Cutting through the fog

Friday October 24, 2008

... on the Abortion Issue: Can we talk – honestly?

By George Wilson, SJ

George Wilson is an ecclesiologist and a member of MDI, Management Design Incorporated, an ecumenical group working with leadership development and collaborative planning tools for non-profit organizations. George has been a mentor to many, myself included. I treasure my forty-year association with George. I think he presents a very viable and timely look at a sensitive issue.

Posted with permission.

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Recent news reports highlighted a most unusual event. Douglas Kmiec, the former dean of Catholic University Law School and a card-carrying, highly respected conservative, was turned away at the Communion rail. The reason: he had declared his support for Barrack Obama. This was not your unrepentant liberal, John Kerry. The Kmiec incident should alert us that it may be time for a review of some fundamental realities of ‘the abortion situation.’

I would suggest that those realities fall under three broad rubrics: the political, the moral, and the sacramental.

Some Political Realities

Reality 1: No political figure, whether in the legislative or judicial arena, is actually ‘pro-abortion.’

The labels ‘Pro-Life’ and ‘Pro-Choice’ are products of political maneuvering, offering little help for clear moral judgment. They are designed to mobilize support for competing political strategies for dealing with a social phenomenon that both sides view as repugnant to our civic identity. Neither represents a serious intellectual effort at confronting the mix of interlocking values in our pluralistic society.

Those who believe the best strategy to eliminate abortion is to repeal Roe v. Wade and re-criminalize the act of abortion have effectively won the P.R. battle. They did so by a form of political jiu jitsu, quickly coopting the positive rhetoric embodied in the label ‘Pro-Life.’ Their opponents in the political battle, who believe reversal of the supreme court’s position to be at least counter-productive, if not positively destructive of other fundamental values in our society, were thereby boxed into a corner. They could hardly espouse a purely counter-stance by declaring themselves ‘Anti-Life.’ No label that begins with ‘Anti’ will ever gain traction in our relentlessly positive society. Searching for a more positive slogan – and remember, that’s all these labels are – , they came up with the much less emotionally engaging rhetoric of ‘Pro-Choice.’ The language of ‘Life’ engages most people at a more profound level than that of ‘Choice’ and was therefore far more effective in actually enlisting foot-soldiers for the ensuing political fight.

But neither label is an adequate representation of its adherents’ actual stance.

In reality, the behavior of many adherents of the ‘Pro-Life’ orthodoxy reveals them to be simply anti-abortion, whether they own up to the fact or not. They hold positions on issues like capital punishment, immigration, unfettered capitalism and the preemptive use of military violence that are hardly compatible with a commitment to life. When they are confronted with a call for a consistent ethic of life – Cardinal Bernardin’s ‘seamless robe’ vision, embracing life from conception through death – , they recoil and dismiss it as airy piety. Nothing must be entertained which might take the focus away from their political target.

Such people should not thereby be considered dishonest. They simply don’t see the necessity of expending any intellectual effort at critiquing the disconnect between their comforting label and its objectively necessary implications. Intellectual rigor would lead ‘Pro-Life’ adherents to greater complexity by compelling them to examine all issues involving ‘life,’ including all of the likely consequences of a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Such an examination might reveal their political position to contain down-side, destructive effects they would rather ignore. It’s politically more effective to stay with a focus that ignores any troubling qualifications.

Similarly, the actual intent of most adherents of the ‘Pro-Choice’ rhetoric is not unfettered license to pursue whatever the individual desires without concern for the rest of society. Their focused goal is really to prevent government from using our society’s coercive resources (police, courts, jails) to monitor and intrude on excruciatingly difficult personal choices for women under great stress. They are to a large extent simply anti-interventionists. But their simplistic label puts them in the position of seeming to affirm reckless individualism or non-accountabilty to any societal respect for human life. Labels are inherently resistant to any element of complexity, so most ‘Pro-Choice’ adherents – like their ideological counterparts in the ‘Pro-Life’ camp – conveniently ignore great gobs of unpleasant implications that could be revealed if their rhetoric were examined critically.

In any case, we all need to be clear that the purpose of the game – on both sides – is to win the political struggle; logical cogency is an easily jettisoned luxury.

Reality 2: The role of legislators and judges in our society is to promote the common good of society as a whole. They try to do so by crafting prudential answers to concrete situations of competing interests in our society. It is not their role to answer abstract moral questions or take absolute moral positions in the name of a people.

