Our Right to Choose

...The present widespread availability of abortion does in fact mean that childbearing can be an option, not an inevitability, for fertile, heterosexually active women...

...Disguise, doubleness, and duplicity, is Allen's obsessive theme...

...Prohibiting abortion is part of an attempt to control female sexual activity through celibacy, motherhood, or social disgrace...

...We are almost always aware that Danny Rose, that loveless schlemiel, is in disguise the famous Woody Allen, who has already won Mia Farrow in real life...

...Shot in unassuming black and white by the brilliant cinematographer, Gordon Willis, Broadway Danny Rose (like its protagonis0 disguises its ambition in apparent modesty...

...he introduces case material with novelistic vividness...

...Yet it seems to me she gives no consideration to the possible positive moral significance in accepting situations we did not choose -- in the "making do" and "keeping on" which women have maintained for generations...

...Library Journal Illustrations Paper $4.95 New Paperback Edition TWO DANCERS IN THE DESERT The Life of Charles de Foucauld by Charles Lepetit Foreword by Carlo Carretto "After reading these pages everyone, I am sure, will feel that if God can so basically change the heart of such an individualist, there is no limit to what he can do with us...

...The history of the human race is full of instances in which the powerful refused to acknowledge the moral worth of the powerless...

...Beverly Harrison wants early abortion to be legally unrestricted and readily available, thereby encouraging the trend toward abortions in the first trimester rather than later...

...At the center of the book is his effort to identify evil as an illness...

...She herself stresses the importance of the capacity for discrete biological existence -- potential freedom from dependence upon the body of the pregnant woman...

...People of the Lie is a candidly personal statement of belief in the reality of evil and a sustained argument for studying the phenomenon scientifically...

...Brief and eloquent, this embodies the heart of the Gospel...

...The Moore character is blissfully happy in this May-December marriage until he discovers, or thinks he discovers, that his wife is having an affair with a handsome younger man, a friend and protege...

...Now, with a darker palette, he shares his reflections and data on the human capacity to thwart development and even destroy it...

...Almost all of Allen's obsessions, emotional and artistic, make appearance...

...Finally, the matter of fetal life...

...Generous spirit, idiosyncratic book PEOPLE OF THE LIE THE HOPE FOR HEALING HUMAN EVIL M. Scott Peck Simon and Schuster, $14.95, 269 pp...

...The book's focus is On the evil in individuals, but there is also a long chapter on what the author calls "group evil...

...Instead, she frames the question so that the well-being of women and their capacity to act as autonomous moral agents are given a central place...

...Here, as in his evaluation of personal cases, his moral sense is signally compassionate, patient, and balanced...

...If Allen is almost always the same, Moore seems barely the same character for ten minutes at a stretch...

...Jealousy unhinges the elfin Moore,who seems unhinged in general, and he undertakes an elaborate revenge which we see enacted in fantasy (in the character's mind as he conducts) and for real (in the fantasy of the film) -- the second a particularly funny scene...

...The distinctive aspects of Harrison's argument should be apparent even from this summary...

...Dom Helder speaks through his eyes, a prophet's eyes burning ",intensely, a poet's eyes softly glowing.' --Emmanuel "The widely loved Brazilian Archbishop who combines deep spirituality with a commitment to the oppressed has written a truly remarkable boo...

...A funny line coming from Woody Allen, but Rose's soul we're made to believe is as beautiful as Grant's exterior...

...Harrison repeatedly emphasizes that the pregnant woman is indisputably a person, while the status of the fetus in the early stages of its development is questionable...

...Harrison expresses the "hope that a non-misogynist Christianity is possible...

...Illness, on the other hand, is any bodily or personal impediment to fulfilling our human potential...

...Refusing criticism from others or themselves, they become immured in narcissism and a desperate fear of detection...

...As a comedian, Moore is like an astonishing lifelike wound-up toy...

...He is a chameleon without a fixed nature, seems rarely to draw on, whatever that is, himself...

...Alas, the use of exaggeration and the substitution of vilification for evidence is all-too-often standard operating proce(Continued on page 187) T HIS BOOK is an extremely important attempt to create an ethic of abortion rooted in women's experience and using women's well-being as a central norm...

...The film's seeming offhandedness is its disguise...

...A book review is not the place where one could explore such differences at the length that the level of Harrison's own argumentation would require...

...Well-taken, however, is Harrison's caveat that it is unfair to hold women to an ethic of selfsacrifice, while men are permitted a minimalist ethic of self-interest...

