A letter to Pope John Paul II.

December 5, 1995

Your Holiness:

No doubt you will be surprised to receive a letter from a secular humanist who does not share your religious views but who subscribes to our common goals of peaceful resolution of conflicts and peace and goodwill to all people regardless of gender, race, ethnic origin, religious beliefs, or philosophical views on life.

Although I meant to write you for some time, the immediate reason I am writing you now is the assassination of Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin and the relationship between verbal violence and violent acts.

I am writing you this letter as a secular humanist who has become famous in Canada for his defense of women's right to abortion, in particular the Morgentater decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which removed abortion from the Criminal Code. I am also honorary president of the Humanist Association of Canada, a man of your generation, born in Poland in 1923, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. I personally have been a target of violence that is a result of hate propaganda against abortion. When I opened an abortion clinic in Toronto in 1984, Emmett Cardinal Carter, the archbishop of Toronto, had a letter read in all the churches of his diocese in which he called upon Christians to "stop this abomination." As a result of this letter, violent protests against the clinic continued for years, culminating in its destruction by firebombing in 1992. When I opened a clinic in St. John's, Newfoundland, in November 1990, a mob directed by Archbishop Alfonsus Penney physically attacked and almost lynched me. As a medical doctor specializing in safe abortion techniques, I have had my life repeatedly threatened by opponents of abortion, and these innumerable death threats have targeted my family as well.

This is why I am writing to you now. As you may know, several doctors and other clinic workers in the United States have been murdered by anti-abortion fanatics, and two doctors in Canada have been shot and wounded--the latest incident on November 10, 1995. In the United States, a young man with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest, John Salvi, killed two young women and wounded five others just because they worked in an abortion clinic or were present there.

Like the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, violence against medical workers who perform abortions implicates the violent language in which some religious leaders condemn them. You speak of abortion as "murder," "crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize," "careless destroy[ing]," the killing of an innocent and defenseless human being," etc. Continuous exhortations in such terms inevitably incite unbalanced and impressionable minds. Spurred on by religious leaders, among whom you are the foremost, these people direct their hatred and violence against people like me who not only provide abortion services to women but also believe abortion to be a woman's right. Those who are inflamed by violent rhetoric strike out against those of us who believe that, by offering safe medical abortions, we not only protect the women involved against death, injury, and loss of fertility but we also make it possible for children to be born when they can be welcomed and treated with love and affection.

I would like to point out to you that many people, including fiberal minded Catholic theologians and other Christians, believe that abortion is a difficult moral dilemma and that the decision whether or not to abort should be left to the individual conscience. When such a decision has been made, it should be, in my opinion, the duty of the state to honor it and the duty of the medical profession to provide it under the best conditions to ensure safety and dignity for women.

Unfortunately, in countries dominated by the Catholic church, abortion is illegal and unavailable under good medical conditions. The result is a veritable carnage of young women who fall victim to incompetent abortionists or to self-induced abortions. It is estimated by the World Health Organization that 200,000 women die each year as a result of such abortions. Arthur Koestler once coined the memorable phrase statistics don't bleed; the women who die, usually after horrible suffering, are all persons with potential cut down in the prime of their lives, often leaving orphans in their wake.

It is clear that many of these deaths and injuries could be averted if the laws in those countries allowed safe medical abortions. In our native Poland, abortion has been made illegal again, at the urging of the Catholic church, and Polish women are again subject to death or injury; the only ones to escape are those rich enough to travel to neighboring countries. The government has reported a sharp increase in the number of babies abandoned, usually to die. Even in Toronto, a young Polish-Canadian woman died in 1991 of a self-induced abortion because she was afraid to face the violent picketers in front of my clinic.

I cannot imagine how you avoid reflecting on the question of both personal and institutional culpability for all the thousands of avoidable deaths of young women worldwide, as well as the impact on the children they leave motherless.

I appeal to you to issue an unequivocal condemnation of violence against health-care workers who provide abortion. An appeal to you to reexamine your attitudes and statements about abortion, in the interest of saving the lives of women across the world who might die needlessly and also of minimizing the real and continuing threat of violence by abortion opponents. I appeal to you to stop using murder, crime, the killing of the innocent, and similar inflammatory terms which incite indignation, anger, hate, and violence. Please refrain from comparing abortion to the Holocaust. As a survivor of the Holocaust, I personally find such a comparison gratuitous, insulting, and obscene. Many people--in particular Jews--share my feelings about this.

How can you compare the willful, deliberate genocide of Jews by the German state, directed by a hate-filled psychopath, to individual decisions by women to choose abortion when they find themselves unable to assume the obligations and duties of motherhood--decisions which many people consider ethical, moral, and responsible? How can you compare pre-cerebral embryos and fetuses to real five people as if they had the same value? Is it not possible for you to distinguish between potential life--which is present in billions of spermatozoa and ova, which is present in billions of early embryos--and the actual life of a person? Are you aware that about half of all embryos are spontaneously shed in what is called miscarriage or spontaneous abortion?

If spontaneous abortions are "an act of God"--to use the common expression--is it not strange that God has so little concern for fetal life that he allows so much of it to go to waste without intervening? Is it not possible to then conclude that God does not mind or object to spontaneous abortions? Why is it that the Catholic church has nothing to say about, has no ritual to mark, the abortion of so much fetal life when it occurs spontaneously, yet becomes so vociferous and condemnatory when it is a conscious decision by a woman or couple?

You are the spiritual leader of millions of Catholics around the world. Although many of them do not follow all of what you preach, they have a profound admiration and veneration for you and believe that what you say is important. For many, your word is gospel. In view of the enormous moral influence you wield, an appeal on your part to moderation would go a long way to diminish violence against abortion providers. Should you be able to modulate your views and teaching on abortion--or at least to moderate your condemnation and exhortations to the faithful to follow your position--it could possibly save lives.

I believe that the most significant beneficial change in the twentieth century--a century marked by genocide and conflict--has been the rise of the feminist movement, the drive by women to remove the shackles of oppression imposed by patriarchal societies and to achieve emancipation, equality, and dignity. Much progress has been achieved in that regard in Western democratic societies, and the trend shows promise of spreading to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, most of the opposition to the rights of women to achieve equality and dignity has come from traditional religious groups. Recently you offered a belated acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the striving of women for emancipation. I see this as a hopeful sign that maybe you could still change some of your attitudes regarding the teachings of the church on birth control and abortion.

Some time ago, I attended a dialogue in New York City between Catholic theologians and secular humanist leaders. We sat around a table and discussed issues of morality and ethics and compared our respective positions. My impression was that the exchange was fruitful mainly in that it did not allow for the demonization of the enemy, and it was clear to all that well, meaning people from different philosophical backgrounds can treat each other with politeness, deference, and respect. I feel that secular humanists and providers of abortion services alike have been demonized by religious conservatives, and I fear the violence that has been unleashed. Maybe a resumption of dialogues across religious, philosophical, and ideological lines would be helpful in preventing such demonization.

Henry Morgentaler, a gynecologist in Toronto, is well known for his legal battles in Canada in defense of abortion rights. He is honorary president of the Humanist Association Of Canada and was honored in 1975 as Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.