Much of the conversation around the issue of society’s way of dealing with abortion is misplaced. Not because of the substance of the moral question but because of a misunderstanding of the responsibility accepted by legislators and judges when they assume public office. The question we appropriately ask public officials to answer in our name is not “Is abortion ever an appropriate moral choice?” That is a question for ethics or religion. Legislators and jurists, and others involved in shaping public policy, function in the arena of prudential judgment, where mixed goods must be juxtaposed. The question we entrust to their judgment is rather: “What is the best practical way to hold the fabric of society together in the face of competing assessments as to the potential destructiveness of particular forms of behavior?” In this case, should the state intervene, and if so, with what instruments of control? Or should it allow non-state agents to shape society’s response? The goal of the choice is the common good, defined not in terms of some utopian ideology but rather as the best way for citizens to live humanly productive lives together in the face of beliefs which are both deeply held and in conflict.

In the minds of some, Roe v. Wade is a poor response to that search because, in their calculus, it generates a set of results which are counter to their understanding of the common good. For others, a reversal of the supreme court’s decision would create ultimately far more harmful results. These are matters of painfully difficult prudential assessment, not the stuff of Olympian, abstract theology. They are questions about which reasonable – and ethically responsible – people can disagree. It is in the nature of prudential reasoning that any proposed response can be only based on a calculus of probable concrete consequences expected or hoped for from the course actually chosen. To excoriate legislators or judges because they come to a different answer than that espoused by a particular religious or ethical interest-group is to misunderstand the kind of decisions they are called to make. Any policy choice they make will have moral implications, for sure, but the criterion for its morality or immorality – precisely as policy, not moral stricture – is the complex mix of actual effects it creates. “By their fruits you will know them.”

Second, a bit of moral theology about individual acts

It is true that Catholic moral theology does draw conclusions concerning the morality of classes of actions. But in assessing the objective morality of individual acts, our theology draws on a set of principles that refer, not to the class of the action, but to the relative proximity or remoteness of the person’s action to an intrinsically immoral act. A given concrete action – say, an actual abortion – might emerge from the confluence of many choices made by many players along the way to its execution. The morality of any of those contributory actions depends on the level of personal engagement with the actual immoral deed. Moralists make a clear distinction between formal and merely material cooperation.

To be the direct agent of an objectively immoral act (in the present case, of an abortion) is one thing. To bear responsibility for conditions which might make the actual immoral act possible is quite another. To be the surgeon whose knife actually terminates the life of a fetus involves much graver responsibility than to be the person responsible for placing the address of an abortion-provider in the Yellow pages. The information in that listing might arguably have facilitated the eventual act by bringing the pregnant woman and the surgeon together. But the responsibility of the editor of the Yellow pages is so remote from the actual transgression as to be negligible.

Similarly, by the choices they make, legislators or jurists may create the social condition that an individual woman and her doctor interpret as license to abort a child. But that interpretation is ultimately a function of the psyche of the individuals making such a choice. Public officials do not ‘approve of’ or ‘condone’ abortion; they are not in the endorsing – or condemning – business. Their relation to any individual act of abortion is – and can only be – at most material cooperation.

And so to Holy Communion

And so we return to the Kmiec rejection – his ex-communication-in-fact if not in law. How close is he to being a proximate enabler of a particular act of abortion?

We may reasonably assume that Professor Kmiec has never actually procured an abortion for anyone. Then what is the relationship of his political endorsement to such an act?

Consider: Professor Kmiec, after first weighing multiple trade-offs involved in choosing to support one actual candidate rather than another one – each being a finite human, not an abstract ideology – , opts to endorse the candidacy of Obama, who may possibly one day become president of the U.S.; and who, if that occurs, may get the chance to nominate someone to the supreme court (if a sitting justice retires or dies) who might follow through on Obama’s expectation in nominating him (think David Souter) when a possible abortion case is accepted by the whole court, leading to a possible renewed affirmation of Roe v. Wade, which judgment might be used by a particular woman or couple to justify the decision to abort.

On the basis of that long chain of potential events, each involving a shifting calculus of probabilities, Professor Kmiec is then treated as a promoter or enabler of abortion. He is said to ‘favor’ abortion. On that basis he is then considered to have made himself unworthy of approaching the sacrament of the Eucharist with the rest of the garden-variety sinners in the faith community. Using logic like that, because of our tragic complicity as citizens in sinful decisions about war and economic injustice – not to mention torture – none of us should be admitted to the sacrament

Wherever one stands on the validity of the intellectual construct which is offered to support such a refusal of Communion, one result is sure. If this kind of thing keeps up, there won’t be much need to turn people away from the rail. They won’t be in line in the first place.

George Wilson, S.J., does church organizational consulting out of Cincinnati, Ohio. His recent book is Clericalism: the Death of Priesthood (Liturgical Press).

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