Abortion is extremely contentious, and for more than 45 years now, there has been considerable “warfare” between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” people. Is there any way to de-escalate such negative polarization?
The
Abortion Wars
James
Davison Hunter is a “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Virginia and
author of the seminal book Culture Wars (1991).
“The
Issue of Abortion” is a major subsection of the ninth chapter of my book Fed
up with Fundamentalism, and as I mention there, Hunter (b. 1955) has suggested
that abortion could well be the catalyst for America’s next civil war.
That
kind of talk didn’t end in the 1990s, though. In May of last year, the
conservative Christian Post featured an
online article titled “The coming civil war over abortion.” That same
month, The
Guardian posted “Christian
rightwingers warn abortion fight could spark US civil war.”
Among
Christians, abortion was primarily only a Catholic issue until Francis Schaeffer
convinced Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell in 1979 to use it to gain political
power—and the abortion wars have now raged for four decades among Christians as well as in society at large.
In this election
year, abortion is at the heart of the political “wars” between the Republicans
and Democrats. Vice President Pence said in his acceptance speech last week,
President Trump has stood without apology for the sanctity of human life every day of this administration. Joe Biden, he supports taxpayer funding of abortion, right up to the moment of birth.
(It has often been said that truth is the first
casualty in war, and Pence’s last statement is misleading and untrue.)
De-escalation
Efforts
In
spite of the rhetoric being used by the Trump administration and its staunch
conservative evangelical followers, there are both Catholics and evangelical Christians
who are seeking to de-escalate the abortion wars by broadening their ethical
concerns.
In
1972 a group of Catholic sisters organized for social justice as the Network.
They became widely known because of their first Nuns on the Bus tour in 2012.
(In 2014 I wrote about them and their leader, Sister Simone Campbell, here.)
Long
known as just NETWORK, their website is NetworkLobby.org
and they are promoting PopeFrancisVoters.org
in their campaign against the current President. Even though they are
Catholics, they say little about abortion and much about a broad gamut of
social justice issues.
Ron
Sider, the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, is an example of a
Protestant evangelical who has through the years been strongly against abortion.
But long ago he began to emphasize the importance of being “completely pro-life,”
publishing a book by that name in 1987.
In
de-escalating the abortion wars, Sider was the editor of a book published earlier
this year under the title The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30
Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity.
A
Spark of Light
Jodi Picoult is a superlative novelist, and I was greatly
impressed with her 2018 novel A Spark of Light. In fact, I decided to
write this blog article mainly because of reading it.
The novel is about just one day—a very fateful day when
there was a shooting in an abortion clinic.
Picoult skillfully narrates the deep thoughts and
convictions of all the people involved in that tragic day: the shooter, the
policeman seeking to get the shooter’s hostages released, the protesters
outside the clinic, the women inside the clinic, and the doctors and nurses providing
the abortion services.
 |
| Dr. Willie Parker (b. 1962) |
Even though it will be quite perplexing to some, Parker believes that performing abortions and “speaking out on behalf of the
women who want abortions” is his Christian calling and his “life’s work” (p. 16).
For all of you who wonder how a Christian can justify
abortion, I highly recommend reading Picoult’s novel and/or Parker’s book.
Doing so thoughtfully, I believe, would go far toward de-escalating the
abortion wars.
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