The American Dilemma

   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 emphatically

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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"

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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

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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]

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   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.

Chapter 2  ||  Table of Contents

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