The search for an alternative

...It is at this point, I believe, that liberal Catholics must intervene...

...Popes, episcopal conferences (Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Germany, Quebec, the U.S., France), and theologians have reached a remarkable consensus on the obligation to protect human life from its earliest stages...

...At this point, when the embryo is now termed a fetus, all organs are present that will later be developed fully, the heart has been pumping for a month...

...I have in mind various "compromise" positions that some liberal Catholics have found attractive...

...When the abortion issue surfaced in American politics, liberal Catholics were not only preoccupied with the war in Vietnam but also absorbed in the aftermath of the Vatican Council...

...In many respects, I find it persuasive...

...Hartshorne extends the same distinction to the killing of "a hopelessly senile person...

...Just as the pro-choice movement seems utterly oblivious to biology in discussing (when it does) the issue of "humanhood," the right-to-life movement is naively overconfident in its belief that the existence of a unique "genetic package" from conception onwards settles the abortion issue...

...First, from long immersion in church-state questions, liberal Catholicism forged a relatively sophisticated theory of law and morality, one that neither divorced nor equated the two...

...Despite their recent gains, it is still the regime of Roe v. Wade that we live under...

...Hartshorne set out to refute the "fanatics against abortion'' with the familiar argument that a fetus is not an "actual person" because it lacks "the quality that we have in mind when we proclaim our superior worth to the chimpanzees or dolphins...

...Though the reaction in these circles to the repeal of abortion statutes and then to Roe v. Wade was negatiye, the reaction to the bishops' plans for a right-to-life campaign was even more negative...

...It should be understood exactly what kind of a challenge this is, and is not, to the dominant position of the right-to-life movement...

...States should have the freedom to enact stricter restrictions if they chose...

...Who should decide, the individual mother or the society...

...Liberal Catholics said and wrote some extremely intelligent things about the abortion question in those early years, but already a pattern of detachment, if not embarrassment, had been established...

...All the more so since pregnancy is not a condition that affects men except indirectly...

...It cannot speak, reason or judge between right and wrong...

...It is to this audience that the possibility of an alternative must be presented...

...It entailed a general appreciation, both in society and the church, of dissent, dialogue, and diversity...

...After this point, abortion could be permitted only for the most serious reasons: endangerment of the mother's life or risk of her incapacitation...

...This prudential argument is impressive...

...Can its destruction be justified...

...It is just another "option...

...At the same time, they should make it clear that they utterly reject the belief of some centrist and conservative Democrats, that the party should draw back on a host of other welfare-and-human-services commitments...

...But it seems to me they were also based on a powerful intuition: that what a thing really is corresponds somehow to an overall physical configuration...

...Similarly, very early miscarriage does not usually trigger the sense of loss and grief that later miscarriage does...

...Thus the debate about life from conception would not be foreclosed...

...The prudential argument against such an amendment has been made-that it so far departs from public opinion as to risk non-enforcement, bringing the law into disrepute while putting abortion itself into a shadow area where grave abuses are likely to occur...

...As a Catholic confronting this question, I am not, to be sure, an isolated moral ponderer...

...His answer: social scientists are taken seriously...

...It is equally, or even more, disturbing when a sophisticated newspaper like the New York Times publishes its umpteenth abortion editorial avoiding any discussion of the value of fetal life and thereby delivering its Olympian advice while begging the question at issue...

...THE GOAL, in sum, should be the prohibition of abortion after eight weeks of development...

...What merit there is in these schemes rests on the hope that psychological or social incentives can allow cultural disapprobation of abortion to coexist with a completely noncoercive legal treatment of it...

...They must say quite frankly that the moral status of the fetus in its early development is a genuinely difficult problem . It is so of its nature, as a unique and boundary-line situation, and not because of the blindness or self-interest of those examining the problem...

...Nonetheless that is exactly what they will have to do if their often stated opposition to abortion-on-demand is not to equal a mere verbal protestation...