...More important, throughout the book Harrison overemphasizes the moral significance of human freedom in determinThe Spirituality of Solidarity II with the Poor WE DRINK FROM OUR OWN WELLS The Spiritual Journey of a People by Gustavo Guti~rrez "The publication of this book is an extremely...

...But she would not absolutely 23 March 1984:183 rule out some abortions up to the time of birth...

...The stark contrast between darkness and light, good and evil, is of course perennially revealing, and the figures of therapist and exorcist may rightly be recognized as modern heroes in the struggle...

...Barbara Hilkert Andolsen Dave Andrusko G K. CHESTERTON, in a typically astute _9 observation, once wrote that it would take a book to set straight a paragraph of falsehoods, half-truths, facts, and innuendos...

...his use of personal example is adroit, unselfconscious, revealingly apt...

...If Allen is not the best of our current filmmakers, and he has to be thought of as among the best, he is at the very least the most self-improved...

...From his first real film, the crude Take the Money andRun to Broadway Danny Rose lies a brief inspirational course in the history of cinema...

...We are asked to believe that Moore (Rex Harrison played the role in the original) is a celebrated orchestra conductor with a beautiful young wife (Natasja Kinski...

...Indeed, Christians would have to reexamine all their assumptions about women, procreation, and family, acknowledging how our cuttural and religious understandings of these realities have varied throughout history...

...First, she challenges the premise of most moralists who have adCommonweal: 184 dressed abortion, namely, "that the status of fetal life is the determining issue in the moral debate...

...I am not content to ground the rights of the vulnerable in a social contract...

...There is no horizon beyond the human...

...He is funny, though never quite recognizably human...

...This candor on her part may discomfort both pro-choice and pro-life readers, but one must admit that she is honestly taking up the major question that really faces us...

...Harrison attacks John Noonan's influential thesis that Catholic teaching consistently grants full human value to fetal life...

...Sin is defined as falling short of the mark, evil as a force destructive of life or liveliness...

...It is at once instructive, persuasive -- and distressingly idiosyncratic...

...That would be a shame...

...Yet without some sense of the transcendent life of God to which human life is called in communion, our fulfillment becomes a matter of self-improvement, more or less nobly conceived, and sin loses its radical meaning of being lost or fundamentally estranged...

...Catholic Paper $5.95 At your bookstore or from ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 23 March 1984:185 ing life plans and procreative choices...

...In The Road Less Traveled, a widely read and helpful book published in 1978, Peck tried to show how religion and psychology interwine on the journey of spiritual growth...

...Danny Rose is the loser as saint who gets his reward, the heroine, here on earth...

...His work in Howard Zieff's sometimes charming remake of Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours -the latest trend in Hollywood is to recycle old movies (something deconstructionist in the impulse) -- is not deplorable, merely frantic and unconvincing...

...Contraception has put that control within reach, but only when backed by abortion in case of contraceptive failure...

...Books: PRO.CHOICE PERSPECTIVES I TIE llGrr TO LIFERI Connle l~dle ~mmit Books, $14.95, 275 pp...

...True procreative choice is a deliberative choice to bear a child with a clear realization of the responsibility involved and a full commitment to rear that child properly...

...All this may make pro-choice activists hail her book as a theological endorsement and pro-lifers dismiss it as the work of the enemy -- and neither read it thoughtfully, or at all...

...Harrison is well aware of the finitude of human resources and human ingenuity which lies at the root of problem pregnancies...

...Third, by using a critical historical method in examining the Christian antiabortion tradition, Harrison shatters a certain complacency that some Christian scholars have shown about the .firmness of the ground on which they build their anti-abortion argument...

...Harrison's constructive theological position is heavily dependent upon the work of Carter Heyward (The Redemption of God, a Theology of Mutual Relation...

...Are such experiences really only the result of a socially induced, moral passivity which women must now wholly reject...

...Therefore, fetuses in the final stages of development and even infants are persons to the extent that we recognize our moral obligations to provide them with the social conditions which allow them to become persons...

...A woman is never the social equal of a man if she can be forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy which devastates her chosen "meaningful life plan...

...FJII3111LI N' CIlMC rAndrew Mertoa Bescon Press, $13.S0, 229 pp...

...it is first of all a book about procreative choice...

...I confess this review would need to be on microdot to have space enough to correct the misinformation, distortion, flights of fancy, misdirection, and fallaceies to be found in The Right to L~fers and Enemies of Choice...

...Harrison acknowledges the difficulty in judging "when we are wisest to predicate the existence of a human being within a continuous process of life development," but she insists that this is something we must in fact judge, that it does not arise self-evidently from the biological facts without some explicit or implicit theory about those facts lurking in the background -- and deserving scrutiny...

