Comment are off

Fall 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW , FALL 1993

the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW FALL 1993 Featured in this issue Faith Abbott on Remedial Birth Control Robert Whelan on Greens vs People Desmond Rushe on Will Ireland Go Trendy William Murchison on Telling It Straight Maria McFadden on Bringing It All Home Paul V Mankowski on United We Fund Paul T Stallsworth on The Church's Politics Wm F Buckley Jr on Those Happy Days Also in this issue Cardinal John J O'Connor Rep Henry J Hyde Jo McGowan Fred Barnes Suzanne Fields Mona Charen Wesley Smith plus the text of the famous prophetic Cal Med editorial Published by The Human Life Foundation Inc New York N Y Vol XIX No 4 5.00 a copy

ABOUT THIS ISSUE This issue which completes our 19th year brings you commentary on the current abortion scene from both sides of the Atlantic as well as a look at social policy in China Weare pleased to bring you our faithful contributors as well as introduce some new writers to the Review We thank Mr William F Buckley Jr for permission to reprint the selections from his new book Happy Days Were Here Again published by Random House For the meticulous readers we note that the first section beginning on page 85 is taken from An Agenda for Conservatives written in January 1990 The Strange Uses of Tolerance was a January 1985 column Cuomitis was another issued in January 1986 and Happy Birthday to J S Bach first appeared in March 1985 all are 1993 by William F Buckley Jr Readers who want more should find the book a large handsomely printed volume of almost 500 pages in bookstores now The reviews of Mr Steven Mosher's A Mother's Ordeal noted in the Introduction were written by Andrew Brick Wall Street Journal and Karen Stabiner Los Angeles Times the book published by Harcourt Brace is also currently available in bookstores The ecumenical Consultation on the Church and Abortion see Rev Paul Stallsworth's article p 66 was initiated by Presbyterians ProLife Its executive director Mrs Terry Schlossberg and Dr Elizabeth Achtemeier a professor at Union Theological Seminary Richmond are currently working on a book about the Consultation In reference to my article should you wish information about a pregnancy loss support group in your area contact SHARE Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support Inc St Joseph Health Center 300 First Capitol Drive St Charles Missouri 63301 314 947 6164 We should correct an error in our Spring issue Appendix A Jessica Shaver wrote that the Centers For Disease Control Records in 1972 showed only 39 maternal deaths from abortion we printed the number as 339 a most regrettable typo Also in Micheal Flaherty's article Summer Norplant and Margaret Sanger's Legacy Norplant is described as a contraceptive Several readers have pointed out that Norplant works as an abortifacient and should be labeled as such Once again we thank The Spectator for supplying us with more amusing cartoons MARIA McFADDEN MANAGING EDITOR

INDEX

Editor J P McFadden Contributing Editors Faith Abbott William Murchison Consulting Editor Europe Mary Kenny London Managing Editor Maria McFadden Contributors Kay Ebeling Ellen Wilson Fielding Elena Muller Garcia James Hitchcock Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn Jo McGowan Mary Meehan Desmond Rushe John Wauck Chilton Williamson Jr Assistant Managing Editor Kate Noonan Articles Editor Robert M Patrick Copy Editor Harold Marsden Production Manager Ray Lopez Circulation Manager Esther Burke Publishing Consultant Edward A Capano Published by THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INC Editorial Office Room 840 150 E 35th St New York N Y 10016 The editors will consider all manuscripts submitted but assume no responsibility for unsolicited material Editorial and subscription inquiries and requests for reprint permission should be sent directly to the editorial office Subscription price 20 per year Canada and foreign 25 U S currency 1993 by THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INC New York N Y Printed in the U S A the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW FALL 1993 Vol XIX No 4 Introduction 2 J P McFadden Taking Remedial Measures 7 Faith Abbott Greens and People 23 Robert Whelan Will Ireland Get Abortion 33 Desmond Rushe Telling It Straight 40 William Murchison Bringing It All Home 49 Maria McFadden Funding Abortion the United Way 59 Paul V Mankowski The Politics of the Church 66 Paul 1r Stallsworth Happy Days Were Here Again 85 William F Buckley Jr Appendices 93 Cardinal John J O'Connor Rep Henry J Hyde Jo McGowan Fred Barnes Suzanne Fields Mona Charen Wesley J Smith California Medicine

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION THE FIRST REVIEW WE READ was in the Wall Street Journal what impressed us straight away was how quickly the reviewer got into the good stuff his second paragraph reads Almost matter of factly Chi An tells of performing her first state sponsored abortion I looked into the pan to find the remains of what had been a few minutes before a 13 week old fetus 1 could make out the remains of arms and legs and trunk and skull Then my eyes locked on a perfect little hand less than half a centimeter long 1 started at four tiny fingers and a tiny opposed thumb complete with translucent fingernails And 1knew what 1had done Halfway through he writes In one of the most astounding parts of the book Chi An shares a series of letters she received Who is this Chi An and what makes her story so impressive Fact is it's not her real name nor did she write the book Me Steven Mosher wrote it in the first person by way of convincing the reader that it is her story and true He's convinced us A Mother's Ordeal is a remarkable book all the more so because it is indeed about the inhuman realities of remedial abortion yet it comes from a major publisher Harcourt Brace and has received serious treatment from major media reviewers if that's ever happened before we missed it Perhaps the reason was caught by another reviewer in the Los Angeles Times who concluded that the pro choice forces could take up Chi An's cause which is not really anti abortion but rather about government taking away a woman's right to choose We had thought to give you something straight from the book itself but how to break into the fast flowing narrative Better to turn it over to our own Faith Abbott and let her tell you all about it in her own flowing style Which is exactly what she has done in fascinating detail as you will see the book was a real page turner for her in fact Faith had known very little about the fantastic fantasies Chairman Mao inflicted on his captive people so you get to follow right along with her as she digs deep enough to discover what was going on down there on the other side of the world After which you can judge for yourself whether the story that Mr Mosher has re told in chillingly matter of fact detail is a powerful indictment of abortion itself as an inhuman barbarity or just another tale of modern totalitarianism 2 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW To be sure Maoists are not the only humans who have a jaundiced view of other humans fanatical Greens too consider humanity itself the enemy and hunger for draconian measures to not merely control but reduce the world's population As it happens Mr Robert Whelan a London journalist is writing a book on the often strange relationships between Christian churches and the environmentalist movement which of course operates under its own credo in fact it's a competing religion Here he gives us a preview of his thesis specifically the notion of people as pollution consider for instance what the international Greenpeace has to say in a recruiting pamphlet Modern Man has made a rubbish tip of Paradise He has multiplied his numbers to plague proportions be sure that those responsible for such crimes against the better part of humanity deserve punishment which the Greens stand ready to dish out In truth Mr Whelan argues there is no reason to believe that population growth will make the environment worse any more than fewer people will make it better his own conclusion is We can have more people and less pollution provided only that we use the intelligence which God has given us to harness available resources and technologies Like Faith Abbott re China we learned a lot we didn't know from this one and you may too Sure and nobody can imagine green being an Irish problem but there is trouble in the Emerald Isle coming from those leading anti people people or as Mr Desmond Rushe calls them the international pro abortion lobby who see Ireland as the last significant obstacle to the achievement of total pan global victory for their Molochian cult To Irishmen like Rushe legalized abortion is an absurd prospect and yet it's possible that a combination of judicial bungling political cowardice liberal agenda hype and media trendiness may make an absurdity a fact of life As you see Mr Rushe minces no words in getting his own beliefs before you indeed after we recovered from reading his piece we had the urge to assure him that in addition to agreeing with his every word we haven't got a drop of Swedish or Dutch blood in us read him for yourself and you'll see why we wouldn't want him to think anything like that we're certainly glad he's on our side which should profit from his powerful prose We hope to get more of it soon But you need not wait for more good stuff next Mr William Murchison serves up another well done roast call it a Texas style barbecuing of that sacred cow Gay Rights which we think you will relish as much as we did It's time somebody put this vexed question er straight and Murchison does it with gusto despite all the undoubted political power gays have bought for themselves it's easier with no kids to put through college the Normal Majority remains un ready for the Queer Nation agenda With this issue we also welcome Mr Murchison as our new contributing editor which should guarantee a steady flow of his distinctive reportage FALL 1993 3

INTRODUCTION We need hardly add that unlike Murchison most journalists take a favorable if not fawning stance vis avis politically correct issues such as gay rights abortion et al while virtually ignoring the personal pain so often involved If there is such a thing as a post abortion syndrome you'd never know it from reading the news media Whereas it is surely no surprise to anyone not blinkered by ideological infallibilities that a woman knows what she has lost when she loses her own child at whatever age or for whatever reason Alas our Maria McFadden has suffered that experience she decided to write about it We hope her determination proved therapeutic and that most readers will find her story not only moving but also informative as we say not much gets published about such things nowadays although the number of women who have had similar losses must be legion Next we have what might be considered inside stuff that is it's not general circulation material but rather a look at what is going on fermenting is a better word within the religious community We were amused to note that Planned Parenthood recently did research into the question Who is likely to be anti abortion The answer costly we hope was religious people the more religious the more pro life we could have provided that revelation for free of course but no matter Our point is God fearing Americans were the most shocked by Roe v Wade and arguably the least prepared Who would have believed beforehand that the Supreme Court would give us the world's most liberal abortion law Although immediate resistance was expected from committed Roman Catholics indeed the pro abortionists tried to divide opponents by dubbing abortion a Catholic issue it came more slowly from the Protestant majority We have here two pieces that we think reflect the growing depth of resistance to Roe and to the continuing slaughter of innocents by the millions First Paul Mankowski S J ponders the moral responsibilities involved in indirect support for abortion providers via such charities as for instance United Way community funding How can it be justified when in fact one need not contribute It's the kind of question that can make us uneasy after all we give out of compassion for the poor and needy are we responsible for what actually happens to our money Father Mankowski thinks we are and you may well agree after you hear him out In fact his essay developed from a talk he gave to a citizens group in Rochester earlier this year Then Rev Paul Stallsworth provides an in depth report on the findings of an unusual assembly the ecumenical consultation on the Church and Abortion which took place at Princeton Theological Seminary in February 1992 It was indeed ecumenical with representatives of various Protestant churches as well as Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics in attendance all guests of the sponsoring Presbyterian pro life group Rev Stallsworth himself is a Methodist minister And the point of inquiry was How does abortion 4 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW affect the politics of the church What response should the church make to a society that has not only legalized but also legitimized abortion The discussion ranged widely into seldom explored territory as Stallsworth puts it No doubt some readers will find it territory that is as new to them as it is to us But that's our point abortion is causing a re thinking of many oncesettled notions to discover what the church should look like in the midst of an aborting society to quote Stallsworth again We found the fresh viewpoints most informative and think that you may as well Our final offering is intended to refresh loyal readers who have come with us thus far whereas we failed to give you something direct from Mr Steven Mosher's new book we do have some choice if you'll pardon the word selections from the latest by William F Buckley Jr True it's not a great deal given the wealth of good stuff in Happy Days Were Here Again which runs to almost 500 pages but the first parts concern us directly Buckley on the controversies that focus on the beginning and on the end of life and the others are just plain fun to read For instance his memorable piece on Mario Cuomo Cuomitis written back when New York's governor seemed the inevitable candidate for president And concluding with Happy Birthday to J S Bach a reverential tribute from a most devoted disciple We read a newspaper story the other day reporting an experiment in California students who listened to ten minutes of Mozart's piano music did significantly better on intelligence tests We don't doubt it but would add that what Mozart can do for the mind Bach's music does for the soul and we would expect Mr Buckley to second the notion surely it was largely to honor Bach that Buckley learned to play the harpsichord so impressively Read and enjoy The appendices that follow are as varied as the articles but all of them are related in one way or another For instance Cardinal John J O'Connor Appendix A recounts how the controversy over condom distribution in New York's public schools followed him to the Labor Day parade causing him to reflect on the question What are we doing to the young Teaching them some very bad lessons he concludes You will note that to make his point the Cardinal quotes from our William Murchison we're pleased to have provided such good ammunition Just as Safe Sex is a politically correct nostrum so is the equally deadly proposition that abortion is good for poor people Like the Cardinal Congressman Henry Hyde Appendix B has some very counter trendy things to ask about that such as whether compassion only masks the racial implications involved in the slaughter of unborn African American babies As he explains that question hit a nerve without question many population FALL 1993 5

INTRODUCTION control advocates have a eugenic agenda as well but nobody is supposed to say that in public so Mr Hyde caused quite a controversy when he did precisely that on the floor of the House Ironically those he most outraged are the very civil rights leaders who should be defending the poor victims In Appendix C we find that our friend Jo McGowan is faithfully fighting the battle in her adopted India her response to President Clinton's lifting of the ban on fetal research got featured Op Ed treatment in The Pioneer a venerable newspaper that began in the 1860s and once published Rudyard Kipling and the dispatches of a young correspondent named Winston Churchill It is hardly news that former President George Bush was ambivalent at best on abortion some would argue that his failure to support his own anti abortion stand helped greatly to defeat him now White House watcher for The New Republic Fred Barnes reports that Bill Clinton shares Bush's aversion to the abortion issue Appendix D In fact Barnes says the new President holds conflicting positions which is why he isn't fighting very hard to implement his pro abortion campaign promises Two other Washington columnists take on some currently vexed questions Suzanne Fields Appendix E argues that highschool girls who get pregnant ought to be stigmatized How else will they learn the hard lessons of life And Mona Charen Appendix F is appalled that homosexuality even so called bisexuality has become the fashionable fad among Washington highschoolers the Washington Post tells us so it must be true There is yet more counter trendiness even in painfully trendy Newsweek which recently ran a My Turn opinion column by Mr Wesley Smith Appendix G who doesn't think suicide is a noble act that endears the departed to loved ones left behind they are more likely to feel abused and betrayed Smith says It all makes one wonder If so many still hold traditional views in strong opposition to current moral fashions how did the Old Morality get displaced in the first place You will find a powerful part of the answer in Appendix H which gives you the full text of the landmark California Medicine editorial that rationalized the new ethic even before Roe v Wade legalized it For the record this is the fifth time we have reprinted that prophetic piece in this journal we ran it first in Volume I Number I perhaps we should have run it in every issue It may be the quintessential New Age manifesto a blueprint for the culture of death we have built for ourselves Next issue which will begin our 20th year we will try to bring you lighter fare but we can't promise meanwhile we hope you will have a good laugh at our little cartoons J P McFADDEN EDITOR 6 FALL 1993

TAKING "REMEDIAL MEASURES"

Taking Remedial Measures Faith Abbott When we were very young most of us were told that if we dug a hole deep enough we would come out in China Perhaps this grownup's joke was supposed to give us an idea of geography China was on the other side of the earth K remember wondering how you could actually dig through all that earth and if you did would you come out head or feet first K didn't spend much time on all this wondering though because China was so remote lit is not so remote now in the 1990s and as a friend said recently if you dug a hole through to China today you'd probably fall head or feet first into an abortion facility Planned Parenthood East Kn 1958 China began its Great Leap Forward In that same year my life took a great leap forward K got engaged to be married My great leap was a success China's a massive industrial development program intended to transform the country's economy overnight was not You could say China's Great Leap Forward backfired Kn that year 1958 a little Chinese girl and the other children in her third grade class were led out into the countryside armed with whistles pans washbasins and sticks and wok lids anything that would make a lot of noise so as to help rid the entire country of grain eating birds Not just a field trip this Chairman Mao had decided that sparrows ate too much grain so he launched a nationwide campaign to exterminate all birds from China's skies Of course the kids loved it silence was enforced in school but now they could make a tremendous din while having an outing in the country and knowing that they were playing an Kmportant Part in the Great Leap Forward Sure enough the din kept all the bird flocks airborne until they dropped dead from exhaustion millions of birds did die throughout China but the resultant infestation of insects caused grain losses far in excess of what the birds would have eaten More about this third grade child and her story later Chairman Mao's next Great Mea he had defined Communism as public cafeterias with free meals was to have everyone eat JFaith Abbott our dauntless contributing editor is now also our Resident Expert on China FALL 1993 7

FAITH ABBOTT out of the same big pot The third grade child and her little brother were in charge of meals for their family their father had died and their mother worked as a teacher all day and the kids took pride in shopping and cooking But when Chairman Mao ordered communal cafeterias to be established all across the country private cooking was forbidden Mao theorized that forcing his countrymen to eat together from the same big pot and work together in the same big fields would lead them to put the collective good above narrow self interest This plan backfired too the peasants eagerly filed into the cafeterias morning noon and night to eat their fill of free food But knowing that they would eat whether or not they workedthey would drag their feet back to the fields and spend their time sleeping off their heavy meals laboring as little as possible Eventually the cafeterias were all shut down At that time there was also a heavy emphasis on making steel When private cooking was outlawed families sacrificed their woks and other cooking utensils to the great smelting pot at the height of this campaign more than a hundred million able bodied men were at work at the smelters The 1958 harvest was bad Mao blamed this on poor weather conditions but the real cause was that so much of the harvest was left to rot in the fields In 1959 there was famine One early estimate was that more than 30 million people had died as a direct result of the Great Leap Forward The most recent estimate from a Party Secretary who served from 1982 until 1989 and who visited most of China's provinces and collected local estimates of the number of casualties in each puts the total number of dead at between 43 and 46 million making that famine the worst by far in human history So much for China's Great Leap Forward Despite the famine and other horrors China's population continued to grow If China were ever to leap forward economically and materially its leaders decided there would have to be far fewer babies born By 1981 the one child birth planning policy was in place nationallybut the child preferred by most couples was a boy boys are important to their aging parents girls when they get married become part of their husbands family China's current big boss Deng Xiaoping did not institute a new Great Leap Forward instead he ushered in an era of reform under his Four Modernizations these being agriculture industry science 8 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and technology There has indeed been a great leap forward into technology and now this is backfiring The ultrasound scanner a marvelous machine is available almost everywhere in the country It is a diagnostic machine and it is against government policy to use these scanners for sex selection doctors are officially banned from telling the parents the gender of a fetus But more and more ultrasound scanning machines are being installed all the time particularly in the rural township clinics where peasants have the most access to them The peasants say that it's not hard to find a doctor who will tell a mother the sex of the child she's carrying a gift of a carton of cigarettes will usually open the doctor's mouth And it's unlikely that the doctor will be caught Last year more than 12 percent of all female fetuses were aborted or otherwise unaccounted for that may not sound too alarming until you realize that this adds up to 1.7 million missing girls H this continues as it probably will in a society where bribery is rampant in the not too distant future there will not be enough mothers to produce sons A Western population specialist in Beijing said that The authorities recognize the problem and will try to do something about it but they will not succeed Ultrasound is all over and extremely difficult to control The third grade child of Mao's Great Leap forward grew into a woman despite famines and purges and a life threatening illness later she nearly died during childbirth Now she has told her story in a book by Steven Mosher A Mother's Ordeal One Woman's Fight Against China's One Child Policy published by Harcourt Brace this year Mr Mosher author of three previous books about China had lived for a year in a Chinese village where he'd witnessed the arrest and forced abortion of several dozen young women many of whom were six or more months along so he knew a great deal about family planning Chinese style before he met this woman Chi An not her real name of course When she and her husband then a visiting research scholar first asked for Mosher's help in San Diego in 1987 he knew little of her past other than that she had been ordered by Chinese officials to abort the child she had conceived in this country The idea that Chinese officials would try to enforce the one child policy on a Chinese couple living here rankled him and he became the prime mover in the fight to win political asylum for the family Mosher explains in his Author's Note that the more he learned about Chi FALL 1993 9

