Covered – Abortion and Connections to:
Nuclear Weapons
Racism
The Death Penalty
Weaponized Drones
Nuclear Weapons
The second quotation below is commenting on the first one:
Herman Kahn
On thermonuclear war, Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 50
“Probably of limited significance to us are the so-called embryonic deaths. These are conceptions which would have been successful if it had not been for radiation that damaged the germ cell and thus made the potential conception result in a failure. There will probably be five million of these in the first generation, and one hundred million in future generations . . . On the whole, the human race is so fecund that a small reduction in fecundity should not be a serious matter even to individuals. It is almost completely misleading to include the ‘early deaths’ or embryonic deaths in the same total with the major and minor defects, but this is sometimes done by scientists who have overemphasized the abstraction ‘genetic death’ and thus lost sight of the difference in terms of human tragedy of a serious defect or an embryonic death.”
Juli Loesch (aka Julianne Wiley)
“Shake Hands with a Prolife Peacemaker,” U.S. Catholic, May 1984
“I always lay a Herman Kahn quote on them about how 100 million embryonic deaths would result from limited nuclear war. One hundred million embryonic deaths is of limited significance, he says, because human fecundity being what it is . . . the slight reduction in fecundity should not be a matter of serious concern even to individuals.
Tell that to a prolife group, and their response will be, ‘That guy’s an abortionist.’ Well, what he was was a nuclear strategist. But you can make that connection because you’ve got that common ground.”
Karen Swallow Prior
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian:
A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
Sojourners, August 2015
I was sitting in the wrong end of a police wagon the first time I questioned nuclear weapons . . .
We had been protesting abortion. I was thinking about nuclear weapons because a couple of those in the bus were peace activists who had long rap sheets from years of anti-war protests. I, on the other hand, was a Republican-voting, independent Baptist church-attending, conservative-leaning, law-abiding (well, until now) kind of Christian. I was awed—and grateful—that these peaceniks would join the likes of me in common cause against another kind of violence. My new friends adhered to the “seamless garment” philosophy, also called the consistent life ethic, one committed to the protection of all human life, whether from war, poverty, racism, capital punishment, euthanasia, or abortion.
Christopher O. Tollefsen
On the Dangers of Thanking God for the Atom Bomb
August 5, 2015
[The atom bombing’s] proponents even now justify it primarily . . . not by denying the intention of killing the innocent, but by reference to casualties prevented, a consequentialist justification. . . . [thus passing over] the subsequent history of our nation, a history that includes further acts of indiscriminate killing during the Vietnam War, a standing resolution to destroy the Soviet Union if it were first to attack us with nuclear weapons, and the eventual adoption by the nation in its domestic affairs of death as a solution to be embraced for its consequences—before birth, as in abortion or human embryo destructive research—or at the end of life, in [Physician-Assisted Suicide] and euthanasia. These are, sadly, natural choices for a country swayed by consequentialist justifications; the way to those choices was paved by the literally catastrophic choice to destroy Japanese cities (as before them, German cities) for the sake of military gain.
Scott Arbeiter
I’m Pro-Life, and Pro-Refugee,
New York Times, February 7, 2017
But in recent years, I have come to realize that being pro-life requires more of me . . . I need to be ready to stand against every form of economic injustice, racism and individual or corporate greed that destroys the life of a family and a community . . .
My maturing pro-life views have also caused me to examine how I grapple with the question of war, nuclear proliferation and other causes I never used to consider pro-life.
Thomas Merton
Cold War Letters, p. 38 (to Dorothy Day, December 20, 1961)
It seems a little strange that we are so wildly exercised about the “murder” (and the word is of course correct) of an unborn infant by abortion . . . and yet accept without a qualm the extermination of millions of helpless and innocent adults [with nuclear weapons] . . . I submit that we ought to fulfill the one without omitting the other.
Julianne Wiley
Consistently Opposing Killing, p. 105
Chapter 12, Activists Reminisce: An Oral History of Prolifers for Survival
I was doing atomic Tupperware parties, talking to people in their living rooms and in small groups about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. I made a point of talking about how nuclear radiation would affect particularly the next generation. A woman, who shall forever be called blessed, asked me: if it’s wrong to injure these kids with iodine 131 accidentally, why isn’t it wrong to kill them deliberately with curettes? She was confronting me on abortion, and I didn’t have an answer. She was direct and persistent enough that it stayed in my conscience a long time, and really challenged me to take all direct assaults on the innocent seriously. The fact that a person in a small group can press a serious question has a power that cannot be denied.