...philosophers-for good reason, he thinks-are not...

...They should protest the distortions of the abortion issue and of anti-abortion concerns now being strenuously propagated by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, the Protestant and Jewish bodies gathered in the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights...

...I am impressed not only with the multiple sources of this agreement but with the general moral sensitivity to related social questions that marks many of these statements...

...People who are angered by glib talk of the "truly needy" cannot rest easy with the recent discovery of the distinction between the human and the "truly human...

...the defenders of abortion-on-demand, the extreme...

...It would be like going halfway with Hitler-a Semi-Final Solution, the right-to-lifers might say bitterly...

...Or when an article on right-to-lifers in Mother Jones resurrects the hoariest of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic canards, that Catholics don't really have to practice the morality they preach because they can always wipe their consciences clean in the confessional...

...Preachment will gradually fall in line with practice...

...We are left with a large area where we feel our way, relying on imagination, intuition, and a sense of appropriateness as much as on logic...

...Blocking the search for another solution, however, has been the anti-abortion movement's insistence that there can be no compromise on a matter of human life...

...And sharing a struggle on so many other fronts, Catholic feminists will be loath to break with allies on this point...

...No one knows whether a ban like this could be successfully legislated, but the chances are certainly far higher than for the current right-to-life proposals...

...Right-to-life groups remain effectively organized to exercise political muscle...

...Such a measure would also lead, not follow, public opinion...

...Liberal Catholics cannot, like the Supreme Court or the pro-choice movement, slough off the issue of the moral status of fetal life as just too complicated to be considered...

...Americans, Catholics included, overwhelmingly support abortion when the mother's health (not specifically life) is endangered...

...But liberal Catholics still remain betwixt and between...

...Although the notion of a ban on abortion after eight weeks will be rejected and even derided by many anti-abortionists, it is not to convert them that I advance the proposal...

...Anti-abortionists may be divided on what exceptions to tolerate in a ban on abortion, but they are virtually united on insisting that conception is the decisive moment which should trigger the law's protective shield...

...The central issue remains the meaning of unborn human life...

...They are justifiably alert to see in any legal coercion of women not the restraints that all members of a reasonable society must submit to, but an extension of the special fetters and disabilities that have historically been inflicted on women...

...Abortion is surely becoming an alternative or "fall-back" form of birth control, with the statistics showing a sharp increase in repeat abortions...

...There are at least two reasons why such an outlook could play a pivotal role in the abortion debate...

...But liberal Catholicism did not limit itself to church-state questions...

...To believe that this society can effectively insist on the value of fetal life while refusing to restrict legislatively any assault that a woman may choose on that value, is to indulge in sociological fantasy...

...On the other hand, they are unhappy with the right-to-lift alternative, a constitutional amendment declaring all unborn life inviolable from conception...

...Despite recent improvement, the national media have treated the pro-life position and the pro-life movement with obvious condescension and bias...

...If Democrats, they should lobby for the repeal of that party's platform support for abortion and its funding...

...Both practically and psychologically, abortion has opened the way to in vitro fertilization and sex selection, both on a small scale...

...IF LIBERAL Catholics are going to make a difference in the struggle over abortion, there are two steps they must take...

...the unborn individual has a distinctly human appearance, responds to stimulation of its nose or mouth, and is over an inch in size...

...Can we take these instinctive responses as morally helpful...

...THE debate about fetal life always reminds me-I swear- of a Dr...

...and - eventually - a recognition that many Catholic "absolutes" have been historically conditioned and often served institutional power rather than the Gospel...

...As Jerome Lejeune noted before a Senate hearing, at this point "with a good magnifier the fingerprints could be detected...

...The fear that the right-to-life movement would harden resistance to reform and renewal in the church has been succeeded by the fear that the right-to-life movement is reinforcing political and social forces that liberal Catholics see as anti-life...

...WHAT THEY FIND, upon returning, is not reassuring...

