Theology Today - Vol 30, No. 3 - October 1973 - EDITORIAL - Catholics, Abortion, and the Supreme Court

279 - Catholics, Abortion, and the Supreme Court

Catholics, Abortion, and the Supreme Court
By John Deedy

Unlike other moral issues, legal abortion is without its neat demarcation points, where Catholics can be expected to divide left and right as if on signal. Conservative Catholics are appalled-quite predictably appalled-by the Supreme Court's -ruling of Jan. 22, 1973, striking down anti-abortion laws and limiting strict restraints to the final ten weeks of pregnancy, But so also are Catholic liberal -some, if not many. I know bona fide Catholic liberals of long standing who wrung their hands over the January 22 decision, and read the decision as a sign of the nation's decline and ultimate fall. The more hopeful tended to look on the decision as a kind of watershed, the effects of which (maybe) would be to gather Catholics once again into a reservoir of strength and unity. After all, this was no peripheral issue, like public-sponsored birth control or federal aid to education. The issue now was the life or death of the fetus, and Catholics, whatever their ideological differences, would line up solidly on the side of life. So the rationale went. The Catholic Church in America would blend into a new unity and thus bring to bear the strength of a unified witness on one of the most crucial problems of the times.

It is an interesting scenario, but several months after the Supreme Court's ruling it is obvious that it is not going to come to pass. For a brief moment it seemed possible that the scenario might materialize-specifically at that moment when the Conference of Catholic Bishops served notice on behalf of themselves and the nation's 48-million Catholics that it was rejecting the Supreme Court's ruling and condoning civil disobedience to "any civil law that may require abortion." The stage could not have been more dramatically set for some mighty confrontation between American Catholicism and American law and culture. Yet, for reasons bound up on the one side with the new freedom of the Catholic conscience and, negatively, with the bishops' near-total dissipation of their moral authority, the confrontation never came to pass. Response to the bishops' rallying cry lagged, and the prospective great moral

John Deedy is managing editor of Commonweal and the author of several books, including What a Modern Catholic Believes About Conscience, Freedom, and Authority (1972). He has written on religious topics in The New York Times, The New Republic, and other publications.

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crusade has devolved into something of a minor skirmish promising no startling results.

For all of that, the bishops are by no means solitary in their witness. A sizable number of Catholics are aligned with them, and they have strong allies in some Protestant circles. Nevertheless, the fact that Catholics as a body do not form a solid phalanx lessens the bishops' strength and makes the attainment of their objectives that much more difficult, if not ultimately impossible. Certainly the lack of solidarity makes the bishops less formidable as moral force and pressure group among those who take into account the clout of particular segments of the society.

If one is allowed a conclusion based on certain related signs, the bishops sense the impossibility of any instant roll-back of legal abortion, and for the moment have tailored thoughts largely (but, as we will see later, not exclusively) to the guaranteeing of statutory protections for Catholics engaged in medicine and for the 718 Catholic general hospitals that treat upwards of 23 minion patients a year. In other words, the issue, at least immediately, is less abortion per se than it is the civil (and moral) integrity of Catholic medical institutions, and the civil (and moral) rights of Catholic doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Since abortion appears to be a fact of American life, this is at least a realistic objective and one on which the bishops have definite chances of success. For even without protective legislation, such as that introduced in the Congress by Sen. Frank Church (D-Id.) and others, it is a reasonable assumption that the courts would stand on the side of institutions and of individuals who, for moral reasons, refused to participate in abortion procedures; the legal precedent need only be the provisions for conscientious objection to military service. Some accommodation might be demanded in situations where the Catholic medical facility and Catholic medical personnel are the only ones for miles around, as would be the case in Alaska and certain Western states. In such situations, Catholics would have to be sensitive about seeming to impose an ethic on a particular geographical area. The challenge here would be to find a way of providing for those for whom abortion is not a moral problem, while preserving the larger principle of respect for human life.