...Next to the innovative Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose seems a skillful entertainment, an interlude between serious projects...

...Harrison stresses women's right to "bodily integrity...

...but it also requires the availability of safe, elective abortion...

...But these are basically naturalistic definitions, admitting no real transcendence of the psychological order except in mythical terms...

...Graciously and modestly, but with equal vigor, he there surveyed the resources and requirements for lives of true spiritual attainment...

...Women's history has not been preserved through the channels which record the history of privileged males...

...As editor of National Right to Life News, I am well aware that, traditionally, neither side to the abortion battle asks for quarter, nor are any prisoners taken...

...Circumstances beyond our control often foil our "life plans" and even our most sophisticated efforts to control our fertility...

...She shows what a careful reading of Noonan's own evidence confirms: there was an ongoing controversy among earlier theologians concerning the point at which termination of fetal life was homicide, and there was disagreement about reasons which might justify leniency toward abortion...

...Peck's judgment on our national responsibility is unequivocal but not harsh...

...Now its source is named quite explicitly as God the Father of Jesus Christ...

...Peck is at his best in detecting the malicious side of certain patients he or his colleagues have treated...

...Christian leaders would have to admit that the Bible provides diverse images of women and the family, and that many Biblical teachings are predicated on male supremacy and domination...

...Carretto is one of those occasional still, small voices that force'us to face ourselves as we face God, and to follow in the footsteps of the Christ...

...JONATHAN BAUMBACH (COMMONWEAL' S movie reviews are currently being written by guest critics...

...She asserts that it is wrong for society to coerce a woman into using her body against her own will as a means to sustain the total physical existence of another...

...It relies instead on the dramatic use of Johannine dualisms...

...Second, by putting the abortion issue in the larger context of procreative choice, Harrison openly directs attention, not to the exceptional cases of rape or threat to the mother's life, but to the more normal category of abortion as a back-up for contraception...

...Leo | . O~ S COTT PECK is the kind of author a reader naturally wants to meet...

...Harrison wants to keep our focus on the well-being of women when social policies on abortion are debated...

...According to Harrison, this access to abortion undermines patriarchal religion's primary definition of women, i.e., childbearers...

...Nevertheless, her theory that human rights are a product of our moral commitment to one another, not rooted in any independent moral reality, such as GOd or the natural law, disturbs me...

...It centers on the My Lai massacre and the United States' involvement in the tragedy of Vietnam...

...Her own view is that a complete rethinking of Christian sexual ethics would be necessary in order for an egalitarian Christianity to emerge...

...As in The Road Less Traveled, he knows the path of love as "a dynamic balance of opposites, a painful creative tension of uncertainties, a difficult tightrope between extreme but easier courses of action...

...Many of Christianity's most misogynist theologians considered it a murderous act ifa married women was in any way sexually active apart from procreative intent or resistant to childbearing as her vocation...

...My distress over Peck's latest work is chiefly a result of his frequently uncritical theology...

...On the other hand, we more explicitly ecclesial Christians may well wonder why we have not been able to make deCommonweal: 186...

...The film, like its star, seems to disappear before your eyes...

...And finally, no matter how much some readers may disagree with her position on the moral status of fetal life -- I among them -- Harrison must be credited for addressing the question of fetal life in such a direct and sophisticated fashion, far from the usual practice in the pro-choice literature...

...OUR itiGrr TO CR00SE TOWARD A NEW ETHIC OF ABORTION Beverly Wildung Harrison Bescon Press, $18.95, 334 pp...

...And those unfamiliar with Carter Heyward's theologizing or not enamored of process philosophy and theology may find Harrison's feminist theology either difficult to understand or unpersuasive...

...U.S...

...She does not explore the fortitude and generosity which would allow a woman to undertake a pregnancy that imperiled her "life plan...

...Therefore she waits until the seventh chapter to ask: when do we appropriately recognize the fetus as a full member of the human community entitled to protection against unjustified killing...

...In a sharp critique of the Christian tradition, Harrison contends that the prohibition against abortion arises primarily in conjunction with hostility toward women and disapproval toward any non-procreative sexual activity...

...Sojourners A selection of Spiritual Book Associates...

...Rage and jealousy are just occasions for new faces, new tics of cleverness...

...Indeed, after reading several of his chapters, you already feel you know him...

...More significantly, he needs to recognize the call to repentance and the experience of forgiveness which are ordinary, practical aspects of the Christian life confronted with the problem of evil...

