The Rights & Wrongs of Abortion

For Roman Catholics, abortion is a grave moral wrong. For a growing number of Protestants and Jews, it is an act that is justified under certain circumstances. Currently, the differences between these views are of more than academic interest. The introduction of several state abortion reform bills has caused a loud and bitter interfaith debate on the subject--and has indicated that even in an era of ecumenical good will, there remain profound disparities between Catholicism and other faiths on fundamental issues.

In Manhattan last week, a New York state legislative committee opened public hearings on a bill to liberalize the state's 84-year-old abortion law. Last month an Arizona state-senate committee approved a similar measure, and in California another abortion reform bill was being prepared for introduction in the legislature. All the proposed new codes would supersede existing laws--of the kind that are in force in most states--that flatly bar all abortions, including therapeutic ones, except to save the life of the mother. Instead, the bills would allow committees of doctors to authorize abortions in cases of 1) rape or incest, 2) substantial risk that the infant would be born defective, or 3) substantial risk to the mother's "physical or mental health."

From the Beginning. Roman Catholic leaders are speaking out against the proposed laws with uncommon vigor and even bitterness. Catholic moral theologians point out that abortion and infanticide have been flatly condemned by the church since its earliest years. Today most Catholic scholars still agree that the fetus is a human life from the very instant of conception; to destroy it willfully, therefore, is to commit an act analogous to murder.* Denouncing the proposed Arizona reform, Tucson's Bishop Francis J. Green declared: "Traditionally, it has been the responsibility of the state to protect life. This law introduces a frightening change in the state's attitude toward a person's right to live."

Even theologians who are willing to question the church's opposition to contraception and divorce stand firmly by tradition when it comes to abortion. Canon Victor Heylen of Belgium's Louvain University asks: "Once you pass into utilitarianism on abortion, where do you go? Why do you kill an unborn child after six months and not old people or not criminals or not just every second person in the world?"

While Orthodox Jews and conservative Protestants generally remain opposed to abortion reform, there is increasing sentiment in both church and synagogue to liberalize existing laws, within certain bounds. The New York State Council of Churches has endorsed the state's abortion bill on grounds of "profound charity." The New York Federation of Reform Synagogues, which also supports the new proposal, has pointed out that "great suffering and the loss of life of thousands of women is the price that is paid because abortion is illegal."

Viable Sperm. Protestant theologians, even as they continue to affirm the essential sacredness of life, argue that the inflexible Catholic opposition is bad morality based on bad biology. Says Episcopal Priest Lester Kinsolving of San Francisco: "The contention that the fetus, being viable, is to be regarded as a human being is not only specious but begs the consideration that the sperm is also viable." Not even the most austere Catholic moralist, he points out, suggests that the loss of semen through nocturnal emission represents the taking of life. German Protestant Theologian Joachim Beckmann concedes that the embryo is alive from conception, but firmly insists that certain circumstances --such as pregnancy through rape--allow abortion, just as killing is permissible in war.

Because of the strong Catholic opposition, the states' abortion bills are not likely to pass into law, at least in their present form. But on this issue, at least, the Protestant and Jewish acceptance of reform seems to coincide with popular opinion. In a survey taken by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, 71% favored legal abortion when the woman's health is seriously endangered, 56% when the pregnancy resulted from rape, and 55% when there is strong likelihood that the child would be born defective.

* In Catholic moral theology, abortion is permissible only when the mother's life is clearly jeopardized, as by an extra-uterine pregnancy. Under the principle of "double effect," a morally evil action (the abortion) is allowable when it is the side effect of a morally good one (saving the woman's life).

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