Catholic authority will be called on to face a number of knotty legal-moral problems such as that one. On the other hand, it may be that its most difficult problems may exist with respect to Catholicism's own communicants. A considerable proportion of American Catholics just does not share the bishops' passion over abortion; a considerable proportion does not even share the moral convictions of the bishops on the issue. The proof is in the large

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number of polls on the subject. Catholic authority seeks to discount these polls as unscientific and misleading. Nevertheless, the polls exist and they persist in showing the same results: a considerable Catholic tolerance for legal abortion. In fairness to Catholic authority, the polls may not be an infallible guide. There is evidence, for instance, that the phrasing of some abortion-on-demand questions in some polls misled certain of the respondents. At least some percentages in some polls did a remarkable turn-around once the Supreme Court decision was handed down and people were confronted with the full implications of the pro-abortion position. Even so, the polls cannot be wiped away entirely. Nor can the correlative fact that a considerable gap exists between the official position of the Catholic Church and the thinking of many rank-and-file communicants. The Gallup Poll, for instance, in August of 1972 showed Catholics 55-36 per cent opposed to legalized abortion, and again in April of 1973 as 56-40 per cent opposed. (The national averages were 42-46 and 52-41 per cent in favor, respectively.) Now as polls go, Catholic opposition to legalized abortion is substantial. But taking the same Gallup figures and looking at them from reverse direction, the polls indicate that well over one-third of American Catholics are in disagreement with the official Catholic position or uncertain in their own minds on the issue (the differences between percentage totals and 100 representing the "not sure" category).

There are two notable details emerging from polls such as these. First, permissibility percentages go up, not down, year by year. This is a fact borne out by a survey of Catholic attitudes towards legalized abortion under specified conditions, which was undertaken by William C. McCready and Father Andrew M. Greeley for the years 1965-1972. It showed upward percentages in all categories. For example, in 1965 only 16 per cent of Catholics condoned abortion "if the family has a very low income and cannot afford more children"; in 1972 the figure was 36 per cent. In 1965, Catholics condoning abortion "if there is a strong chance of a serious defect in the baby" numbered 45 per cent; in 1972 it was 67 per cent. The McCready-Greeley study, done under the aegis of the National Opinion Research Center and summarized in America magazine for October 28, 1972, showed an average change of 19.5 per cent among Catholics in six topic categories in tolerance for legal abortion.

Second, percentages favoring legal abortions increase by descending age categories. In other words, the younger the person the more tolerant he or she is likely to be to concepts of legal abortion. The McCready-Greeley study indicated that 89 per cent of Catholics under age 30 would approve legal abortion "if the woman's health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy"; 77 per cent "if

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the woman became pregnant as the result of a rape"; 74 per cent "if there is a strong chance of a serious defect in the baby"; 43 per cent "if the family has a very low income and cannot afford more children"; 32 per cent "if the woman is not married and does not want to marry the man"; 32 per cent "if the woman is married and does not want any more children." Those were the findings for 1972. In 1965 the percentages were 66, 42, 43, 4, 8 and 8, respectively.

If these figures indicate a dichotomy between what the church teaches and what Catholics believe, how much more so do campus polls! A poll of 350 Georgetown students in the spring of 1973 revealed that 64 per cent of the respondents-almost two-thirds-favored allowing women to have an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. (Thirty-two per cent opposed the proposition, while four per cent abstained.) Broken down according to sex, women were slightly more likely than men students to favor abortion within the first three months, the percentages being 67.2 and 63.1, respectively.

Even Catholic doctors present something less than an encouraging picture for those who would expect them, through the interplay of religious and medical ethics, to be solidly anti-abortion. A poll taken by Modern Medicine magazine the month following the Supreme Court's abortion ruling indicated that 27 percent of Catholic doctors supported the decision.

As conceded earlier, some of these polls may be open to scientific criticism and sometimes contradictory readings. Even making those allowances, it is apparent that Catholic authority has a major educational job on its hands in America if it looks for Catholics to be of a mind on abortion, as they were a mind on so many things so few years ago. In point of fact, given present drifts, Catholic authority faces the prospect of the official position on abortion becoming a distinctly minority position within Catholicism itself, much as is the case with birth control. This is particularly so if one looks ahead to the generations coming along, with their more tolerant attitude towards abortion. If Catholic authority senses any quickened educational challenge as a consequence of all this, it escapes arresting notice. Its energies go into legislative and political channels, while its communicants increasingly slide into indifference or pro-abortion dispositions. It is a situation ready-made for Catholic authority to wake up some morning and find itself as isolated from its own as from the civil groups it is attempting to persuade.