FAITH ABBOTT An's life the more he came to realize how unique her story was She had been trained as an abortionist but had been forced to have an abortion herself she had been bullied into signing a one child agreement yet had gone to work as a population control enforcer Here was the ultimate insider's account of China's family planning program Mosher writes a stranger than fiction story so dramatic that it simply begged to be told He urged Chi An to allow him to commit her experiences to paper and spent many hours interviewing her In order to present her story to the reader in as direct and unfiltered a way as possible he chose the unconventional approach of writing in the first person Their conversations were taped entirely in Chinese Mosher translated them into English and the resulting book reads like an autobiography and is as absorbing as a novel In 1965 when Chi An was fifteen she was admitted to nursing school The students were about to take their year end exams when the Cultural Revolution broke out the students were told by Chairman Mao to Stop Classes Foment Revolution Exams were canceled and the students spent their days holding political rallies and street marches It wasn't until April 1968 that they returned to regular classes and by this time birth control was an important part of the curriculum I was surprised to read that Chairman Mao had originally disapproved of birth planning he viewed it as tantamount to genocide The People's Daily of course followed his lead this was in the early 50sand condemned birth control as a way of slaughtering the Chinese people without drawing blood the people are the most precious of all categories of capital But after the famine Mao changed his mind and the policy on having children gradually became stricter The last part of the birth planning course completed just before Chi An's graduation in 1968 was on abortion To pass it the student nurses had to perform a suction abortion under a doctor's supervision in preparation for the abortions they would later be expected to perform on their own Chi An describes her first time See if we have got everything the doctor ordered after I finished Following his directions I took the collection bottle and poured its contents into a shallow pan Then I used water to rinse off the blood and smaller particles that clouded the bottom of the pan Now look closely the doctor said It is important that we have got all the stuff out lO FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW I looked into the pan to find that the stuff consisted of the remains of what had been a few minutes earlier a thirteen week old fetus I could make out the remains of arms and legs and trunk and skull I tried to piece them back together in my mind to see if there were any missing parts Most of the pieces were so battered and bloody they were not recognizably human Then my eyes locked upon a perfect little hand less than half a centimeter long I started at four tiny fingers and a tiny opposed thumb complete with tiny translucent fingernails And I knew what I had done She knew what she had done Why then did she continue To understand it helps to know something about brainwashing Chinesestyle Chairman Mao reigned supreme He was the Conscience of the nation Reverence for him was cult like Chi An says we came to obey his instructions unquestioningly When the Cultural Revolution began in earnest Mao took control of the People's Daily and overnight transformed it into his personal mouthpiece In bold red type across the top of page one were such slogans as CHAIRMAN MAO Is THE RED SUN IN OUR HEARTS ESTABLISH CHAIRMAN MAO'S ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY WE WILL DESTROY WHOEVER OPPOSES CHAIRMAN MAO There was a pledge of allegiance to Mao and a ritual as fixed as a military drill followed by Devotions Chi An says When it was reported that some Beijing Red Guards prayed to Mao three times a day we promptly did likewise asking for guidance from Chairman Mao in the morning harmonizing our actions with His teachings at noon and reporting everything to Him at night Mao was invoked as the brightest the greatest the most wonderful leader in the history of the world Thou has started the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with thine own hands And they would chant the Maoist creed Whatever road thou wouldst we travel we shall follow we shall follow thee closely and carry thy Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution through to the final victory Chairman Mao place thy trust in us We shall always carry out thine orders And so on As the propaganda war intensified so did the various factions efforts to outdo each other in showing reverence Chi An's first experiences as a graduate nurse were happy she and her medical team were sent to work in rural areas helping to diagnose and treat the common ailments of the peasantry They inoculated children and gave antibiotics Chi An herself saved the life of a young girl who had pneumonia FALL 1993 11

FAITH ABBOTT But in 1972 premier Zhou Enlai tightened the screws on birth control which it was decreed was essential for socialist revolution and socialist construction New regulations were formulated and a great new campaign begun its watchwords were late spaced and few Late referred to late marriage not before about age 25 spaced meant children born at least four years apart few meant no more than two children You the young nurses were told will help in this campaign by sterilizing and inserting IUDs in rural women Officials of the Women's Federation an arm of the Communist Party were barraging local women with this new message One is not too few two will perfectly do and three are too many for you In the village squares posters proclaimed that The struggle for birth control is an important aspect of the class struggle Those who oppose it are class enemies Young mothers were informed at mass meetings that large families were now prohibited holdouts were paid house calls and told that if their first child had been born within the last four years they must have an IUD implanted if they already had two or more children they must be sterilized Gone laments Chi An were our days as itinerant doctors traveling from village to village treating peasants for every ailment under the sun Now we rarely left the commune medical clinic where we performed an endless series of sterilizations and IUD insertions We no longer used our portable X ray machines to diagnose cases of tuberculosis but only to search out missing IUDs At first when women began coming in for sterilizations Chi An believed they were doing so of their own free will Having been taught not to question government policy she automatically pushed the question of coercion out of her mind But ever new regulations hit her personally in 1975 when she and Wei Xin also a pseudonym were married This was marriage Chinese style first you had to get letters of permission from your units then you had to be registered at the local police station Before your marriage application was accepted you had to listen to Our Great Leader Chairman Mao's document concerning the official policy on birth planning It was not sufficient to listen and to agree in general You must demonstrate a positive attitude toward the birth planning policy announced the woman official You must obtain a quota from your unit before you get pregnant And you must contracept until you receive a quota No exceptions are allowed to any of these conditions You must abide by each and everyone of them Do you agree 12 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW It's only a piece of paper Wei Xin whispered to Chi An as he signed the two child agreement and pushed it over for her to sign She thought that perhaps by the time they had children this policy like so many would have been forgotten or unenforced so she signed her name too and then they were legally married But she had a sense of foreboding X felt as if I were signing the rights to my children away ITt was Chi An's mother who got them a birth quota she managed to wangle it from a friend who was head of their Street Committee There was no time to lose for more than two hundred families the quota was eight babies for the next year The woman to whom the quota rightfully belonged was simply and secretly bumped off the list it wasn't known that she was already two months pregnant When Chi An found this out she was remorseful she probably wouldn't get pregnant in time couldn't she give this other woman her quota No Her mother reminded her that it was against regulations to transfer a quota from one couple to another why if that were allowed people would be buying and selling them on the black market Yes her mother agreed it did seem unnecessarily harsh to tell someone to destroy a growing baby for lack of a quota But that is what the authorities will do as soon as they find out her condition They will instruct her to take remedial measures Chi An did manage to conceive and bear a child within the time limit Two weeks after she and her baby boy were released from the hospital she was approached by a population control worker and asked to sign a one child agreement Under the current regulation she was told if you agree to have no more children you will receive a monthly bonus of five yuan and a washbasin And if she signed it would be best for her to undergo sterilization just to make sure there are no accidents Chi An said she'd consider it but her husband had mentioned that he might like a second child In that case she had two choices insertion of an IUD or birth control pills She managed to avoid both she had a baby to nurse and the pills would reduce her milk supply and because of her ill treatment in the hospital she had a uterine infection and could not wear an IUD The population control worker reminded her that remedial measures are required for those who violate the four year waiting period but thenamazingly left her alone Nursing mothers do sometimes become pregnant and Chi An did FALL 1993 13

FAITH ABBOTT when her son was seven months old She tried to hide her condition but was caught and continually harangued The population control official said We must take care of your condition without delay The Street Committee official said Because of my friendship with your mother I did you a favor I gave you a quota out of turn If you have a second baby outside the quota system I will be criticized You owe it to me to take remedial measures Chi An's unborn baby's life was at stake she felt sure it was a girl yet she was terrified at the idea of playing cat and mouse with Party officials Her political conditioning had taught her to take the path of least resistance When the wind blows the grass bends had become a byword of her generation and she knew from experience that Those who did not bend to the will of the Party were broken by it The authorities were after her husband too This is sheer coercion he said but How can an egg break a rock She had the abortion Immediately afterward the population control official led her into the post operative room gesturing that she was to climb up onto the bed She hadn't the strength she fell to the floor on hands and knees and sobbed Please forgive me Heaven if you can hear me please forgive me for what I have done In 1979 Chi An and other young nurses from her ward were summoned to a mass meeting There seemed nothing new at first in what the Party secretary was saying Having children is not a question that we can afford to let each family decide for itself It is a question that should be decided at the national level China is a socialist country This means that the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the state She had heard all this before But then Secretary Wang fixed us with a stern glance and then slowly and deliberately said We here in Shenyang city must set an example for areas of the province more backward in family planning The city government responding to the call of the provincial authorities to reduce the birthrate has come to the following decision the bearing of second or higher order children is to stop immediately No couple in Shenyang city is to be allowed more than one child This one child policy goes into effect today We must all wholeheartedly support the new policy of the Shenyang city government I want all women of child bearing age to sign a one child agreement They were of course to volunteer Prizes would be given The first group of volunteers after sterilization received transistor radios and one hundred yuan a combined value equivalent to three months 14 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW salary for most of them The next group got a set of bedsheets Chi An was still holding out She was told that she would have to agree sooner or later that if she waited till the end she would become very passive This was another instance of Chinese Communist Party double speak What she meant by passive was that in the end the pressure would grow so intense that I would have no recourse but to sign a one child agreement The Party preferred to maintain a pretense of choice when it imposed its policies on the people but in the end they would stop at nothing to enforce compliance The third group received a set of dish towels the fourth and fifth groups got nothing Despite the constant harassment Chi An bore up well until the official dropped her bombshell She had been talking with the population control cadre over at Shenyang University I understand that your husband has qualified to go overseas Do you know that your continuing refusal to sign a one child agreement may affect his chances Chi An agreed to sign but only on the condition that she would not have a tubal ligation by this time the official was so eager to report 100 percent compliance to the Party secretary that she agreed Chi An's husband did fly to the United States in 1980 and Chi An managed to get transferred from the sanitarium to a factory health clinic the factory was a small city unto itself with cradle to grave security regular hours medical benefits day care centers time for Chi An to spend with her son When the job was offered she understood that she would be involved in family planning activities Though I didn't relish the thought of having to enforce the one child policy by now my envy of women with more than one child had hardened into something akin to resentment And so Chi An became a population control worker trained to enforce the one child policy through peer counseling pressuring uncooperative women to think clear about their condition She refused to do late term abortions but helped with them she hunted down women who were known to be illegally pregnant she helped administer forced sterilizations she had to watch even to assistdoctors who gave lethal injections at birth How does she justify all this At the time she explains she was actually convinced that China's population problem was so serious that individual desires had to be suppressed for the good of society as a whole that those who had more than the permitted number FALL 1993 15

FAITH ABBOTT of children were holding China back But she was secretly jealous of them It made good economic sense to me that China had to control its population in order to modernize But at the same time I remained generally sympathetic to what these sad faced women were going through Had I nourished the slightest hope that one day I might be permitted a second child I would have been more so As things were I was convinced that I was doing them a kindness by helping them to accept as I had the inevitable She was an excellent manipulator Well she would say in her most sympathetic manner You appear to have exceeded your allotted number of children I too once conceived an over quota child I too had to undergo remedial measures I know it is a difficult thing to do But it is necessary for the sake of our fatherland Are you willing There were the pleaders They would go down on hands and knees and beg Please allow my baby to live Please spare the life of my child At first Chi An was sympathetic but then she became irritated Why couldn't these pleaders understand that the clinic workers were not personally responsible The doctors were only following orders she herself was only a minor functionary Besides she too had been compelled to have an abortion she too had only one child Why should anyone be allowed to have more children than she did I hardened my heart she says against such women and began rebuking them Why do you insist on having a second child Don't you know that it isn't fair to those who have only one Some officials were doing more than just following orders for the sake of the fatherland At the beginning of 1984 the head of the district birth planning office well known to be a fanatic about the one child policy called a meeting of all the birth planning workers in her district This woman desperately wanted to be selected as the model birth planning worker of the province she would win a promotion and prizes She had placed only second before and was furious that another city had been selected as the province's model birth planning city The legal limit for births in the cities had been 0.5 percent it had been tough work day and nightto ensure that no more than five babies were born for everyone thousand people at the factory But the prize winning director had allowed only one birth per thousand Therefore it was announced that all quotas would be reduced by 80 percent and there would 16 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW be no exceptions Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping has instructed us in order to reduce the population use whatever means you must but do it So then many activists struggling to meet his new quota began coercion with a vengeance Expectant mothers were escorted to clinics as soon as they were discovered to be pregnant there were rumors of women being bound gagged and aborted even though there was supposedly a provision in China's family planning law that forbade the use of force The rumors were fact the law was simply ignored Chi An herself had taken part in force she alone knew the likely hiding place of one of her best friends who was illegally pregnant she found her and turned her in After that Chi An suffered acute remorse about that friend and about all the hundreds of women she had in her words driven to despair and she made a decision no longer would she force women to become unwilling accomplices in the abortion of their own children No longer would she brutalize women in the name of population control Somehow she would find a way to distance herself from this dreadful work forever When she heard from her husband in New York that it was now possible for Chinese spouses to get exit permits and visas she requested a two year leave of absence for herself and her son lit took half a year to get through the maze of government offices that had to approve her plans background investigations delayed the issuance of her passport and her exit visa was held up when it was discovered that she wanted to take her son with her no one at the provincial department of foreign affairs actually said so but it was obvious that they were concerned that if she were allowed to exit China with her only child she would never return She thought their fears foolish There was no doubt in my own mind that Wei Xin and K would return to our fatherland She had hopes that upon her return she would have become too valuable to waste on the onechild policy perhaps she could be assigned to teach in a nursing school or perhaps by that time the one child policy would have been relaxed Her superior at the factory had been reluctant to approve her absence only after she and her husband had written letters promising that she would return to the factory did he agree and even then to make sure that her IUD was still in place he FALL 1993 17

FAITH ABBOTT ordered her to join the line of women workers waiting for their regular three month X rays Chi An was furious and silently fumed Do you think that I a population control official myself will have my IUD secretly removed and conceive an illegal child while I am abroad In 1987 Chi An now living with her husband and son in San Diego had an operation to remove a tumor Apparently the surgery removed something else as well As he was doing the ultrasound the doctor had turned to me smiling sure that he was the bearer of good news There is no sign of an IUD but there is every indication of a baby I kept my face expressionless as I had learned to do in the presence of authority but I felt as though I had fallen into a well I am pregnantdespite being thirty eight years old despite wearing an IUD which is somehow missing despite my plans to go to nursing school as soon as my English improves despite my intention to return to China to help my backward countrydespite everything by accident I am pregnant At first she felt a wonderful sense of freedom No one was going to report her to the authorities she could keep the baby if she wanted to But then reality set in she could not take two children back to China without subjecting them all to heavy penalties She would have to do what the Party expected what she had demanded from so many other women she would end this unexpected irregular illegal pregnancy Without telling her husband about her condition she went to have an abortion But at the very last minute when she was already on the table with her feet in the stirrups she changed her mind It was her husband's child too what if he wanted this baby She managed to disentangle herself rolled off the table and crouched naked on the floor Don't touch me she shouted We want this baby The doctor looked at me in reproach at my change of heart a look I knew all too well from my own work with pleaders and began peeling off his rubber gloves I realized that I had won There would be no abortion She went home and told her husband I am pregnant I went in for an abortion but I couldn't go through with it His face lit up and he said Perhaps we can get permission from the authorities to have a second child after all we are in America now Perhaps they will make an exception to the one child policy The next day Chi An wrote to her factory's population control office asking if the one child policy applied to couples living outside China The reply stated that second children are absolutely 18 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW banned for state employees no matter where they might be stationed And there was chilling news about the special government contract about to be awarded to the factory U we exceed our birth allowance by even one baby we will lose this contract the woman responsible for bringing this on her comrades will be dealt with severely The authorities were already harassing Chi An's mother They tell me you have gotten pregnant in America she wrote They also said that if you don't get an abortion your factory will not be selected as an outstanding unit in the field of population control If this happens there will be unimaginable consequences for our entire family Chi An was convinced that this letter had been dictated to her mother by the population control officials standing over her Another letter from the factory made it clear that if Chi An were to return pregnant even in her eighth or ninth month she would absolutely not be allowed to have her child The message was loud and clear You MUST FIX YOUR PROBLEM lin a complete reversal of her earlier role Chi An realized it was Kwho was carrying an illegal child When General Secretary Zhao insisted on remedial measures for women pregnant outside the plan he was talking about me The frightened troubled faces of the women Khad hounded in the past were about to become my own Many couples at the factory already blamed her for the loss of a child if they were to lose their bonuses and raises as well all because she had insisted on having the second child that she had denied them what might they do Someone just might seek to avenge their child's death An eye for an eye she thought a baby for a baby My newborn would not be safe in the factory nursery or anywhere else for that matter After much agonizing Chi An and her husband made the decision to cut their ties to their homeland and to apply for political asylum and this became a cause celebre Chi An explains that almost nothing angers China's leaders more than the Western practice of granting asylum to political dissidents for it causes them to lose face in the eyes of the world State Department officials felt themselves to be under considerable pressure to placate Beijing immigration officials seized on a narrow interpretation of the law arguing that resisting Beijing's family planning policies did not amount to political dissent and was therefore not sufficient ground for asylum Deportation was imminent but an official in the Justice Department got involved and after a brief tussle with the Immigration and Naturalization FALL 1993 19

FAITH ABBOTT Service he had deportation proceedings put on hold To establish the well founded fear of persecution required by law this official needed affirmative answers to two questions Now that the child had been born they'd had a daughter would they still be persecuted if they were returned to China And could their refusal to obtain an abortion be considered an act of political dissent By this time their visas had expired and only the United States Attorney General could overrule the INS And this is when Steve Mosher got busy He had articles about the case published in the Washington Post and Human Events the Post article was reprinted in Reader's Digest and Mosher added a P S asking that readers an estimated 27 million write letters to the attorney general Letters to the Justice Department began pouring in by the thousands And the rest you could say is history in one of Ed Meese's last acts as U S Attorney General asylum was granted and President Bush later signed an executive order giving sanctuary to all Chinese fleeing the one child policy And a happy P S to this Chi An's mother was allowed to join the family in America On September 20 Jane Fonda actress activist fitness queen and now Good Will Ambassador to the United Nation's Population Fund told a packed house at the UN that opposition to birth control by religious institutions is outdated and hazardous to Earth's health Powerful vested interests including the Catholic Churchwant us to ignore contraception as a necessary part of family planning said Ms Fonda warning that the continuing population explosion is producing more than the planet can feed A spokesman for New York's Catholic Archdiocese called her remarks silly I think Chi An would agree There had been a time when she agreed with senior Party officials about China's being such a poor country that people would not be allowed to have as many children as they wanted Ten people cannot eat from a rice pot intended for two Even after she had rejected forced abortion and sterilization she remained convinced that China's population was the number one obstacle to its prosperity She no longer believes that to be true She has learned that the wealth of the United States was created by individuals not by the government also that most of the countries of the developed world 20 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Japan Taiwan and much of Western lEurope are more densely populated than China yet despite this overcrowding none of these countries suffer from labor shortages and she asked herself Why is it that only poor countries are defined as having too many people Could it be that China doesn't have a people problem so much as it has an economic one And could it be that Chi An knows more than Jane Despite Fonda's fondness for Red regimes remember she was dubbed Hanoi Jane when 20 years ago she protested U S actions in Vietnam from the enemy's capital she's never lived under one In my experience writes Chi An the Chinese Communist Party has produced little but misery in its four plus decades in power tens of millions of my countrymen have been starved to death in famines Tens of millions have been tormented in repeated political campaigns Again and again large sectors of the population the capitalists the landlords the intellectuals the students at Tiananmen Square have been singled out and persecuted for problems largely of the Party's own making She now sees that China's continuing ills from poverty and hunger and health problems to overcrowding and environmental degradationare in large part the direct result of nearly a half century of Party misrule How convenient for the authorities to have a prestigious foreign theory overpopulation that allows them once again to shift the blame onto the Chinese people 2000 Olympics Go to Sydney In Surprise Setback for China headlined a front page story in the New York Times calling the decision a major political setback for the Chinese Government and stating that in the end lBeijing's candidacy appears to have fallen victim to China's human rights record and arguments by Western politicians and human rights groups that a Government that continues to repress dissidents should not be rewarded with the honor of holding the 2000 Olympics A spokesman for the Human Rights Watch a New York based group applauded the International Olympics Committee's decision which he said puts the Chinese leadership on notice that they will pay a price for the continued abuse of their own citizens What about the continued killing of their own future citizens lBeijing continues to deny that its controversial population control program is based on coercion says Chi An but the facts tell a different story the technical policy on birth control remains in force mandating IUD insertions for women with one child sterilization for couples FALL 1993 21

