by Mary Krane Derr

During the early 1980s, as a young person of multi-religious ancestry, I looked for some form of spirituality that affirmed the good in every person and every religion, rather than continuing the pointless sectarian wars of history in any sense.  I wanted to live out G-d in everyday life, through active love, including that form of dimension of active love usually termed social responsibility, with more attention to the spirit than the letter of things.  By a stroke of grace I ended up at a Quaker-founded college.  I was drawn to attend Meeting and borrow books from the Meetinghouse library. The Friends’ emphasis on the Inner Light and the daily, heartfelt work of making peace and justice drew me in.  As a young woman and an emerging feminist, I was deeply fascinated too by the importance and courage of foremothers in starting and continuing the Society of Friends. I began to think about joining myself.

I distinctly remember the moment when the desire of joining chilled, past the point of re-ignition.  I was standing in the Meetinghouse library, looking over the books, trying to stay prayerfully open to whatever title the Divine nudged me towards.  The title Who Shall Live? snagged my eye.  I was a woman, a disabled person, a survivor of violence, and a descendant of genocide and colonialism survivors.  The very question, with its encoded assumptions of entitlement and excessive power, sent a wave of panic through me.  It had such an imperialist “vibe” to it.

The full title of the book is even worse: Who Shall Live? MAN’S Control over Birth and Death. It was published by the American Friends Service Committee in 1970.

I picked up the book and carefully read through its arguments for abortion and active euthanasia.  The words and the things they proposed struck me as cold, abstract, detached from the Heart of Love, pronounced from an “on-high” stance that G-d does not take with human beings, that G-d does not encourage us to take against one another.  The book described serious social problems, yes, but why were Friends, the very people who had borne such witness against the Vietnam War, who resisted the threat of nuclear annihilation, who affirmed the full presence of the Inner Light in women — why were they proposing “solutions” that just perpetuated inequity and violence, rather than going beyond them?

I folded the book up, eased it back into the shelf, and walked out of the Meetinghouse into the snow.  No, not towards religious fundamentalism — towards anything but.  Yet the message was clear: whatever respect and love I had for its best teachings, the Society of Friends was no place for me.

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Mary wrote this piece for this website. 

See her blog posts with the Consistent Life Network:

Ancient Roots of the Consistent Life Ethic: Greece

Women’s History Month: Jane Addams

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

And the Special Memorial Issue of Peace & Life Connections

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See also on our website: AFSC & Who Shall Live? A Book Responds and a chronology of AFSC’s actions at Prochoice Positions of Quaker Bodies.

Chronology:

American Friends Service Committee   

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has the following chronology, based primarily on documents sent by email attachment when requested for their position in 2007, with the 2009 observation added:

Chronology

1969 – The book expressing the position was approved by the AFSC Board. It was entitled: Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death. It established a position in favor of legalized abortion.

1971 – AFSC joined an amicus brief in Roe v. Wade.

1980 –  AFSC joined an amicus brief in Harris-McCrae.

1981 – AFSC lobbied against the Abortion Control Act of Pennsylvania, including a report on the expected impact on pregnant teens.

1992 – AFSC sent a memo to regional directors about their involvement in Casey. They mentioned also having been involved in Webster.

2000 – AFSC joined an amicus brief at the request of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights in the Carhart case. That’s in support of partial-birth abortions.

2004 – The March for Women’s Lives, April 25 at the National Mall in Washington DC, was a demonstration which focused on preserving and expanding taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand. Several sources on the web indicate that AFSC was on the list of co-sponsors.

2009 – AFSC signed on to “An Interfaith Call to Action on Reproductive Health,” a letter to the Obama transition team. It called for enacting the “Freedom of Choice Act” and repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

Quotations from the AFSC documents

July 1980 statement of interest in support of amicus brief in Harris-McCrae case, supporting the pro-choice position on abortion:

“The AFSC has a vital interest in this litigation because of Friends belief in the infinite worth of each human being and the equality of all human beings in the sight of God. This testimony has led the AFSC to commit a significant portion of its resources to work which seeks to root out the causes of violence . . . ”

March 20, 2000 minutes of Board Executive Committee conference call:

“Some hesitancy was expressed about the way an earlier statement of interest express[ed] our belief in the worth of each human being, which might leave AFSC vulnerable to charges of not valuing the unborn.”

The sentence on the worth of each human being was removed from the updated statement of interest.

HOWEVER –

At a face-to-face meeting on October 18, 2010, at AFSC headquarters in Philadelphia, Clinton Pettus, Deputy General Secretary for Programs, told Rachel MacNair that AFSC did not have a position on abortion.

This is verified by their blog, in which no comment was made after the Dobbs decision of June 24, 2022, at a time when any group with any position at all felt the need to comment.