Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes

Kansas & Wyoming, 1958-1960

In those old days of the  (pre-Vatican Two) Catholic Church, they used to say of people like me that we had “lost our faith.”

In my case, it wasn’t quite true. That year, 1958,  as I turned sixteen,I didn’t lose my faith.  Instead, I discovered I just didn’t have any.

I was a junior at a Catholic boarding school, St. Joseph’s  Military Academy, in western Kansas. How I got there (my family was then on an Air Force  base in Puerto Rico), and what led me to realize my faithlessness are stories told in another place (for the curious, details are in the memoir, Meetings).

For me, this discovery was not a crisis. Even though it ultimately got me kicked out of St. Joseph’s, despite good grades and correct behavior, I didn’t lose sleep over it. After all, since I didn’t have belief, I didn’t mourn “losing” it. It wasn’t a real loss, like money, or getting snubbed by a pretty girl.

For that matter, there was a kind of consolation: although I didn’t believe in Catholicism (or any other religion), I was still interested in religion, and  for the nonce, that would mainly be Catholicism.

To be sure, “interest” in religion wouldn’t satisfy the priests who taught us, or my mother, praying in Puerto Rico for my imperiled immortal soul. But it would at least help me in religion class, a major subject at St. Joseph’s. I could still raise skeptical questions, disguising them as merely hypothetical, especially about matters in our thick religion textbook.

Ah, the textbook.

It was 600+ pages, and one of a four-part series, with the overall title & theme, “Our Quest for Happiness.”  Published in 1955, its goal was no less than to shape our entire lives henceforth, in Catholic virtues, dogmas, rituals and institutional loyalty. It came with extensive attestations to the doctrinal soundness of its program. And sure enough, despite my apostasy I got good grades in the course.

This reading was sixty-plus years ago. But its echoes keep reverberating through current events, louder in many places, so recently I hunted down the last two books of the set, to review.

Volume Three, for juniors, was The Ark & The Dove (The Ark symbolized the Church, which could rescue us from the ocean of mortal sins; the Dove was the Holy Spirit, whose talons could pluck us from those turbulent and toxic  waters).

I missed the first two volumes by being in a public school on the base in  Puerto Rico, but the third one was morbidly fascinating. It featured a heavily  slanted history of the church, and then a lengthy examination of many of the sins the Holy Spirit was sent to save us from.

My attention was of course drawn to the subsections there about sex, of which I knew but little. They were naturally sanitized and repackaged to promote “purity,” and even more to warn against “impurity.” So we’ll skip them here too, because the topic which evoked the present recollections, and will bring us to the stethoscopes, was a sub-sub-section on something essentially new to me.

It was near the end of the book, in an inventory of mortal sins (i.e., actions that would send one’s soul to hell).

On this list, Murder was predictably one of the biggies.  And here’s how Vol. 3 opened the subject:

Two particularly revolting forms of murder need special mention as they are approved and even practiced in the world today.

a) Abortion
The first of these is called abortion, by which is meant the deliberate and sinful doing of anything which will separate a new human life from its mother before it can live alone. Once human life has begun it is murder to put an end to it.

This criminal offense is a grievous sin not only for a mother who deliberately causes or permits it, but for all others who cooperate in it. It is not permitted even to doctors, and so-called “laws” which allow it under certain circumstances are not laws because they violate the supreme law of God.

Even in those very rare cases where it appears to be either the life of the mother or of the child, no one is allowed directly to attack the life of either one to save the other. God alone is the arbiter of life and death. We are never allowed to do evil for the sake of some good.

The child has a right to life equal to that of the mother.

The depriving of a child of a chance for eternal salvation must also be considered in judging the gravity of this crime.

So terrible does the Church consider this sin, and so dangerous to society, that she excommunicates all those who command or procure direct and deliberate abortion.

Those who cooperate in the crime are also excommunicated.

[Addendum from Volume 4: “Toward the Eternal Commencement”:

2) Killing the Unborn
The vice [of] abortion, is the deliberate taking of the life of an unborn infant. . . .It sends a human soul into eternity without Baptism.]

I’ve dredged up these three generation-old pronouncements because for me they shed some light on current struggles over abortion policy since the Dobbs decision overthrew Roe. There are no quick fixes here, but  maybe some clarification about the sticky mix of murder and metaphysics involved. Let’s summarize their case:

Abortion in this schema not only criminally ends the physical life of the fetus as a human; it also robs them of their chance to enter heaven as a lost innocent, because the act prevents it from being baptized with water & the proper prayers prescribed by Catholic dogma.  The infant soul is thereby consigned to an eternity in Limbo.

What’s “Limbo?” Think of a waiting room in an abandoned train station, floating somewhere between heaven and hell. The unbaptized in it escaped hellfire, but they’re stuck waiting for a train to heaven that’s never going to arrive. (You ask me, except for the flames, that’s still a pretty close proxy for perdition.)

