A consistent life ethic? Supporting life after birth.

IN JULY OF 2006, PRESIDENT BUSH signed an order forbidding stem cell research that involves the destruction of embryos. In this same month he continually opposed a ceasefire in Lebanon in a war that was clearly disproportionate and resulted in a high level of deaths of non-combatants. Cartoonists had a field day with the contradiction between such exacting reverence for life at the level of fertilized eggs, while disregarding the value of the lives of born human beings. One cartoon had Bush saying, "Israel has a right to defend itself," and, in the next breath, "as long as there are no embryos involved." Another cartoon showed Bush receiving the casket of a fallen American soldier with the attending military person saying, "Don't worry, Mr. President, it is not an embryo."

The question I want to pose in this talk today is whether the Catholic campaign in favor of the protection of fetal life from the first moment of conception, while failing to raise its voice against vast killing of non-combatants in war, poverty and environmental degradation, does not help produce this very contradiction. Despite its claim to a "consistent life ethic," Catholic teachings in fact use very different kinds of moral reasoning when dealing with questions of war than when dealing with abortion. This contradiction was pointed out 18 years ago by Catholic ethicist Christine Gudorf in her article, "To make a seamless garment, use a single piece of cloth," (Patricia Beattie and Thomas Shannon, eds. Abortion and Catholicism: The American Debate. NY: Crossroads, 1988, 279-296).

In this talk I want to deal first with the problems of the absolutist moral reasoning applied by Catholic ethics to unborn life, and then turn to the inconsistencies of its lack of moral rigor when it comes to threats to the life of the born, particularly due to war, poverty and environmental destruction. My own view is that abortion should be "legal, safe and rare," to quote President Clinton's phrase. I do not believe that there is a "human person" present from the first moment of conception, nor do I believe that the Catholic tradition actually teaches or follows this belief in its pastoral practice, as is evident from its refusal to baptize even late-term miscarriages.

Catholicism, following an Aristotelian view of human nature as an integral union of body and soul, traditionally taught that the human soul is present only when the body of the fetus has developed to a certain level of human physical development, traditionally placed at about five months. Today we might see this as the point where brain development reaches the level of sustaining viable human life outside the womb. Certainly to claim that a fertilized egg within days of conception is a human person is a totally Platonic view of the human person. Upholding this claim asserts that there is a human soul fully present in a tiny speck of germ plasma. Despite its rhetoric, the Catholic tradition has never actually taught this, as Catholic philosophers, Dan Dombrowski and Robert Deltete, show in their book, A Brief Liberal Catholic Defense of Abortion (University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Although I don't believe a fertilized egg, or even a three-month fetus, is a human person on the same level as a born person, it is not "nothing." Rather it is a potential life that is in process of actualization. Except in those relatively rare situations where an abortion decision is made in the case of a fetus whose conception was desired and chosen, but proved to be severely deformed, or whose continued development would threaten the life of the mother, most decisions for abortion are taken in the context of un-chosen pregnancies. Despite the argument that when women choose to have sex, they choose the possibility of pregnancy and thus should be responsible for the results, we know that women's social and cultural context in our society and throughout the world means that much of the time women do not really chose the conditions under which they have sex, even in marriage. Even short of actual rape, women are often being somewhat coerced into having sex, while not being in control of its results.

Even when women want to use contraception, including so-called natural family planning, men often do not cooperate. For a variety of reasons, women many times find themselves involuntarily pregnant. Although many women are able to adjust to this unwelcome news, especially if they have a stable marriage, but sometimes even outside of marriage, many others feel deeply threatened by a situation in which psychologically, socially, economically or all three, they are not in a position to bear and raise a child. (And I don't think that women have any responsibility to bear an unwanted child to term only so the child can be adopted by someone else). This situation is not going to be changed but only worsened by coercive legal measures, such as remaking abortion illegal and hence criminal under the law. Such legal measures will only assure that abortion becomes clandestine, unsafe and hence likely to result in the deaths or injuries of the women, as well putting her in danger of legal sanctions.

