Bishops & abortion.

"For the pope, the bishops ... and most practicing Catholics," Newsweek's Kenneth L. Woodward wrote recently in the New York Times, "abortion is the taking of innocent human life and therefore violates the most fundamental of human rights" ("A Political Sacrament," May 28). Basically, I agree. But what policy positions ought to follow from this moral position? Is a person with my convictions bound, if he is to be consistent with himself, to oppose a right to abortion?

It is not a merely academic question in this election year, when there is a Catholic prochoice candidate for the presidency. And now Woodward and Mario M. Cuomo have brought this dispute--or returned it, more accurately--to the pages of Commonweal (September 24). After having dismissed Cuomo's 1984 speech at Notre Dame as "ancient sophistry," Woodward impugns Cuomo's argument as crude, even cruder than crude, and thus worthy only of repudiation. What makes Cuomo's argument so crude, according to Woodward, is that "he says that his reasons for thinking abortion 'sinful' are not only 'private' but sectarian as well." Cuomo does imply in his Notre Dame speech that the problem with making the Catholic position on abortion the law of the land is that it is based on what he calls "religious values" not shared by "the pluralistic community at large." In his Commonweal reply to Woodward, Cuomo makes this claim somewhat more directly: "surely a willingness to believe what I myself cannot prove" and what many people consider "at best an article of faith"--namely, "the proposition that human life begins at conception"--"is no basis on which to build a consensus of Americans ... in favor of a ban on all abortions." If this "proposition" or "article of faith" underlies the Catholic position on abortion, then part of Cuomo's argument against making the Catholic position the law of the land is indeed that the Catholic position is "sectarian." The other part seems to be that the obligation to serve "the whole pluralistic community" prudently and with due respect to fundamental differences overrides his own "religious values."

I confess to being blind to the crudeness of Cuomo's argument. Woodward writes that the Catholic argument against abortion is "broader" than one proposed from a purely religious perspective, "advancing philosophical, political, and even biological warrants." By way of example, he reports that in a telephone conversation he "reminded Cuomo that a human embryo can never turn out to be a cat or dog"--an "argument" that does seem to me to be crude, and that Cuomo rightly criticizes as exhibiting a "cavalier disdain for the need to explain or justify the Catholic position." Yet it is true that Cuomo's own argument is open to challenge, and in two respects. First, is it true that the Catholic position on abortion is sectarian? After all, there are arguments against abortion that do not turn on the status of the fetus, though this fact may sometimes come as a surprise in Catholic circles. Second, whether the Catholic position is sectarian or not, what is the justification for the claim that the obligation to serve the "whole pluralistic community" overrides one's "religious values"? As Paul Weithman has noted in these pages ("Let Them Speak," July 16), there are several different views of the duties of public officials in a representative democracy. Cuomo apparently takes the view that an elected official is obliged to support his or her positions in terms of what the late political philosopher John Rawls called "public reason": in terms that all constituents can be expected to recognize as reasonable, even if they may disagree. As Weithman writes, some Catholic politicians "have concluded that not all of their constituents can recognize the reasonableness of Catholic teaching on abortion, and that to enforce the Catholic view would be inconsistent with the duties of their public office." But both of these conclusions are controversial.

As Catholics, must we oppose a right to abortion? The answer seems to depend upon, first, whether there are credible moral arguments supporting a right to abortion in limited circumstances and, second, whether and to what extent such different positions deserve respect. If I recognize some arguments as credible, yet not convincing to me--say, arguments for a right to abortion at very early stages of development, or when the fetus is severely deformed--then I have some thinking to do. Two questions arise. First, which trumps which: the right of the unborn to life, or the claim of my fellow citizen to be free to act according to her moral convictions? Second, how to stand toward Roe v. Wade? Arguably, Roe and subsequent decisions gravely harmed both public debate and morals by establishing an effectively unlimited right to abortion. But is the antidote to support candidates who will appoint judges dedicated to overturning Roe and doing away with a right to abortion altogether? In other words, should whether abortion is legal or not be for voters to decide? Maybe so. But if--and only if--there are credible moral arguments supporting a right to abortion in limited circumstances, Catholics and others opposing abortion need to wrestle with the question of whether there ought to be a correspondingly restricted right to choice. Is the answer self-evident?

In his Notre Dame speech, Cuomo called for a "dialogue in the Catholic community" on "[t]he problems created by the matter of abortion" and claimed, quoting Bishop Joseph Sullivan, that the church had failed "to teach our own people" adequately about these problems. To be sure, many Catholic academics and public intellectuals, both lay and religious, have written with great sophistication about abortion as a moral and political problem. Yet it is true that the U.S. bishops as a body, with the teaching authority that they enjoy, have not produced a document of comparable value. So a proposal following in Cuomo's path: If the bishops on Washington's Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's task force on "Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians" want to contribute to the public debate, they could produce a document fully and fairly presenting and evaluating the arguments for a right to abortion and against it, taking account of facts on the ground like Roe and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, and grappling with what Rawls called "the fact of reasonable pluralism." The bishops may take the work of the President's Council on Bioethics as a model. Their report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, meticulously presents arguments both for cloning for biomedical research and against it before making a policy recommendation. A similar document on abortion--meaning, say, two hundred tightly argued pages--would benefit both the faithful and our national political culture. Such a document would be challenging to its readers, but then, the "problems created by the matter of abortion" are challenging in themselves.

Bernard G. Prusak teaches humanities and political theory at Boston University.