FAITH ABBOTT with two children and abortion for women pregnant outside the plan Couples who violate the policy are threatened and persecuted The Party Chi An says is again making use of this ploy in the one child campaign in effect holding women and children responsible for all of China's problems In the West there is a name for such deception It is called blaming the victim That is one in the West phrase Chi An understands but I wonder if when she first came to this country there weren't Western phrases that she found confusing and bewildering Such as pro choice Wouldn't that seem to mean to Chinese ears choosing to conceive and to have your baby And shouldn't reproductive rights mean having the freedom to well reproduce And did it seem strange that people who are anti abortion are often dubbed by those in the pro choice movement anti choice Yet pro choice China is an anti choice nation And I wonder what she thought of our euphemisms for the unborn baby China has its own euphemisms such as remedial measures but in Chi An's story the fetus is never referred to as a product of conception or just a blob of tissues or even a potential child It is always a baby or a child that the woman was or was not permitted to have You could give the Chinese credit for calling a spade a spade but any honesty on the part of the abortion enforcers is mightily offset by their brutality if an illegal baby isn't dismembered within the womb and slips out alive it is immediately given through the soft part of its head a lethal injection of formaldehyde Or it is strangled strangling is the preferred method in some regions The mother hears her baby's first cries then silence Even safe in America Chi An could still hear those cries But then she and her husband took instructions at a Catholic church in due course she says I made my first confession and felt at peace with myself now the only baby's cries that would wake me in the night were those of my newborn daughter She resolved to atone for my past crimes by helping others but one question persisted How could I help the women still in China Her answer was to tell her story to Steve Mosher however painful that might be It must have been very painful just as Mosher's skillful retelling is painful to read But it is a tale the reader will not forget and should it be widely read in China it might do what Chairman Mao could not change the minds of a generation 22 FALL 1993

GREENS AND PEOPLE

Greens and People Robert Whelan In searching for a new enemy to unite us we came up with the idea that pollution the threat of global warming water shortages famine and the like would fit the bill The real enemy then is humanity itself The Club of Rome 1991 The population controllers had been arguing since the 1950s that global population growth would usher in every imaginable economic and social evil and that wars poverty and famine would increase until this Pandora's box could be shut by the universal provision of birth control to ensure small families for all but especially for parents in the Third World The idea that virtually every problem in the world came down to overpopulation proved to be so easy to promote that it quickly became established as part of the popular orthodoxy Overpopulation was regarded as a fact one of those things that everyone knows However a strange thing happened As the years went by global population increased more rapidly than at any time in history doubling between the 1950s and the 1980s from approximately 2.5 billion to 5 billion Xn spite of this the day of doom did not arrive none of the terrifying forecasts of the effects of population growth came true The first scare story on the back of which the population control movement had been launched was the prospect of famines These were regarded as inevitable as the world's population would outgrow the capacity of the earth to feed us all However the food supply proved not only equal to keeping up with the greatest increase in global population in history it kept way ahead The next big scare was that natural resources would run out Xn 1972 the Club of Rome published its famous report The Limits to Growth predicting the exhaustion of natural resources By dividing known reserves by consumption the report gave dates by which major resources would be finished Some of the dates have passed and the world is now richer in resources than ever before Furthermore the advent of new technology has made us less and less dependent on physical resources For example the silicone for silicone chips Robert Whelan currently based in London writes on population issues This article is an extract from his forthcoming study of the relationship between Christianity and environmentalism called The Cross and the Rainforest it is printed here with the author's permission FALL 1993 23

ROBERT WHELAN is found in sand to which there is no realistic limit Empirical evidence also made nonsense of the notion that population growth causes poverty Countries like Japan Hong Kong Taiwan South Korea and Singapore experienced spectacular economic growth concurrent with rapid population growth which gave them some of the highest population densities in the world Even the President of the World Bank a body committed for many years to reducing population growth was forced to tell a gathering of the International Planned Parenthood Federation The evidence is clear that economic growth rates in excess of population growth rates can be achieved and maintained by both developed and developing countries By the beginning of the 1980s the rationale for population control was beginning to wear a bit thin However by this time the population control movement was a multi billion dollar industry employing tens of thousands of population planners and financed largely by Western taxpayers money In order to stay in work the population controllers had to find new arguments on which to base their programmes At this critical moment the Green bandwagon started to roll downhill It proved to be the salvation of the population lobby because if more human beings don't mean more poverty or famine or unemployment they certainly do mean more human activity If this activity could be shown to be of itself destructive and undesirable then the population controllers were back in business People as pollution In 1985 an umbrella organisation was formed called Common Ground International Its aim was to bring together environmental organisations with population organisations on the pretext that whilst they had in the past worked separately their concerns were now so similar that it made sense to join forces Their first project was a touring exhibition called Let's Get It Together Aimed mainly at children it comprised a series of panels blaming population growth for every imaginable horror including child abuse Visitors were greeted at the entrance to the exhibition by full length mirrors emblazoned with the legend You Are Looking At the Most Dangerous Form of Life on Earth The children were of course looking at themselves This set the tone for the arguments for population control which we were to hear in the years ahead In striving to make population 24 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW into an environmental issue the population lobbyists argued that the population explosion was the environmental problem and that nothing would improve on the environmental front until it was dealt with This was the origin of the idea that people are a form of pollution or popullution Jonathon Porritt leader of the British ecology movement summarised the philosophy as living is polluting which is to say that anything we do will make the world a worse place The arguments for population control fell on fertile ground in the environmental movement Green literature is shot through with the most negative images of human beings who are depicted as a cancer or a plague upon the face of the earth A recruiting leaflet produced by Greenpeace has this to say about the species of man Modern Man has made a rubbish tip of Paradise He has multiplied his numbers to plague proportions caused the extinction of 500 species of animals ransacked the planet for fuels and now stands like a brutish infant gloating over his meteoric rise to ascendancy on the brink of the war to end all wars and of effectively destroying this oasis of life in the solar system The cumulative effect of these degrading and revolting images of human beings is to de sensitize the reader When it has become possible to regard people of whom one personally disapproves as a low or degenerate form of life then drastic solutions to deal with the problem of other people become acceptable In his fascinating book The Intellectuals and the Masses John Carey has shown that this tendency to dehumanise groups of people by the use of pejorative terms such as vermin scum swarming insects spawn etc has an impressive intellectual pedigree It was a commonplace amongst a number of leading figures in European culture at the end of the last century and the beginning of this and Carey is able to illustrate his argument with quotations from Bernard Shaw H G Wells Virginia Woolf E M lForster and many others Carey attributes the revulsion felt by these people towards the mass to the fear of the emerging popular culture of mass circulation newspapers radio and cinema The intellectuals were not in control of these mass media and felt that their position as guardians of JEuropean culture was under threat They therefore amused themselves by devising methods to exterminate the rabble According to D H lawrence To learn plainly to hate mankind to detest the spawning human being that is the only cleanliness now If I had my way I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace He was supported in his views by Bernard Shaw FALL 1993 25

ROBERT WHELAN If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it John Carey argues that this use of de humanising language was copied by Hitler when describing the Jews and that this was a factor in persuading people to accept the final solution In the same way the images of human beings in Green literature as a horde of rats an uncontrolled virus and an infestation on the planet must predispose people towards accepting dramatic methods of population control Many people have been persuaded that human beings are such a bad lot it would be better for the planet if there were fewer of themor even none at all In 1989 the Sunday Times gave over a whole issue of its magazine section to environmental doom mongering carrying the headline The World Is Dying and rammed the message home with the sub heading You Damage the Earth Just by Living on It Even The Economist could thunder in an editorial The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing That is not to say that the rise of human civilisation is insignificant but that there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run How to lose people Against this background of anti human prejudice it is easy to grasp the Greens enthusiasm for population control programmes At the extreme edge we find the ecoterrorist group Earth First and others calling for reductions in the human population almost amounting to extinction Massive human diebacks would be good It is our duty to cause them It is our species duty relative to the whole to eliminate 90 per cent of our numbers Some have even welcomed AIDS as a means of achieving this Earth First spokesman John Davis believes that human beings as a species have no more value than slugs Nearer home the British Green Party calls for a reduction of the UK population from the present 57 million to between 35 40 million Although Sara Parkin former family planning nurse with Brook Advisory Centres and architect of the population policy insists that this would not involve coercion it is difficult to imagine how else such a dramatic drop in numbers could be achieved There is certainly no historical precedent for it It is also disquieting that the book A Green Manifesto by activists 26 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Sandy Irvine and Alec Ponton which is recommended reading for Green Party members advocates payments for periods of non pregnancy tax benefits for families with fewer than two children sterilisation bonuses withdrawal of maternity and other benefits after a second child larger pensions for people with fewer than two children an end to infertility research and treatment and a more realistic approach to abortion On the international front the authors claim that Help given to regimes opposed to population policies is counter productive and should cease They are the true enemies of life and do not merit support So too are those religions which do not actively support birth control Green governments would reluctantly have to challenge head on such damaging beliefs Irvine and Ponton also quote approvingly American population guru Kingsley Davis who said If having too many children were considered as great a crime against humanity as murder rape and thievery we would have no qualms about taking freedom away fhis sort of rhetoric does not encourage readers to put too much trust in Green claims that population reduction will be achieved without coercion On one point we must agree with the Greens human beings certainly do affect their environment You can discern human settlements from the air by their straight lines and curves We shape the natural world to make it fit our needs Our human ingenuity enables us to create order out of chaos and to plan build and invest for the future in a way which would be impossible for even the highest species of the brute creation fhis capacity for making the world comfortable is something of which human beings used to be proud and of which they should still be proud It reflects the wondrous gift of reason which the Creator gave to man alone amongst his creation fhe almost complete domination which we have achieved over the rest of the natural order reflects our special position in the creation Unlike any other created thing we were made in God's image to eventually spend eternity with him God gave to Adam complete command over the rest of the natural order and he was even more explicit with Noah after the Hood And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the air upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea into your hand they are delivered Gen 9 1 2 In what amounts to a very remarkable reversal of traditional values FALL 1993 27

ROBERT WHELAN the Greens see human beings as most successful when they do the least For example an article praising tribal wisdom in People and the Planet the magazine of the International Planned Parenthood Federation had this to say of Amazonian Indians Such people walk lightly on the landscape with such success that outsiders often consider their habitats a wilderness as if no people had ever lived there emphasis added The same view was expressed by Edward Goldsmith the founder of The Ecologist in his book The Way Ecologically the temporary settlements of nomads are the most desirable because they have the smallest impact on the environment He goes on to quote the anthropologist W E H Stanner who claimed that Australian Aborigines make less impact on the environment than beavers who build dams and termites who build nests If bugs are now being held up to us as role models then we have clearly come a long way from the biblical view of man as the lord of creation The downgrading of human beings and the elevation of animals is more than an intellectual exercise It has had profound consequences for the well being of certain groups of people including the unborn Greens and abortion We have witnessed throughout the last twenty years a growmg movement to establish rights for animals which have been legally guaranteed Throughout the Western world a plethora of laws have been passed to protect whales seals birds of prey spotted owls and natterjack toads There is scarcely any animal or insect species which has not found its constituency of human supporters International agreements often reached as a result of massive media coverage featuring dramatic pictures of bleeding animal corpses have severely restricted the hunting of seals and whales The lobby for a worldwide ban on the ivory trade has been successful in spite of the fact that countries which permit the trade such as Zimbabwe and South Africa have increased their herds of elephants considerably and the fur trade in Britain is on the verge of extinction due to animal rights activists Those who disturb colonies of bats or the nests of the condor eagle can face stiff fines and even prison sentences At the same time abortion which for hundreds of years was regarded as murder has become widely accepted as a normal part of Western lifestyles Despite the fact that advances in embryology and fetology have established beyond doubt that the baby in the womb is alive 28 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and human from the moment of conception the Western nations have almost all taken steps to remove legal protection from the unborn The child in the womb no longer enjoys the most basic of all human rights the right to his own life Abortion has led to the acceptance of practices so barbaric that they would have been regarded as unthinkable only thirty years ago These include the trade in human parts from aborted fetuses the use of living human embryos for experimental purposes and the cannibalising of aborted babies for fetal material to patch up adult patients suffering from conditions such as Parkinson's Disease Is it a co incidence that animal rights have increased as human rights have decreased or are these two things linked Are they in fact both part of the same equation which involves a radical re assessment of the value which we place on human beings in the order of creation When the Australian Senate set up a Select Committee to enquire into the use of human embryos for experiments it received evidence from Professor Roger Short of the Australian Academy of Science He maintained that the traditional protocols of carrying out experiments on non human higher primates like gorillas and orangutans could no longer be followed because they are endangered species Human embryos were regarded as useful because we are not endangered Although Green parties in different countries do not espouse exactly the same policies they appear to be united in one important respecttheir support for abortion If human beings are really a form of pollution a sort of cancer on the face of the earth then it makes sense to cut the cancer out Hence the attraction of the abortionist's knife to the Greens lP'oplllllaanorru amI ahe ell1lVnrOilumelllltt I have argued so far that the demeaning view of man as a form of pollution which is put forward by Greens is incompatible with Christianity because Christians believe that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God 1 0 describe man as a pollutant is therefore a form of blasphemy However there are many Christians who do not subscribe to this view of man as pollution but who are still genuinely concerned that population growth is damaging the environment After all more people put out more rubbish And if population growth has to be slowed down or reversed how are Christians to square that with FALL 1993 29

ROBERT WHELAN God's command to be fruitful and multiply Gen 1 28 Is it true that as some Greens claim the Bible was written for a less crowded world and cannot be taken literally now We therefore need to address this important question of whether or not population growth makes the environment better or worse It has to be admitted that the idea that population growth will make the environment worse has a certain logical appeal More people will consume more resources they will require more houses more power supplies more cars How will the planet cope Environmental problems like most of the problems which are blamed on population growth are certainly real enough problems but they are being attributed to the wrong causes Like poverty famine and unemployment which have all been blamed on the population explosion they are basically political and economic in origin To have a good environment you need two things the political will to tackle the problem and the level of resources to pay for the solution Countries which are rich and free will therefore always have better environments than countries which are poor and oppressed An important addition has been made to our understanding of the relationship between politics and the environment by American economist Mikhail Bernstam In his monograph The Wealth of Nations and the Environment published by the Institute for Economic Affairs he argues conclusively that the issues of pollution and resource consumption are directly linked to the political and economic structures of countries Illustrating his argument with statistics from official sources he shows that the innate tendency of socialist or planned economies is to consume more resources create less output and produce more pollution The tendency of capitalist or market economies is to consume fewer resources to create more output and generate less pollution During the 1970s and 1980s there were falls in the per capita energy consumption of the market economies of Europe and the USA while per capita consumption was steadily rising in the USSR We have to remember that living standards were higher in the West and rising especially in terms of all the consumer goods we take for granted which use energy like cars videos and computers while the standard of living in the USSR was much lower and falling throughout the period We were able to make less energy do much much more Bernstam shows that these trends cannot be attributed to the rise of the Green movement and the rash of environmental legislation 30 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW which characterised the 1970s and especially the 1980s they go back much further He also manages to counter the familiar Green argument that we must accept economic stagnation because further growth would mean more pollution Bernstam argues that as economic growth is impossible without technological progress and as that technological progress cannot but eventually reduce resource use and environmental discharges then long term economic growth is impossible without environmental improvements Bernstam warns that the future of world environmental conditions depends to a significant extent on the choice of economic system in developing countries Put simply this means that the spread of market economies will lead to a better global environment and the spread of socialist or centrally planned economies will make it worse This is a prescription that the Greens would find revolting given their deep seated hostility towards markets Good news mm Africa Africa is a continent which is frequently held up by the population control environmental lobby as an example of the horrors of population growth More people are equated with more poverty and a more degraded environment H is therefore doubly significant that the most important work which has recently emerged to squash these assumptions has come from Africa In December 1992 the Overseas Development Institute published an important study of the Machakos District of Kenya by Michael Mortimore and Mary Tiffen The authors studied reports on the area going back to the 1930s and found that the enormous increase in population by more than five times since the 1940s coincided with great improvements in agriculture output per hectare up by ten times and improvements in the environment Problems which had worried observers in the 1930s notably soil erosion had been dealt with as a result of an increased labour force and improved access to markets for their products H is now possible to survey before and after pictures of areas which were described as irredeemably degraded in the 1930s and which are now covered with crops and trees Patrick Darling of the Natural Resources Institute a division of the Overseas Development Administration has now written an overview of the research to emerge from Africa in recent years which shows FALL 1993 31

ROBERT WHELAN how often population growth has accompanied improvements to the environment and how the one is indeed often dependent on the other For example In the Kano close settled zone of northern Nigeria studies show increasing population densities over the centuries going hand in hand with increasing tree densities smal1 livestock numbers and crop yields without any discernible loss in soil fertility Population pressure causing the deforestation of Kano proves to be just another discredited dry season rural tourist myth A nationwide survey of smallholder farmers in Kenya shows that as densities increase the percentage of farmers planting trees goes up livestock ownership rises more milk is sold and more manure and other imputs are used and these characteristics hold true under different agro ecological conditions There is no reason to believe that population growth will make the environment worse or that population shrinkage will make it better We can have more people and less pollution as long as we are prepared to pay and as long as we continue to use the intelligence which God has given us to develop the new technologies which will continue to improve the quality of life on earth t Hi it's me Listen It's David's birthday so a few million of us are going out for a meal Are you interested THE SPECTATOR 15 May 1993 32 FALL 1993

WILL IRELAND GET ABORTION?

Will Ireland Get Abortion Desmond Rushe It will be an extraordinary and bitter irony should Ireland awaken one morning to find legislation permitting abortion on its statute book It will also represent a negation of the democratic process which is enshrined in the country's Constitution But the possibility is there a nation which on two occasions has voted by a three to one majority for a total ban on abortion may find legalised abortion a reality It is an absurd prospect yet a combination of judicial bungling political cowardice liberal agenda hype and media trendiness may make an absurdity a fact of life The developing scene is being watched with very great interest outside Ireland because Ireland is the only member of the European Community and one of the few countries in the world which in taking an uncompromising stand on the protection of the unborn has not become a party to the most barbaric and evil of modern practises Should Ireland fall into the abortion net the international pro abortion lobby will emit whoops of delight for the last significant obstacle to the achievement of total pan global victory will have been removed The Irish have been traditionally and solidly anti abortion An Act of 1861 outlawed all abortions and served its purpose adequately for considerably more than a century But the British parliament legalised abortion in 1967 and the Roe v Wade decision opened the door in the United States six years later The miasma began to spread and thicken and the international abortion bandwagon moved into a higher gear The descent into moral decadence became an increasingly obvious world phenomenon to which Ireland was by no means immune and the most distinguished Irishman of his time on the global scene made it the recurring theme of his public utterances Sean McBride a highly respected statesman an eminent international jurist and the only person in history to have been awarded both the Nobel and Lenin peace prizes referred to the collapse of public and private Desmond lRushe a Dublin journalist was for many years a theater critic and columnist for The Irish Independent FALL 1993 33

DESMOND RUSHE morality with dogged persistence and pleaded with Ireland to SWIm against the suppurative tide Once the darling of self professed liberal OpInIOn moulders Mr McBride became an outdated Canute seeking to stem the flow of progress and a tiny but vocal minority began to question traditional values Egged on by abortionist pressure groups the Irish stand came under attack curbs on artificial contraception would have to go divorce would have to be made available and abortion would have to be legalised In response a pro life movement was galvanised into action and a campaign was instituted to have a referendum held on the abortion issue The rationale was that the 1861 Act offered but fragile protection to the unborn because it could be altered by parliament The ProLife Amendment Campaign sought to have a definitive ban on abortion inserted into the Constitution that way future change could be brought about only by the majority wish of the people expressed in a further referendum And so in a referendum held in 1983 the Irish people took an unequivocal pro life stance by the massive majority of more than three to one That one would have thought was that And it was until January 1992 when a 14 year old Dublin schoolgirl alleged that her pregnancy was due to rape by the father of her best friend Miss X as she was to become known throughout the world and her parents decided on an abortion which would be carried out in England but instead of simply going to have the killing quietly done the parents informed the police of their intentions The reported motive for this remarkable action was that part of the dead unborn baby might be retrieved for a DNA test which might help convict the reputed rapist Having consulted the Attorney General the police advised the parents that such evidence would be inadmissible in court and the parents then told the police they would bring Miss X to England for an abortion next day After they had departed the Attorney General sought an ex parte injunction in the High Court restraining Miss X from having an abortion and the girl and her parents meekly and obediently returned to Ireland without an abortion having been carried out Later the High Court ordered the defendants not to interfere with the right to life of the unborn baby and denied them the right to travel outside the Irish jurisdiction Incidentally the right to travel outside Ireland for any purpose whatever had not been an issue in the 1983 referendum and indeed had never even been mentioned 34 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW By now the case of Miss X had become a black cause celebre in the international media it had all the ingredients beloved of tabloid journalism and of so called quality journalism which conceals a tabloid mentality beneath a broadsheet format It had sex and rape and a bewildered innocent child as the victim of a heartless and repressive system Its huge emotive potential was exploited to the maximum and media commentators shed floods of crocodile tears in their drooling about the plight of Miss X ireland was excoriated and represented as a compassionless relic of the Dark Age a pariah among civilized nations Political opportunists popped up in several countries and in the time honoured tradition of political opportunism showed scant regard for truth as they garnered publicity In Sweden liberal politicians urged that a coming state visit by their King Gustav and his Queen Silvia to Ireland should be cancelled lest the ir royal personages be sullied by Irish barbarism this was one of many examples of hypocritical moral posturing at a level which even for political buffoons was impressive Sweden as I pointed out at the time was a traditionally neutral country like ireland but its neutrality in World War n was as accommodatingly flexible as to allow Nazi hordes to pass through it on their way to ravage Norway There was a black irony in the fact of Swedish politicians assuming high moral ground in relation to a case of extreme and extraordinary rarity in ireland while Sweden itself pursued a pro death policy not merely in relation to the unborn but also in regard to trafficking in weapons of death manufactured to slake Swedish commercial greed After all Sweden supplied both Iran and Iraq with the means of mutual slaughter during the eight year civit war between the two countries and continues to sell lethal weapons secretly if possible to whatever warring state faction or tribe has the money to pay for them Swedish political hypocrisy was matched elsewhere as in Holland which is so enlightened and liberal that the elderly there may soon be in as much danger of being murdered through euthanasia as the unborn are through abortion And Herr Gerhard Schmidt leader of the German socialists in the lEuropean parliament said We must redefine conditions for lEe membership I propose that only states which have experienced the Age of lEnlightenment have the right to be members of the Community I doubt whether in fact Ireland can stay in the Community FALL 1993 35

DESMOND RUSHE Clearly Herr Schmidt believes that Ireland missed out on the Age of Enlightenment an 18th century French invention of extremely dubious benefit to the human race equally clearly he believes that Germany really did experience the Age though he did not elaborate on whether the experience resulted in the ascent to power of Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler who between them engulfed humanity in two world wars during the first half of this century and who left such monuments to enlightenment German style as flying bombs gas chambers Belsin Buchenwald Auschwitz and Dachau The Herr Schmidts of this world should not of course be taken seriously but there is a big gullible public out there still sufficiently naive as to be influenced by the most imbecilic words of the most scoundrel of politicians In the publicity circus which inexorably grew around the Miss X case all over the world the truth inevitably became an early victim Facts were fudged and distorted and the Irish attitude towards the sacredness of human life born and unborn was perversely represented as something of unconscionable cruelty Almost without exception the Irish media print and electronic became part of the international clamour they condemned restrictions on Miss X's right to travel abroad for an abortion and in some cases argued that she should have the right to kill her baby wherever she might choose even in Ireland It was against the background of this huge and painful welter of publicity that Miss X and her parents appealed the High Court decision to the Supreme Court When it came the majority Supreme Court judgment caused consternation dismay and anger in pro life circles The court reversed the High Court restriction on travel and on the grounds that Miss X's right to life was threatened by suicide if the pregnancy continued concluded that she was entitled to abort in Ireland if need be The suicide factor arose out of the evidence of a pro abortion pyschologist who was not subjected to cross examination and whose views were subsequently repudiated by some of Ireland's most prominent medical and psychiatric experts The decision was hailed by the media with virtual unanimity as humane and compassionate in truth it was bizarre and perverse A major function of the Supreme Court is to protect the integrity of the Constitution but in this case it can be argued that the court accomplished the reverse Article 6 l of the Constitution states All powers of government legislative executive and judicial derive under God from the people whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State 36 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and in final appeal to decide all questions of national policy according to the requirements of the common good Surely an attitude on abortion is a question of national policy if it is the people exercised their power in the 1983 referendum when they conclusively imposed a total ban By what strange process of legalistic reasoning could the Supreme Court usurp the right of the people as incontrovertably proclaimed in the Constitution by legalising an abortion in the case of Miss X and by extension for every woman who might claim to be suicidal because of her pregnancy In any event the court's judgment created a situation of utter confusion a situation which the pro abortion lobby was quick to exploit The dilemma posed by the ruling of the highest court in the land touched off renewed and intense controversy with the pro life movement on the one hand demanding another referendum which would allow the people to again exercise their wish for a total ban and on the other with pro choice and pro abortion what's the difference groups calling for legislation which would accommodate the court's decision and legalise abortion albeit in limited circumstances In the event the government decided to hold a three part referendum which asked the electorate to vote 1 on allowing abortion information and non directive counselling to be made available 2 on allowing the right to travel and 3 on the substantive issue of whether abortion should be permitted on restricted medical grounds The wording of the substantive question did not find favour with pro life interests because it did not give an unqualified right to the unborn but neither did it find favour with some pro abortion interests because it did not sufficiently protect the health of the mother and as a result it was paradoxically opposed by pro life interests as a whole and by pro abortion interests in part In the voting last November the travel and information sections of the three part referendum were carried but on the substantive issue 65.4 of the voters rejected the government's plan for restricted abortion There has been more controversy as to whether the wording was rejected because it went too far or didn't go far enough but it is significant that the majority vote was almost precisely what it was in the 1983 referendum Despite the hype the emotiveness of the Miss X case and concerted media support for the proposed limited abortion legalisation it is clear that the people reiterated their 1983 desire for a total ban FALL 1993 37

DESMOND RUSHE Twelve months later the dilemma remains unresolved Pressure for another referendum with clear cut wording establishing a total ban continues so does pressure calling for legislation which will accommodate the Supreme Court ruling The dilemma seems destined to continue for at least another year like many other countries the Ireland of today is grievously lacking in decisive and dynamic political moral leadership Meanwhile the fashionable liberal agenda is being promoted with considerable avidity by the Fianna Fail Labour coalition government A referendum to remove the ban on divorce is promised for the middle of next year homosexual acts have been decriminalised with the age of consent placed to 17 years and a law has been passed permitting the widespread availability of condoms A government advertising campaign places no emphasis on sexual abstinence and little on responsibility in its appeal to the youth permissiveness is being promoted through the implicit message that all will be well that there need be no fear of unwanted pregnancies or of sexually transmitted diseases or of contracting AIDS if a condom is worn Aided by political and legislative institutions the slide into moral degeneracy is gathering momentum and for the pro life movement the signs are ominous If the condom mentality and divorce come with parliamentary blessing can abortion be far behind The Catholic Church in Ireland is uncompromisingly against the direct termination of unborn human life and while individual bishops have been prominent in their public statements there has been criticism of the hierarchy as a body According to some leading pro life campaigners the hierarchy have become too timid too afraid of adverse media and political reaction less outspoken in the influence they may exert on their flocks The Church of Ireland on the other hand has no fear of censure from the media politicians or champions of liberalism it is prolife but it is also pro abortion for strict and undeniable medical necessity as the Protestant Primate of Ireland Archbishop Robin Eames put it at a Synod when the Miss X case was hogging the headlines The Church of Ireland is a great but church it is against divorce but it accepts divorce when marriage has irretrievably broken down It is against abortion but it accepts abortion in certain instances In all matters of serious moral import it is on the side of the angels but when it comes to the crunch it is on the side of liberalisation 38 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW as well lit is adept at speaking out of both sides of its mouth at the same time at having its cake and eating it and is not unlike Mrs Murphy's dog that friendly creature which goes part of the road with every passerby The But Syndrome which characterises the Church of Ireland's stance on abortion is not uncommon it is rife among political leaders and the danger is that it could also become rife among the huge mass of the Irish people who have twice recorded their abhorrence of the taking of unborn human life in any circumstances whatever and who in this area at any rate and unlike the Church of Ireland refuse to compromise They must be allowed to express their refusal to compromise in another referendum THE SPECTATOR 1 May 1993 FALL 1993 39

TELLING IT STRAIGHT

Telling It Straight William Murchison Queer means odd Both words mean something different from well different mostly a non judgmental term Whatever is odd or queer makes you scratch your head in puzzlement or dismay as if to say However did this come about An example is the British term Queer Street meaning financial straits Queer as it happens is also old fashioned slang meaning a homosexual The term it goes without saying is derogatory When trying to spare the feelings of homosexuals or signal outright sympathy with their cause modern folk say gay The successful expropriation of this everyday adjective constitutes the most remarkable act of verbal brigandage ever seen I once sat on an editorial board that was interviewing a city council candidate His name was Gray In the conversation we learned his true surname Gay He had added the r he said in order to spare himself and his family potential embarrassment This essay is not an etymological inquiry It concerns rather the ongoing ever more successful quest on which homosexuals are launched that of normalizing their identity at least in terms of their relations with the straight majority The antonym of straight is crooked but this seems not unduly to trouble gays The late 20th century is full of may I oddities moral social political and so on None is odder than the culture's extraordinary patience with the efforts of homosexuals to de queer themselves Or more accurately to eat their cake and have it When feeling mainstream they would oblige us to treat them as such When their hearts are young and gay they demand the right to dress in drag hold hands smooch and generally advertise their contempt for or envy of that straight world in which they are conscious outsiders Indeed a subset of homosexuals revels in the name queer Or seems to Its members wear outlandish get ups One homosexual action group proudly bills itself as Queer Nation a nose thumbing gesture aimed at presumptuous straights who regard their way as the only way No doubt there are deep psychic reasons for this kind of equivocal WilIiam Murchison our new contributing editor is a syndicated columnist based at the Dallas Morning News 40 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW approach to the self definition of homosexuality but these are best left for qualified specialists The gay challenge to straight society is topic enough for now a topic growing in dimension and in danger The gay rights movement's overall aim is to acquire society's consent to the proposition that homosexuality is as attractive and valid a lifestyle as heterosexuality This consent should it be gained would represent the most revolutionary change in the history of Western morals all our understandings on sex and sexual relations turned upside down Like the abortion rights movement gay rights has adopted the language of civil rights Its language is the language of law Morality to the gay rights movement is a fringe issue Moralists judge other people's private behavior The Constitution acknowledges no such right The only applicable right in fact is the right to do whatever one wants without hurting someone else The strategy must be called inspired An age besotted on equality can respond only with interest and frequent sympathy to the claims of another disenfranchised group particularly one portraying itself as the target of hateful words and deeds Gay rights activists like to compare themselves with the civil rights leaders whose action tactics helped pull down the beetling edifice of racial segregation in post World War n America When President Clinton put on the table his proposal to open military service fully to homosexuals and lesbians backers of the proposal compared it to President Truman's 1947 order that racially integrated the military ILawsuits a favorite civil rights tactic are popular with exponents of gay rights A favorite target of these suits is state laws that ban and penalize sodomy The U S Supreme Court set back this strategy by upholding in Hardwick v Bowers Georgia's right to pass and enforce a sodomy law The court said there existed no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy However there are always legislative ears to be whispered into legislative arms to be twisted behind the owner's back The gay rights movement's success in the legislative sphere has been impressive Numerous cities have enacted ordinances that protect gay rights The one passed in St Louis in late 1992 is stronger than many others but not atypical It bars discrimination in housing credit employment education and public access on various grounds the most conspicuous being sexual orientation Violators are to pay fines of up to 500 and go to FALL 1993 41

WILLIAM MURCHISON jail for as long as 90 days At the time about 130 cities had such laws Another tactic is to campaign for laws and ordinances recognizing sexual partners male or female of government workers as full fledged dependents eligible for health insurance and other benefits the same as wives and husbands Austin Texas capital city of a generally conservative state recently passed such an ordinance These and like efforts have provoked backlash For instance last August the commissioners of Cobb County a prosperous middleclass enclave northeast of Atlanta condemned by resolution the homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with community standards Nor did that end the matter The commissioners proceeded to eliminate county funding for the arts and their too frequent as the commissioners saw it embrace of the gay agenda In 1992 Colorado voters became briefly famous infamous to gays for approving a constitutional amendment outlawing preferential treatment of homosexuals by state or local government This knocked out non discrimination ordinances passed by towns like Aspen The provision has not yet been enforced pending resolution of a court challenge filed by homosexual activists More remarkable yet was Congress reluctance to overrule the Pentagon and concur in Clinton's plan for full incorporation of homosexuals and lesbians into military service Clinton on whom the gay rights movement lavished votes and money in 1992 was trying maladroitly as it turned out to fulfil undertakings he had made to his gay supporters To the credit of powerful Democrats like Sen Sam Nunn of Georgia chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee the issue got promptly refocused The good of the military rather than the desires of the homosexual lobby became the chief criterion for assessing the proposal which brought about its swift evisceration Yet did the episode convince Clinton that America isn't really ready for the gay rights agenda Certainly his behavior respecting the Boy Scouts of America indicated otherwise Last summer the Boy Scouts were holding their national jamboree at Fort A P Hill an hour and a half from Washington D C Thither the Scouts have come since time out of mind to celebrate the Scout virtues that are so much a part of American folklore On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country begins the Scout Oath In the debauched 90s it sends shivers down the spine There is more The Scout promises to keep himself morally straight That word again This means the Scouts respect what are known as traditional moral values including the 421FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW ideal of heterosexual monogamy Open homosexuals one can't always tell of course about the secret or suppressed ones are barred from serving as scoutmasters This sturdy stance has landed the Scouts in some trouble particularly in the San Francisco Bay area are you surprised where some schools have ousted Scout troops and the local United Way cut off their funding Did Clinton therefore rush off to Fort Hill to pay the Scouts homage as had predecessor presidents He did not He certainly had plenty of time The jamboree lasted from August 4 to 10 He did designate Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to represent him However Babbitt never showed The Wall Street Journal referred to this snub of the Scouts as one of those small acts of expediency that tell worlds about an administration And in the present case tell worlds about the power of gay rights After centuries of acquaintance with the moral law and its stipulations Americans are instructed to forget it There is a new plan a new program the old one is off Naturally the intelligentsia chime in with messages of support Episcopal Bishop John S Spong of Newark New Jersey asserts in a recent book Living in Sin that homosexuality and heterosexuality are equivalent orientations neither good nor evil Both aspects of sexuality will ultimately be seen as natural Our pious conditional resolutions binding moral homosexuality to celibacy reveal nothing less than an irrational belief in a sadistic God in the light of new knowledge This new knowledge is widely advertised Certainly Spong in his regular attempts to set up shop as a New Age prophet makes much of it The idea is that homosexuality cannot be considered a conscious choice it is rather an orientation the product of internal forces such as give one man a taste for chicken fried steak another a flair for five card draw deuces wild We would not wish to punish or disadvantage a citizen for what he cannot help would we How very 20th century The whole spirit of the times pours scorn on the pitiful old fashioned idea of individual responsibility for personal actions We are prisoners of our environments the Zeitgeist whispers seductively in our ears H we are fat fearful overfond of the bottle unsuccessful in business inclined to bicker with spouses inattentive to children why let's not blame ourselves Our genes are to blame or our parents or the callous indifference of society Nobody here but us victims Our national banner is the crying towel FALL 1993 43

WILLIAM MURCHISON Gay rights leaders understand well enough the nature of the tactical advantage they are trying to seize Whereas they formerly spoke of sexual preference the term today is sexual orientation an easier pill they hope for the general public to swallow than unnatural sex by personal and individual choice Every new scientific study that might suggest as much is leaped on with enthusiasm One study has pointed to a gay gene that may determine sexual orientation according to the researcher who is himself homosexual and therefore not quite above suspicion of cooking the results More recently the National Cancer Instutute has suggested a genetic link to homosexuality Not one of these studies goes farther than the mere suggestion of such a link And where is that gay gene It has not yet been isolated the cancer institute researchers acknowledge The retired Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard writing in the New York Times notes the near impossibility of establishing links between genes and behavior It is all speculation guesswork made riskier if showier by the political character of the guesswork Gay rights as we see has turned gays into a constituency that cannot be ommitted from any large political calculation least of all in states where they are numerous such as California and New York Beyond this the gay gene studies sound an odd note a defensive deterministic one If homosexuality is after all so joyous and enriching a lifestyle why the quest to prove it involuntary Would it not make more sense to advertise it as an option that all might follow with profit Yes why not meet the straight society head on convince it that homosexuality is as noble and as bracing as vintage bordeaux No doubt the failure to do so bears some relationship to the sparseness of the evidence that might support such a claim Yet the public pretense is that homosexuals are different only in bed We are your sons and brothers or daughters and sisters is a slogan that with local variations appears on pro gay rights placards all around the country The idea is that we know you and you know us This permits homosexual activists to agitate for more than tolerance for a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval if one gets down to it Mere tolerance can be withdrawn nor does such a condition feed the self esteem of the tolerated who feel like fifth wheels Homosexuals want legitimation In fact they want society's patronage Gay groups clamor for eductional materials that represent homosexuality with sympathy as for instance the briefly celebrated 44 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW children's book Heather Has Two Mommies Authorized for use in New York City schools the book related that although Heather's mommy had a lesbian lover this really was nothing novel or alarming and Heather should be glad for the extra attentions this state of affairs made possible This attempt at gay legitimation did not end happily The book and the school superintendent's attempt to impose it on more old fashioned families cost the superintendent his job Gay journalists have been successful at persuading mainstream publications to hire them specifically as reporters and commentators on the lifestyle they practice This is queer indeed There are no reporters conveying news of the heterosexual community unless you count all those hetero weddings that get written up every Sunday In fact the success of straights at monopolizing the marriage scene angers many gay activists these clamor for the full legal recognition of gay unions the operative term for now at least Some liberal clergymen engaging in theological improvisation have extended them this very right IFor all these efforts the singularity shall we say of the homosexual lifestyle continues to stand out Recent surveys contradict gay rights claims that 10 percent of Americans are gay The claim derives from Alfred Kinsey founder of the celebrated sex research institute bearing his name who adduced the figures in 1948 Kinsey's precise claim was that 10 percent of males over 16 practice homosexuality exclusively for periods of up to three years Kinsey was notably unselective in choosing his interview subjects Around a fourth of the males he spoke with were prisoners present or former many subjects had attended his sex lectures 200 were male prostitutes hardly a crosssection of 1940s America Though the 10 percent figure has been a longtime staple of gay rights rhetoric other studies fail to confirm it In fact studies in this country and elsewhere point to homosexual populations temporary or exclusive as small as 0.7 percent France 1.4 percent Britain and 1.2 percent the United States Well so what Don't 1.2 percent of us have rights Why not give homosexuals theirs But they have them already you seethe same rights as everyone else free press jury trial religion speech Privileges not rights is what the gay rights movement seeks the right of its members to be queer when they want the right to be the same as everyone else when the fancy takes them There are no historical precedents for such an extravagant claim lodged in FALL 1993 45

WILLIAM MURCHISON behalf of a group linked only by sexual preference orientation However the territory is not so uncharted as one might imagine Civilization has in the past done some hard thinking about homosexualityand continues to prompted by just such claims as the above On the heterosexual relationship as we know the family is founded No male female sex no families The command to be fruitful and multiply is received on the Highest Authority but even a determined secularist will acknowledge that absent fruitfulness the human species disappears P D James stunning new novel The Children of Men addresses just this point both chillingly and inspiringly The likelihood that the gay rights movement however articulate and well organized can overthrow the heterosexual family must be counted marginal That is not to say the movement given present objectives is incapable of inflicting harm on perceptions of family life and on family structure The clamor for legitimation of homosexuality is deeply harmful to families It confuses the purposes for which families are formed and may subject individual members to additional and deeply personal confusion Few in the broader society care deeply whether homosexuals or lesbians pair off in sad parody of the marriage relationship and reside together When they court visibility and seek cultural and legal affirmation of their relationship it becomes society's affair The family is more than a reproductive device it is training ground the chief agency and the best one writes Rita Kramer for developing character in the individual and for transmitting the values of the culture What is the family to do teach the equivalence of heterosexuality on which the family is founded and homosexuality which denies the family's sexual basis If heterosexuality is no more than a lifestyle option there is no social need to prefer it Parents on this showing should let children discover and pursue their sexual orientation Nor is there reason in such a case not to recognize legally any personal relationship the persons involved might choose to declare In recent years homosexual and lesbian couples though firmly committed to sterility for themselves have sought the rewards of parenthood They have adopted children or in the case of exheterosexuals have absorbed into their new relationships the children they already had Washington D C is currently recruiting homosexuals and lesbians as adoptive parents Lately lesbians have begun impregnating themselves with sperm acquired from sperm banks Just when one 46 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW thinks the 20th century has no more bizarrerie to show us one reads of something like this What will come of it all no one of course can say with precision The world has never known at least on a broad scale such a thing as homosexual parenting At a minumum the values imparted to such children will not include the superiority of traditional family norms Enormous confusion is sure to afflict these children as to who they are and what kind of sexual identity is theirs Then there is AIDS which kills Everyone who contracts AIDS dies of it There are no exceptions Despite enormous efforts to depict it in other lights this great blight is much more often than not the consequence of homosexual activity The association of AIDS Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome with homosexuality is played down by gay rights spokesmen or sympathizers The politically correct view is that anyone can contract AIDS Heterosexuals are invited to consider the danger to themselves if they do maybe they will leave off gay bashing and enlist in the war on AIDS As gay rights apologists see it writes Irving Kristol The well established connection between homosexual promiscuity and AIDS must be ignored lest a bias toward traditional family values filter into public discourse embarrassing those who instruct us that these values are sadly out of date It is far safer and therefore highly popular to argue that AIDS can strike anyone and regardless of race creed color or sexual orientation Which it can theoretically In the real world the one the theoreticians normally find so uncomfortable homosexual and bisexual men are the main victims of AIDS Seventy percent of American AIDS sufferers fall into these two categories By far most women who are infected have contracted the disease from relations with bisexuals or intravenous drug users Heterosexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex rarely causes AIDS according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Rectal intercourse unnatural and as we see dangerous is the chief culprit The Typhoid Mary of AIDS a homosexual Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas told doctors investigating the disease's origins that over the previous decade he had averaged 250 sexual liaisons a year It's my right to do what I want with my body he claimed even unto infecting his lovers with the deadly disease he carried Homosexuality on a moral social cultural par with heterosexuality if this is so one is obliged to ask How do we explain the AIDS epidemic FALL 1993 47

WILLIAM MURCHISON AIDS may be the deadliest fact about homosexuality but it is one fact only History has very little to say that is complimentary of the homosexual lifestyle Most of the time general condemnation has been its lot Such was the case up until the late 1970s The gay rights movement was born into a culture fed up in large part with norms and hang ups ready to throw the whole business overboard and begin anew The surly spirit of rebellion that the counterculture introduced in the mid 1960s accommodated and empowered the gay rights movement indeed made the movement a movement instead of a disorganized discontented lunatic fringe Power is power and votes are votes But likewise facts are facts and there is no altering those factual considerations acknowledged since that time as old Blackstone put it whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary Sex rightful sex is the relationship between man and woman a relationship anchored in infinitely more than theory and teaching And yes in accordance with the Divine strategy God Remember Him As Maker and Creator He formerly bulked large in human affairs His viewpoints were received as more than mere opinion If He made man and woman for each other then with each other they belonged and not in the arms of as the current phrase would have it same sex mates Bewitched bothered and bewildering times these times of ours Drinking in the public discourse one finds it hard to tell up from down east from west But a vital distinction cries out to be underscored The age our age may be odd Queer it is not Not yet at least THESPECTATOR 4 September 1993 48 FALL 1993

BRINGING IT ALL HOME

Bringing It All Home Maria McFadden Long years of engagement in the anti abortion movement can cause what might be called a burn out syndrome one gets tired of being counter cultural and is tempted to wonder Is this really so important And Are we really being fair to women Certainly abortion isn't the only issue maybe we should lighten up At least I'd like to come home after a day's work and forget about the issue and just live my own life I used to have these thoughts but two things happened my husband and I lost our first pregnancy and I found out that our apartment is across the street from a well known abortuary You might say the issue has been brought home Being pregnant held some surprises for me I have always always wanted children and I was thrilled to find myself pregnant Still as the days of morning sickness throughout the day fatigue and hormonally induced anxiety wore on I had some ambiguous feelings Am I really ready to be a mother Am I ready for my life to change Rather than spending every minute of the day in rapture about the thought of a baby I sometimes felt depressed about having no energy and feeling sick and then guilty for not being constantly thrilled And yet I knew I already loved and fervently wanted the baby As I struggled with these new and complicated feelings I understood better almost in spite of myself the abortion controversy If the pregnancy had been unwanted if I were unwed panicked and alone then how would I feel Very much like someone for it was someone was taking over my body very vulnerable my fear exacerbated by hormones by the inability to make decisions I realized that part of the problem with abortion is that we are asking women in crisis women who are in their least calm and reasonable state to make a decision that will affect them the rest of their lives and will end another life In the old days the consensus that abortion was a grave moral wrong set up a sort of guard rail for pregnant women who might be veering out of despair towards a dangerous edge Today with the idea pushed that a fetus is a human Maria McFadden our managing editor a k a Mrs Robert Maffucci writes from experience FALL 1993 49

MARIA McFADDEN life only if you want it the guard rail is gone and women who are in a crisis are being taken advantage of by men in their lives by feminists who want to deny that childbearing is more than just a choice among many other choices and by an abortion industry that makes millions of dollars a year from women in trouble In David Reardon's valuable book Aborted Women Silent No More one of the women he interviewed expressed similar thoughts Ila Ryan had four illegal abortions in the 60 s and is now a member of Women Exploited by Abortion and a pro life advocate She finds that legality has done little to change the reality of abortion then as now women are being coerced into an abortion during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy when they are at their lowest ebb emotionally and physically What with nausea vomiting and the ambiguous feelings about the baby which is a common symptom of pregnancy abortion seems like a quick end to the early discomforts of pregnancy I personally feel that women are being manipulated into hasty decisions to terminate their pregnancies for the profit of the abortionist It is a decision she will regret for the rest of her life At the same time I was having these realizations that pregnancy can be difficult I also experienced a profound sense of the miraculous It seemed to me a wonderful miracle that I was pregnant Even though I know how it happens it seemed incredible that it had actually happened to me It was like being in love when it happens to you you almost want to believe that you are the only person on earth experiencing the thrill and the joy Walking along the street I felt my body had been transformed that I held and protected something precious I concealed a happy secret from passers by Spiritually there was the strong sense that my husband and I after all didn't really produce this baby it was a gift from God Freely givento be freely taken away At 10 weeks I had slight bleeding My first reaction was to say to God or to the child that I was sorry I complained Please be OK I begged the baby and I won't complain anymore I really didn't mean anything by it I love you I went to the doctor for a sonog'ram and no one was too concerned slight bleeding is common as a matter of fact the doctor had the nurse turn the screen toward me so I could see I was excited at the prospect of hearing a heartbeat or seeing a recognizable form But after some looking the doctor fell silent and then went to look at my chart I stopped looking at the screen I hadn't been able to make anything out anyway SO FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW At that point I knew something was very wrong and that it was probably too late I tried to mean it when I prayed it's Your baby and Your will After another more sophisticated ultrasound I was told that what the doctor saw was a 5 6 week old egg sack not a 10 week fetus My baby I say that but there wasn't even a fetus had stopped growing weeks before even though I still had all my pregnancy symptoms I went home that day alone for the first time in weeks I realized I had been patting my tummy and talking to someone who hadn't been there For a week I stayed home to see if I would lose the pregnancy naturally mourning angry It felt like a break up I thought I had someone I loved and knew but the relationship was over and there was nothing I could do about it A week later I had a D C in the hospital two days later I got back to work newly unpregnant I think that only women who have had a pregnancy loss can fully understand the experience and it was in talking to them that I gained the most comfort in the first few days and weeks after my and my husband's loss Miscarriages in my case it was a spontaneous abortion so ironic for me to see those words are so common that most women who have children will experience at least one And yet it isn't easy to know where to turn to get help in dealing with pregnancy loss When my mother was having children miscarriages just happened you didn't really talk about them and you weren't expected to grieve at least not openly As a matter of fact my parents lost three pregnancies in a row but I never have really considered them deceased siblings My mother says that you weren't encouraged to think so personally about each new life and they certainly didn't have the modern windows to fetal life we have now so intrauterine life was more abstract The attitude then was it's a shame but you have or you will have others so don't make a big deal out of it get over it Some people today still say things like that to grieving parents But we in the pro life movement ought to know that each pregnancy is unique and irreplaceable That is one thing I now know on a level deeper than words You cannot replace a pregnancy with the next one I don't know if it is because we know so much more about FALL 1993 51

MARIA McFADDEN fetal development now or if it is that women wait longer to have children have fewer and often have trouble with fertility but women who have pregnancy loss today do grieve And parents and families who suffer a pregnancy loss mourn the child who didn't make it For those who work in Pro life and I am sure for those who work in the medical profession there is the added irony that we try to save children we don't know but we often can't save our own I was fortunate to have excellent and compassionate medical care and a lot of sympathy from friends and relatives I also had many prayers but for a while I couldn't pray I was angry at God Why did He give just to take away He hurt not just me but my husband and both of our families especially in my family I thought the good news of a baby would do much to balance the painful reality of my father's illness And as all women who lose pregnancies do I thought about what I might have done wrong Was it the trip I took the worrying I did All these feelings are normal to women who suffer pregnancy loss and knowing that helped me separate thoughts and truths from feelings As most doctors will tell you spontaneous abortions usually occur because there is an abnormality in the embryo chromosomal or genetic or in the process of implantation These early miscarriages aren't really miscarriages in which a woman has a problem carrying the baby to term Women will naturally have some feelings of guilt but in most cases there is nothing they could have done differently the fetus just wasn't meant to be That doesn't always help at first Why couldn't my pregnancy be meant to be but it does end up preventing useless self recrimination Spontaneous abortions are also quite common 10 20 percent of pregnancies are lost and about 80 percent of those occur in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy Many women I know have lost their first pregnancy this way Knowing the statistics doesn't erase the pain but it does help balance feelings of unfairness As for God I soon realized that I had so much to thank Him for and after all He has His reasons for everything Perhaps He wanted my husband and me to have some time alone together and I had to trust that He knew what He was doing with the pregnancy From my research of post abortion syndrome I knew of the At Peace with Your Unborn service in which you pick a sex for and name the child you lost and imagine him or her safe and happy in God's arms My husband and I thought we were having a girl 52 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and we thought of naming her Clare And since I do believe that a soul is created at conception I like to think of Clare as God's little angel and our family's angel in heaven Theologically incorrect I guess because angels aren't human but it brings comfort Still this has been a very difficult time For days after the miscarriage I worried that something would happen to my husband even if he was just around the corner I was afraid of losing him too I had a hard time seeing newborns on the street or in the mall I worry about not having a successful pregnancy in the future I feel sometimes irrationally that I failed as a mother and that I disappointed those I love the most I had frequent nightmares in the weeks following my miscarriage In some I or my husband or other family members or friends were insane or deathly ill I had dreams about a baby girl but usually I wasn't holding her or I didn't hold her on her first day of life In one I remember vividly I had a baby but it was lost After a day of frantic searching and hysterical pleading with everyone to help me a group of neighborhood kids showed up pulling a little red wagon with my happy two year old So it was OK it was all a misunderstanding they were just taking my child for a walk But when I gathered up the child and started walking toward my husband the baby started shrinking I looked down and I had a newborn and I suddenly realized that she would die if I didn't feed her but I hadn't been taught to breast feed at the hospital Suddenly I was in a room with two cousins who each had a newborn and they told me to go ahead and feed the baby it was no big deal I felt inadequate That's when I woke up At least in most of my dreams I had a happy healthy baby It's just that she was always being held by other people I suppose my subconscious doesn't think I hurt a baby but does wonder if I am able to be a mother To help myself I started looking for literature on miscarriages It's hard to find Of the plethora of self help books in one bookstore I didn't see any on pregnancy loss Women's health books had small sections which did say the right things let yourself grieve it is a big deal all your feelings are normal etc but I wanted more I have literature in my office on post abortion syndrome which mentions miscarriages but focuses mainly on abortion I was thankful I didn't have the added guilt of an abortion but I couldn't help FALL 1993 53

MARIA McFADDEN thinking in a new way about the abortion experience What made it so different from what I was going through Abortion is after all a pregnancy loss There are no books in the secular bookstores on post abortion syndrome because it's not supposed to exist But if I felt sadness guilt fear worry and anger and I had no choice in the matter do women who make the choice and come home not pregnant for the first time feel nothing That I cannot believe I went to the largest bookstore I knew of and finally found two books on pregnancy loss When Pregnancy Fails by Susan Borg and Judith Lasker and A Silent Sorrow by Ingrid Kohn and PerryLynn Moffitt Both books deal with the losses of miscarriages ectopic pregnancy stillbirth sudden infant death syndrome and abortions done for reasons of suspected or confirmed fetal deformity or disease Abortions done for other reasons aren't discussed they are not considered pregnancy losses but reproductive choices When Pregnancy Fails was written in 1981 and re released in 1988 Both woman authors had lost children Lasker delivered a stillborn baby girl and Borg's infant son lived only a few days Accounts of these types of losses are staggering I cannot pretend to know what it is like to carry a child for nine months to really know and feel the child and then have the baby die Yet the authors experience of trauma led them to write a book that encompasses many types of pregnancy loss not at all dismissing an early loss as inconsequential in comparison to their tragedies The sections on miscarriages are comforting compassionate and informative It was a relief to read of women having the same feelings I had and to find the experience of miscarriage appreciated Even in an early miscarriage there is a strong element of surprise The pain of contractions and the amount of bleeding are much greater than most women expect especially since the pregnancy is barely obvious Although they have not felt the baby move and might not see a formed fetus the experience is still very frightening The feelings afterward the guilt the anger and the depression resemble those of parents whose babies die at a later time in pregnancy Although miscarriage is the most common type of failed pregnancy the grief associated with it is probably the least understood A Silent Sorrow is a more recent study of pregnancy loss published in 1992 Both of its authors suffered miscarriages The book covers many situations early and late miscarriages high risk pregnancy losses stillborn and newborn deaths pregnancy loss and infertility and Prenatal Diagnosis and Abortion The Burden of Choice There 54 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW are also good chapters on subjects such as the father's grief and ability or inability to express it the grief of grandparents the importance of a ritual to say good bye and the role of religion including sample rituals for lost babies from the Jewish and Christian traditions Mentioned in both books is the support group SHARE Pregnancy and Infant JLoss Support Inc which is based in St Charles Missouri and has chapters nationwide It seems that most women find out about SHARE if they ask for support groups at the hospital A Silent Sorrow is an excellent resource and its extensive bibliography is evidence that there has been a considerable amount written about pregnancy loss But you have to look for it Unlike AIDS or breast cancer pregnancy loss trauma is not likely to be I think a hot topic in the politically correct media because it is uncomfortably close to the abortion issue Abortions for reasons of fetal disease or deformity are discusssed in this literature because the child was initially wanted and the parents suffer the loss of their wanted child The authors all express sympathy with the pro choice point of view or they are afraid not to books with a pro life message are seldom if ever accepted by mainstream publishers Abortions done because a child is not wanted are not included However the authors of A Silent Sorrow write in the preface that they considered using terms such as fetus and embryo when discussing abnormal pregnancies and abortions realizing this language was more in keeping with the pro choice stance but In the end we continued to refer to the Unborn baby We felt compelled to acknowledge this common grief No matter what the cause of their loss bereaved parents mourn for someone who was dear to them someone who was supposed to be their baby At the same time these books acknowledge the grief felt when a baby is lost they buy into the current notion that a baby is a baby before birth only if the mother wants it an abortion of an unwanted child brings no grief And yet in my grief it seemed natural to sympathize with women who have abortions Maybe I shouldn't Maybe some women have abortions because they are pregnant with a boy and they wanted a girl or they want to look good in a bathing suit in the coming summer and they never look back I don't understand women like that though they probably exist But there are many women who want the baby in some ways and not in others women who are pressured by many factors into a decision they are not at FALL 1993 55

MARIA McFADDEN all sure of women who are tortured over their abortion decision and tortured afterwards Occasionally some women as these do write their stories all the while insisting they are pro choice Dr Amy Thalia Miller a pseudonym wrote a heart wrenching column in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle September 9 titled Choice and Loss Ms Miller is a professional woman a doctor in her early forties who found herself pregnant at the end of a relationship She wrote the father with the news and tried to call but he ignored or hung up on her calls and went on his vacation Amy spent the first months of pregnancy floating in ambivalence with lists and decision trees determined to make the right choice She didn't think she could afford to be a single mother she didn't know if it would be fair to the child not to have a father and she didn't think she could go through the experience of having the baby alone At twelve weeks she says she was growing attached to the child when in burst the formerly non communicative father with tears and apologies he promised I could count on him However he was coming up for partner at the firm and this was not the right time for a baby Maybe next year He pitched an elaborate termination package complete with financial incentives couples counseling and a back up sperm donation if all else failed However if I kept the baby Nick would run me to the ground to avoid paying child support and he would refuse to be a dad Amy had an abortion at fourteen weeks I never really decided I caved in Nick showed up and drove me to the clinic I rolled over onto the table and in a five minute procedure I gave up my first child Amy goes on to write a classic description of post abortion syndrome her heart quickening with regret when she sees toddlers she is compelled to ask people on the street the ages of their children she imagines her son as he would be now and in the future After the abortion of course Nick took off his promises were empty As Amy struggles to recover she realizes that there is a point when giving up a baby is violent to a woman and though she insists she is emphatically pro choice I wonder really how emphatic she asks In our fervor to protect a woman's right to choose are we promoting the idea that abortion is no big deal I think that is exactly the idea the pro abortion lobby wants to promote and why not The less of a big deal it is perceived to be the more abortions will take place More women will exercise 56 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW their reproductive rights safeguarding them for those who wish to be free of the consequences of sex and clinics doctors and pharmaceutical companies will make more money Even the medical fact of my own D C was a big deal to mel hadn't been in the hospital since I was four years old and the thought of general anesthesia was frightening When I returned from the hospital recovery room one of the first things I said to my husband was that I was sure women who have D C's in abortion clinics don't get the care and careful monitoring I received Curious about this I looked in the Manhattan Yellow Pages under abortions and birth control Clinics proliferate in the neighborhood in which I work One particular placed offered abortions with caring service Low Fee Back to work in 1 2 hour And they offered general anesthesia no pain I have to admit here that I lied I called pretending I was pregnant The woman who took the call only wanted to know how far along I was and then said That'll be 300 honey for anesthesia antibiotics and everything I asked how long general anesthesia would take Half an hour honey No big deal except that women who have this kind of shoddy care may end up sterile or dead My husband and I are recently married and we moved into a good building we love The only thing I didn't like about the location is that the building directly across the street is a business building it's dark and cold looking at night There are also garbage trucks making pickups in the middle of the night and as we are only on the second floor this wakes us up We had been wondering what was in that building because we see young people congregating on the steps and we often see people in white coats so we thought maybe it was a drug rehabilitation clinic About two weeks after my D C we learned that the fourth floor of the building we can see the windows is none other than the Margaret Sanger Center of Planned Parenthood Abortions are done there up to 16 weeks Women are in there having procedures similar to mine but they are losing a baby that might have made it When I come home from work now rather than leaving the issue at the office I look up at the lit windows across from Epiphany Catholic Church and I wonder about the women in there and I think of Clare FALL 1993 57

MARIA MCFADDEN Amy Miller and I have something in common we lost our first pregnancy We grieve and we worry about the future She writes So focused was I on exercising my rights I never considered the possibility that I would experience this abortion so profoundly as a death one all the more painful for my complicity I am still ravaged by fright nights when my head hits the pillow and I lie awake in terror that I will never have another child Not that any child will ever replace this child my first the one I lost When I think now about being fair to women my mind reels at the injustice of describing abortion as an empowering choice Women don't gain power by stepping on the dead bodies of their children We know better And until more women admit this there will be little comfort for the millions of women who suffer the silent sorrow of pregnancy loss Is there somebody else THE SPECTATOR 2 October 1993 58 FALL 1993

FUNDING ABORTION THE UNITED WAY

Funding Abortion the United Way Paul V Mankowski The deliberate destruction of the life of an innocent human being is always and everywhere wicked I will take this principle in shorthand murder is wicked as the linchpin of everything that follows I believe that there are conclusive reasons for acknowledging this principle to be an exceptionless moral norm but I will not attempt to sketch them here I am simply nailing my colors to the mast convinced that those are unlikely to profit from this particular exercise who deny that killing the innocent is wrong By exceptionless moral norm I mean this a rule of human conduct that excludes a class of action in such a way that as soon as we can identify a given act as belonging to that class we understand that the choice to perform it is morally forbidden regardless of the attendant circumstances For example if we acknowledge that the rule forbidding treachery is an exceptionless moral norm once we admit that a certain action conniving to steal military secrets in order to sell them to a hostile power say falls under the category of treachery no circumstances or complicating factors can make this choice a moral one As the Oxford philosopher John Finnis reminds us there are many moral norms that are true but not absolute in this sense Feed your children for example This moral norm is true forceful but not absolute When the only food available is the body of your neighbor's living child one morally cannot apply that norm in one's action nor does one violate it by not applying it The norm forbidding killing the innocent is however absolute precisely in the sense that it is exceptionless I am myself a convinced Roman Catholic and I believe that the universe of moral reason is only brought to fullness and clarity by faith Yet the remarks that follow presume no faith no Catholic or Christian conviction I am making a minimalist argument directed to persons of any religion or no religion at all who are willing to admit the truth of the claim that killing the innocent is wrong So much for the major premise The minor premise is simply that abortion is an occasion of the destruction of innocent human life Paul V Mankowski S is currently engaged in Old Testament studies at Harvard FALL 1993 59

PAUL V MANKOWSKI The objections to this claim are not formidable No one has been able to argue convincingly that a fetus is not innocent in the relevant sense or that it is not human or that it is not alive or that the procedure in question does not end this life Most of the objectors have had to abandon the language of philosophy and resort to the language of law and have been pushed into the position of maintaining that one and the same entity the child has a full franchisement of human rights on one side of the uterine wall but not even the most fundamental human right on the other The feebleness of this position is so glaring that most abortion proponents have shifted their rhetorical spotlight from the object of the moral act to the independence and freedom of the moral agent They insist through a kind of numbing repetition on a generalized Right to Choose leaving the thought unfinished sensing quite rightly that the Right to Choose the moral object in dispute the death of the innocent is indefensible So I maintain the deliberate destruction of innocent human life is wicked Abortion is deliberate destruction of innocent human life Therefore abortion is wicked If the major premise holds exceptionlessly and if the minor premise is true then the conclusion must hold exceptionlessly as well But the question before us today is who counts as a moral agent in the act of abortion Who shares the responsibility for its wickedness And the answer is the same as for any other action those who knowingly and freely conduct themselves so as to make this action possible those who participate who take part who collaborate in the action You notice that I did not say those who desire a given action to take place are morally responsible for it Desire that an action occur does not implicate one in its occurrence unless one chooses to do something that will help it occur By the same token if a man desires that a certain action not occur but freely and knowingly acts in such a way that it will he does share moral responsibility for the action An officer in the Nazi SS may have been personally opposed to the Holocaust he may have desired that the destruction of innocent Jews not happen but if he served in the machinery of destruction knowing the purpose to which the machinery was put he was complicit in the act he was morally responsible Sentimentally perhaps it makes a difference whether the SS officer operated a gas chamber at Auschwitz or simply rubber stamped papers in a well lit office in Berlin to the sound of Mozart coming over 60 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW the radio morally it makes no difference whatsoever The pertinent categories for moral responsibility are knowledge and freedom Do I know what's going on Am I free to oppose wrongdoing Who then shares moral responsibility for abortion Those who freely and knowingly act in a way that will make it possible Even if a person desires that abortions not occur should he deliberately provide a condition for abortions to happen he shares responsibility for them Providing funds for abortion providers to operate abortion services or to counsel abortion is obviously supplying a condition for abortions to happen because abortions and abortion counseling cost money Those who freely and knowingly fund abortion providers must accept moral responsibility for the death of the innocent At this point the objection will be raised to my treatment What you say may be true as far as it goes but this is not a fair description of funding that derives from global umbrella charitable organizations You have wrongly described the act of the financial contributor If I donate some money to an organization in order that it will do good things with my contribution and I make my wishes plain about which things I consider good and the good things the charity funds far outnumber the bad how can I be responsible for the bad actions I reject Now this is a serious objection that an intelligent person can make with good will but it involves the rejection of a principle that is absolutely central crucial to a system of universal reasoned morality The traditional axiom that expresses this principle runs in Latin malum ex quocumque defectu which means wrong comes from any defect whatever That is when we are contemplating the action of some agent we are obliged to judge it wrong as soon as we identify a morally significant defect in the agent's motivation either in his means or his ends and here the term defect means an intention to act contrary to a relevant and forceful moral norm No amount of good motivations and good intentions can outweigh a single significant flaw in the contemplated action Think of it this way Suppose we're dealing with a notorious wifebeater who lives next door One day he approaches us to ask for 20 with which to buy a baseball bat Suspicious we ask him whether he intends to harm his wife with the bat He admits that he intends to kill her with it but goes on to say that he intends to use it for many other purposes as well purposes we admit to be innocent and even wholesome such as hitting fungoes to kids during Little FALL 1993 61

PAUL V MANKOWSKI League practice moreover he insists the amount of time and the number of occasions he will spend working with youth will far outweigh the time and exertion spent engaged in actions we object to so we have no moral ground for withholding the 20 Now obviously this is moral nonsense and it is no good making a little speech to ourselves I am giving this money for Little League that absolves us of complicity in wickedness If we freely and knowingly engage in an act that makes evil possible there is no aggregate of attendant good effects that removes or diminishes our complicity and our blame By the same token if we contribute money to keep open an abortion clinic even if that clinic performs services that are morally neutral or good such as pregnancy testing or pap smears in addition to abortions we cannot segregate good from bad by inspecting our own desires and conduding that after all we did not wish those abortions to occur that we helped make possible Now suppose after we've refused to buy a bat for our wife beating neighbor he comes to us again and says Alright I agree that there are differences of moral opinion about wife battering and I won't ask you to buy me a bat Could you please give me 20 to pay my heating oil bill Obviously there is nothing immoral about heating a house and contributing financially to heating expense might seem innocent enough But when we quiz our neighbor on his intent to bat his wife to death he admits his plan is still on But you needn't worry about your own involvement he assures US I promise the bat won't be paid for out of my utilities account but out of my recreation budget In fact you can bring in any auditor you want to prove to your own satisfaction that your 20 won't go toward the bat Do we accept this dodge Of course not Provided the murderer perseveres in his stated intention to kill and needs money to accomplish his end ANY expense we relieve him of that he'd have to pay anyway makes us complicit in the contemplated murder It is folly to pretend that strictly audited accounting procedures have any moral bearing whatsoever in this case As long as a murderer has any discretion over his income and has any income besides what we give him any donation we directly or indirectly provide to him helps to make his murders possible All villains after all have innocent expenses as well as nefarious ones I hope the application to charitable funding of abortion providers is clear enough Morally it makes no differeence whether an agency 621FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW relieves an abortionist of his light bill or his secretarial expense or the cost of the apple juice for the post surgical blood sugar boost If you pay for his Kleenex you're paying for death To claim otherwise is a scam and a scandal Nor is it reasonable to think that channeling monies from charitable agencies solely into referral or counseling or family planning offices makes the slightest difference from pumping them directly into dilation and curettage This is important we do not have to assume there will be any fiddling of accounts the financial procedures may be flawlessly and scrupulously observed But if there are any sources of funding shared between the soft end and the sharp end of a reproductive health service and any discretion in the use of income avoidance of moral culpability for funding is a fiction But wait a minute Is it not the case that we have a moral duty to act charitably to provide for the poor and the weak according to our means And isn't it the case that financial donation to agencies engaged in serving the poor and unfortunate is an exercise of this charity a way of discharging this duty The answer to both questions is yes Does it follow however that our duty to charity permits us to discharge our responsibilities by directing our alms through funding agencies that disburse monies to organizations engaged in systematic homicide By no means It is good to remember here that while a negative moral norm like You shall not kill the innocent holds semper et ad semper always and on every occasion positive moral norms e g Provide for the poor hold semper sed non ad semper they are always in force but require further moral judgment as to the times places and circumstances of their application In particular a positive moral norm can never be honored in such a way that an exceptionless negative moral norm is violated You cannot observe the positive moral norm that says Feed Your Children by slaying your neighbors and violating the negative norm forbidding homicide of the innocent By the same token you cannot morally provide for the poor and disabled in a way that involves directly or indirectly the taking of unborn life through abortion The waters are muddied here by the erroneous assumption sometimes abetted by the propaganda of the charitable organizations themselves that the poor and vulnerable will suffer if donations are re routed because of moral objections to the executive policy of the charity There are two responses to be made here On the one hand it should be pointed out that this consideration cuts two ways that it ought FALL 1993 63

PAUL V MANKOWSKI to make directors of the charity loath to fund a morally defective or questionable agency out of their putative concern for the greater good On the other hand it must be said that as an inducement for potential donors to pony up their contributions in defiance of their own ethical objections this consideration would be plausible if and only if there were no way of directing alms to the needy except through the umbrella organization in question and of course this simply isn't the case Everyone has the freedom to discharge his obligations to charity by rifle shot donation that is by targeting a specific agency with a wholesome beneficent morally praiseworthy purpose and giving money and other kinds of assistance directly to that agency In addition rifle shot donation has the twin effect of making the recipient agency more responsive to the moral and social concerns of the donor than is possible through donation by means of pooled funds while it heightens the interest and knowledge of the donor in the social goods served by his targeted agency And of course nothing whatsoever prevents a moral dissenter from a pooled fund program from giving as much or more than his customary money to meals on wheels or to programs for the retarded or to a cancer research hospital To accuse those who choose alternate funding routes for their alms of neglecting the needy when the choice for the alternate route is motivated by ethical repugnance to institutionalized homicide is stark moral nonsense Is it really so difficult If any other instance of institutionalized homicide were involved if the controversy concerned social agencies that aspired to execute runaway children or eliminate the homeless by putting them through gas chambers or reduce non European races by paramilitary death squads would we even hesitate in our deliberation Would we let ourselves even for a moment be inclined toward a donor designation program that funded these procedures but allowed us to earmark our own contributions for non homicidal purposes Wouldn't the smallest taint the remotest hint of association with such enterprises utterly damn any organization that solicited our donations regardless of the nobility of the causes for which they promised to apply them Would we accept anything less than full repudiation and compensation before we even consented to listen to such an appeal It wasn't that long ago that the heaviest moral pressure was brought to bear on public institutions such as universities to divest themselves 64 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW of stocks they held in companies that did business in South Africa because of South Africa's policy of racial apartheid even though appeals were made by many opposed to apartheid that divestiture would cause great economic distress to precisely those people the moral activists were trying to help The standard response was that no price can be put on moral integrity If this reasoning applies to the injustice of apartheid surely it must apply a fortiori to abortion ITs there not a fundamental inconsistency at the bottom of this controversy On one hand we have appeals made to our humanity our sense of compassion for the handicapped and our protectiveness toward the weak on the other monies are asked for the elimination of human problems through the elimination of problem humans On the one hand our hearts are warmed by pictures and stories of those who have struggled against adversity in heroic ways to better not only their lives but ours on the other we are asked to help ensure that some never even have the chance to struggle Charitable solicitations bring us face to face with people who are less than perfect physically mentally and emotionally and who challenge us to expand our notion of community and our own generosity our vision of humanity is thereby enlarged On the other hand we are offered a picture of what Planned Parenthood foundress Margaret Sanger called a race of thoroughbreds that is life happiness and prosperity for the fit an early surgical death for those who aren't our vision of humanity is narrowed brutally If someone were to try to make us believe that we can't say yes to one picture without saying yes to another would we really want to listen to him at all Would we trust him with the things and persons we loved Would we pay him to fix our broken world for us Donations to charity are not compulsory They are free acts deliberate choices for which we must accept full moral responsibility because after all we become the people we are for better or for worse through our morally significant free choices When we freely choose to fund abortionists we have freely joined ourselves to their inequity It's unsettling but true morally speaking you become what you pay for FALL 1993 65

THE POLITICS OF THE CHURCH

The Politics of the Church Paul T Stallsworth There is politics and then there is politics There is to be sure a politics of society In the United States the politics of society is partisan through and through It is Democrat Republican and or on occasion Independent or Liberal It involves campaigning and electing compromising and legislating talk shows and newspaper editorials rights and more rights In this kind of politics there is seldom something new under the sun But there are other kinds of politics Consider in the pages that follow the politics of the church Simply stated the politics of the church is the church's distinctive common life Distinctive because the church's life sharply contrasts or should sharply contrast with the ways and means of the prevailing culture Common because the church's life is or should be communal Clarity is required here the politics of the church is not just about denominational politics That is it is not solely about striving for obtaining and maintaining power or passing certain legislative programs or policies in the organizational structures of a particular denomination The politics of the church is theologically more demanding on a continuing basis than the political struggles that occur within denominational bureaucracies and or structures Admittedly denominational politics is a slice of the politics of the church but it is a very small slice The church's politics begin in Trinitarian affirmation God the Father gathers the church God the Son rules over and in the church as the Head rules the Body and God the Holy Spirit sustains the church Based on these truthful realities the politics of the church involves the church being a Christian colony as Stanley Hauerwas and William H Willimon have contended in Resident Aliens Abingdon 1989 If the church is to be a Christian colony with integrity the church must have her own communal language communal mind and communal practices Because of and only because of the communal language mind and practices the colonial politics of the church can resist the dangers and temptations presented by the imperial Rev Paul T Stallsworth is pastor of Cresswell United Methodist Charge in Cresswell North Carolina and president of the Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality 66 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW politics of society Because of the grace of God the politics of the church which has to do with love and truth can hold off the politics of society which has to do with the extension of power and compromise lit could be said that the ecumenical Consultation on the Church and Abortion which took place on February 28 and 29 1992 at Princeton Theological Seminary and which was initiated by Presbyterians Pro Life was basically about the politics of the church The Consultation was also about the politics of the church at war with the politics of society as Dr Paul R Hinlicky formerly of Lutheran Forum and now on the Evangelical Faculty of Comenius University in Slovakia argued in his keynote address on the War of Worlds which appears in Pro Ecclesia Spring 1993 pp 187207 More specifically the evangelical Protestant oldline Protestant Orthodox and Roman Catholic consultants uncovered what the church and the politics of the church should look like when the church is hosted and confronted by a society that has legalized and legitimized abortion 1 0 get at what the church and the politics of the church should be the Consultation discussed in detail the marks of the church lin Protestant terms the marks of the church are Word Sacrament and order or discipline What follows are the findings of the two day Consultation that is what the church faithful in Word Sacrament and discipline should look like in the midst of an aborting society This Consultation was an exploration into seldom explored territory After all as Dr Mark Ross of First Presbyterian Church Columbia South Carolina asserted American churches are today without a doctrine of the church A sign of this problem churches lacking ecc1esiology that is a doctrine of the church is the abortion debate that usually takes place in the churches This debate routinely employs the same vocabulary and the same arguments that the general society's abortion debate employs One might suspect that this is an important indicator that the churches neglect their own politics What the Consultation attempted to do was to use the problem of abortion as an occasion to take the church and the politics of the church seriously Therefore the issue for the Consultation was not how to weigh the rights of the unborn child over against the rights of the mother The issue for the Consultation was how the churchconstituted by Word Sacrament and discipline witnesses out of her own grace full resources to an aborting society FALL 1993 67

PAUL T STALLSWORTH The Politics of the Word The Word is the first major mark of and the first political reality in the church This fact admits that the church is not a self gathered community nor is the church simply another voluntary association among many others Rather the church is a community gathered together and held together by God and by God's Word A church in an aborting culture would begin well by remembering that truth as well as the specifics that follow The Word Creates the Church the church knows that the Word of God is more than just words from the Bible Also the church knows that the Word is more than preaching First of all according to the church's faith the Word is a person said Reverend Alexander F C Webster of the Greek Orthodox community and this person of the Son of God is unique He is the source of our common life as Christians of our truth and of our morality Furthermore according to Dr John Richard DeWitt of Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis the church faithful to the Word adheres to the full authority of the Word of God which includes the Trinitarian teaching regarding Jesus Christ who is the only Savior of sinners and the only Lord of the universe of His church and of our lives Therefore the church faithful knows that she lives because of and only because of the Word of God who is Jesus Christ Therefore the church faithful need not wonder about or go shopping for her reason for being Her reason for being is a given to be a community of the Word even when the world despises the living Word not to mention a well reasoned word The church assembled and sustained by the Word preaches and teaches the Gospel in an unapologetic way Indeed the church said Professor Robert W Jenson of St Olaf College is marked by the living Word of the Gospel The church which is well girded to face the threat posed by abortion has a clarity of doctrine that continues the witness of the Apostles Such a church has a particular and by modernity's standards a peculiar vocabulary Such a church is not timid about speaking of God Father Son and Holy Spiritand evil grace and sin deliverance and lostness heaven and hell General doctrinal clarity a foundation for the church's politics is at odds with today's world Today society at large as well as sectors of the churches is quite happy to maintain an anythinggoes style of pluralism in all philosophical and practical realms 68 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Philosophically American pluralism has recently degenerated into a nihilism in which two incompatible moral claims are held to be true Jenson contended An illustration public opinion polls in the United States repeatedly show that many Americans believe that abortion is the taking of life at the same time many of the same Americans believe that the freedom to choose abortion ought to be legally protected Furthermore Jenson noted that many in the society reject even the possibility of a difference between right and wrong This condition Jenson maintained can slide into fascism which is the reduction of all human relations to partisan politics and the reduction of politics to power Fascism is the political condition in which it is affirmed that the rules by which we as society live together have no basis in real distinctions between right and wrong Hence we ourselves have to make them up So we are free to make up our own rules that suit our own will to power Such polities as it turns out usually require having somebody to kill Given this description it is no wonder that Jenson described American society as post Christian or ex Christian For the sake of the world which in today's America includes a pluralism seemingly gone mad apparent nihilism and potential fascism all of which are shaped and spread by the wasteland of popular culture Jesus Christ the Word established His own polis the church to witness to the world Dr Richard D land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian life Commission declared Jesus in Matthew 5 looked at a lost decaying dying world that was groping in the darkness Then He turned to His disciples to the redeemed and said You are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world The Christian polity therefore offers both preservative and light provoking benefits to the larger society lin both cases doctrinal surefootedness and confidence grounded in the Word of God are required for the church to be politically strong enough to face up to a culture which permits abortion for rather casual reasons Such doctrinal clarity is not easily achieved especially in churches where theological seriousness is taken to be impolite or beside the point Still it is politically necessary if a church in the modern world is to be part of the church faithful The WOIl'd through the tradntnoBli A faithful church in the modern world knows that through the ages the church's teaching on abortion has had an undeniable trajectory FALL 1993 69

PAUL T STALLSWORTH Though the New Testament is silent on abortion which does not in any way suggest that therefore abortion should simply be considered a matter to be decided by individual conscience the early church and her fathers spoke decisively and definitively about the perceived evil of abortion Reverend Webster explained The Orthodox witness on the issue of abortion is so clear consistent thorough unanimous and durable that there really is not a contemporary debate within Orthodoxy on this issue The Orthodox witness on this issue is overwhelmingly uniform There is not a single church father excepting Saint Augustine who wrote anything that is extant that reflects anything but what we call today a pro life position In fact this position became increasingly clear and precise as the centuries wore on One characteristic of the politics of the church therefore is the ability to read the Bible through the tradition of the early church Another characteristic of the church under the Word is the basic knowledge of the church's tradition on the moral issue in question As it penetrates the church this knowledge leads to the formation of the mind of the church says Webster Resisting the formation of that mind or to maintain silence on abortion a church thereby becomes non church to use Jenson's term Presently among oldline Protestant denominations in America there is not a mind of the church on abortion Indeed regarding abortion there is much division and strife Furthermore there are and have been of late sectors of the churches that have been guilty of wicked collaboration Dr DeWitt with those who have advocated abortion rights Consider for example the United Methodist Church renting space to the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights RCAR in its Methodist Building in Washington D C The politics of the church renewed under the Word of God therefore could not help but elicit denominational confession of sins and urge denominational withdrawal from abortion advocacy The Word against autonomy A culture which permits or encourages abortion nearly on demand is a culture which grants the individual nearly unlimited autonomy That is an aborting culture elevates the individual to a self governing status in the sense that shelhe can make all of herIhis choices in public and private life according to herIhis self chosen criteria for making those choices In short an aborting culture makes the self sovereign It sees the self as an abstract free floating disembodied 70 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW decision making autonomous individual Dr Hinlicky noted When the germ of autonomous individualism invades and infects the Christian community there are devastating ecclesial consequences On the one hand says Mrs Frederica Mathewes Green who is with Americans United for Life and Feminists for life autonomous individualism can turn the church into a granny church that goes on giving out sweet advice that is not in touch with reality In this situation the church can act and speak idealistically Indeed the church can even be pro life in the abstract But the church's idealistic position does not make a real difference because what really matters when autonomous individualism has found its way into the community are the real choices of real individuals made apart from communal Christian commitment On the other hand suggested Webster autonomous individualism can turn the church into a feel good institution Autonomous individualism can lead church members who are hard driving types out in the work place to think that their personal peace of mind on Sunday morning is the reason for the church's being Hence they want feel good theology during worship services they do not want to be bothered with prophetic challenges about abortion or anything else Both the granny church and the feel good church have a politics untouched by the Word Hence they are non church Ironically and sadly autonomous individualism which wrecks the political life of the church might have been historically carried by American Protestant theology and Arminian revivalism according to Professor Jenson Said he The model nobody is going to stand between me and my God is precisely the religious version of the Enlightenment model of individualism If that actually happened and it is highly debatable in Dr land's opinion American Protestantism itself helped to dissolve the political communal lives of the churches Over against autonomous individualism and the gutted nonpolitical non church it produces stands the Word The church which faithfully preaches teaches and demonstrates the Word calls the sovereign self and the philosophy of the sovereign self into question And yes the church not just the pastor preaches teaches and demonstrates the Word Dr Hinlicky argued that good preaching destroys the fictional world of autonomy and it reconnects people with God and with the people of God In other words biblical narrative gets hold of a person deconstructs his notion of autonomy and then reconstructs him by connecting him to God and the church FALL 1993171

PAUL T STALLSWORTH In this way people begin to see themselves not as autonomous individuals but as creatures of God destined for redemption As autonomous individualism eliminates the politics of the church the Word by undermining individualism makes such a politics possible The Word on Creation The church faithful boldly confesses that the Word of God has to do with creation including marriage sexuality and children For starters because of the Word the church is hospitable to children The church's willingness to welcome new children as God's gifts stands in sharp contrast to contraceptive mentality that stops at nothing to resist children On this point Reverend Benjamin E Sheldon of Bethany Collegiate Presbyterian Church in Halvertown Pennsylvania said The issue here is the sovereignty and faithfulness of God and the trustfulness of us as His creatures Contraception can represent a lack of trust in the sovereignty of God Underneath the contraceptive mentality is the question Can we trust God who is sovereignly in control After all is there a single human being in this world who has not been created by God Are there any accidental people out there A man once said I was conceived in the back seat of a car near the Boston harbor before my father shipped out for war in 1942 Pregnant my mother went back to her parents But he never came home I do not think that man was accidenta1 The conferees around the table agreed that a faithful church's word on contraception is not required to conform to Roman Catholic teaching on the subject However the Catholic position it was also agreed deserves a serious hearing It was also consensually agreed that the politics of the church under the Word should advance an openness to children more than a desire for contraception The Word to the world The Word is spoken by God to the world However faintly the church hears God's Word to the world It is that Word which gives shape and substance to the politics of the church The church is never content to fixate on her own internal life for the church also has a mission to the larger society A part of that mission with regard to abortion is engaging the larger society in moral discourse As the Word gives the church the ability to exercise moral discourse in her internal life the Word also gives the church the ability and the duty to enter the public realm for purposes of discussing invitingly 72 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and persuasively the issues of the day in terms of right and wrong Prof Jenson believes that American society is now trying to silence competent moral discourse Therefore the church should stand as a living and sure guarantee that the Word and its resultant moral discourse will not be silenced That is in a culture heavily concerned with rights the church should be persistent in raising the issue of what is right especially when it comes to abortion Here the politics of the church has immediate consequences for the politics of society The politics of the church includes the duty to love and the capacity to suffer Formed by the Word the church is enabled to speak the truth in love Even when the subject at hand is abortion and the hard truths about abortion the church is both commanded and enabled to speak out of love When addressing abortion the church which demonizes pro choice advocates or lapses over into self righteousness falls into non church A faithful church stands on alert against permitting unloving motivations or self righteous attitudes to guide its ministry in the area of abottion These are times as are all times when the world will make the church suffer because of her witness including her witness on abortion Since powerful sectors of American society for example the prestige media the popular culture and the universities favor the freedom to abort the church that is faithful to the Word on abortion will be forced to pay a substantial price for her position When the church suffers because of her faithfulness when the church stands with a woman in a difficult pregnancy the church's life conforms to the life of Jesus Christ the Word of God who suffered Also when the church suffers she displays that the greatest good in human life is not the avoidance of suffering as some who advocate abortion seem to suggest instead the greatest good is the endurance of suffering for the cause of Christ The above then describes the politics of the church that are derived from the Word who gathers the church It is clear that the church's politics on the matter of abortion demands much more than mentioning in a sermon once in a blue moon that abortion is wrong The greater challenge is to envision the problem of abortion in the light of the Gospel Said Jenson in summary Instead of always concentrating on the evil that is abortion we might preach the Gospel We might preach a Kingdom in which children even aborted ones will be accepted gloriously FALL 1993 73

PAUL T STALLSWORTH The Politics of the Sacraments The second general mark of the church is the Sacraments Through the ages the Sacraments of the church catholic assumed by the Princeton conferees to be baptism and eucharist to simplify ecumenical problems have fundamentally shaped and directed the life and mission of the church By duly administering the Sacraments the church has been is and will be fundamentally determined and formed by sacramental grace Again duly administering the Sacraments the church always becomes an identifiable political community When a sacramentally faithful church is located in an abortion on demand culture whose politics makes the self sovereign that church's political character sharply constrasts with the surrounding culture The Sacraments against Autonomy the political character of the sacraments is indicated by the Latin word sacramentum which originally meant an oath particularly a soldier's oath of allegiance In the vocabulary of the early church sacramentum was used to emphasize God's oath of allegiance to His world and to His people Therefore the church celebrating the Sacraments recalls anew God's mysterious oath of allegiance which is seen most clearly in Jesus Christ at the same time while celebrating the Sacraments the church offers anew her oath of allegiance to this God and no other Therefore the Church's sacramental events which both celebrate God's allegiance declared to the world in Jesus Christ and the Christian community's consequent allegiance to God are political events The Sacraments help to make the Christian community a political community which is to say a real community Baptism and eucharist are politicizing realities That is they create the political community which is commonly called church In the power of the Holy Spirit they create a community that is bonded together especially under duress They create a community that is cleansed together that is nourished together that is strengthened together Of course the Sacraments are remembered and employed for the benefit of those who have broken ranks with the church But first of all they function constructively by creating a real political community around and in the Gospel It is this kind of community and only this kind of community that can withstand the assault against God and humanity that is abortion The politics of the sacramental church is not first of all interested in the question Who gets into heaven Prof Jenson said that the 74 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW sacramental church gets away from concentrating on this individualistic anthropology of salvation Indeed when the church understands herself to be a sacrament Jenson argued the church negates the myth of the autonomous individual After all the Sacraments in mysterious ways get hold of people who as supposedly autonomous individuals do not understand or affirm what they are doing That is the Sacraments convert people out of themselves and their egoism and to God and the church Thereby the Sacraments strengthen the politics of the church to witness faithfully to a disordered aborting culture The acramends humiiitty and hope The Sacraments shape the faithful church wherever located to be a community of humility and hope That is a seriously sacramental church is a humble and a hopeful church Otherwise stated the sacramental church has a politics of humility and hope At the Lord's Table said Professor Mark Talbot of Calvin College we are reminded that we but for the grace of God are not above doing the worst things which human beings are capable of doing Indeed we remember that there but by the grace of God go we In an antinomian situation where sexual practice and abortion have been separated from communal morals and made private issues the humility cultivated by the Sacraments helps to save the church from self righteousness Acknowledging the arrogant excesses of the abolitionist movement in America the church formed by the Sacraments when addressing abortion seeks to be righteous opposing unrighteousness without becoming self righteous Furthermore humility might well lead the church toward greater empathy with those who have sinned sexually or through abortion Hope is also a characteristic of the politics of the sacramental church Said Talbot As we partake of the bread and the wine we are reminded of Someone whose body was broken and whose blood was shed for us What looked as if it was the worst possible tragedy did not turn out to be that at all Talbot carried on Talking about what happens to Christ on the Cross Augustine wrote something like this Though You Jesus are poured out You are not dissipated and scattered instead You gather us to You The picture is of a cup turning over and the liquid dropping out of it As the liquid hits the ground it scatters the way Christ's blood was scattered When the disciples saw that at the cross they at first considered it to be the worst possible thing But God reversed what was happening FALL 1993 75

PAUL T STALLSWORTH So everything was drawn back up to Christ rather than dissipated Through tragedies less significant than the tragedy of the crossincluding those associated with abortion God draws us to Himself Therefore the church the community which is baptismally bathed and eucharistically fed can offer hope even in seemingly hopeless situations for redemption and for new life Practicing its politics the church humbly hopes and offers hope The Sacraments and pastoral care Humble and hopeful the church's pastoral care is determined by the Sacraments For beginners most of the church understands the unborn child who has been aborted to be a recipient of God's eternal grace In the midst of sin and sadness the church publishes the hope that that child because of God and God's promises as Dr Land says is destined for eternal life with the Company of the Redeemed Therefore along a similar line a service for the miscarried might be instituted and practiced in churches When some would contend that not all the aborted unborn are heaven bound an Episcopal priest representing sacramental Christianity reacted strongly against such speculations At the end of the day he said the church is going to gain more from thinking about abortion and the destiny of the aborted in terms of incarnation and resurrection Those terms are accessible to Christian people What captures me is that Jesus has lived out His life on earth in every nook and cranny of human existence and His resurrection draws everything to Him Those are doctrines which are recalled and reenacted in baptism and eucharist that lead the local congregation to think clearly about abortion The Sacraments enhance the pastoral care of the church in a second way Since the Sacraments as outward and visible signs are materially a part of creation and history they assist the pastor and the flock in naming evils perpetrated against creation and in history Hinlicky explained A complacent privatized Christianity that exists for the sole purpose of personal consolation can obscure the evil of abortion But in my understanding of Christian salvation the church speaks of the resurrection of the body which involves the redemption of historical life Therefore abortion is radically evil because it denies the historical life of one who is to be redeemed The materials of the Sacraments the water the bread and the wine keep the church anchored in creation and history and aware of God's redeeming work in creation and history and aware of those evils which violate 76 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW creation and history Third pastoral care is also strengthened by sacramental presentations of the realities of sin and forgiveness Both baptism and eucharist demonstrate that humanity all men and all women all boys and all girls has declared war against God They go on to display the bloodied love of God and invite repentance and confession Indeed as Dr Ross noted the Westminster Confession says that we must repent of particular sins particularly Included of course are those sins associated with abortion The Sacraments and Abortion looking beyond the scope of pastoral care and underlining the importance of the church's Sacraments to the church's politics Professor Jenson said The Roman Catholic Church and the Easteln Orthodox bodies with all of their flaws shortcomings and delinquencies define the life of their churches quite unambiguously sacramentally Also it is these two churches as churches that have an unambiguous witness on the matter of abortion That is just a fact None of the rest of the church as churches has such a clear witness This connection between Sacrament and witness is not accidental and the rest of the churches should meditate on that Sacramental churches it seems are the churches better equipped because of their sturdier politics For all churches this is the reason for sacramental renewal The poHntics of order and disdplirne The third mark of the church along with Word and Sacrament is the mark of church order or discipline Church discipline is clearly a part of the political reality that is called church Indeed the church with a healthy politics is a church with an unambiguously defined discipline The goal of church discipline is different from and more than a let's get the bad guy inquisition The ultimate purpose of disciplining the church is maintaining a resounding respect for the reputation of God in Christ After all with the church the reputation of God in Christ is at stake If the church does not stand up to the character of God then God's reputation is tarnished by the church's failure said Reverend Timothy Bayly a Presbyterian Church in America pastor Dr DeWitt added that church discipline is not first of all surgical and punitive Instead disciplining the congregation has to do with discipling the congregation It has to do with fleshing out what is preached and taught It is largely positive Only secondarily FALL 1993 77

PAUL T STALLSWORTH is it remedial medicinal and in a churchly sense punitive Likewise Frederica Mathewes Green specified that the two penultimate purposes of church discipline are first to save the soul that has fallen into error and second to protect the church as a community from debilitating influences Unfortunately in many contemporary churches discipline is nonexistent Today's churches find it difficult if not impossible to practice their politics even the mildest forms of church discipline addressing the vilest manifestations of sin have fallen into disuse The church seldom disciplined on anything becomes non church There are several reasons for today's church being unmarked by the politics of discipline First as Reverend Gary LeTourneau a Presbyterian Church USA pastor noted the churches have substituted a theology of unconditional niceness for a theology of Christian love Consequently on abortion and other moral matters the Christian community has become too nice to offer either substantive guidance or redemptive correction The theology of niceness permits emotions to overrule all ecdesial doctrinal and moral considerations Second the philosophy of autonomous individualism which to one degree or another can be found in most churches powerfully resists an authoritative community Autonomous individualism wants no church politics it encourages individuals following their own lights to make their own choices about all aspects of life A third reason for the lack of discipline in the church is the self understanding of the church All too often the church understands itself to be just another business which exists because it successfully markets itself by persuading individuals to contract for its services The first victim of this contractual notion of the church which arises rather naturally in a culture of democratic capitalism is the truth that declares the church is the Body of Christ The second victim is a church politics that would require church discipline A fourth reason for the church without discipline is that the threat of hell no longer makes a difference in the church or in society James Nuechterlein the moderator of the conference and the editor of First Things mentioned that Martin Marty has written and spoken of the cultural unavailability of hell Today given the powers of pluralism in all spheres of modern life one might also speak about the cultural unavailability of judgment of any kind To these reasons others could surely be added Obviously the church that would be disciplined is the church that is required to swim with all of her might against the cultural stream 78 EALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW The discipline of compassionate truth telling Regarding all matters the disciplined church's first duty is to tell the truth in love To be sure Christians without exception are called to the duty to love one another However the love to which Christians are called is not a feel good love Christian love is based on Christian truth and advances Christian morals On abortion the disciplined church unapologetically preaches teaches and counsels out of the church's Great Tradition As the church through the ages contended that abortion is sin and demonstrated that her common life should be ordered to resist this sin the disciplined church of today does likewise This mandates that the church be upfront in her claim that the unrighteous including those who have participated in abortion and remained unrepentant will not enter the Kingdom of God It also mandates that the disciplined church following the model presented in Matthew 18 lovingly seeks after her own who through abortion or any other grave sin have fallen from grace The woman who has sought and received an abortion is not the only one who falls under the church's discipline However she is one Unintimidated by the various forms of ideological feminism the disciplined church must take her and her sin seriously Said Frederica Mathewes Green The woman who has had an abortion no matter how extreme the reasons is as guilty as the man who under a similarly difficult situation kills one of his own children The bottom line is that God entrusted her with a new life For whatever reasons she chose to abandon that trust and abandon that child To refuse to take this woman and her sin this seriously added MathewesGreen is to insult her to treat her like a minor child and to discount the importance of her salvation The discipline of the powerfuR The pastor of course is central in maintaInIng a church with discipline The pastor under the authority of Christ said MathewesGreen is the leader of the flock not a distributor of warm fuzzies who repairs everybody's self esteem when it is damaged Preaching teaching and counseling compassionately and frequently on abortion the pastor acts as the church's shepherd On the denominational level the same faithful pastor might have to work to disentangle his her denomination from pro choice political advocacy e g from membership in the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights But again the end of discipline is always restoration not simply punishment FALL 1993 79

PAUL T STALLSWORTH Church discipline regarding abortion does not fixate only on the most vulnerable the woman who is tempted to abort or who has aborted The church's disciplinary politics on abortion extends also to those who are often left out of the proverbial picture of an abortion They are often left out of the abortion picture because they are more difficult to discipline and they are more difficult to discipline because they are powerful But the church with integrity disciplines without discrimination despite the economic social and political standing of the disciplined For example there was Ambrose of Milan who in 390 A D excommunicated the emperor Theodosius the Great Webster wondered aloud if there was a contemporary Ambrose in American Orthodoxy who would stand up to a Paul Tsongas or a Paul Sarbanes regarding their stated positions on abortion The sad fact is that oftentimes churches lay down their duty to discipline and thus their political integrity in front of idols of power Dr Land pointed out a few instances from recent American Christianity Can you imagine what would have happened if the Southern Baptist Convention would have removed fellowship from Jimmy Carter for his pathetically inadequate position on abortion Can you imagine what would have happened in the 1950s if the governor of Mississippi had been disciplined by his local Southern Baptist church because of his odious views of African Americans Or if the Methodists in Alabama had similarly treated Gov George Wallace when he stood in the schoolhouse door Or if Cardinal John O'Connor excommunicated Governor Mario Cuomo Then the fat would be in the fire Answering the last question in the series Nuechterlein offered a humorous understatement There would be disapproving editorials in the New York Times Before worrying about her pro choice politicians the faithful church attempts to discipline in whatever ways her own who are closer to home and who contradict church teaching for example doctors who perform elective abortions and pastors and seminary professors who push a pro choice line Forever seeking the restoration of fellowship the disciplined church will strive to be both merciful and truthful Furthermore such a church emphasizes that discipline is not so much the church kicking out a member as it is the church recognizing that a member whose practice contradicts church teaching thereby excludes himself from the fellowship of the church 80 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW The discipline of moraHs In the area of abortion much of the church's discipline is persistent persuasive and clear preaching and teaching on the church's sexual morals The church's sexual morals include but are hardly limited to recognition of God's good gift of sexuality to women and men and respect for abstinence in singleness and faithfulness in marriage The church does not tire of offering forgiveness through Christ to those who break ranks with the church's prescribed politics of sexuality at the same time the standard of the church or the mind of the church or the law of the church on sexual morals is never in doubt The point is that the disciplined church formed by the Word of God has a communal sexual ethic that is she is not willing to turn sexual life over to personal choice and individual conscience In an aborting society such a church will be forced to stand up against the sexual disorder of the culture The church focuses special attention on the moral education of her young Of course this involves much more than one lesson taught to a youth group once every four years on marriage and family Acknowledging that society miseducates in the area of sexualityand that miseducation ranges from the distribution of hardcore pornography to standard sit com television to MTV to many sexeducation programs in government schools which ironically and sadly tend to foster sexual promiscuity the church educates her own in her own way about sexual morals The church is also intentional about equipping parents to teach their children and youth about Christian sexual morals Abstinence training is a key part of the disciplined church's teaching ministry The Discipline of Merciful Works the church that has a communal politics is anxious to engage in works of mercy in behalf of those tempted by abortion This church knows that most women in crisis pregnancies do not want to pursue abortion According to a Nurturing Network survey 91 out of 100 aborted women wanted options to abortion that were not forthcoming Therefore this church provides women with alternatives real alternatives to abortion The Sheltering Church Movement which was described by Mr Steve Wissler one of the founders of the Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality calls on churches to provide alternatives to abortion tempted women A sheltering church offers hospitalityincluding counseling food low cost or no cost housing medical FALL 1993 81

PAUL T STALLSWORTH assistance child care and most of all love and hope to the vulnerable woman with child Such a church also provides workers for other organizations including crisis pregnancy centers in the community that offer shelter to the pregnant woman who is vulnerable The church that shelters Mathewes Green emphasized is not just another social welfare agency Nor does a sheltering church attempt to become a kind of artificial husband by standing in for the man who has vanished from the scene This church will indeed offer ministry to the neighbor but a part of that ministry is the gift of accountability Said Mathewes Green on the one hand offering ministry without requiring accountability the church slides into a welfare mode and on the other hand requiring accountability without offering ministry the church winds up in a punitive mode The church that shelters women and their children gives the gifts of ministry and accountability to those who need both Another work of mercy by the disciplined church and her members is once again truth telling Said Mrs Carol Risser of Loving and Caring Inc in Lancaster Pennsylvania A friend told me that the last thing she needed to hear in the aftermath of her abortion was By getting an abortion you did the best thing under the circumstances Her words were What I needed was to hear the truth about abortion so that I could face what I had done Truth telling is also accomplished by a church burying an unnamed victim of abortion who is found in a paper bag at the end of a farm lane Truth telling is also achieved by a church showing a film series like Whatever happened to the Human Race by Francis A Schaeffer Yet another of the disciplined church's works of mercy is to be pro child in orientation That is the disciplined church is forever providing real ministry as opposed to sentimentalized programs to children A church reaches out to all of the children in its neighborhood This church according to Mrs Ellen Kogstad Thompson of New Moms Inc of Chicago knows that there are n6 illegitimate children There may be illegitimate acts on the part of parents but the children should not thereby suffer This church opens its doors and its arms to all children The church shaped by the politics of Christian discipline is also interested in the economics of the workplace For example such a church will encourage employers to strive to provide benefits such as health insurance that would improve the well being of the children of their part time and full time employees This work of 82 FALL 1993

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW mercy last of all leads the church to the halls of state legislatures and beyond The societal political goal which is easier stated than accomplished is policies that constructively support women who have been abandoned and their children Let the cllmll dn be tllne cllmll cihl The word of God spoken the Sacraments practiced and the order maintained as noted above create a specific political community with a specific politics That community is called the church living over against the disorder of the world for the sake of the world the church is distinctive living over against the disorder of an aborting culture for the sake of that culture a church with a clearly defined politics based on Word Sacrament and order carries a certain common life into the future Above an attempt has been made to describe characteristics of that common life The church's main calling from God the church's primary duty to God is to be the church In addition as Reverend Richard John Neuhaus of First Things put it the church's greatest contribution to society is this Unembarrassed uninhibited to be how we areby our baptism and our faith by the blood that washed away our sins by the hope of glory The church's identity is never at the service of another goal even a laudable goal Rather the church's identity and the faithful maintenance of the church's identity is the need in itself Abortion is a practice that collides head on with the politics of a church which is by the grace of God attempting to be the church Abortion collides directly with that church's preaching and teaching of the Word celebrating the Sacraments ordering of her life together On the other hand if abortion does not collide with the politics of a church the chances are that that church has become to use Jenson's term non church It is not enough for a well meaning church to have a policy statement brief or detailed on abortion Abortion offers a greater and more fundamental challenge to the very soul of a church than a policy statement even a good one can handle Abortion and all of its associated temptations are resisted by and only are resisted by a church which lives in accord with what she is the Body of Christ faithful in Word Sacrament and order The People of God rises to the threat of abortion by being the People of God not by recalling a paragraph in a book of church law The People of God rises to FALL 1993 83

PAUL T STALLSWORTH the abortion threat through obedience to the revealed Truth of God Jesus Christ as Neuhaus put it Regarding abortion the politics of the People of God has to do with truth and obedience not with democracy and compromise The lethal logic of Roe v Wade said Neuhaus advances a cluster of devastating societal problems including promiscuous abortion euthanasia the return of eugenics coercive programs of population control and recklessly manipulative genetic engineering That lethal logic now at work in American law states that there are no rights possessed by those who are unable to assert their rights Over against this lethal logic the politics of the church faithful to God in Word Sacrament and order stands out and stands up Over against this lethal logic the politics of the church telling the truth offering forgiveness and serving the least of these witnesses to the politics of the Kingdom of God And that Kingdom the church knows declares and demonstrates is coming in power and glory Hmm Most illuminating THE SPECTATOR 16 October 1993 84 FALL 1993

"HAPPY DAYS WERE HERE AGAIN"

6Happy Days Were Here Again 9 William F Buckley Jr Whatever else is responsible for the breakup of the family it is inescapably the case that the official prejudice against religion in education has played a large perhaps even a decisive role The Playboy philosophy explicitly regnant in the sixties may have appealed to the younger generation as the key to hedonism but hedonism is not the key to happiness and the wretchedness that blights so many families white certainly but predominantly black has much to do with the nakedness of the public square in which for generations there were men and women who spoke the language of duty and morality of loyalty and obligation And licentious engagements in hedonism are more readily outgrown in the more disciplined classes than in those less self reliant The church state clause in the First Amendment has effectively been transformed into an instrument of secularization The time has come for those who deplore present trends and wish to resist them to invoke their knowledge of history sufficiently to proclaim that fanatical interpretations of the separation clause of the First Amendment are unrelated to protecting the public from the illusory threat of an established religion And to go further to note that the effect of the fanatical interpretation of the separation clause has been to insulate two generations of urban youth from exposure to an ethos whose advocates would have been celebrated as prophetic benefactors of the lower class if only what they spoke hadn't already been spoken under the aegis of the Bible Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo Christianity in the public square A politics related to the view of man as a transcendent creature cannot avoid addressing the fundamental questions of human life which have to do obviously with the preservation of life during its normal span The questions raised in hot dispute around the world focus on the beginning and on the end of life The question of abortion divides Americans and the appropriate William IF Buckley Jr needs no introduction With his kind permission we reprint here several choice selections from his latest book Happy Days Were Here Again Random House FALL 1993 85

WILLIAM F BUCKLEY JR means of proceeding politically also divides Americans Among those who oppose abortion for instance there are the latitudinarians who believe that effective moral pressure can only be generated internally At the other end there are those who believe that the higher moral perception should be written into the law even as there were those who believed 150 years ago that a flat out prohibition against slavery was the only tolerable moral mandate Abraham Lincoln as we all know was not among them And in between are those who believe that existing political mechanisms need to feel pressure of whatever kind to move in the correct direction Disagreement as to means is not only tolerable but welcome sharpening the argument as it does and exploring to good end different epistemological techniques But that there should be an end in common is plain that end being to gain acceptance of the assertion that some time before the child is born the child is and that to close out his life is a morally aggressive act inconsistent with the dignity of life which is the foundation of conservative politics The same consideration should guide us in respect of life at the other end of the compass This problem is already acute and will grow more so given the pace at which science succeeds in elongating the time between when man is so to speak ready to die and the time when man will die The great quarrel will deal with the responsibility of society when there is the clearly expressed will of someone who deems life on earth under this current condition worse than death We are aware that self inflicted euthanasia is becoming conventional in the Low Countries of Europe and we are progressively made aware that medical journeymen often surreptitiously practice euthanasia on their own initiative What we have not arrived at is an understanding suitable to conservatives who believe in the sacredness of life but who believe also that there is a point where its prolongation becomes fetishistic rather than humane Lively arguments on where the line is how it is to be drawn and what are the reasonable presumptions in the absence of coherent instructions from the patient will take place Conservatives must once again be willing to listen and to accommodate themselves to reasonable moral compromises provided they are assured that the only agents whose voices will give guidance are those directly involved with the individual as an individual rather than the individual as a state statistic 86 FALL 1993

The Strange Uses of Tolerance Do you agree that opponents of abortion ought not to threaten the lives of men and women who operate abortion clinics or their property The answer is presumably that yes you agree The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in the rule of law and that means that you take your protests not in hand but to your legislature or court But all morally dynamic societies are accustomed to externalized forms of indignation and these are often ugly though their motivation isn't always ugly Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an American classic about how women were treated when caught in adultery The Scarlet Letter as already noted was a visible stigma designed to draw perpetual attention to one woman's breach of matrimonial faith It was society speaking at that time finding its own voice declaring its solidarity behind monogamy The branding of an adulteress strikes us now as infamous and cruel but it was better than what was routine a few hundred years earlier and still is in some societies namely the execution often by torture of the adulteress Defenders of white supremacy during a long and ignoble period of American history adopted a variety of means by which to signify their displeasure at ruptured social conventions These included flogging tarring and feathering and occasional lynching The idea of racial integrity was very big in America and the law recognized it as integral to the social structure forbidding as was done in many states interracial marriage John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave because he decided to take into his own hands his battle against slavery and this he did by itinerant attacks and killings of targeted slaveholders and their spokesmen Nat Turner like John Brown was also hanged because he led a rebellion against slavery that resulted in considerable carnage But have you noticed John Brown and even Nat Turner are slowly making their way back into the kinder passages of history books At worst they are zealots It is not held in any question that their cause was just It is only specified that they should have turned their energies not to different causes but to different means of achieving their ends And so we see that societies tend eventually to judge the exertions of prophets on the basis of current attitudes toward right and wrong Adultery is no longer an offense people get excited about Racism FALL 1993 87

WILLIAM F BUCKLEY JR on the other hand is and from any cosmopolitan gathering of civicminded citizens one could put together enough volunteers to crew a man of war to set out against Capetown armed with letters of marque and reprisal from the Black Caucus of Congress How do societies resolve conflicts between two opposing moralities The New York Times editorial asks confessing its disappointment with President Reagan's handling of the abortion rally in Washington What did Reagan do wrong He did ask for a complete rejection of violence as a means of settling this issue to be sure But the president reiterated his commitment to ending the terrible national tragedy of abortion That is what upset the Times because it views the abortion decision of the Supreme Court as one that gives practical even brilliant voice not to abortion and not to its foes but to tolerance But what does that mean Would the appropriate answer to the opponent of slavery have been that he should be tolerant toward those slaveowners who disagreed What defenders of tolerance appear incapable of understanding is that there is a school of thought that makes it not a mark of moral jingoism to assert responsibility for protecting the lives of the unborn but a mark of fraternal obligation If it is true that an infant is on Day Minus One for all intents and purposes as human as an infant on Day Plus One then it is something other than mere passage through the womb that confers on that child the protections we grant under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution which derive from the Fifth Commandment of the decalogue that specifies that thou shalt not kill 88 FALL 1993 Oh no it's an attention seeking missile THE SPECTATOR 17 July 1993

Cuomitis Mario Cuomo Governor of New York seems to be saying that there is so much anti Italian prejudice in America he has no choice but to contend with it by running for president and getting elected Oh yes and if he runs for president and isn't elected why that means he was right the whole time there's a huge anti Italian prejudice out there It's an odd thing to talk about anti Italian prejudice in the most influential state of the Union in which the governor is of Italian descent and a Democrat and one of the two senators is of Italian descent and a Republican The second senator is of Irish descent Ah Mario would say but New York is different To which observation the balance of the country would no doubt say Thank God But in fact New York State is two demographic realities New York City and upstate And Mr Cuomo did well in both regions If he were nominated for president by the Democratic party the following is a pretty safe bet namely that more voters would vote for him merely because he is of Italian descent than would vote against him because he is of Italian descent Mario Cuomo's sensitivity is something of a phenomenon Sensitivity is in many respects an admirable human trait but it can paralyze one's judgment A fine example of this is the now famous statement by Mr Cuomo that there is no such thing as the Mafia To suggest that there is is to engage in anti Italian defamation Presumably all those people who shoot each other and get electrocuted simply adopted Italian names to confuse us Mr Cuomo sometimes seems to be implying that to concede the existence of a Mafia membership in which is predominantly Italian American is the same thing as suggesting that all Italian Americans are members of the Mafia His hypersensitivity causes the governor to make gross gestures every now and then Joseph Sobran the syndicated columnist last spring stoutly defended President Reagan's decision to go to the cemetery at Bitburg This defense caused a cartoonist in Albany to depict Sobran as a Gestapo guard at a Nazi concentration camp a vile act of polemical aggression Because Governor Cuomo has smelled anti Italian prejudice in one of Sobran's columns he picked up the telephone and congratulated the cartoonist Last week after Governor Cuomo had courageously recommended clemency for a thoroughly reformed convict who has served eighteen years for a crime he might well not even have committed FALL 1993 89

WILLIAM F BUCKLEY JR the governor ran into protesters one of whom carried a banner KILL A COP GET PAROLED BY THE WOP One hopes no public official will think to call that protester to congratulate him on his eloquence His is a classic case of St Mario's paranoia commented Roger Ailes the bright Republican media consultant I think he's quite a disturbed man It's beyond being thin skinned He always has to invent a moral crusade to justify his out of control ambition to be president We're all heathens and his job on earth is to save us and that's what he's doing here One hopes Mr Cuomo will not now accuse Mr Ailes of antiItalian prejudice If he does he will need simultaneously to account for the fact that Mr Ailes is right now managing the reelection campaign of Senator Alfonse D'Amato who is not a member of the Mafia who supported president Reagan's visit to Bitburg but is not pro Nazi All these things need to get said nowadays if the mere mention of the Mafia as primarily an Italian American organization induces the governor to tell you that a the Mafia doesn't exist and anyway b it isn't primarily Italian American Granted it is easy to be called a racist Such black leaders as Benjamin Hooks and Jesse Jackson regularly say it of the President of the United States At a trial a few weeks ago a cuckoo lawyer turned to me and asked darkly whether in using the term a white lie I had intended anti black insinuations One can't deny that there is ethnic prejudice but it tends in America more and more to manifest itself fraternally rather than inimically More Italians as I have suggested tend to vote for the Italian candidate than Irish or Jewish or Hispanic tend to vote against a candidate because of his Italian ancestry If Mr Cuomo runs for president I shall pray that he will be defeated but in doing so I shall conceal from Providence the knowledge that he is an Italian American God's anti Italianism as we know has reached such limits that he had to go all the way to Poland to find a pope 90 FALL 1993

Happy Birthday to J 0 So Bach Three hundred years ago on March 21 Johann Sebastian Bach was born The event is as though God had decided to clear his throat to remind the world of his existence That existence had been greatly dishonored by the terrible Thirty Years War that had ended only a generation before Bach's birth a war whose reverberations we still experience even as the ayatollah continues to dishonor the Muslim creed he misunderstands himself to incarnate Bach has the impact of a testimonial to God's providence not because he wrote the most searingly beautiful church music ever heard about The Passion According to St Matthew one can say only that it does credit to the Gospel according to St Matthew but because he wrote the most beautiful music ever written If one were to throwaway the three hundred cantatas the hundred odd chorale preludes the three oratorios the passions and the Mass which would be the equivalent of destroying half of Shakespeare still the other half would sustain Bach as a creature whose afflatus is inexplicable for some of us in the absence of a belief in God If it is true as the poet says that one can't look out upon a sunset without feeling divinity then it is also true that one can't close the door on that sunset and entering the darkened chapel listen to the organist play one of Bach's toccatas and fugues without sensing divinity It is not necessary to believe in God in order to revel in Bach It is not necessary for that matter to love one's country in order to fight for it nor even to love one's family in order to protect it And there is no need to make heavy weather over the point though there is a need for such human modesty as Einstein expressed when he said that the universe was not explicable except by the acknowledgment of an unknown mover The music of Bach disturbs human complacency because one can't readily understand finiteness in its presence Carl Sagan who sometimes sounds like the village atheist reports that the biologist Lewis Thomas of the Sloan Kettering Institute answered when asked what message he thought we should send to other civilizations in space in that rocket we fired up there a few years ago with earthly jewels packed in its cone I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach Then he paused and said But that would be boasting There are those who believe it is not merely to boast but to be vainglorious to suggest that the FALL 1993 91

WILLIAM F BUCKLEY JR movements of Bach's pen could have been animated by less than divine impulse There are sobering lessons to contemplate on Bach's birthday One of them is that when he lived he was almost entirely unnoticed True he was renowned as a virtuoso at the harpsichord and the organ When he died one of his biographers notes there were something on the order of ninety obituaries written only three of which however mentioned him as a composer This is tantamount to remembering Shakespeare as a great actor The thought reminds us of what it is that we almost let slip through our fingers and reminds us even more darkly of what it is that we have irreversibly let slip through our fingers We are reluctant to believe that anyone else ever existed of such artistic eminence as JSB but we can never know can we Nor can we ever understand how it was that so musically minded a culture as that of what we now know as East Germany could have greeted so indifferently a gemus so overpowenng And it reminds us too that there are among us men and women who will not drink from this most precious vessel of our cultural patrimony To some he does not speak If we understand that then we understand surely what the problems are in Geneva where grown men are actually talking to each other as if it were a challenge to formulate arrangements by which the world should desist from the temptation to destroy itself If a human being exists who is unmoved by the B minor Mass it should not surprise that human beings exist who are unmoved by democracy or freedom or peace They have eyes but they do not see ears but they do not hear Well Bach tended to end his manuscripts with the initials S D G Soli Deo Gloria To God alone the glory But God shares that glory and did so three hundred years ago when Johann Sebastian was born 92 FALL 1993

APPENDICES

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