The A word once again

I've written about  abortion here before, and now I'm pretty much just going to repeat myself, but it's time to do so.

Point one -- and this is important -- conservative evangelicals had absolutely no problem with abortion until the mid-1970s. Historian Randall Balmer tells the story here, and it is absolutely incontrovertible, as this excerpt makes clear:

Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

 

What happened to change this? The answer is school desegregation. After Brown v Board of Education, "Christians" throughout the south opened segregated private schools. But in the early 1970s, the courts ruled that segregated schools were not entitled to tax exemption. This infuriated evangelical leaders, but conservative activist Paul Weyrich realized it would be difficult to openly organize in favor of racial discrimination. So he needed a different issue to galvanize white racist "Christians," and he convinced church leaders that abortion could play that role.

Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled  Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.

Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and  Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”

 

Now that we understand that this was a  largely manufactured issue, we need to understand why the abortion rights movement and liberal politicians have been so reticent to say so, or to take on the purported moral issue directly. As I have noted here many times, abortion is nowhere condemned as sinful in the Bible, Old Testament or New. On the contrary, the only reference to abortion in the  Bible is in Numbers 5, which prescribes a ceremony for the purpose of inducing abortion in the case of an unfaithful wife. The idea that human life begins at conception, of course, could not even have been conceived (sic) until the 20th Century when the mechanism of conception was first understood as the fusion of the gametes and the creation of the zygote. 

 

But the claim that a zygote is a human being in any meaningful moral sense is transparently ridiculous. At least half of them do not survive. In many cases the woman does not even know she is pregnant, but just has a late period. So if you believe that human life begins at conception, you also believe that God slaughters hundreds of millions of babies every year. 

More true facts. Childbearing is far more dangerous, far more likely to cause injury or death to the mother, than is abortion. Abortion, and for that matter infanticide, were commonplace in Biblical times and right through the Middle Ages. While Catholic thinkers have had somewhat varying opinions about the matter, the Catholic Church did not definitively define abortion as sinful until the late 19th Century, in reaction to the feminist movement. It was about sex, not life. And as I have shown, conservative protestants didn't come around to that opinion until 100 years later. As for the Constitution, the 14th Amendment grants rights to "a person born in the United States," which is as clear as it can possibly be.  

The Constitution also prohibits "an establishment of religion," which means that while you are free to believe whatever you want, you can't impose your religious beliefs on me. And in this case, the religious beliefs in question are of very recent origin, more analogous to Scientology than to Christianity as it existed for 2,000 years. So let's say so.