This has become the case in El Salvador, where an Opus Dei archbishop and a campaign by right-wing Catholics has resulted in a national law criminalizing all abortions. The result has been a large number of clandestine abortions mostly by poor women (since the wealthy can get abortions from private doctors or in other countries), where many die or are injured as a result of the unsafe procedures. When they go to hospitals or otherwise seek medical care they are taken into custody and may be imprisoned. The penalty for the abortion provider is 6-12 years, 2-5 years for someone who helps the women and 2-8 years for the woman herself in the first trimester and 30-50 years thereafter. One desperately poor mother who aborted an 18-week fetus has been imprisoned for 30 years, even though she has three small children dependent on her as their sole parent. This is clearly an example of absolutizing the value of the life of the unborn and disregarding the value of the lives of the born.

Catholic ethics must recognize that the decision for or against abortion is one of conflicting values of life. It is not simply a matter of the "murder of innocent life" in which there are no values of life on the other side that are equally and sometime more imperative. In the case of the woman in El Salvador, in desperate circumstances of poverty she chose the value of survival, for herself and her three children for whom she was the sole providing parent, rather than bearing yet another child she could not afford to support. Women are caught in conflictive situations where their ability to function economically, psychologically and otherwise has to be weighed against the value of a potential child.

If ethicists are serious about reducing abortions, and I believe the instances of abortions should be reduced as much as possible, this will not be done by coercing women to bear children they feel they cannot bear, but instead by helping women as much as possible not to become involuntarily pregnant in the first place. This is the root of the issue which "prolife" advocates avoid. To really help women avoid un-chosen pregnancies is a very complex problem, certainly having to do with making effective and safe contraception readily accessible. But avoiding un-chosen pregnancies also means addressing all the cultural issues that put women in the position of less than fully chosen sex, lack of adequate sex education about how to avoid pregnancy, and, above all, lack of full moral agency to enforce their preferences about sex and birth control.

Catholicism both forbids abortion under any circumstances and is a major cause of producing the situations that cause it. As a religious ethic which both denies the moral permissibility of effective birth control ("natural family planning" is not effective birth control for most people) and also disparages women's moral agency as autonomous persons, Catholicism clearly is a major force in the world that promotes the conflictive situations of involuntary pregnancy that cause some women to opt for an abortion.

While absolutizing the right to life of the unborn, even of fertilized eggs in the first days after conception, Catholicism has little moral rigor when it comes to the vast carnage that is untimely causing human beings between birth and old age to fall victim to death, due to war, poverty and environmental devastation. While theoretically Catholicism forbids the direct taking of innocent life at any stage of life, the most rigorist sanctions are applied to taking unborn life, while there are no sanctions applied to killing non-combatants in war, selling toxic waste to farmers as fertilizer that cause people to sicken and die, favoring military spending over social welfare spending that is impoverishing the majority of the world's population and any number of other actions which have the consequences of unjust and untimely death. This gross inconsistency lends the impression that only unborn life is really "innocent"--that people lose their innocence and become fair game as soon as they are born--perhaps an odd expression of the doctrine of original sin.

As Chris Gudorf pointed out in her article, Catholic ethics uses an absolutist version of deontological natural law ethics when speaking of abortion, while when speaking of war it shifts to a consequentialist ethic that carefully balances conflicting values. Absolutist deontological natural law allows no debate and applies coercive sanctions, excommunication, and the demand for criminalization. However, the consequentialist ethic draws on a multiplicity of perspectives, allows for various opinions and relies on persuasion, not legal sanctions, ultimately leaving matters in the hands of individual conscience. Where is the bishop who would say that soldiers who directly massacre non-combatant civilians are excommunicated? Where are bishops who would suggest that those who manufacture nuclear weapons are excommunicated and should repent by leaving such forms of employment? There were two Mexican bishops some years ago who declared that torturers were excommunicated, but they were maverick leftists whose views were unsupported by the rest of the bishops and by the Vatican. In short, Catholicism speaks softly and carries no stick when it comes to untimely and unjust death after birth.

