil Liberties
Union and was struck down on June 15, 1983, by the U.S. Supreme Court.
[3]
Divisions over the abortion issue are also evident in the churches
of America. Prior to the 1960s, most denominations had very conservative
positions on abortion. But the 1960s brought significant changes. In 1968,
the American Baptist Convention adopted a resolution stating that "abortion
should be a matter of responsible,
Page 3
personal decision," and that legislation should be provided for termination
of pregnancies prior to the twelfth week.[4] In the same
year, the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association urged
that efforts be made to abolish existing abortion laws, and that the decision
to have an abortion be a private matter between a woman and her
physician.[5] Other American denominations such as the United
Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Protestant Episcopal
Church adopted similar resolutions.
After the Supreme Court's sweeping abortion decisions in 1973,
striking down most of the then-existing state legislation restricting abortion,
a conservative reaction began taking place. Several denominations went on
record as opposing abortion on demand. They included the Southern Baptist
Convention, the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, the Church of the Nazarene,
the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, the Reformed Presbyterian
Church of North America, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Free Methodist
Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church (Evangelical Synod), the Mennonite
Church at General Assembly, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and
the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches.[6] The Roman
Catholic Church has consistently opposed abortion, both before and after
the 1973 Supreme Court decisions.
One of the main purposes of this volume is to discover and clarify
some of the principal issues and values that divide Americans in the abortion
controversy. When does human life begin? Should the unborn be considered
persons in the eyes of the law? What circumstances, if any, make abortion
morally justifiable? Should abortion be a purely private matter between a
woman and a physician? Would a return to more restrictive abortion laws violate
the separation of church and state? These are some of the issues to explore
as we examine the biblical, ethical, and medical data. That examination will
serve as the basis for offering specific guidelines for decision making on
abortion at both the personal and public policy levels. But before moving
in that direction, it will be helpful to listen to a few voices from the
Christian past.
Page 4
Voices from the Christian Past
The attitude of the early Christian church toward abortion forms
a sharp contrast to the permissive attitudes found in America in the 1980s.
The early church, living out its faith in a Greco-Roman culture that tolerated
both abortion and infanticide, vigorously and consistently opposed the taking
of life in the womb. In the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve
Apostles, a manual of Christian principles that may date back to the
first century, abortion is explicitly prohibited. "Thou shalt not procure
abortion, nor commit infanticide" (Did. 2:2).[7]
Similar strictures are found in the Epistle of Barnabas (19:5). The
second-century Christian philosopher and convert, Athenagoras, answered the
slander that Christians were "homicides and devourers of men" in his defense
of Christianity to the emperor: "How can we kill a man when we are those
who say that all who use abortifacients are homicides and will account to
God for their abortions as for the killing of men. For the fetus in the womb
is not an animal, and it is God's providence that he exists."
[8]
Tertullian, another convert to Christianity and a lawyer by
profession, was also an outspoken opponent of abortion. In his Apology
to the emperor, written near the end of the second century, he responds to
the charge that Christians practice cannibalism and infanticide. This cannot
be so, since "for us, to whom murder has been once for all forbidden, it
is not permitted to destroy even what has been conceived.....He is a human
being who will be one...."[9] Tertullian did, however, consider
a direct threat to the life of the mother to be justifiable grounds for
abortion.
While Augustine had some hesitation about the exact time of
ensoulment, he unhesitatingly opposed abortion as a practice. Characterizing
abortion as an expression of "lustful cruelty," he stated, in reference to
pagan practices, that "sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust comes
to this that they even procure poisons of sterility, and if these do not
work, they extinguish and destroy the fetus in some way in the
womb."[10] Augustine's attitude became the dominant one
in the latin churches of the West. In the East, Greek church fathers such
as Basil of Cappadocia were equally emphatic.
Page 5
Those who "deliberately commit abortion are subject to the [ecclesiastical]
penalty for homicide," which involved ten years of penance.
[11]
Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian of the Middle Ages, opposed
abortion but distinguished between the moral gravity of early and late
abortions.[12] Aquinas's position presupposed the embryology
of Aristotle, who taught that the "rational" soul was not present before
the fortieth day in the case of a male, and the eightieth day in the case
of a female. Later, in 1585, Pope Sixtus V, his principal target being
prostitution in Rome, condemned abortion without any distinction between
a "formed" (ensouled) and an "unformed" fetus. By the middle of the eighteenth
century, Catholic teaching had moved away from the earlier position of Aristotle
and Aquinas and had identified conception as the time of
ensoulment.[13] The change was, in part, due to new
embryological information unavailable to Aquinas.
