The church & abortion, perception & reality

...With a safe, dean abortion civic in the nearest mid-sized city, no one I I IIIII III IIIII IIII II I needed to know what had happened...

...It is the women and the children, the old and the young whom we burn alive, suffocate, bury and destroy...

...At a Washington conference last April, National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) spokesman Russell Shaw said that the previous two-and-one-half years in the abortion issue created for him a situation where motives had to be questioned...

...Until women pregnant out of wedlock are fully accepted, and are supported in their material needs, abortion will remain what it is today: a moral wrong widely viewed as politically essential to establishing parity between men and women in the world...

...What is perhaps most unsettling, and is really at the root of the failure of the various amendments, is the notion of what has come to be known as "primacy of conscience" in these matters...

...By the hundreds and thousands...

...CARLENE B. HILL (Carlene B. Hill works fbr a Massachusetts daily newspaper...

...AIlTI-ABORTION STRATEGY, A FIRST RESPONSE The church & abortion [perception & reality PHYLLIS ZAGANO M IARY MEEHAN is of course right...

...Only in Pfeifer's child has his impulse taken root, and only in Pfeifer's life will it have an impact...

...But confronted with both issues in one person -- a girl who chose not to kill her fetus and so branded herself with a scarlet A -- the panel said premarital sex and stripped Pfeifer of an honor it had previously awarded...

...Speaking of his 1984 reelection campaign, which is expected to be very difficult, he has said, " I f I have to come on home on the principle of the rights of the unborn, then I'll come on home...

...Like more than a million of her peers each year, Pfeifer could have chosen abortion...

...The real point is that clarifying the notion of primacy of conscience must be given high priority in any serious consideration of abortion...

...The bishops could then direct their pro-life efforts to preaching and teaching, counseling and absolving...

...It is the cities and the towns...

...it is the areas in which the factory workers must live that we bomb...

...When the war started, the bombing of open cities, the massacre of civilians was a German crime...

...There is absolutely nothing in Catholic doctrine, principle, or judgment which would in the remotest way support direct abortion...

...Whenever individual moral convictions fall outside the social order, decisions of conscience come at a price...

...Legalized abortion gave teenaged girls an out, paralleling the irresponsibility allowed teen boys...

...This is not taught, because it seems to give legitimacy to the other, nonabortifacient methods of birth control...

...There are numerous American politicians presumed to be Catholic whose stance on abortion is basically the same as Mansour's, and no one has called them to task in quite the same way...

...The argument must flow from the belief that abortion is a matter of personal choice, that is, the fights of another human are not being violated by means of abortion...

...Yet it is being taught in an atmosphere of general confusion, against a backdrop of individual bishops issuing personal pastoral statements whenever the spirit -- unfortunately often not the Holy Spirit -- moves them...

...One might well argue that Agnes Mansour, despite the complicating factor of perpetual religious vows, was subject to a seeming double standard...

...Far more graphically, and at a far greater personal cost than any of the statements borne for a day on placards by pro-life demonstrators, Pfeifer bore her pro-life statement for nine months and will live with it -- her daughter, Jessica - - for the next eighteen years or so...

...If these or any other amendments were passed, what difference would it make...

...A return to the days pre-Roe v. Wade would be a return to the clinics in sunny offshore islands for the rich and a return to coat hangers and hemorrhage for the poor...

...This policy, which Mr...

...Given the choice between killing an unknown infant and dropping a notch or two in their profession, the decision, for most, has been clear...

...Recent lurches by individual bishops into various public arenas and political questions have created tremendous confusion in perceptions...

...Through it all trods the weary and confused faithful, unable to distinguish among doctrine, moral principles, and "prudential judgments...

...That, we can hope, is the rationale behind any argument by an otherwise believing Catholic for continuance of Medicaid funding for abortions...

...This attitude is becoming ingrained in the public mores, creating an independent problem for pro-lifers and bishops alike - - the halls of Congress do, after all, loudly echo constituent beliefs...

...Clearly, on political questions the bishops have always had to watch their steps as well as their 501 (c) (3) exemptions...

...The Editors, "Area Bombing" March 17, 1944 that according to this word Catholics are sinning by earning money from the defense industry...

...When we started bombing the continent our 'precision' bombing was our great pride...

...The story is grist for the abortionist's mills, a perfect example of how the pettily self-righteous have taken a moral wrong and made it a political necessity...

