Posted on 06/06/2003 10:32:33 AM PDT by Cathryn Crawford
The Pro-Life Movement's Problem With Morality
Exclusive commentary by Cathryn Crawford
Jun 6, 2003
Making claim to being pro-life in America is like shouting, “I’m a conservative Christian Republican!” from your rooftop. This is partly due to the fact that a considerable number of conservative Christian Republicans are pro-life. It’s hardly true, however, to say that they are the only pro-life people in America. Surprisingly enough to some, there are many different divisions within the pro-life movement, including Democrats, gays, lesbians, feminists, and environmentalists. It is not a one-party or one-group or one-religion issue.
The pro-life movement doesn’t act like it, though. Consistently, over and over throughout the last 30 years, the pro-lifers have depended solely on moral arguments to win the debate of life over choice. You can believe that abortion is morally wrong, yes, and at the appropriate moment, appealing to the emotions can be effective, but too much time is spent on arguing about why abortion is wrong morally instead of why abortion is wrong logically. We have real people of all walks of life in America – Christians, yes, but also non-Christians, atheists, Muslims, agnostics, hedonists, narcissists - and it’s foolish and ineffective for the pro-life movement to only use the morality argument to people who don’t share their morals. It’s shortsighted and it’s also absolutely pointless.
It is relatively easy to convince a person who shares your morals of a point of view – you simply appeal to whatever brand of morality that binds the two of you together. However, when you are confronted with someone that you completely disagree with on every point, to what can you turn to find common ground? There is only one place to go, one thing that we all have in common – and that is our shared instinct to protect ourselves, our humanness.
It seems that the mainstream religious pro-life movement is not so clear when it comes to reasons not to have an abortion beyond the basic arguments that it’s a sin and you’ll go straight to hell. Too much time is spent on the consequences of abortion and not enough time is spent convincing people why they shouldn’t have one in the first place.
What about the increased risk of breast cancer in women who have abortions? Why don’t we hear more about that? What about the risk of complications later in life with other pregnancies? You have to research to even find something mentioned about any of this. The pro-life movement should be front and center, shouting the statistics to the world. Instead, they use Biblical quotes and morality to argue their point.
Don’t get me wrong; morality has its place. However, the average Joe who doesn’t really know much about the pro-life movement - and doesn’t really care too much for the obnoxious neighbor who’s always preaching at him to go to church and stop drinking - may not be too open to a religious sort of editorial written by a minister concerning abortion. He’d rather listen to those easy going pro-abortion people – they appeal more to the general moral apathy that he so often feels.
Tell him that his little girl has a high chance of suffering from a serious infection or a perforated uterus due to a botched abortion, however, and he’ll take a bit more notice. Tell him that he’s likely to suffer sexual side effects from the mental trauma of his own child being aborted and he’ll take even more notice. But these aren’t topics that are typically discussed by the local right-to-life chapters.
It isn’t that the religious right is wrong. However, it boils down to one question: Do they wish to be loudly moral or quietly winning?
It is so essential that the right-to-life movement in America galvanize behind the idea the logic, not morality, will be what wins the day in this fight, because sometimes, despite the rightness of the intentions, morality has to be left out of the game. Morality doesn’t bind everyone together. The only thing that does that is humanness and the logic of protecting ourselves; and that is what has to be appealed to if we are going to make a difference in the fight to lessen and eventually eliminate abortion.
Cathryn Crawford is a student from Texas. She can be reached at feedback@washingtondispatch.com.
Who does not share the view that murder (being the taking of an innocent human life) is wrong?
If we do not argue that murder is a moral wrong, then why is murder wrong?
Go ask your wife if I need to re-up in SAS.
Ah, excellent point, Teach. Proceed with tutoring. Oh, yes, I forgot, classroom teachers never use moral arguments in classrooms (say, a social science instructor spouting anti-war doctrines), do they? Of course, they never change any young impressionable minds in imposed environmental science lectures, do they?
But it carries little weight on the macro-level argument that abortion should be illegal. Without morality, abortion becomes just another choice where the risks (TO THE MOTHER, ONLY) are weighed against the benefits (TO THE MOTHER ONLY)--somewhat akin to a young woman deciding whether to use sunblock at the beach. Sure, her skin cancer risk goes up but, on the other hand, she will look great for her date next Friday with a tan.
Once morality is out of the equation, a life and death decision is trivialized. People who will not buy the moral argument will rarely weigh future risks very seriously and will weigh the immediate inconvenience of a baby very highly. These people are lost to society and God until the moral issue becomes important to them.
So the practical approach may save a few lives at the margin. But only the moral approach can stop the holocaust.
Because if we all got to kill the people we wanted to kill without consequence, then there would be no one left on the planet.
Especially after elections ;)
You'd be surprised at how receptive he was to being 'disciplined'.
And if I got dressed up in the Nazi costume... Oh my......!
Alright, alright, if we're supposed to get all of the amoralists on our radar screen and shoot our pro-life missiles using weaponry they can understand, then, say, for every public service announcement on child abuse, we should feature a protagonist and an antagonist arguing about whether it's OK to beat a kid...then we'll have the child-defender say the magic line that will quietly win the argument:
"You know, whether you know it or not, we have skin just like those kids...we share that in common...and part of our humanness is our instinct to protect ourselves."
Between 1967 and 1970 sixteen states legalized abortion. In most it was limited, only for rape, incest and severe fetal handicaps or deformities, and when the pregnancy jeopardized the life of the mother (all of which constitute only 5% of the abortion cases today). There were two notable exceptions - California in 1967 and New York in 1970 legalized abortion on demand.
Not everyone shares the same moral standard.
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