Caught in the grip of abortion, the great polarizer

ABORTION afflicts Americans’ politics but not their consciences.

Earlier this month, for example, a national poll taken for the Associated Press found that 19% of those surveyed feel that abortion should be legal in all situations, while 16% think it should be completely outlawed. About three-fifths of the respondents believe abortion should be legal under certain circumstances. The other 6% just don’t know what to think. When AP refined its data slightly, it found that 52% of those polled think abortion “should be legal in most or all cases,” and 43% feel it “should be illegal most or all of the time.”

The survey found no significant difference between the views of men and women, though the former comprised a slightly larger percentage of the undecided. If this poll is like others on the topic -- and its findings certainly suggest that it is -- there were no significant differences among ethnic groups or even religious denominations, though a majority of those who feel that abortion should not be permitted even to save a woman’s life are evangelical Protestants who regularly attend church.

What’s interesting about these views is that they haven’t really changed in the 33 years since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe vs. Wade. To the extent that abortion continues to roil American politics, it is a consequence of the two parties’ increasing polarization along checklist lines and the fact that that country is, in partisan terms, split down the middle. In this situation, the 9% to 13% of Americans who tell pollsters that a candidate’s stand on abortion decides their vote become a sought-after minority.

Investigative reporter Eyal Press has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of what this reality means in human terms with “Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City and the Conflict That Divided America.” As the title suggests, he charts the history of the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements and the way in which their confrontation convulsed his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. His father, Shalom Press, is an obstetrician-gynecologist who also performs abortions. One of his colleagues, Dr. Barnett Slepian, was shot through a window as he stood in his kitchen one Friday night, shortly after returning from synagogue. After years as a fugitive, the killer was tried and convicted.

Press, whose maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, does a concise but careful job of setting out the social and economic conditions that set the stage for Buffalo’s anti-abortion turmoil -- and of the uses local politicians made of the passions aroused. His grip of religion generally is less steady than his grip on politics -- details are slightly off, nuances missing. He links the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, “a Bible-quoting Baptist,” to a surge in “fundamentalism” in both the United States and Israel from which his family emigrated. Carter, a born-again Christian, is not a fundamentalist. Similarly, the haredim in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood cannot be “quasi-Medieval,” since Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who founded the Hasidic movement to which they belong, wasn’t born until 1698.

Still, he does a clear -- and more important, fair -- job of sketching the progress of the “right to life” movement from its post-Roe origins among a handful of devout Catholic pacifists to its being organized by evangelical Christianity’s muscular, high-testosterone, gun-rack-in-the-back-window wing.

It has been, as Press reports, a bumpy and, for many, disillusioning transition leading to increasingly tenuous alliances. The author quotes Msgr. George C. Higgins’ appraisal of the situation: “Unfortunately, there are many in the pro-life movement who do not share the bishops’ broad application of the respect-life principle. They apply the principle selectively -- to the unborn child, but not to prisoners on death row, nor to the poverty-stricken family in the inner city.... I would hope that pro-life Catholics seriously consider the possibility that in collaborating with the right wing on abortion they risk defeat of the overall social justice agenda.”

When it comes to focusing on the small but repellent cadre of fanatics responsible for the destruction of medical offices and the murder of six doctors and clinic workers since 1992, Press is similarly if unsatisfyingly factual. If those facts, thoroughly reported as they are, fail to illuminate, that’s hardly his fault. This is a problem beyond the reach of reportage -- or, for that matter, of psychology. You can muck around in all the stories of alienation, marginalization, sexual dysfunction and messianic delusion until your stomach turns and never arrive at a satisfactory general explanation for what’s wrong with these people.

Evil is like that.

The functional lesson that can be taken from Press’ extremely helpful and concise histories of both movements is a lesson in responsibility. It’s a story of how those who should have known better stood aside while the reckless and heedless polluted a difficult civic discussion with the histrionic language of incitement.

In 1964, less than a decade before Roe was decided, the archbishop of Boston -- Cardinal Richard Cushing -- was thrown into a quandary over how to respond to a legislative proposal seeking repeal of Massachusetts’ longtime ban on selling or distributing contraceptives. Cushing sought the advice of American Catholicism’s leading theologian, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray.

Murray, who was the principal architect of the Second Vatican Council’s statement on religious liberty, told the prelate that there were, in fact, three reasons to support the proposal: One was that the civil law cannot be asked to do more than set “relatively minimal standards of public morality.” Second, when it comes to “the field of sexual morality the public educative value of the law seems almost nil.” Finally, Murray argued, in a country like the United States, “in which government is not paternal and the jurisprudential rule obtains ... [i]t is difficult to see how the state can forbid, as contrary to public morality, a practice that numerous religious leaders approve as morally right.” Even though “the stand taken by these religious groups may be lamentable from the Catholic moral point of view ... it is decisive from the point of view of law and jurisprudence for which the norm of ‘generally accepted standards’ is controlling.”

There speaks the moral sanity of pluralism.

The heart of Murray’s advice, though, involved two things he felt his coreligionists should do after the commonwealth legalized contraceptives, whose use he opposed. First, he wrote, they needed to make it clear “that out of their understanding of the distinction between public and private morality, and out of their understanding of religious freedom, Catholics repudiate in principle a resort to the coercive instrument of law to enforce upon the whole community moral standards that the community itself does not commonly accept.” Rather, Murray advised, Catholics should “lift the standards of public morality in all its dimensions, not by appealing to law and police action, but by the integrity of their Christian lives.”

Press ends his book with a less eloquent but not substantially different plea: “One can only hope that those who feel compelled to express their beliefs [concerning abortion], no matter where they stand, do so in the only manner befitting a democracy -- through words and principled action, not bullets or bombs -- which is also the only method with the true power to persuade.”

As the old Yiddish expression goes, “from your lips to God’s ear.”