...I thought Moore more appealing in supporting roles--particularly as the closet lecher m Foul Play...

...Let me be clear that I cannot agree with Harrison's position on a number of points, some of them quite significant...

...His style is disarmingly straightforward...

...CARLO CARRETTO "An impressionistic biography of de Foucauld-interspersed with'brief, provocative selections ~om his works...

...It is touching without being manipulative, more open to feeling than most of Allen's work...

...Ultimately Harrison insists personhood is constituted by a covenant of caring which establishes moral relationships among the members of society, not by mere biological human existence...

...Indeed the oft-repeated phrase "life plan" created echoes in my mind of something most befitting a briefcasetoting MBA pursuing a well-mapped career...

...Harrison insists that women's emancipation depends on their ability to control their own reproductive powers, a control women have struggled for throughout history...

...Jonathan Baumbach has written on film for Partisan Review, Harper's and other journals...

...Their self-deception spreads, and the refusal to acknowledge it becomes their unpardonable sin, marking them out as "people of the lie," true children of the "father of lies...

...She makes "viability" a significant point affecting the moral claims of fetal life...

...Many early theologians believed that semen contained complete persons in miniature...

...Therefore, any act which resulted in the ejaculation of semen, .while deliberately impeding its "nesting" in a woman's body, was murder...

...Rather she stresses women's responsibility as co-creators with God to exercise human freedom in shaping the life-enhancing potential in creation through procreative choice...

...In Malachi Martin, Peck has chosen a curious witness for the church's practice of exorcism...

...Her chapter in search of an alternative "feminist perspective" on the history of abortion is ultimately unsatisfying because there are too few source materials to sustain a serious examination...

...The schlemiel, Danny Rose, is a great man in disguise...

...Harrison rejects a notion of a transcendent, dominant God who directly creates each and every fetus as a "gift" to be passively accepted by subordinate women...

...D UDLEY MOORE, like Woody Allen, is a satiric stage comic who has become a movie star...

...To balance the fragmentary comments of selected Church Fathers on which the history of Christian attitudes toward abortion is usually based, Harrison examines the "real historical perspective in which the contemporary discussion belongs" -- the history of women's struggle to control their fertility and to cope with real material deprivation...

...Harrison faults pro-life advocates for insisting on the personhood of fetuses without a sincere commitment to provide the conditions for their personal develoment...

...Paper $6.95, Cloth $9.95 HOPING AGAINST ALL HOPE by Dorn Helder Camara "Spiritually, he stands head and shoulders above most of today's tallest...

...I can only signal my disagreements, while emphasizing that Our Right to Choose is a major, and even brilliant, contribution to the abortion debate...

...Characterized by "willfulness" rather than "willingness," such people stubbornly resist any change in the pattern of their destructive behavior...

...It is no wonder, then, that the book has little sense for a religious history lived before God in community...

...Unfaithfully Yours is often zany and entermining,but it lacks presence and conviction...

...For one thing, this is not just a book about abortion...

...NOU'WEN Paper $7.95 I SOUGHT AND I FOUND by Carlo Carretto He speaks of faith, hope, and love, of the priesthood, celibacy, and the church, of evil and death--all with devastating honesty and simplicity...

...In the earlier book, a pervasive grace arising from our personal unconscious empowers such love...

...Harrison is a woman of moral integrity -sensitive to the claims of the socially disadvantaged...

...It is the fulfillment of a promise that is implicit in Guti~rrez's A Theology of Liberation-" -tlENm I.M...

...Selection of such a late point in fetal development is consistent with Harrison's commitment to give heavy weight to the rights of the woman facing an unwanted pregnancy...

...Here is an established psychotherapist who expresses his humanistic and religious concern without any academicism or professionalism whatsoever...

...Fourth, in making a case for such a late point in fetal development as the occasion for predicating "personhood," Harrison sets out a serious critique of the romantic "biologism" of many abortion opponents...

...Broadway Danny Rose is a supple, intelligent, and selfregarding film, less adventurous perhaps than Allen's best work -- Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig -- though satisfying on its own terms...

...Therefore, she selects viability as the crucial point when respect should be shown for a being possessing the "foundation requirements of personhood...

...Likewise for Harrison procreative choice is a fundamental moral good...

...sig/tifi'cant event in the development of liberation theology...

...Genuine procreative choice requires a society ready to accept corporate responsibility for the welfare of children...

...Allen is at once Danny Rose and himself, talking as the character and through him, expressing himself when the occasion demands with wit and eloquence unavailable to his semi-articulate persona...