...Public opinion and elite opinion-makers are still massively opposed to outlawing abortion from conception-and so fall into line, for want of a rational alternative, behind abortion-on-demand...

...But quite apart from worries about where the logic of abortion may lead, which depends on innumerable sociological factors, the logic itself does not withstand scrutiny...

...In the end, however, the character of both the right-to-life and pro-choice movements is a peripheral matter...

...It is hard to tell how slippery the slope is in America...

...It is just that in their emphasis either on the woman's right to choose or on social, interpersonal, relational, and rational criteria for "humanness," pro-choice arguments almost always deny the fetus any moral standing in such a way that, except for sheer arbitrariness (and instinctive decency, one might add), moral status should also be denied the newborn...

...Commenting on two of the more notorious such philosophical articles, published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in a scholarly journal with impeccable liberal credentials, Roger Wertheimer wondered why their work seemed unlikely "to create anything comparable to the public outrage generated by the now infamous work of Jensen and Hernstein" on race, class, and IQ...

...There is little doubt that the same citizenry which has resisted Roe v. Wade is even more opposed to banning abortion from conception...

...It cannot have personal relations, without which a person is not functionally a person at all...

...Such should be the minimum national policy, established if necessary by constitutional amendment...

...Or when NOW and other pro-choice groups raise the alarm that the anti-abortionists are out to ban birth control...

...People who were disappointed in the church's implementation of conciliar reforms, and for whom the credibility of church leadership had already been sorely tested by Humanae Vitae, now saw the bishops embark on a course that promised to repeat many of the errors of the past...

...Seuss story called Horton Hears a Who...

...The protective elephant, Horton, rescues a civilization of tiny creatures (the "Who") in a series of wild stanzas each ending with the refrain, "A person's a person no matter how small...

...What they assume is quite likely true of most women...

...The right-to-life movement, prematurely jubilant over the chances that a human life statute could use Congress's fact-finding power to do an end run around Roe v. Wade, has watched in dismay as (1) some of its stalwarts developed constitutional scruples and deserted the field...

...Those familiar with philosophical literature know that, logic being logic, defenses of infanticide are no longer uncommon...

...I have little sympathy with the idea that infanticide is just another form of murder.'' There may be good social or symbolic reasons for not killing infants but since the infant cannot claim equal rights with "already functioning persons," such killing is not "fully comparable to the killing of persons in the full sense...

...In any case, the emphasis of enforcement can be much more easily, as well as justly, placed on the tangible reality of the heart-beating, brain-active, human-featured fetus rather than on the subjective issue of the mother's motivation, whether it be serious or trivial or anywhere in-between...

...All of these analogies are meant to bring what is obscure and unique into the realm of the visible and more familiar (although one doubts that the last category accomplishes this...

...Hartshorne is too conscientious to ignore the objection that an infant does not possess these capacities either...

...if it somehow passed, it would create martyrs who would find ready public sympathy...

...Not at least to those who morally reject infanticide...

...The pro-choice lobby has suffered a series of legislative and judicial setbacks, culminating in the election of a theoretically anti-abortion administration...

...Philosophers defending abortion have resorted to the most fantastic analogies yet-"thought experiments" involving Martians, violin players mysteriously hooked without permission to someone's circulatory system, or kittens injected with a chemical so that they develop human brains...

...and, again Catholics included, they support abortion in the first trimester...

...This society certainly is not...

...Instinctive rejection of abortion does not prevent them from returning, perhaps with regret, though often, too, with a good deal of self-righteousness, for one, two, three abortions...

...Would you then use the law to force a woman to carry through a pregnancy to term...

...By declaring the legal inviolability of the greater part of fetal life, and by leaving open to states the possibility of defending the rest, such a prohibition would be a statement about the seriousness and moral precariousness of abortion at any stage...

...Yes, it does prove that what is involved is a human individual and not "part of the mother's body...