While Martin Luther apparently did not directly address the
question of abortion, his teachings on original sin and the origins of the
human soul had the effect of personalizing the unborn
child.[14] John Calvin was more explicit. In his commentary
on Exodus 21:22, which deals with an unintentionally induced premature
birth,[15] Calvin wrote:
This passage of first sight is ambiguous, for if the word death only applies to the pregnant woman, it would not have been a capital crime to put an end to the foetus, which would be a great absurdity; for the foetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus in the womb before it has come to light. [16]
For Calvin, the unborn child is "already a human being," a judgment
in harmony with the early church fathers such as Tertullian.
During the nineteenth century, abortion became a public concern
in America. In 1869, the General Assembly of the "Old School"
Page 6
Presbyterian Church adopted the following resolution as its official denominational statement:
This assembly regards the destruction by parents of their own offspring, before birth, with abhorrence, as a crime against God and nature.....We also exhort those who have been called to preach the gospel, and all who love purity and the truth, and who would avert the just judgments of Almighty God from the nation, that they be no longer silent, or tolerant of these things, but that they endeavour by all proper means to stay the floods of impurity and cruelty.[17]
The congregationalist churches in New England and the Great Lakes region
also engaged in anti-abortion activities. Arthur Cleveland Coxe, episcopal
bishop of the diocese of western New York, publicly supported efforts by
American physicians to tighten up the abortion laws. "As to those crimes
which I have likened to the sacrifices of Moloch," wrote the bishop, "I am
glad that our physicians are beginning to be preachers."
[18]
In recent years, conservative Protestant opposition to abortion
has increased. Prominent leaders such as Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer,
Harold O.J. Brown, Donald Bloesch, C. Everett Koop, R.C. Sproul, Bruce Waltke,
John Frame, Jerry Falwell, and others have gone on record as opposing the
present abortion situation in America. Such opposition has, as we have seen,
deep roots in the history of the Christian church.
The Magnitude of the Problem
Legal abortions in the United States increased from 898,000
in 1974 to 1,533,000 in 1980, the latest year for which figures are available,
according to researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Of those obtaining
abortions in 1980, 30 percent were under age 20, 70 percent were white, and
79 percent were unmarried.[19] The last figure shows that
abortions in the United States are most often sought as a "solution" to the
problem of pregnancy outside of marriage.
Abortion represents a $700-million-a-year industry in this
country.[20] The United States leads the world in teenage
abortions, with
Page 7
about half a million each year. Some 150,000 abortions are performed
in the second trimester of pregnancy, "the most grisly of all," notes Dr.
Matthew J. Bulfin, "the ones that some hardened abortionists refuse to do
because the killing is so real and unmistakable."
[21]
These figures mean that each day an average of 4,257 unborn
human beings are aborted in the United States. In Washington, D.C., the nation's
capital, abortions now outnumber live births. [22]
The statistics are especially disturbing in light of recent
findings concerning the medical hazards of abortion. The preliminary results
of a study being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health indicate
that women who have had abortions increase significantly their risks of having
adverse outcomes in future pregnancies. Those who had one or more abortions
were 85 percent more likely to have a miscarriage in a future pregnancy;
were 32 percent more likely to give birth to an infant with low birthweight;
were 67 percent more likely to have a premature birth; were 47 percent more
likely to have labor complications; and were 83 percent more likely to experience
complications in delivery.[23] While these preliminary
results should be interpreted with caution, they clearly signal a health
hazard. Studies by physicians in Eastern European countries where abortion
has been legal for many years have reported significant rates for complications,
including internal bleeding, infections, perforation of the uterus, and damage
to the cervix.[24] Despite the claims made for the safety
of abortion — now one of America's most common surgical procedures —
it is becoming evident that a full disclosure of the hazards has not yet
been made to the American people.
