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Friends United Meeting |
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April 1999
A Consistent Pro-Life Ethic: The Seamless Garment Network
By Rachel MacNair
In 1973, the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision overturned the laws of all 50 states and legalized abortion. The number of abortions rose steadily through the 1970s, essentially hit a plateau in the 1980s and has steadily dropped during the 1990s. For several years, the number, the ratio of abortions to live births, and the rate of abortions per 100,000 women have dipped steadily, especially among teenagers. The number of doctors doing abortions is down drastically, and new doctors aren't entering the field. According to ABC News (January 16, 1998), 60% of abortion doctors are age 65 or older.
The abortion business is in decline. Under Quaker testimonies, this is heartening news.
The idea of the Light Within, "that of God" in everyone, underpins stands that Quakers take. It leads to the Testimony on Peace, because violence against those who have the capacity to respond to "that of God" within them is wrong. For the same reason, there is equality of all human beings-a point that is connected to the assertion that all are entitled to be free of violence.
Peace
Abortion is a brutality forced upon fetal children by sharp instruments or chemical poisons. I won't describe it in gory detail, but the details are indeed gory. The video "The Silent Scream," which shows the child on a sonogram while an abortion is being done, is difficult to watch for those of tender conscience. The only things that make abortion different from war and the death penalty are things that make it the same as domestic violence. Indeed, it's not uncommonly tied to domestic violence against the mother, since it makes such violence easier to do-in some cases, it can actually be part of the abusive cycle.
The abortion staff also reacts to the situation as if it were violence that they were doing. A scholarly article from 1974 cites the symptoms of "obsessional thinking about abortion, depression, fatigue, anger, lowered self-esteem and identity conflicts....The symptom complex was...similar to 'combat fatigue.'"1 Since that time, combat fatigue has come to be known as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A later scholarly article which also looked at a large number of abortion staff didn't use the term, but still described the symptoms: "withdrawal from colleagues, resistance to going to work, lack of energy, impatience with clients and an overall sense of uneasiness. Nightmares, images that could not be shaken and preoccupation were commonly reported. Also common was the deep and lonely privacy within which practitioners had grappled with their ambivalence."2 These two studies were done by people who believed that abortion availability is a good thing.
In fact, this set of reactions among abortion staff is virtually uncontested. More contested is the presence of PTSD, in a specialized form of Post Abortion Syndrome, in women who undergo the procedure. Disputing studies abound, but the fact is that women who have had abortions are a major constituency group of the pro-life movement. At least we can say with confidence that for a large number of women, a sympathetic ear to their pain and grief over past abortions is a felt need.
This psychological consequence of doing violence is one of many connections between abortion and other socially-sanctioned violence. Another is the dehumanizing words and thoughts that must be used in order to justify the violence. The unborn child, the fetus, has been regarded as a disease, a parasite, a waste product, a repulsive animal-all the kinds of names that have been used against women and against people of other races, nationalities and beliefs.
The whole notion of using death to solve problems-to eliminate problems by eliminating people-underlies all socially-sanctioned killing, and it makes the killing spread from one kind to another. It doesn't work well to tell a teenage boy not to use killing to solve his own problems, at the same time the state is running executions, or to tell him to register to be drafted for a killing operation if the government finds it necessary to solve a problem. Conversely, that boy is told that he can have sex in the knowledge that if a baby results, it's only a matter of money and a trip to the abortion clinic, and there are no more consequences. If the possibility of killing someone (one's own child, at that) is a normal part of the pleasure of sex, then how well can we get across to him that he can't kill someone because he wants their expensive shoes?
War, the death penalty, and abortion all have a brutalizing effect leading to street crime and domestic violence. The violence which isn't socially sanctioned then inspires people to support the death penalty, and a web of violence is strengthened-the seamless shroud. Fortunately, the link between types of violence has a flip side: nonviolence and other services that counter violence are also all connected. We need to humanize people in our language and thoughts, put in time and energy to solve problems nonviolently, and provide counseling or emotional support to people who've been either victims or perpetrators of violence. When we do this in one area, it will get around to all the other areas as well. An impact on any place in the web of violence will travel to the rest of the web, and the web of peace we weave-the seamless garment-gets strengthened with every individual strand or thread.
