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Abortion and Civil War
By Charles Fager
(Author's note from 1998: Many of the policy issues described in this essay, originally written in 1988, still seem timely more than a decade later. Further, the personal journey it describes was an important part of my life, one not to be denied or concealed. Thus I have made only as few minor changes in the text. A much shortened version of the piece was published in The New Republic.)
INTRODUCTION: My Abortion Pilgrimage
I first realized I was uneasy about abortion one autumn afternoon, shortly before my first daughter was born. A young woman friend paid a call on us, to say she was unexpectedly pregnant. Unmarried, and not interested in marrying the man involved--what, she asked, did we think she should do?
It was 1969. America was at war in Vietnam, and in constant upheaval at home. I thought of myself as a radical then, dedicated to ending the war and reshaping society in some not very clear, but more peaceful and equalitarian manner. This radicalism had always included being progressive-minded, I presumed, on matters regarding sex and gender.
Nevertheless, looking at my wife's enlarged belly, and then at our friend's flat one, I heard myself suddenly blurting out, "Well, I think you should have it, and either keep it or put it up for adoption, because that thing in there is human."
This declaration surprised me as much as it did our friend. But there it was, coming from somewhere very deep inside.
Once I admit to having been raised Catholic, of course, some readers may cry "Aha!" and consider its origins easily explained and as easily dismissed. But I had long since shed the other central tenets of my childhood religious training, from transubstantiation to the primacy of Rome (especially this latter), and had found a religious home elsewhere.
"Ensoulment"--Who Needs it?
Moreover I also rejected, then and now, the Catholic doctrine that is at the bottom of this matter, that of "ensoulment." According to the "ensoulment" idea, at conception God creates and injects into the zygote an incorporeal and invisible essence, its individual immortal soul; and it is this substance which in fact makes that new cell "human."
One problem I have long had with this notion is that if it is really what happens, the old questions about God's justice and the suffering of innocents, questions as old as the Book of Job, become, at least to me, not just unanswerable but intolerable.
That is because embryological research has clearly established that somewhere between one third and one half of all such zygotes are spontaneously aborted, many of them so early that the women may not even know what has happened. (The New England Journal of Medicine in July 1988 reported the results of just such a study.)
Yet according to Catholic doctrine, each of these billions of nascent humans had immortal souls, which made them essntially human, and which are automatically denied access to heaven forever, through no fault of their own. They spend eternity in limbo, wherever that is.
Given the high rate of spontaneous abortion, that means there could be as many souls out there innocently barred from the salvation which Catholics are taught is the true divine purpose of human creation as there are who have been born and had their chance at heaven.
Perhaps most Catholics and anti-abortionists can swallow such a theology; I cannot.
This "ensoulment" notion, furthermore, makes all the Catholic anti-abortionist waving of bloody prenatal photographs irrelevant in a very basic respect, inasmuch as their own church specifies that it is not the flesh, but this invisible metaphysical extra which is the critical factor. Yet not even the most devout Roman embryologist, assisted by the finest of intrauterine electron microscopy, ever has, ever will or ever could see it.
What do I conclude from all this? That while a zygote may be an empirical entity, the issue of when and whether it becomes human is a question not of science but of belief. That observation in itself is not a criticism of Catholic beliefs; but beliefs cannot be proven, and ensoulment is a belief which, Catholic boyhood notwithstanding, I do not hold.
Leaning Toward Life
In truth, I don't know when unborn life becomes human, and in the years since that encounter in 1969 I have come to doubt that the moment of conception is the time, or that early abortion constitutes any morally significant form of "homicide." Yet this uncertainty does not alter my overall uneasiness about abortion as a social phenomenon. The not-yet born unquestionably deserve to be considered human sooner or later, and my gut tells me we had better lean toward sooner rather than later, if we know what is good for us as a society. Which in this matter, I believe we don't.
I freely admit this to be my own belief, a visceral conviction ultimately beyond any form of "proof." But if you are tempted to criticize it therefore, I would respectfully ask you to examine where your own deepest convictions about life come from. In my experience the viscera is as typical and reliable a source as any other in such matters, and for that matter life itself defies reason.
In any event, this antipathy to abortion is one of the two central considerations that have shaped my attitude on this issue ever since. The other conviction, which in the beginning was no more articulate, is that, nevertheless, the attempt to prevent abortion by outlawing it was not only doomed to fail as a practical political matter, but was dangerously wrong in conception as well.
This second conviction is what the following essay is primarily about. But before plunging into it, I'd like to say something briefly about the further evolution of the first factor, and how I have expressed it in the almost twenty years since I discovered it.
Roe v. Wade, and Me
Admittedly I haven't had great success as an opponent of abortion; our young woman friend heard me out patiently, replied that she had resolved to end her pregnancy, and she did. Then as 1969 turned into the 1970s and the issue heated up in a public way, most of the "progressive" folks I knew lined up enthusiastically in support of legal and publicly-funded abortions. As they did, I hung back and agonized over my heretical notions, trying to reconcile them with the rest of my activist stands.
Actually, such a reconciliation wasn't very hard to make in theory; if you think the unborn are human, it's no big jump to add them to the list of blacks, Vietnamese, women and so forth as an oppressed group deserving liberation and protection against undeserved violence. It's my pacifist friends who have more trouble, justifying their making of an exception in this case.
No, the hard part wasn't the theory, it was the practice. Here the difficulty was twofold: First there was the challenge of breaking with my liberal-radical peers, which I did not want to do; and second, one had to face the company one would be keeping in the anti-abortion ranks. That movement was then made up primarily of Catholics, and the more right-wing, Vietnam War-supporting Catholics at that. What was I to do in the face of this dilemma?
I attempted a double response to this twofold challenge: First, I tried to carve out an independent, politically progressive anti-abortion stance; and at the same time, I kept looking for other stray souls who didn't want to save the unborn from being abortion fodder today only so they could be turned into cannon fodder tomorrow.
My first major attempt to state this position in print came in January 1973 in a cover article for the "alternative" weekly I then worked for, "The Real Paper" of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was one of two such pieces; the other was by the paper's resident feminist, who made all the usual arguments for it. My piece argued that abortion was wrong, and that its widespread use was less a mark of liberation than a barometer of oppression among women, especially the poor and nonwhite; but I also made it clear that I opposed making it illegal.
The piece was controversial, to say the least. Letters came pouring in for three weeks thereafter. Most of them denounced me in various shades of purple prose; scarcely a handful even seemed to understand what I was saying, and of these only one or two backed me up. The vehemence of the response was daunting, but nothing in the letters made me think I had been mistaken.
Then, abruptly, the letters stopped; my heresy was, not exactly forgotten, but definitively swept aside by nothing less than a judicial earthquake: The Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which was announced late that same month.