...By "liberal Catholics" I do not simply mean Catholics who are left-of-center politically, although the greater portion of them are...

...Mental" illness (likelihood of suicide or in-stitutionalization) should not be disallowed as though it were not "real," but the decision-making mechanism has to be one of assured integrity because such indications are undeniably more subjective...

...In one version, for instance, abortion is to be...

...The end result would be the certain identification of the pro-life impulse with heartless coercion...

...For liberal Catholics, that means• They should take every opportunity to voice, without hesitation or embarrassment, their disagreement with Roe v. Wade in liberal milieus, and insist on the need for an alternative that is not so blatantly neglectful of the reality of fetal life...

...One can even grant this argument some plausibility...

...They would represent reasonable compromise...

...At the present time, I believe the force of differing moral intuitions should be recognized...

...And yet I believe it is being counterbalanced by the increasing impatience many liberal Catholics feel at the tactics and rhetoric of the pro-choice representatives...

...Part of the explanation is historical...

...The fact that only a minority of their fellow citizens share the pro-life position in its entirety is no more relevant than that a minority of Germans opposed Hitler or that a minority of pre-Civil War Americans followed the Abolitionists...

...Seuss people...

...It has become the conventional wisdom that a Down's Syndrome child should not be brought into the world, and cases appear to be multiplying where such children are not medically sustained after being brought into the world...

...Thus any victory the anti-abortionists win may be almost as "elitist" and at least as subject to public resistance and reversal as the 1973 pro-choice .victory in the Supreme Court...

...Still, to those who believe, as I do, that later abortion is a greater evil and a much greater challenge to our standards of protection for human life, such a measure would make a great difference...

...Although it is not logically impossible, for example, to consider the great number of fertilized eggs that fail to implant themselves in the uterus as lost "human beings," a great many people find this idea totally incredible...

...It is such an image that provides the emotional force for analogies to Herod's massacre of the innocents or Hitler's extermination of the Jews...

...We analogize from the end of life to the beginning of it...

...the latter, politically and socially impossible...

...Liberal Catholicism emerged from the realization that the old alliance of throne and altar corrupted religion and politics alike...

...condemned by the churches (but not too harshly) and deplored by the culture...

...We do not think as badly of societies that put their burdensome old folks on ice floes as we do of those that regularly slaughter adults in warfare...

...The theologians and philosophers among them have always recognized these difficulties-and fall back on taking the "safer" course in case of uncertainty...

...Its advocates would not be burdened with charges about the IUD or rape...

...Every document is available for a national identify card...

...Finally, they should find a way to articulate the kind of prohibition suggested here in legal form and have it entered into the lists in Congress...

...It is disturbing when a grass-roots anti-abortionist denounces Bella Abzug not only for being pro-choice but for being "anti-family...

...Why not," he asks, ' 'for their assault on the conscience and intellect of civilized people is surely no less brutal and blundering...

...The historical test case is Prohibition...

...To accept anything but a nearly total ban on abortion would be to surrender the very principle of human life at stake and to become complicit with an evil program of extermination...

...Liberal Catholics who oppose abortion-on-demand should strive for the protection of unborn life not from conception but from that point when not one but a whole series of arguments and indicators have converged to support the "humanness" of the unborn...

...It is unlikely that a human life amendment would pass...

...I do not introduce infanticide as a fright word...

...IF THE FIRST STEP requires liberal Catholics to disagree frankly with the pro-choice forces, the second step requires them to do the same with the pro-life movement...

...If the "federalist" amendment supported by Senator Hatch should succeed, then an-eight-week prohibition should be a proposal backed in many states...

...Thus the two alternatives: Roe v. Wade or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion at every stage...

...Last January, the Christian Century published an article that aptly illustrates why liberal Catholics may be moving away from peripheral worries to the central issue...

...One would think that liberal Catholics might have a distinctive contribution to make in this painful and apparently irresolvable conflict...

