It may be fair for those with a consistent life ethic to criticize me for saying so much more about COVID deaths than abortion. A few thoughts [5 points], then everyone on all sides can yell at me.
COVID deaths are preventable if each of us does our part, which requires so little. Abortion isn't so simple. Supporting policies to improve access to contraception and economic support for pregnant women is a start, but political “solutions” have been hard to come by, perhaps because neither party’s leaders are all that interested in seeing fewer abortions.
I’m never going to have a pregnancy go wrong and threaten my life, and it bothers me that many of the loudest anti-abortion voices and the majority of politicians banning abortions are men, and that their “solutions” involve zero accountability for the men responsible for unwanted pregnancies. Women can speak to this issue better than I and have far more at stake.
It bothers me that the anti-abortion movement among evangelicals (not Catholics) didn’t begin as a response to Roe v Wade (1973) but later, as a political cause chosen by men upset by mandated desegregation of private Christian schools to rally white conservatives in support of the GOP and “pro-life” candidate Reagan, who signed the country’s most permissive abortion statute into law as CA governor but said what these men wanted to hear about keeping government from interfering with their segregated schools. Why weren’t evangelicals, including Christianity Today and the Southern Baptist Convention (see their statements in 1974 and 1976) incensed about abortion earlier? I say this without minimizing legitimate ethical concerns about abortion: I believe well-intentioned people like me were, and continue to be, manipulated by politicians who care more about being elected than they ever cared about overturning Roe or enacting policies that they know would lead to fewer abortions.
Under the right conditions, a woman’s ovum (egg) can become a human. But we all agree it’s not a human at first. It’s not clear to me that this cell becomes a living human when fertilized, or when implanted, or that a group of cells without a brain or consciousness is a human being. Heart cells can be placed in petri dish, divide, and begin to beat, as heart tissue does. Is that tissue a living creature? Suppose a person dies of cancer, could be resuscitated and kept alive artificially for a while, but asked not to be resuscitated; is their corpse, which has a perfectly good brain and heart, a potential human life that we’re obligated to resuscitate? Are we obligated to fertilize every ovum in every woman, or implant every ovum fertilized in vitro, because these are potential human beings? Is it murder to allow a fertilized egg in an IVF clinic’s freezer to thaw? Israel’s abortion laws are among the world’s most liberal; are Jews completely wrong in their millennia-long belief that life begins at birth, when the ruach (breath) of God enters the body (Gen 2.7)?
Bioethicists ask questions like this; they get at the core of what it means to be a living human and often don’t have easy answers.
I don’t know at what point an ovum becomes fully human and deserving of the same protection as any other person. Personally, if asked for advice, I would err on the side of caution. That said, I’m uneasy when one group convinced they have the only right understanding, unlike the rest of us who are less certain or have a different understanding, is determined to use the power of government to impose their view on everyone else. We’re dealing with questions that don’t all have clear scientific answers (unlike, say, whether COVID vaccines and masks work).Most who identify with the conservative “pro-life” movement have anti-life attitudes on other issues. Former Attorney General Bill Barr received an award from a “pro-life” Catholic group the day between two federal executions, which the “pro-life” Trump administration resumed after a nearly 2-decade pause. Many of the loudest voices spreading misinformation, shrugging off COVID hospitalizations and deaths, and undermining every effort to stop the pandemic claim to be “pro-life.” Many who say they’re pro-life are also pro-torture, pro-drone strikes that kill civilians, and pro-nuclear weapons, and defend police violence against unarmed suspects. And many oppose efforts to curb emissions of carcinogens and neurotoxins from coal plants. None of this necessarily invalidates the pro-life movement’s concerns about abortion, but clearly the movement is shaped more by a political agenda than a consistent life ethic or valuing of God’s image-bearers. A myopic obsession with gaining political power, perceived as the only way to solve (ostensibly) a single social problem, at any cost, even the fall of our democracy to authoritarianism, makes me question the wisdom of the entire enterprise. Others may want to spend another 40 years trying to overturn Roe by voting “pro-life.” But I’m focused on fighting this pandemic, which we can overcome with the tools we already have, if we’ll simply have the wisdom to use them.