Equality
Once conception occurs, we biologically have a member of the species Homo sapiens. Is anything more required to be considered a part of the human community? Don't we make a point that race, gender, level of ability, geographic origin, are all irrelevant? Aren't age, size, and current location also irrelevant? If we take an entire class of human beings and put them outside the protection of the human community, we've not only ignored the equality of human beings, but sabotaged all other claims to such equality. It's a bad precedent, and one that doesn't stay within bounds of unborn children. Other traditional prejudices come into play-sex-selection abortions that fatally discriminate against the female, for example. There are abortion practitioners who make a point of aiming their services at communities high in racial minorities
But the child is not alone-she or he is attached to a woman whose life is changed by the child's presence. Yet contrary to the arguments of those who favor keeping abortion legal, its ready accessibility has actually hurt women's equality tremendously.
Abortion treats pregnancy as if it were a disease. The premise of male domination throughout the millennia has been that men are biologically superior to women. Abortion defenders answer that while this may be true, we now have a technological fix for this. True advocates of equality would reject the premise. Women were never biologically inferior to men, and don't require surgery to become equal.
Abortion serves as a weapon in the arsenal of men who wish to dominate women. Such men see it as making women sexually available to them, to be vacuumed out and re-used. One man, seeing a pro-life literature table, announced that if his girlfriend were stupid enough to get pregnant (!), she would be to the abortion clinic that afternoon whether she wanted to or not. This pro-abortion, anti-choice sentiment is usually more subtle, but can and does constantly lead to pressures against pregnant women. One state legislator in New York even said that he favored abortion legalization because otherwise many of his friends would be stuck with child support payments.
By making abortion a "right," exploitative men are not only facilitated but can be self-righteous about it. Employers can be offended that a woman asks for accommodation of her child-rearing tasks. Pregnant women are put at a disadvantage when trying to get support that would be expected if the baby were already born. In extreme cases, rapists and especially incest perpetrators have used abortion clinics to cover up their crimes.
Women's-rights advocates of the 19th century were aware of abortion as being a wrong against women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that the way to solve the problem of child-murder by abortion was with the emancipation of women. Susan B. Anthony said we must reach the root of the evil, which was that women did not have the right to control their own bodies-their husbands did. One of the first women doctors, Dr. Charlotte Lozier, turned a man in for asking her to do an abortion and refusing all her offers of help to take the child to term; she was universally praised for this in feminist circles, which hoped that more women in medicine would mean fewer abortions, as women doctors would shield women from this great wrong against them.
The Future
As the abortion business declines, it will still inspire passions by those who support and oppose it. Common ground, which would give pregnant women more life-giving options, is one area in which work is being done by people from all faith and non-faith backgrounds. Quakers, with our consensus-building and conflict-resolution skills, can be especially helpful.
Unfortunately, much of this debate has been disharmonious among Quakers. The Friends Committee on National Legislation will take no position because of this. The American Friends Service Committee in 1970 came out with a book called Who Shall Live? Man's Control over Birth and Death, which argued for abortion legalization. It's sad that the positions of these organizations can't be more life-affirming, as would normally be expected of Quakers.
But the practice of abortion has suffered from the same problem as war, executions, and poverty: its repulsive nature is hidden under abstract language, when it's not ignored entirely. As more and more people become familiar with the reality of it, then the only way to make the repulsiveness go away is to make the practice go away. This process has started already, and we can look forward to it happening more. With attention to nonviolent practice, we can make it disappear a little faster, and mitigate its damage in the mean time.
Rachel MacNair graduated from Earlham College with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, and is a member of Penn Valley Meeting, Kansas City, Missouri. She has served as national president of Feminists for Life of America (1984-1994) and is vice-president of the Seamless Garment Network. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology in order to study the effect that committing violence, especially socially-sanctioned violence, has on the perpetrators.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting