A woman has a right not to bear a child, and a fetus has a right to be born. When these two rights are seen as being on a collision course, conflict is inevitable. Prestigious leaders representing religion and ethics, law, medicine, and the social sciences disputed, debated, and defended the world’s abortion practices during a three-day International Conference on Abortion held this month in Washington, D. C.
Although the conference, co-sponsored by the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and Harvard Divinity School, appeared heavily loaded with Roman Catholic delegates, many participants favored the desires of the mother over the rights of the fetus. But quite a few, sometimes emotionally, equated abortion with genocide. Some called it murder.
There was little consensus beyond such broad affirmations as “human life deserves special respect,” and “abortion for mere personal convenience is contrary to the principle of the sanctity of life.” Suggestions to curb the “copulation explosion” ranged from “abortion on demand”—suspension of all abortion laws, thus making pregnancy termination a matter of the mother’s private judgment—to perfection of male sterilization methods to prevent unwanted children.
Safe and easily accessible do-it-yourself abortion pills may soon revolutionize society’s approach to abortion, however, and make the legal aspects largely irrelevant. Paul Ramsey, professor of religion at Princeton University, told the gathering that the “M” pill, which Swedish doctors are perfecting, will enable women to make their own decisions about whether to carry or miscarry after conception.
“This is soon going to become a question having nothing to do with the penal code, a practice wholly in the personal or private realm which laws cannot reach,” the soft-spoken professor said in a press conference. In his opinion, the morality of abortion, not its legalization, is the key issue. The churches and synagogues, therefore, should be concerned chiefly with the moral issues of abortion—“not with proposed public policies that would use abortion law reform as an interim solution.”
At present, forty-five states and the District of Columbia approve abortion only when it is required to save a mother’s life. Louisiana forbids abortion for any reason. Colorado, North Carolina, and California recently revised their laws to allow abortion if the mother’s mental or physical health is severely threatened, if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or (in Colorado and North Carolina) if there is a chance that the child may be deformed. Liberalized abortion laws were defeated during the past year in Connecticut, Nevada, Michigan, Iowa, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee, Florida, and Maine. Some twenty other states are considering liberalizing their laws.
The only European countries where abortion is legal, virtually free, and readily available are behind the Iron Curtain. In Hungary, for the last fifteen years abortions have exceeded births. Many Roman Catholic countries are influenced by the position of the church, which officially states not only that any attempt to destroy life by abortion is a mortal sin but also that a doctor must save a child’s life in preference to its mother’s.
Dr. Herbert Richardson of the Harvard Divinity School, one of the conference conveners, summarized the ethicists’ closed-session discussions: Human life begins at conception, or at least no later than eight days after conception. Abortion should be performed—if at all—only in exceptional cases. Both theists and non-theists saw human life as qualitatively different from all other earthly life, and therefore worthy of special respect. And theists agreed among themselves that religious affirmations are relevant: God is creator of man and the author of life; man is created in the image of God; man is the steward of the gift of life and not its complete master.
Beyond this, opinion diverged. Some moralists deemed it morally possible to take the life of an unborn child under certain conditions as a “human response to God’s love and his neighbor.” Others held that the fetus has inviolable rights; no individual or society has the right to say which shall live and which shall die. A third group, apparently believing in God’s personal self-revelation, said God is “effectively present” to illumine the mind and strengthen the will when parents must make an agonizing moral decision about an abortion. The ethics spokesmen also avoided equating law and morality and declared, “Not every sin should be made a crime.”
But position papers, prepared for the two days of closed-door sessions, as well as the open, final-day meeting attended by about 1,500 persons, bristled with unanswered nitty-gritty questions, yielded few concrete answers. Several speakers quite frankly acknowledged that differences inherent in a pluralistic society may make the abortion question unresolvable.
Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, dean of the Boston College Law School, opposed the newly adopted easing of abortion laws in North Carolina, charging that the legislation was a ploy to hold down the number of minority persons and reduce the welfare rolls. Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, emphasized that Caucasians account for 97 per cent of the nation’s illegal abortions (variously estimated at 200,000 to 1.2 million a year) because the whites can afford them while the Negroes and Puerto Ricans can’t. And Dr. Christopher Tietze, known as the king of abortion statistics, called estimates of 10,000 to 20,000 American women dying annually from criminal abortions “unmitigated nonsense.” He said 500 is more realistic. And he suggested these would be substantially reduced if the United States would shelve its abortion laws altogether.
The conference, first of its kind, drew seventy-three delegates from Canada, the United States, and four overseas countries. Only six were women. A representative of the National Organization for Women, a group that advocates abortion as a civil right for all women, castigated the convention for being “stacked” against women and in favor of the “reactionary” Roman Catholic viewpoint.
Meanwhile, several women had their day outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the conference was held. They carried signs plastered with coat hangers and knitting needles and plumped for availability of legal medical abortions for all women.
Miss Patricia Maginnis, a do-it-yourself abortion teacher from San Francisco, held classes in makeshift quarters of the Washington hippie newspaper, the Washington Free Press. Her supply of printed instructions on self-induced abortion techniques and list of Canadian and Mexican “abortion specialists” quickly ran out when overflow crowds packed the shabby living room. Miss Maginnis, 39, said she has had three abortions, including two self-induced ones that landed her in the hospital.
Arthur Goldberg, U. S. representative to the United Nations, concluded the conference with a speech that advocated human engineering through genetics and chemistry. This, he said, could change man’s makeup and “purge him of his tendencies to deadly aggression, cruelty, false pride, and all the other age-old failings that humanity no longer can afford to indulge.”
But the smattering of evangelicals present could not help wondering whether the world’s social experts will try the only time-proven and God-given method of changing man: conversion through redemptive encounter with Jesus Christ.
If not, where will dramatic breakthroughs such as a once-a-month abortion pill and genetic tinkering lead except to the nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?
RUSSELL CHANDLER
War And Peace
A team of relay runners is carrying a torch for pacifism on a cross-country exhibition scheduled to arrive in Washington, D. C., October 21. The “Hiroshima Peace Torch,” ignited last month in Japan, was blessed by Episcopal Bishop C. Kilmer Myers on the steps of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral before the eastward sprint. Religious and anti-war groups plan another ceremony when the missile-shaped torch, which carries fragments of U. S. antipersonnel bombs in its base, reaches the capital.
The ketch “Phoenix” was headed toward North Viet Nam this month with a cargo of medical supplies, according to a spokesman for a Quaker group in Philadelphia that is sponsoring the trip. This was the second such voyage in defiance of U. S. law. Several American young people were aboard.
The Free Pacific Association says a poll taken among Roman Catholic priests in the United States shows 87 per cent of them favoring a firm policy by the government to win the war in Viet Nam. Seven thousand were said to have responded to a questionnaire distributed by Catholic Polls, Inc.
Personalia
Industrialist J. Irwin Miller is introduced as a prospect for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination by Esquire magazine. A cover photo and long article plumping Miller, former president of the National Council of Churches, appear in the October issue. The article notes that Miller, a layman of the Disciples of Christ, once pulled out of a big family-financed church to start a new one because the minister “just did not believe in the ecumenical movement.”
Dr. Paul F. Geren was named president of Stetson University, a Southern Baptist institution in De Land, Florida. Geren has held a number of diplomatic posts for the U. S. government and for a time served as deputy director of the Peace Corps. He holds a doctor’s degree in economics from Harvard.
Father James F. Drane, Roman Catholic priest who was suspended because of a newspaper article on birth control, was granted a one-year research fellowship by Yale University. The 37-year-old clergyman from Little Rock, Arkansas, said he would be doing research in “ethics and politics.”
Dr. Bengt Runo Hoffman, formerly associate professor of religion at Concordia College, assumes this month the newly created post of professor of ethics and ecumenics at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (United Presbyterian) has hired two teachers from the Hartford Seminary Foundation: Ford Lewis Battles, a church historian, and Robert S. Paul, onetime associate director of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute.
Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, formerly of B’nai B’rith, will teach religion and sociology at Marymount Manhattan College.
N. A. Nissiotis was named an associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. He is the first Orthodox priest to gain this high rank.
The Rev. John R. Mumaw of Harrisonburg, Virginia, was elected moderator of the Mennonite Church at the denomination’s biennial General Conference in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. The Rev. John M. Drescher of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, editor of the Gospel Herald, was chosen moderator-elect.
Cambridge-trained Michael C. Griffiths will succeed J. Oswald Sanders as general director of Overseas Missionary Fellowship when Sanders retires in 1969. Griffiths has been superintendent of OMF work in Japan.
Deaths
ARMIN G. WENG, 69, for fifteen years the president of Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary; in Rockford, Illinois.
THOMAS B. LUGG, 77, retired general treaturer of The Methodist Church and general secretary of its Council on World Service and Finance; in Evanston, Illinois.
F. NELSON BLOUNT, 49, founder of Steamtown U. S. A. and a noted evangelical layman; in an aircraft accident near Dublin, New Hampshire.
Miscellany
French President Charles DeGaulle cagily avoided seeing either of the two Roman Catholic cardinals in Poland during his visit there this month. He did meet briefly with Bishop Edmund Nowicki of Gdansk (Danzig) and took Communion at the local cathedral. A young man tried to present a statue of the Virgin Mary to DeGaulle but was taken away by police.
Concern rose over the health of Pope Paul VI as final preparations were made for the opening session of the Synod of Bishops in Rome this week. At midmonth, Vatican sources said a prostate operation was virtually certain after the synod closed next month.
The Orinoco River Mission of Venezuela, an affiliate of the International Foreign Mission Association, reports the discovery of Indian villages believed never to have had contact with the outside world. Missionary Charles Olvey said an aerial survey revealed that the natives did not appear even to have the ax or machete to clear areas for their homes.
The Life Line Center of the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, Australia, was badly damaged by the second fire there in four years.
Sunday-morning church programs have become ritualized and predictable, say spokesmen for the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. So, under a grant from the Lilly Foundation, “experiential” worship services will be developed.
A report to the World Council of Churches said its basic annual budget for welfare is $13.3 million and estimated that the world has ten million refugees. Among projects is Action for Food Production, an effort to improve agriculture in India in which the WCC cooperates with Roman Catholics and secular agencies.
The number of baptized Lutherans in the world totals 74,419,334, a slight drop from last year, the Lutheran World Federation reports. East Germany had a significant loss, while Tanzania had the largest increase.
