Challenging Abortion in the Clinton Era

January-February 1994

By Christine D. Pohl

WILMORE, Kentucky—Those of us who are strongly pro-life in our commitments may be inclined to look at our present political context and feel ambivalence if not despair about abortion. President Clinton says he wants to make abortion rare as well as safe and legal. Abortion is already relatively safe and legal in almost all situations, but it is so common, so frequently chosen, we are forced to wonder: how could it be made rare?

Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, or a human life amendment were passed this week, abortion would not, as a result, become rare. Neither would it become rare if abortionists were prosecuted as criminals. It would become less frequent perhaps, but not rare. The fact is that Roe v. Wade is not likely to be overturned, nor is abortion likely to be made illegal and subject to prosecution. Thus, we must think about more complex responses to the challenge of making abortion rare.

Public policies and public opinion are inconsistent and often incoherent on this issue. The wholesale destruction of life has been made legal, but the law does not admit that abortion involves the destruction of human life. Most Americans believe that abortion involves killing, but most want it to be available under some circumstances. Abortion on demand has helped us to become increasingly brutalized and desensitized as a society. We have become comfortable with the extraordinary characterization of women and unborn children as adversaries, of fetuses as aggressors or mere tissue. We have become more and more willing to contemplate social reasons for ending the lives of dependent people.

Furthermore, the laws governing abortion are not meaningfully connected to policies that might help to make abortion rare—policies (or the absence of them) on health care, family, maternity and paternity leaves, and mother/child nutrition. The United States supports almost unlimited liberty for abortion but gives remarkably limited support to women who carry children to term. Until our laws become more fully supportive of women and children, I do not think abortion will become rare.

So how is abortion to be made rare?

Those of us who acknowledge that we are stewards of God's gifts—including our citizenship and vote, our skills and training, our money, time and resources—should continue to lift our voices on behalf of the most vulnerable people, caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, and deploring bloodshed. We should also work to restrict abortion even as we promote policies more supportive of women and families. Christians should work much more intentionally to reshape public opinion. We need more and better educational efforts about the value of unborn life, the danger of killing innocent human life, the value of child rearing and nurture, and the value of women's lives and life plans. Perhaps now that the legality of abortion is less threatened, people will be able to risk acknowledging how terrible it is and face the moral, emotional, and physical damage it does.

We must carefully and consistently challenge pro-choice arguments for what they are, namely, appeals to autonomous individual control and unrestricted rights that borrow from the language and practice of domination. The complicated oppression of women has made abortion appear to be a tool of freedom. Thus, Christians need to offer genuine support to women, helping them to experience equality and respect so that the pro-woman/pro-abortion configuration can be exposed for the error that it is.

Many of us in the church need to face our complicity in abortion. Our refusal to address the complex social problems of the day, together with our own pursuit of personal well-being and success, have unwittingly contributed to making abortion seem reasonable, responsible, or necessary to many in our society. In a spirit of contrition and humility we need to teach, model, and live in ways that affirm God's gift of life and recognize both our limitations and God's sovereign control.

A number of my assumptions may be open for challenge and others need further development. I have taken an approach that recognizes that we live between the times of Christ's coming and must function here and now. I assume that Christians will and should participate in public life and that we can properly build coalitions with non-Christians to accomplish limited aims. We can make political compromises, without compromising ourselves morally, in an attempt to make rare a very terrible practice.

But I am also left with a number of questions. This living between the times—does it mean that we can accept the slow, laborious process of changing the moral framework of public opinion while innocent lives are being destroyed by the thousands each day? If abortion remains legal, will there ever be sufficient institutional pressures to force consideration of the larger public policy questions, or will Americans continue to choose the quick fix of abortion over complex and more expensive policy decisions? What would it look like, really, if law, social institutions, and the values people hold all worked together to encourage both the continuation of pregnancies and the high valuation of women's life plans?

[Dr. Pohl is Associate Professor of Social Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary. This article represents excerpts from a paper she presented at a recent meeting of graduate students and mentors in the Crossroads Program sponsored by Evangelicals for Social Action with support from the Association for Public Justice.