III

Dissident Catholic opinion on abortion has many shadings. There are those American Catholics who are outright in favor of

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abortion. But the bulk of dissident opinion, I would guess, is subtle and nuanced-and while it may take exception to the official Catholic position, it is not necessarily pro-abortion, at least as a moral proposition. A part of the latter opinion is reflected in a Phyllis McGinley vote cast several years ago as a member of a Rockefeller study commission examining the possibility of abortion-law reform; it was a vote cast on concepts about the role of the Catholic in a pluralistic society. "I hate the idea of abortion," Miss McGinley said to an interviewer, "but ours is a pluralistic state, and I don't expect the state of New York to administer the laws of my church." (A survey had shown 87 per cent of the state's population favoring reform of the old abortion laws.) Under this logic, permissiveness with respect to abortion is something that must be lived with, however reluctantly, in the pluralistic society.

Father Francis X. Murphy, the church historian and lately a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, would seem to concur with Miss McGinley, on the basis of a comment last February to reporter Marjorie Hyer of the Washington Post: "In the whole political situation, the church has the right to try to persuade people. And we can make a good case. But we have no right to force other people to accept our viewpoint beyond the point of persuasion." Reflecting logic such as this, some Catholics would argue that the Church should not press efforts to secure an abortion law written out of its theology, since such a law would in effect repress the moral and ethical beliefs of others.

Dissident Catholic opinion may also be in reaction to the rhetorical overkill of Catholic authority in condemning abortion. Words like "murder," "genocide," "massacre of the innocents," when injected into the abortion debate not only erect barriers to dialogue between Catholic authority and groups with which it must communicate-civil, judicial, legislative, medical, religious, etc.; they also have the effect of turning off many Catholics who are themselves not ideological pro-abortionists. They step to the sidelines, where they are spared the embarrassment of association with zealots. Since many of these are the more sensitive and intelligent of Catholics, authority deprives itself of a potentially valuable resource in seeking to bold any kind of line on abortion.

That a situation of rhetorical excess exists in American Catholicism with respect to abortion is impossible to deny. The problem has been noted by numerous writers. Andrew Greeley, for instance, wrote in his column appearing in diocesan newspapers that he found the Supreme Court's decision "a juridical monstrosity," but he added that the behavior of some Catholic anti-abortionists was so extreme as to make them "quite indistinguishable from the fanatics of the other side." Commonweal magazine likewise criticized "episcopal fulminations" and the spectacle of what

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it identified as "full-page dead-fetus pictures in the diocesan press." (Obviously the impulse to overreact on abortion is not uniquely American. The Month, a distinguished British Catholic review, commented recently on the proclivity of British Catholics to use language "which makes it quite impossible for their opponents ever to listen to them." "They stop their ears and grow indignant," said The Month."... [I]ts very emotiveness gets in the way of reason.")

Finally, dissident Catholic opinion is very likely connected with disappointment over the hard fixing of the official position and a corresponding unwillingness to entertain any theological or medical possibilities beyond what is presently permissible in Catholic morality: indirect abortion, or the "accidental" expulsion of a fetus during a medical procedure or operation on a seriously ill woman for purpose other than procuring expulsion of the fetus. Progressive Catholic intellectuals question an immovable attitude with respect to abortion, when so many questions about conception and the origin of life remain to be answered by biological science. New knowledge has already brought into doubt old theories about human life being present at the moment of conception, a detail which, if accepted by Catholic authority, could open up theological possibilities for abortion in the early days or weeks of a pregnancy.

There is also some disenchantment over the lack of openness to the possibility of abortion in so-called hardship cases, such as incest and rape. Some unofficial theological thought would permit abortion in cases such as those by extending to abortion the "unjust aggressor" principle; for example, just as a nation is morally justified in acting against or in response to an "unjust aggressor," so in cases of rape and incest might the fetus be acted against, the fetus in such instances being an "unjust aggressor" in the woman's body. By way of aside, Catholic authority in the past used the "unjust aggressor" principle to cover killing in defense of chastity and one's good reputation.