...Another twenty-five percent or so take place in the next two weeks-and the pressure of a legal time limit would probably mean many of these would be obtained earlier...

...Those claiming to be conscientious in seeking abortion can be presumed to have made use of the leeway it allows...

...But that does not mean we want to slide merrily back to that state of things...

...The 1977 figures showed fifty percent of abortions taking place before the end of the eighth week...

...I cannot, however, expect my fellow citizens to appreciate the weight of this testimony as I might...

...One could go on...

...That is the challenge liberal Catholics must be willing to face if they are to make any difference at all in the moral controversy...

...And while equal life opportunities for women-and vastly strengthened social supports for child-raising-are a crying need quite apart from the abortion question, it is hard to imagine any such system that could move either the trivially motivated woman or the seriously burdened and tested one to prefer lifelong responsibilities to a clinic visit and a ten-minute procedure...

...Liberal Catholics cannot let the present dominance-of those alternatives be an excuse for abdication.-of those alternatives be an excuse for abdication...

...This psychological assumption, I suspect, may be a projection of the moral and generative sensitivities of those who make the argument...

...We can, of course, substitute the medical term "neonate" to reduce distracting emotions about this matter...

...But all fall short in this effort, some much farther than others...

...WHAT, IN PRACTICE, would such a prohibition accomplish...

...We do not think as badly of primitive societies that practice infanticide as we do of those that practice human sacrifice...

...It does not prove that, say, a twenty-eight-day-old embryo, approximately the size of this parentheses (-), is then and there a creature with the same claims to preservation and protection as a newborn or an adult...

...The first step is to give up the idea that this issue can be resolved without legislative restriction on abortion...

...The fact that prominent segments of the nascent anti-abortion forces exhibited all the characteristics of past crusades against birth control, dirty books, and the Reds didn't help...

...I am not saying that the anti-abortion argument, with its appeal to potentiality, is untrue...

...Electrical activity in its brain is now discernible...

...Morality is neither a matter of social conditioning, nor of abitrary "personal" opinion, nor of majority vote...

...It would be too much to say that liberal Catholics have been moved en masse to root for the right-to-lifers, but at least a good number of them have had their sense of fair play and their natural identification with the underdog aroused by shoddy pro-choice maneuvers...

...Thus Dr...

...On the one hand, they are "personally" opposed to almost all abortion and further reject the idea that abortion-on-demand be accepted as the social norm...

...We analogize from the uncertainty of a hunter who doesn't know whether that moving creature in the bushes is a child or a dangerous animal to the uncertainty we face contemplating the unborn life...

...Such an analogy as the latter-whatever else may be said about its uses and abuses-springs from a neglect of biology as great as that of pro-choice advocates who claim the fetus is ' 'part of the mother...

...Rather than being isolated culturally as a "special case," abortion is now mentioned neutrally in everything from Sylvia Porter's New Money Book for the 80's ("How to Shop for-and Reduce the Costs of-an Abortion") to health and sex primers for teenagers...

...The psychological assumption behind these schemes is that women naturally find abortion so painful and morally ambiguous that a religious or cultural reminder-or the provision of real support for childbearing and child-rearing-will suffice to dissuade from abortion almost all but the genuinely tragic cases...

...I have the impression that the clarity of the anti-abortionists' position rests on an image like that-a homunculus, or at least a microscopic baby, inhabiting not the head of the sperm as in medieval lore but the changing shape of the embryo and fetus...

...IN FACT, liberal Catholicism has remained on the margin of the abortion controversy...

...We analogize from the physical structure and organic integrity of an adult to that of an embryo or fetus...

...Argument in this area always proceeds by analogy...

...In no case is abortion finally disallowed for any woman who seeks it, nor funding for abortion denied any woman who needs it...

...As the increasing resort to abortion- one and a half million a year-mocks all the hopes that this would be an exceptional last resort, limited to tragic dilemmas, liberal Catholics have had to put aside their dissatisfaction with the contending armies and return to the basic questions...

