Abortion, Roman Catholics and Conservative Christians

I've supported the rights of women to have an abortion for a long time. I'm 67, in my 43rd year of being a Presbyterian pastor, and I don't remember a time when I didn't support women's rights on this issue.

As for my Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, I wonder about their pro-birth stance, and by pro-birth, I mean the general notion that once conception has occurred, the woman is merely the carrier of a new life and thus has no say-so whatsoever about it.

She is beholdin' to the gods, or to the god of the Roman Catholic Church, to carry the foetus, the child-within, to term. Period! It's the will of god, as they say, but with darker dimensions in play.

1. When I was in Detroit, working with Dr. Jack Kevorkian on physician assisted suicide, I received dozens of letters from Roman Catholics with one consistent theme: suffering in this life is good for the soul. I suspect some of this plays a role in the pro-birth position.

2. Furthermore, a generally degraded notion about women still lurks in the dark corners of the Roman Church - women are to be seen, not heard. At best, they are baby-factories. A woman is determined by her biology, her ability to get pregnant and bear a child. This is her destiny, her calling, her responsibility, and, of course, it's all determined by god.

3. Much of this notion was forged in Medieval Europe where disease and war decimated the population for centuries, so the church unwittingly played into the hands of the kings and landed nobility by promoting a pro-birth policy to help replenish the labor supply in Europe. Slavery, from the word "Slav," was a part of Europe's pagan and even Christian legacy. The need for labor spurred the turn to slavery in the 1400 and 1500s in Europe and ultimately in the Caribbean Islands and the United States for the production of sugar (the Crusades brought back sugar) and cotton. And everyone agreed, now that Africans were a steady supply of cheap labor, that it was okay for the Christian world, white, to enslave those from the "Dark Continent," providing cheap labor as well saving the slave from the pagan world of Africa. Since people of color were less than fully human, the White Man's Burden was all the important - to take care of these "children," even as they worked the fields for the White Man's Profits.

4. Hence the silly restrictions on birth-control and the edginess about sex-education. Getting pregnant is a woman's highest calling, and anything that diminishes her chances of pregnancy are to be opposed. Hence, Santorum's opposition to birth-control.

Conservative Protestants share the same views:
1. All pregnancy, whatever its origin, is of god.
2. All pregnancies, then, must be carried to term. Period.
3. The woman has no right whatsoever to any decision in any of this.
4. A woman's body is never her own - it belongs to the foetus.
5. A woman's destiny is child-bearing - she is a baby-factory.

All of this plays a huge role in the ambiguity Conservative Protestants still have toward women in the workplace, in the pulpit and in the home. Women are still very much second-class human beings in Conservative Circles, determined not by their minds, but by their wombs.

Powerful Conservative Protestant Men love to have some arm-candy at their side, and perhaps will fund abortions for their wives and daughters in private clinics, reached via private jets, but in their public persona, they maintain a pro-birth stance. Working-class Conservative Protestant Men can't afford such luxuries, so they pay a terrible price as well, as one child after another is born. Is it any wonder that conservative men are often bitter about women and cruel to them? The womb becomes the man's enemy as well, and many a poor man flees from pregnancy, abandoning the women and the future-child.

In both groups, the pro-birth mindset is mindless and bitter, driven by a pro-birth fanaticism that rarely yields to reason, compassion, or reality.

The pro-birth position is evil in its degradation of women, men, and the children it produces. 


Millions of children are doomed to a life of hardship and sorrow because of pro-birth fanaticism, which prohibits sex education, birth control and generally disregards the deeper issues of poverty, under-employment, unemployment, the lack of health-care, and the lack of good schools for the children.


In the worst-case scenario, a pro-birth position still produces cheap labor for the nobility.

Catholic Bishops

Catholic bishops wade into campaign politics by barring Joe Biden from communion for his stand on abortion.

So what’s a Christian to do?

What’s a Roman Catholic to do?

The Roman Church is a powerful political force in this nation and around the world. One of the last things Pope Benedict said to his American audience upon departure: “Obeying the teachings of the church is part of your Catholic faith.”

Well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

I don’t like to engage in intra-church criticism – after all, we’re all in this together, but I’m a Protestant, and I affirm the Protestant heritage – a heritage that worked hard to liberate the believer from the control of the church, so that the believer could relate to God unhindered by the trappings of the church.

Presbyterians have never engaged in telling folks what to do.

Or have they?

There was a time when Presbyterians were told, generally, that drinking, dancing, card-playing and theater attendance were of the Devil. And there was time, as well, when Presbyterians were inclined to slam shut the communion door to one another, depending upon who the elders were at the time.

Early on, when Constantine embraced Christianity – more a political move than a spiritual one – the church became a vast institution with landholdings and powerful clerics.

The stability of Europe often relied more upon the crosier than the crown. Whenever I hear of a bishop telling folks how to think and behave, I’m reminded of the Middle Ages when people feared the church because it had the power of excommunication – that is, to bar one from communion and damn their soul to ever-lasting fire.

When we study the New Testament and the life of Jesus, we see God eschewing all forms of power and control. Having learned some hard lessons along the way, God realized that violence against the human spirit only begets dysfunction and more violence. So when God comes to us in Bethlehem’s cradle and finally becomes, not cross with us, but Cross for us, we see another way, the way of love. Longer, slower, more uncertain, but in the end, the darkness cannot overcome this kind of light.

I guess bishops will do what bishops do, but it’s a far cry from what Jesus envisioned when he gave the Spirit to the disciples and bid them go to the world, to love as he loved, not with might, but with mercy; not with control, but with compassion.