Let me summarize a few issues on war, poverty and environmental devastation to make clear what a truly horrendous threat of death and destruction humanity is facing at this time, and the leading role of the U.S. in these crises. First, on chronic war. Since the U.S. creation of the atom bomb and its use against two Japanese cities in 1945, the world has been held hostage to fear of the possible use of "weapons of mass destruction." The U.S. has continually taken the lead in producing new stages of these weapons of greater and greater destructiveness, as well as expressing its willingness on several occasions to actually use them on a first-strike basis.

Today this threat has arisen in relation to Iran. The "bunker busters" or so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons that the U.S. is contemplating throwing on Iranian uranium-refining facilities (which Iran claims have to do with peaceful and not military use) would not just explode underground, having little effect above ground. Rather it is estimated by Physicians for Social Responsibility that an attack by these weapons on two buried Iranian research facilities would generate a blast in which 2.6 million people would die in 48 hours and a million more would suffer immediate injuries. Radioactive dust would be carried east to expose 10 million more to deadly fallout. Where are voices from the bishops or the Vatican warning against the danger of using such weapons?

In addition to continued development of nuclear weapons which itself fuels a continual nuclear arms race around the world, the U.S. has built the most enormous military system in world history. It also has continually armed the nations it considers its allies, sometimes arming both sides of regional conflicts, as seen in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. As a result, vast stockpiles of arms and chronic war presently characterize the world. The U.S. is ringing the world with military bases. Since the invasion of Iraq there are 109 military bases in that country alone, including four very large and apparently permanent bases the size of small cities. Any serious quest for world disarmament cannot simply focus on disarming America's rivals, a strategy that only fuels the desire of other countries to have such weapons to prevent an American invasion. Real disarmament must be disarmament of all sides, not just Korea and Iran, but the U.S. and its allies.

U.S. military spending, as well as military spending around the world, consumes half or more of our and other nations' national budgets, starving every social program. Reducing spending for war is essential if humans are to address the issues of poverty, health, education, renewal of basic infrastructure and repair of environmental devastation.

Moving on to poverty: the human species has never before in its history experienced such vast disparities of wealth and poverty. Some 20 percent of humanity control 85 percent of the world's resources, much of it concentrated in the top 1 percent. This means the other 80 percent of the world shares the remaining 15 percent of the wealth, with the poorest billion people living in dire misery, with more than 30,000 human beings dying every day from starvation. Discussion of disparities of income only begin to touch on the extremes of the gaps between the affluent top 20 percent, which include many of us here today, and the very poor 20 percent. What we are talking about is an abundance of means of transportation, fleets of cars, access to frequent air travel, large homes, advanced technology, good medical care, high walls and guards protecting this elite, versus an extreme lack of access to decent housing, little or no medical care, education, inadequate food and potable water, a daily vulnerability to violence and disease for a third of humanity. Where are the voices in our churches that are addressing the glaring injustice of the disparities of wealth and poverty and demanding that the well-off in our church pews see this as an urgent moral issue that demands a response in terms of their personal lifestyles?

Environmental devastation is the context for economic destitution and war worldwide. This needs to be seen as an interaction of many factors. Addressing these issues in a holistic manner must include the exponential growth of population that has expanded from 1 billion to over 6 billion in the last 75 years and could well double in another 30 years, causing increasing death from malnutrition, disease, including pandemics such as AIDS, unclean water, war and social violence.

Another key factor of environmental degradation is the use of fossil fuels, especially petroleum, as the world's chief energy source. The world is facing the depletion of petroleum in the next 10-20 years, and this growing scarcity is key to the oil wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of air pollution and acid rain that destroys soil fertility and forests. Fossil fuel burning is also causing global warming that creates increasingly violent weather patterns, such as stronger hurricanes and melting ice caps that threaten to inundate islands and coastal areas where many cities are located.

Soil erosion and pollution of soil and water from industrial and domestic wastes are major causes of decreased fertility of the soil, toxic waste supply and diseases conveyed to humans and animals through such pollution. At the same time the pouring of fertilizers, human and animal excrement, plastics and other wastes into oceans is altering the capacity of the world's oceans to sustain life. Larger mammals and edible fish are dying, while the oceans are reverting to primitive forms of life that can survive without oxygen, but which are highly toxic to humans and animals. Such toxicity is not just carried by marine life, but also is blowing in the winds, causing severe respiratory problems for those who live near oceans.