The door to the present laissez-faire abortion scene in America
was swung open in 1973 by the Supreme Court's abortion decisions, Roe
v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. These decisions struck down some 31
state laws then restricting abortion and permitted abortions even in the
final trimester, if the woman's "health" — very loosely defined —
was said to require it. Legal scholars have criticized the decisions as lacking
grounding in sound constitutional law.[25] In July of 1976,
the Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth
that a father had no right to prevent the abortion of his unborn child, if
the mother desired it. Critics of the decision saw it as a further undermining
of the family unit. [26]
Page 8
In June of 1977, the Court decided three related abortion
cases; Maher v. Roe, Beal v. Doe, and Poelker v. Doe. In these
rulings the Court, by a six to three majority, held that states were not
required to pay for elective abortions under the Medicaid
program.[27] Likewise, in Harris v. McCrae, decided
on June 30, 1980, the Court held that states could cut off funds for "medically
necessary abortions."[28] The effect of these decisions
was to hand back to state legislatures the volatile issue of public funding
of abortion, making it a continuing focus of controversy. More recently,
on June 15, 1983, in City of Akron v. Akron Center For Reproductive Health,
Inc., the Court struck down an Akron city ordinance restricting abortion,
and reaffirmed the basic abortion-on-demand stance of its Roe v. Wade
decision ten years earlier.
Far from settling the national controversy on abortion, the
Supreme Court's decisions have provoked a still increasing volume of debate.
With this brief overview of the American abortion scene, we now turn to
representative positions held today on the ethics of abortion.
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1. Linda Bird Francke, The Ambivalence of Abortion
(New York: Random House, 1978), quoted in Family Circle, January 27,
1978, p.57.
2. "Abortion Under Attack," Newsweek, June 5, 1978,
p.42.
3. Lex Vitae 1, no. 4(1978):4; Boston Globe,
June 16, 1983, p.1.
4. Cyril J. Barber, "Abortion: A Survey of Attitudes and
Research Materials," Journal of Psychology and Theology 1(1973):67.
5. Ibid., p.68.
6. C. Everett Koop, "The Other Human Rights Issue,"
Eternity, October, 1978, p.40.
7. The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Kirsopp Lake (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1912), 1:312-13.
8. Athenagoras Embassy for the Christians. Cited by
John T. Noonan, Jr., ed., The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970), p.11.
9. Apology 9, 9; cited by George Hunston Williams,
"Religious Residues and Pre-suppositions in the American Debate on Abortion,"
Theological Studies 31 (1970):25.
10. Cited in Noonan, Morality of Abortion, p.16.
11. Ibid., p.17.
12. Williams, "Religious Residues," p.31.
13. Ibid., p.38. For further discussion, see John R. Connery,
Abortion: The Development of the Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1977).
14. Williams, "Religious Residues," p.34.
15. For an exegetical discussion of this text, I refer you
to the discussion in Chapter 4 of this volume.
16. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Last Four Books
of Moses, trans. Charles Bingham (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950),
3:41,42.
17. Cited in James C. Mohr, Abortion in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p.192.
18. Ibid., pp. 192-93. Ironically, physicians tended to
be more outspoken than the Protestant clergy in this era.
19. Presbyterian Journal, March 9, 1983, pp. 6,7.
20. Matthew J Bulfin, letter to the editor, New York
Times, July 1, 1983, p. A22.
21. Ibid.
22. Gary Bergel, "Abortion: A Biblical Issue That Must Be
Resolved," Intercessors for America, February 1, 1983, p.1.
23. "A Prospective Study of the Effects of Induced Abortion
on Subsequent Reproductive Function," research contract No. N01-HD-6-2802,
sponsored by the National Child Institute of Child Health and Human Development,
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. These are only preliminary
results.
24. These medical complications are discussed in greater
detail in Chapter 3 of this volume.
25. See John Hart Ely, "The Supreme Court Decisions," Human
Life Review 1, no. 1 (1975): 44-73; James F. Csank, "Dred Scott and the
Abortion Cases," Human Life Review 3, no. 2 (1977): 79-100; Archibald
Cox, "The Supreme Court and Abortion," Human Life Review 2, no. 4
(1976): 15-19.
26. Francis Canavan, "The Theory of the Danforth Case,"
Human Life Review 2, no. 4 (1976): 5-14.
27. Legal Defense Fund Newsletter no. 61 (June, 1977):
1-6.
28. For the text of Harris v. McCrae, see the
Journal of Church and State 22, no.3 (1980): 575-95.
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