If Catholic authority is reluctant to take theological initiatives in connection with the abortion issue, the same reluctance does not exist regarding political initiatives. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from the decision of Catholic authority to join in the movement to seek a constitutional amendment to counter the effects of the Supreme Courts abortion ruling. At twelve regional spring meetings of the U.S. bishops, sentiment was expressed favoring a constitutional amendment, and in June the administrative committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops went formally on record. Without recommending any particular wording,

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the bishops endorsed the idea of an amendment to protect unborn life. This is an action with which it is possible to have decided reservations. For one thing, constitutional amendments are not easily come by; enormous energy must be invested in seeking an amendment, but the odds of being successful remain stacked against the seekers. More particularly, the procedure carries within it the seeds of divisiveness. And why not? It is no small matter to attempt to tag an addition to the Constitution. The one sure thing about seeking a constitutional amendment on the abortion issue is that the effort will be fraught with contention.

Congress obviously is not anxious to plunge ahead on the point. Rep. Lawrence J. Hogan (R-Md.), a chief spokesman in Congress for anti-abortion legislation, has introduced a constitutional amendment bill, but by late spring he was able to gather only seven co-sponsors for his measure. Approached by a reporter for his views on the Hogan amendment bill, Rep. Robert F. Drinan (D-Mass.) seized on the tiny number of co-sponsors. "Seven co-sponsors?" the priest-Congressman repeated, throwing his hands in the air. "I thought he'd have about forty or fifty by now. With seven co-sponsors I should waste my time [commenting]?"

A constitutional amendment could be years in the determination, but it may still be the only legislative alternative for the Catholic bishops. At one time there seemed an outside chance that President Nixon would issue an executive order of non-compliance with the January 22 Supreme Court ruling, an action which proponents encouraged by citing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and drawing parallels thereto. But of course Mr. Nixon did not act, and given his Watergate difficulties it is almost inconceivable that be would act now. A President in so tenuous a position as Richard Nixon is not likely to take so drastic a step as to negate a Supreme Court decision and thereby alienate millions of Americans whose good will and support be might need.

Where all this leaves the Catholic leadership of the United States is hard to say. The leadership is pretty much shot for one thing. The bishops have made sanctity of life the cornerstone of their stance, but their credibility is badly diminished, undercut among Catholics and in the wider community by long equivocation on Vietnam and by what Father Walter J. Burghardt of New York's Jesuit Woodstock Community calls Catholic limits on love--the failure to give to the quality of life nearly the same attention given to sheer naked life itself. Nor will the aligning behind a constitutional amendment add much to their credibility and authority-or to the respect in which they wish to be held. For this is indication

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that the bishops may be opting for a political and legislative answer to their abortion dilemma, when in fact they should be looking to the moral formation of minds and consciences on the subject.

Of course, it may be that the bishops have the latter task in mind, and that in supporting a constitutional amendment they are only exercising a particular option open to them in order to save church and nation from the evil they define as abortion.

Held in perspective, there can be no quarrel with pursuit of a constitutional amendment-or, better yet, lesser quarrel. But there undoubtedly will be considerable quarrel if the constitutional amendment objective becomes all-consuming with the bishops in the way that aid to education did several years ago, and if, by way of corollary, the bishops remain as one-dimensional on abortion as they have on parochial schools. This is not to say that the Catholic leadership ought to give up its points of view on abortion (but it ought to amend some of them), or that it must go along with current political and ethical trends. It is only to say that something more is expected of the leadership than agitated political activity.

What then might the Catholic leadership do? Perhaps I will be excused for quoting the prescription of the magazine with which I am associated. This is Commonweal's advice to the leadership of the American Catholic Church: "Radically re-educate itself on both the value of every human life and its own need to take a less compliant and more prophetic stance against the trend toward egoism and selfishness in our government, culture, and church. Support responsible birth control so people will learn to decide about a child before it is conceived. Take women seriously and give them real status in the community of the church so that childbearing is not seen just as a woman's joy-burden but as a community responsibility. Make it socially acceptable and financially possible to have a child outside of marriage. Really be pro-life: champion all those whose lives are still in process, whose future is still precarious, whose true potentials are still struggling to be born."

If the leadership supports all this, abortion could become a diminished problem for American Catholicism.