...Second, while liberal Catholics refuse to treat traditional moral positions as beyond reexamination, they remain rooted in a philosophical tradition that rejects relativism and moral individualism...

...The argument is not that this is the "magic moment" when "human life begins...

...At the moment both sides are in disarray...

...indeed, as more women undergo abortions, or know those who have done so, the difficulties of arguing for a total ban will mount...

...It was not by some hawkish population controller but by the distinguished philosopher Charles Hartshorne...

...3) the administration made clear that implementing Milton Friedman's notion of "freedom to choose" had priority over combating Planned Parenthood's...

...Will the logic of abortion, as anti-abortionists have always warned, further undermine what respect and protection we currently afford other human lives when, like the fetus, they are vulnerable, unproductive, and threatening to our psychic or material resources...

...On the face of it, it would prevent fewer than half the current abortions...

...In a second version, extensive social efforts to assure job opportunities and provide child care are added to cultural disapprobation in order to encourage the pregnant woman to carry her child...

...Furthermore, such a proposal could be enforced without self-destructing...

...what they are unwilling to face is the strong evidence that millions of women simply do not feel this way...

...It would be utterly clear that they were not insisting that any church's moral code be fully translated into law...

...Perhaps someday a combination of philosophical argument, moral credibility gained on other issues, and behavior that proclaims the sanctity of human life at every stage could persuade the majority of Americans to accept the current anti-abortion position...

...Each involves a break with one or the other side, at least as the dispute is now constituted...

...His answer is blunt: "Of course, an infant is not fully human...

...But the endangered creatures Horton saves are, of course, exact but miniscule versions of people-at least grown Dr...

...Here the logic of abortion is indeed powerful: why hesitate to do to a newborn what one is willing to do to a well-developed fetus a few months earlier...

...But they are not winning the battle of public opinion...

...The old theories of delayed animation and "formed'' and "unformed'' fetuses may have been based on bad biology...

...Maurice Mahoney of Yale's medical school, who is surely aware of the "genetic package" argument, testifies, "For me, humanness requires that some process of development has taken place which gives the embryo a human form, so that it has a nervous system, a heart and circulatory apparatus, and indications of human shape...

...Giving that answer will not be easy, especially for Catholic feminists, both male and female...

...We analogize from the potentiality of an infant or a sleeping person or someone in a reversible coma to the potentiality of the unborn...

...We cannot rest with the two alternatives of Roe v. Wade or a ban on all abortion from the time of conception...

...Whether other societies have been capable of maintaining a strong disapproval of some practice without in any way institutionalizing that disapproval in law or social sanctions, I don't know...

...the former is morally intolerable...

...Their answer will have to'' Yes.'' Not for every pregnancy (we'll get to that), but for many pregnancies, yes...

...2) the president appointed an ambiguously pro-choice, certainly not anti-abortion, justice to the Supreme Court...

...It would be a decisive step back from Roe v. Wade, and it would put the lie to the notion that widespread abortion is an inevitable part of modern "progress...

...These days our pluralism itself, combined with the pressures of a homogenized national culture, results in the boundaries of morality being largely marked out by the boundaries of the law...

...But it is much less persuasive than most anti-abortionists themselves believe...

...In the light of pro-choice rhetoric and pro-choice principles, for many liberal Catholics the oversimplifications and insen-sitivities of the right-to-life movement no longer loom as large as they once, did...

...The argument is rather that this is one moment when an accumulation of evidence should compel a majority, even in a pluralist society and despite whatever obscurities about early life continue to be debated, to agree that the unborn individual now deserves legal protection...

...The wariness remains...

...It is simply not the case that a refusal to recognize Albert Einstein and Anne Frank as human beings deserving of full legal rights is equivalent to a refusal to see the same status in a disc the size of a period or an embryo one-sixth of an inch long and with barely rudimentary features...