Editorials
EDITORIAL WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE One would have thought it impossible to muddle the abortion debate even further. But that is what has happened in the past month or so. And the fault lies on...
...Pro-choice senators embarked on a filibuster and have had little trouble, at least up to the moment of this writing, in preventing the Helms amendments from coming to a vote...
...To be precise, Mr...
...Instead of such candid-ness, liberal spokespeople and lobbyists have preferred to see the abortion issue recast as a question of religious coercion, invasion of privacy, or contempt for the Constitution and the Supreme Court...
...At one stroke the representative of the pontifex maximus removed all illusions of bridge-building...
...WRECKING BRIDGES If secular ambassadors behaved in the manner that the Vatican diplomatic corps sometimes does, they would be quickly declared personae non gratae and sent packing...
...8.7 billion has been requested for 1983, and government spokesmen say they plan to continue similar boosts for later years...
...This can't be," he protested...
...Liberals have long contributed to the abortion muddle by determinedly evading the central issues...
...but the reason for his congressional opponents' success ought to give thoughtful right-to-lifers pause...
...Is that any consolation...
...Big increases in credits for military sales in 1983 are proposed for South Korea, Thailand, Jordan, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Kenya, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Zaire, Honduras, and, of course, El Salvador...
...Jesse Helms may be a kind of superhero to some segments of the right-to-life movement, precisely for the persistence and parliamentary muscle displayed in a maneuver like this one...
...The meeting's theme, after all, was "building bridges...
...At least a significant portion of this leadership recognizes the danger of tieing opposition to abortion to a right-wing agenda and to a particular presidential administration, both of which may soon be discredited...
...Around the Christian world, the Chinese church for instance, or the Protestant and Orthodox traditions, await convincing proof that the Roman Catholic church has renounced ecclesiastical colonialism...
...Besides the ever-present Human Life Amendment, this session of Congress has produced two new anti-abortion proposals...
...Apart from the problems of identifying opposition to abortion with Helms's generally execrable right-wing politics, this specific Helms initiative has managed to link efforts to stem the tide of abortion (a) with the school-prayer controversy, the very prototype of a church-state issue that anti-abortionists strive to insist (and rightly so, we believe) abortion is not...
...Constitutionally dubious, the bill's main merit would be to force the Supreme Court to reconsider the equal dubiousness of its original abortion decision...
...With the USSR following the same course in its sphere, clearly the arms race at least is not feeling the effects of the worldwide economic recession...
...The issue, so well dramatized here, is not simply the status of women in the church...
...Here are the grounds according to which we conclude that this right attaches to the newborn but not to the unborn...
...It confirms the stereotype they promote, that anti-abortionists want to impose religious beliefs with government power and would make short shrift of constitutional protections...
...The United States has already begun to increase military aid and arms sales abroad and the plan is to expand them steadily through 1984 and beyond...
...Helms was able to get a version of the human life bill-plus provisions making permanent the ban on federal payments for abortions and encouraging state challenges to Roe v. Wade-onto the Senate floor...
...Instance: When the Conference of Major Superiors of Men and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious met in San Francisco in mid-August, it was deemed fitting that some of the women should distribute the cup at the Eucharist...
...The Hatch amendment, on the other hand, is a straightforward counter to that decision: it returns the abortion question to where it was before Roe v. Wade, the legislatures of the separate states, as well as reserving a role in the debate for the nation's Congress...
...Helms presented his abortion resolution as an amendment to another amendment-this one stripping the federal courts of their power to settle school prayer cases-all tagged onto the pressing debt ceiling bill...
...For two years, the Reagan administration has kept the abortion issue from interfering with its real concerns - rearranging the nation's economic policies to accord with its conservative, big-business philosophy and building up America's military forces...
...BOOMING BUSINESS Unemployment is up and so are bankruptcies...
...If the New York Times had any intellectual integrity on this matter, it would compose an editorial saying, "No, we don't think an unborn human has the same right to be preserved from destruction as a newborn one...
...Of course things didn't work out that way...
...The one, a human life bill, uses Congress's fact-finding power as a bargain basement substitute for a full-fledged anti-abortion amendment...
...Abortion opponents have become increasingly impatient, along with the various constituencies for other "social issues.'' And with the economy and military spending looking more and more like liabilities at the polls, the administration has naturally begun to shore up its "social-issues" front, as well as appease the Republicans angered by its backtracking on supply-side tax cuts...
...In effect, then, the Helms maneuver is a weapon handed to the liberal defenders of the status quo...
...Despite the unlikelihood that either of these measures would gain Congress's approval, anti-abortion forces naturally wanted to see the members of Congress debate and vote on them before facing elections in the fall...
...A master parliamentarian, Mr...
...Abortion, too, has enjoyed his renewed attention - but without, it seems to us, producing any gains for the anti-abortion cause...
...As the women approached the altar during the offertory, they were turned back...
...And the fault lies on every side...
...One wonders what the pro-life leadership would have advised if they had been consulted...
...It would seem not...
...Such programs ran to $6.8 billion this year...
...In addition, government cash sales of arms are expected to go up from the $8.7 billion they amounted to this year, and non-governmental commercial sales are expected to rise from this year's $1.8 billion-all this despite a recent finding by the Congressional Research Service that arms purchases may jeopardize the internal stability of poorer countries by retarding their economic growth...
...Senator Baker, for example, long kept the Hatch amendment off the Senate floor-although time was available for debating and approving what even many senators admit was a frivolous balanced-budget amendment...
...But don't worry: the trade in armaments is in good shape...
...But the planners of the liturgy on August 17 had not reckoned on the presence of Archbishop Pio Laghi, the apostolic delegate...
...More financing will be provided to enable other nations to buy weapons, including advanced weapons, that they otherwise could not afford...
...We submit these grounds to the world to be examined for their philosophical soundness-that is, are the reasons for this distinction between unborn and newborn any less arbitrary than those previously advanced to rationalize the granting of rights to white-skinned people but not to pigmented ones, to mile humans but not to female ones...
...Now enter Jesse Helms...
...It's also a question of the scope of the local church's autonomy...
...Thus the president has endorsed a school-prayer amendment to the Constitution, reaffirmed his support for tuition tax credits, gained Senate acquiescence in a balanced-budget amendment, and even returned to the law-and-order theme...
...He did this by presenting the legislation in the form of an amendment to the measure lifting the country's debt ceiling, a bill that must be passed by the end of September...
...According to at least one report, pro-lifers were unaware that Senator Helms planned to link his anti-abortion proposal to the measure bulldozing judicial obstacles to the reinstatement of public school prayers...
...and (b) with a method of reversing Supreme Court decisions by removing specific items from the reach of federal courts, a method that threatens judicial independence and the separation of powers...
...An amendment to an amendment, you see, cannot be further amended, so Helms's tactic was meant to force a debate on the anti-abortion measure exactly as he presented it...
...The debacle of the Helms initiative should reinforce their determination that this not happen...
...But budget-making priorities, plus the desire of both parties' congressional leadership to avoid any votes that would handicap incumbents in November, has resulted in repeated postponements of debate and action on the abortion question...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