Given all these atrocities, a growing human population is facing a major reduction of its ability to produce healthy food on both land and in the oceans, rivers and lakes. Humanity stands on the edge of huge global disasters in the next few decades. These interlocking crises of war, poverty and ecological devastation need to be addressed both locally and as a world system of human life on the planet. Where are the voices of church leaders at this crucial moment in human history?

The Christian churches seem to be fixated on a kind of navel-gazing, seeking to return women to passive acquiescence to male domination, denying gays the option of sanctifying their relationships and caring for each other and absolutizing the lives of embryos, while ignoring the thousand-pound gorilla in the middle of the room that threatens to squeeze us all against the wall.

This does not mean there are no values to be defended in relation to the unborn, but these must be appropriately balanced in relation to the enormous threats to the lives of the born. I suggest that this means that Catholic ethics needs to be somewhat more consequentialist about the decisions of women to reproduce or not reproduce children and more principled when it comes to defending life after birth and sanctioning those whose policies are causing untimely death.

In relation to reproduction, Catholics should not only recognize the need for effective birth control, but also support women's moral agency in sexual and reproductive choices to reduce as much as possible the likelihood of women finding themselves involuntarily pregnant in situations where they feel they cannot bear and raise a child without grave threats to their own well-being and future development. When such un-chosen pregnancies do occur, Christians might hold out the ideal of encouraging women to be generous in caring for an unexpected child in stressful circumstances, but this must be a matter of persuasion, not coercion. Sacrificial generosity can only be voluntary, it cannot be forced.

Moreover if Christians are to call such women to generosity they must be willing to help provide some of the support services that would lessen the conflicts that are at the root of "their" problems with bearing an un-chosen child. How about a Christian community adopting a relation to such a woman--helping find her a better job, obtain medical care, support education and day care for her children? In other words, how might those who hold out such values actually help relieve the distresses that are causing a woman to make a decision that she might prefer not to make if in less stressful circumstances? But, finally, one must be willing to trust women to make the decision which is best for them, precisely what the Catholic church's hierarchy has been least willing to do.

When it comes to life after birth, threatened by war, poverty and environmental devastation, Christians need to be more principled and more willing to urge sacrificial action. While recognizing the ambiguities of threats to life on both sides of conflictual situations, the Catholic church must be willing, at the very least, to condemn atrocities, where there is a direct massacre of civilians or where there is disproportionate violence that is killing large numbers of non-combatant men, women and children. They must be willing to call for sanctions when such atrocities occur. Those who massacre or torture should be put on trial, imprisoned, put out of the army.

But the Catholic church must also analyze more forthrightly the total patterns of militarism, the unjust monopolization of power and wealth, which is causing so many humans and the earth itself to sicken and die. It must be willing to call for Christians to take sacrificial measures against such destruction, refusing to pay taxes for war, refusing to accept the call to fight in war or to make weapons of mass destruction, even if such decisions might bring imprisonment, social marginalization or loss of employment.

Again, such sacrificial action must be voluntary. It cannot be coerced. Again, no one should take these risks alone. They should be part of support communities that help alleviate the costs of such risks. But there is no reason why church leaders could not present the possibility of such actions in a persuasive and attractive form as an appropriate calling of Christian faith, rather than seeking only a minimalist ethic which does not challenge an unjust status quo of the dominant global system.

Putting the ethic of life before birth and life after birth more in sync with one another would help overcome the credibility gap from which Catholic teachings on ethics presently suffer. Only by putting these two ethics more in sync with each other can we genuinely speak of a "consistent life ethic" that is not simply a code word for an absolutist rejection of abortion in any circumstances, while ignoring the myriad threats to the life of the born. A "consistent life ethic" is a nice slogan. But we are very far from a realistic and truthful understanding of what that would mean in Catholic ethical teachings and practice.

This is the text of a speech given by Ruether at the Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in October 2006.

ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER, PH.D. is a professor emerita of the Graduate Theological Union at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., and is presently teaching at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. She is a Catholics for a Free Choice board member.