...She bore a child out of wedlock...

...It is the murder of innocent people and the suicide of our civilization...

...Yet in a society where personal comfort is uppermost, and nothing is worth endangering it, everything dictates the belief that the choice of abortion in this case or that case might very well be the" sensible" answer...

...but whether or not individual bishops and the NCCB are themselves confused, the laity clearly are...

...But some of these politicians, too, speak often and loudly regarding the "rights of women to privacy in their reproductive choices" -- as though that were the only issue and ignoring what one activist bishop often says, that the A QUESTION OF HONOR PENALIZING BIRTH A RLENE PFEIFER was three times class president, ranks in the top ten percent of her class, chaired her school's student government last year, and got expelled from the National Honor Society last month for lack of good character...

...There follows closely the belief that if something is legal it is therefore moral...

...Nationwide, among teens, roughly forty percent pick abortion as the remedy of choice for a pregnancy...

...If American Catholics, struggling as they are beneath the weight of their bishops' various and varying political agendas, perceive abortion as a matter of private choice, there is no hope for passage of any legislation to limit or eliminate abortion because the people who most ought to argue for that legislation have not been educated...

...I characteristics of a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which I mean simply that the more often it is said that the bishops' conference has divided the pro-life movement, the more divided the pro-life movement becomes . . . . It is really time for all the components of the pro-life movement to desist from this vitriolic infighting and to establish some kind of dttente if not entente and refocus their attention on the pro-life cause itself...

...But when decisions like Arlene Pfeifer's -- decisions to sustain life despite personal inconvenience -- are made harder by a society that insists on exacting its pound of flesh from the less-than-perfect, then society has clearly taken a stand against life...

...This is of course to be expected, for it is no longer news...

...No wonder the bishops are losing the abortion issue...

...While this is in many respects the advice Meehan gives, it ignores, as does she, the manifest confusion about the role of bishop...

...In discussing the Mansour case, for example, it was almost inevitable that Network, a Catholic lobbying group, should invoke "the long-standing Catholic principle of primacy of conscious," should complain that a demand made by the church on a Catholic holding public office was "inconsistent with and inappropriate to the way in which public policy is made in a pluralistic society," and should support "the individual's fight to act on the dictates of conscience in pursuit of the public good...

...Whether they win 6r lose the legislative battle, the bishops will still have done nothing to counter this argument...

...By contrast, abortion, it would seem, is just the sort of question where they would not have to...

...Facing the marketplace's conviction that pregnancy means professional unreliability -- and their male employers" less-readily admitted belief that women who sleep around (unlike male bons vivants) deserve punishment -- they, too, are aborting...

...This is precisely what they need to offset their appearance of behaving like liberal Democrats on nearly every other issue...

...The recent pastoral letter on war and peace is but one example...

...For Martin Luther King and his followers, the price was beatings and jail terms...

...The bishops are political blunderers, and the failures of the Hyde, Hatch, land Eagleton amendments are but small example of their inefficiency and ineptness in the halls of Congress...

...People are beginning to argue that nearly anything the church states, whether it states it definitively or not, is a matter of individual conscience...

...penalties of whispered comments and averted eyes as her widening form entered a room...

...Their philosophical laziness has now returned to haunt them, and there is still no real education as to the distinctions...

...If the father were a fellow student - - which Pfeifer says he is not - - he would not have to face honor society expulsion...

...Birth control and abortion are separate arguments, yet some methods of birth control are really early abortions...

...No amount of passed or unpassed legislation will change that attitude, and without a change in attitude, the legislation will not pass...

...That simple phrase would do more to repair the damage that has been done, to make a fresh start, than anything else they could say...

...for anti-war and anti-nuclear activists they include fines and court fees...

...Whoever he may be, he, too, chose not to postpone sex until after marriage...

...Then the crime becomes not a direct one against an individual but an indirect one against society and its mores, or against the specific regulations of a church, which for much of the population are now in opposition to the mores of society...

...Women are taking the same fast exit...

...They could shut down the NCHLA and tell their other committees to keep away from legislation, thus leaving the issue in the hands of people who have genuine competence in politics...

...The campaign needed to pass one or another amendment is rooted in educating the population, especially the Catholic population, to the church's very human reponse to this very human problem...

...There is a kind of halo effect around appeals to both conscience and legality that blurs the question of whether state, church, or morality should ever demand that conscience be answerable to some clear standard...