Limbo was technically abolished by the Vatican in 2007. But the church didn’t say what was to happen to all those stranded unbaptized multitudes. And that overdue train to the pearly gates station still hasn’t been scheduled. Maybe their plight is more like Waiting for Godot, playing on an endless loop, with a cast of billions, and no intermissions.

Meantime, the Catholic hierarchy, especially in the U. S., is still in thrall to the outlook of The Ark and The Dove. And there’s more to it yet to tease out.

One major implication came up in my senior year religion class, in 1960. Expelled from St. Joseph’s for spreading heresy, my mother made one more try to save my soul, sending me to St. Mary’s High, a day school in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where my father had been transferred from Puerto Rico. Religion classes there used the same Quest series, taught by a priest.

I was part of a college-bound clique of seniors, with intellectual pretensions. One of us (I don’t think it was me; I was in the closet with my faithlessness, counting  down the days til graduation and escape), challenged the priest about the late-term pregnancy crisis issue. “What happens then?” Was the question. “What can they do?”

The priest didn’t give an inch. I don’t recall his exact words, but in sum, they were a close paraphrase of the Volume 3 text:

Even in those very rare cases where it appears to be either the life of the mother or of the child, no one is allowed directly to attack the life of either one to save the other. God alone is the arbiter of life and death. We are never allowed to do evil for the sake of some good.

The child has a right to life equal to that of the mother.

The depriving of a child of a chance for eternal salvation must also be considered in judging the gravity of this crime.

But going a step further. He explained, “The doctor gets two stethoscopes. He puts one near the mother’s heart, the other where he can hear the child’s, and waits. When one heart stops, he does his best to save the other,”

This  sounded awful to me, but it wasn’t a crisis. Despite having nine siblings, as the firstborn son in those years, I was utterly ignorant of actual birth, its potential traumas and hazards. The conversation petered out.

But there was more to these texts, which I didn’t notice til much later:

> The placement: Abortion gets special top billing on the murder list, ahead of genocide and all other fatal atrocities. It has remained the top  action priority for the American Catholic hierarchy ever since;

> Its evil is intensified because it is classified as both a physical and a supernatural  crime, depriving an innocent of both their life and their chance at heaven;

> Its evil is such that all who are accessories to it, before, during or after, are equally culpable and penalized by the Church with excommunication;

> The church insists that “this crime” of abortion is “so terrible” and “so dangerous to society”  that its “gravity” can hardly be overstated. It warrants the American bishops’ deepening alliance with, and leading role in the rise of authoritarian politics.

> In which case, a further sub-section of the text on the taking of life comes into view :

> Punishment of Serious Crimes by the State

As a surgeon is allowed to amputate a limb to protect the welfare of the whole body, so too, public magistrates to whom the welfare of the community is entrusted, have the authority to inflict the death penalty on dangerous criminals whose crimes would be gravely detrimental to the good of society if left unpunished or given a lesser penalty. Holy Scripture justifies capital punishment when it says: “Whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God.” Genesis. 9, 6.

It would be easy to dismiss the implications of these passages. But consider the common words and phrases: death should be imposed for crimes considered “gravely detrimental to the good of society if left unpunished or given a lesser penalty. Holy Scripture justifies” it, for crimes that involve “the shedding of blood”.

My views, for the record, have come to align with Bill Clinton’s adage, that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”  But my concern here is with how events in more than one anti-abortion state confirm that this drive for abortion bans sealed in blood, stated so clearly in 1955, remain the driving force and over-arching  goal of Catholic-dominated anti-abortion politics.

Their rhetoric regularly reinforces it: abortion is equated with the Holocaust; with American slavery; their movement is the successor to the Confederate civil war, and more.

Much the same appears to be true of their evangelical allies. But they are relative newcomers, only taking up the cause at the behest of Jerry Falwell Sr. and other apparatchiks in the late 1970s. By contrast, the volumes of my high school text were in high gear in 1955, being taught nationally fifteen years before New York and Hawaii first legalized abortion, and eighteen years prior to Roe.

And they haven’t relented. The fall of Roe was but one step toward their main objective. The mandates their texts laid on my generation continue; the two stethoscope fate is much more than a fever-dream relic of my vanished youth. The bishops and their zealots were then much closer to their goal of a gallows-enforced ban than they are now. And now, with Roe out of the way, besides determination to regain lost ground, they are also clearly aiming for, as their movement’s principal spokesman has announced, “retribution.”

What to do? That’s for the political strategists to thrash out. But they better stay busy, for the continuing Quest for Happiness of some is others’ continuing nightmare. And at least for me, its most ominous image is a doctor entering a delivery room, with a crucifix in one hand, and two stethoscopes in the other.