Abortion: What Does It Say About Us as a People?

Recent events, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of Missouri’s Webster case and the nationwide attention raised by the Operation Rescue movement, have intensified the public debate over abortion liberty. Even if the court should drastically limit abortion liberty as defined in Roe vs. Wade--the problem of securing the right to life of the unborn will not be solved, nor will the argument cease over abortion. It has become the preeminent moral and civil rights issue of our time.

Rather, the debate will be multiplied as state legislatures may be required to reconsider state abortion statutes abolished by Roe. These laws, in the main, represented local community consensus on the right to life of the unborn.

That consensus remains clear. Every available reputable piece of survey research--including a Los Angeles Times poll--tells us that a majority of the American people reject abortion as a means of contraception, reject abortion because an unplanned pregnancy would involve economic difficulties and reject abortion to resolve problems of personal relationships between a man and a woman. Since these “contraceptive abortions” account for approximately 99% of the abortions now performed, according to testimony given to the Senate Judiciary Committe in 1983. It seems apparent that the American people have rejected the abortion liberty as defined by Roe vs. Wade.

The abortion debate is not the only pressing “life issue” confronting us today. But the seriousness with which we conduct that argument will speak volumes about our ability, as a free society, to make morally informed choices about such issues as fetal-tissue research, treatment of handicapped infants, genetic engineering, the severely retarded, the comatose and care of the elderly.

We also need to reflect on the foundations of law in a just society. Belief in democracy does not mean that the truth, the good and the just are always what the majority says they are. To the contrary--our Bill of Rights means that some things in our democracy aren’t up for a vote--like freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition government for a redress of grievances.

Viewed from another angle, our democracy’s laws are bounded by a higher law; all of us, as human beings and as citizens, are accountable not simply to civil law but to concepts of truth and justice that stand injudgment on our laws, and on us. Jim Crow laws may have been duly enacted by lawfully elected legislatures, but they were morally hateful; they violated our common sense of justice, and were thus legally indefensible in the full meaning of “the law.”

The Founding Fathers were referring to this higher law when they spoke of inalienable rights and included among them the right to life. Living and legislating in what is often the tension between justice and legality are no easy business, to be sure. Catholic social thought has traditionally affirmed that prudence--the skill or habit by which we calculate how our moral norms should be embodied in practice--is the highest of political virtues.

But we misunderstand the virtue of prudence if we reduce it to legislating morality, or to splitting the difference between opposed positions. Living the virtue of prudence has something to do with pluralism in these United States. Pluralism does not mean indifference to issues that divide us. Rather, pluralism means engaging our differences, forthrightly and frankly, within the bond of democratic civility.

When we do that, we won’t find easy answers to the dilemmas of public policy, domestic or foreign. But we may find a measure of practical wisdom--something we surely won’t find if we reduce our opponents’ positions to caricatures.

I would urge all of us, as Americans of many faiths and political convictions, to reflect on this fact: The number of deaths caused by abortion every year in this country is the equivalent of losing a city the size of Detroit to a nuclear attack. What does this say about us as a people committed to building a hospitable society? What does this say about us as a people who have traditionally welcomed the gift of life, cherished it and defended it against its enemies?

What has happened in America since Roe vs. Wade was handed down in 1973 is not merely offensive to Catholic sensibilities. It is deeply unworthy of us as a people. We have to think that through, carefully and with mutual candor and mutual charity, if the new abortion debate is to strengthen American democracy and help us continue the founders’ and framers’ task of building a community of character to which we can pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.