...Such an understanding of abortion is spreading, and the bishops are doing next to nothing to stop it...

...Catholic philosophy cannot support any view which would tend in the direction of legitimizing abortion for any of the myriad of reasons given these days -- from rape through incest to inconvenience and psychological disability, not to mention the panoply of medical debilities in the fetus which would create a"substandard" child...

...In this, her high school principal John Mallino told the press, the teen demonstrated her lack of leadership "and character, and I emphasize character...

...There are two ways the bishops could make up for their deplorable record on abortion legislation...

...It still is, but it has become the precision bombing of entire inhabited areas . . . . It is no longer the factories we are bombing...

...r, m SOURCE of this confusion and ignorance, purposeful or not, is clearly the conflation in the press (and in the minds of Catholics) of the questions of birth control and abortion...

...II IIIll 23 March 1984:175...

...It could be that the trainers are not trained...

...Pfeifer, however, determiaed that the life within her deserved to survive, and accepted the II Commonweal: 174 choice has already been made once conception takes place...

...The infighting described by Meehan is real and it is devastating, not only to the possibility of abortion legislation, but to the general perception of the efficacy of the American Catholic bishops in matters of what most would agree to be serious moral questions...

...At another church gathering, the word of the bishops is law, and someone insists 23 March 1984:173 Going...

...Most Catholics know more than they really need to about nuclear weapons, El Salvador, and the annual bishops' appeal, yet could not convincingly either explain or defend their own church's understanding of abortion...

...As we know all too well, the American body politic is not fazed by legislation and it will continue to do that which it pleases...

...This exercise has in many respects the PHYLLIS ZAGANO teaches at Fordham University, Bronx, N.Y...

...His name could remain unknown...

...These are their special areas of competence--and ones that clearly need more attention, if one may judge by the many Catholics who have abortions and promote the practice...

...At one church gathering they are told it is all right to disagree with the bishops, because this or that section of the pastoral is a "prudential judgment...

...About the character of Jessica's father, we know only by inference...

...And the public press conflates the argument as well, from another direction, calling abct'tion just another form of birth control: speaking of unwanted pregnancies in an article about choosing a contraceptive, New York Times writer Jane E. Brodie said, "About half are terminated by abortion, a procedure decidely safer for the pregnant woman than childbirth," although she granted that this approach to birth prevention was "emotionally traumatic" and "more problematic" than other methods...

...Nonetheless, the bishops are having trouble getting support -- widespread support -- for what has come to be known as "their" view, as well as the view of a few portrayed too often in the media as the lunatic fringe of the rosary cult...

...His thanks for this kind of courage have been frequent sniping and--in the last two years--outright opposition from the bishops' men...

...It is unclear why the bishops fear association with conservatives like Helms and Hyde on the abortion question...

...Her crime...

...From Commonweal forty years ago- "Again and again we have protested against the change in our bombing policy...

...No method was certain and the penalties for failure - - childbirth and public censure -- would fall only on the girl...

...Asked whether premarital sex or taking a human life is the greater moral issue, members of the faculty council at Pfeifer's Pennsylvania high school would undoubtedly say taking a human life...

...A deeper question which Meehan does not ask is the more serious one...

...This confusion may be extant among individual bishops and within the NCCB as a whole...

...Churchill announces will not be abandoned.., is in our opinion murder and suicide...

...The Catholic church is not supposed to be a branch of the Democratic party...

...Alternatively, if they want to keep an oar in politics, the bishops could sit down with congressional leaders who have proven so effective on the issue and ask, "How can we help...

...For generations, parents have kept their daughters closely tethered on the grounds that unlike the boy next door, their daughter could get pregnant...

...Henry Hyde, the skilled pro-life leader in the House, has also received shabby treatment from them...

...And so the American Catholic public goes blithely about its way, using all forms of birth control, not knowing that some methods are abortifacient...

...Not even the advent of birth control liberated teenage girls from parental anxiety...

...But unlike the girl, his deed is invisible, rinsed away in the shower within hours of commission...

...As easily as the $200 cash for the operation could be raised, all evidence of a pregnancy could be erased even before it became publicly visible...

...While it was covered, and covered widely, by the American press in November 1982 and in May 1983, there is little being said in public media about it at all today...

...In teaching Humanae Vitae, the American bishops made the quite serious educational mistake of not separating, and separating clearly, abortifacient methods of birth control from other methods...