Some Consistent Life Network Blog Posts on Nuclear Weapons
(see more in the list of all posts):
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons / Karen Swallow Prior
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue / John Whitehead
Racism
1. Anti-Racism Voices
Fannie Lou Hamer
Source: a 1971 speech obtained from the Lillian P. Benbow Room of Special Collections at Tougaloo College, Mississippi.
It’s not too late. There is still time for America to change. . . .
The war in Vietnam must be ended so our men and boys can come home—so mothers can stop crying, wives can feel secure, and children can learn strength . . .
The methods used to take human life, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amount to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder.
Source: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. by Harriet A. Washington. New York: Doubleday, 2007, pp. 189-190
“One day in 1961, Hamer entered the hospital to have ‘a knot on my stomach’—probably a benign uterine fibroid tumor—removed. She then returned to her family’s shack on the plantation to recuperate. But in the big house, ominous tidings circulated. The owner’s wife, Vera Alicia Marlow, was cousin of the surgeon who had treated Hamer. Marlow gossiped to the cook that Hamer had lost more than a tumor while unconscious—the surgeon removed her uterus, rendering Hamer sterile. The cook repeated the news to others, including a woman who happened to be Hamer’s cousin, and thus Hamer was one of the last people on the plantation to learn that she would never have a family of her own.
‘I went to the doctor who did that to me and I asked him, ‘Why? Why had he done that to me?’ He didn’t have to say nothing—and he didn’t. If he was going to give me that sort of operation then he should have told me. I would have loved to have children.’ But a lawsuit was out of the question, Hamer recalled. ‘At that time? Me? Getting a white lawyer against a white doctor? I would have been taking my hands and screwing tacks into my casket.’ “
The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion
by Graciela Olivarez, Commissioner
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972
from the “Separate Statement of Graciela Olivarez” in Report of the President’s Commission on Population and the American Future
Erma Clardy Craven, social worker
Source: Abortion and Social Justice, Sheed & Ward, 1972
It takes little imagination to see that the unborn Black baby is the real object of many abortionists. Except for the privilege of aborting herself, the Black woman and her family must fight for every other social and economic privilege. This move toward the free application of a non-right (abortion) for those whose real need is equal human rights and opportunities is benumbing the social conscience of America into unquestioningly accepting the ‘smoke screen’ of abortion. The quality of life for the poor, the Black and the oppressed will not be served by destroying their children.
Mattie Byrd
Source: Letter to Ira Reiner, Los Angeles District Attorney, around 1989 (therefore referring to a legal abortion)
I am the mother of Belinda A. Byrd . . . I am also the grandmother of her three young children who are left behind and motherless. I cry every day when I think how horrible her death was. She was slashed by them and then she bled to death, taken from this world on January 27, 1987. She has been stone dead for two years now, and nobody cares. I know that other young black women are now dead after abortion at that address . . . Where is [the abortionist] now? Has he been stopped? Has anything happened to him because of what he did to my Belinda? Has he served jail time for any of these cruel deaths? People tell me nothing has happened, that nothing ever happens to white abortionists who leave young black women dead.
2. Pro-Racism Voices
Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out
Nicholas Kulish and The New York Times, August 14, 2019
Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: Curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.
She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.
An heiress . . . with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement.
Some Consistent Life Network Blog Posts on Racism:
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
Police Brutality to the Preborn[p;;z’
“The Affairs of a Handful of Natives”: Nuclear Testing and Racism
The Death Penalty
Helen Prejean
Endorsing the book, Consistently Opposing Killing
The societal wounds of racism, poverty, and a penchant for using violence to address problems are intimately connected to the death penalty, to war, to the killing of the old and demented, and to the killing of children, unborn and born. If more people were familiar with the consistent life ethic, as expounded in this book, then the voice of all unseen vulnerable people would be better heard.
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Stop the Death Penalty
National Review, February 24, 2020
I do think that good Christian pro-life people need to examine the witness of not having mercy for a Nick Sutton. People respond to love. Mercy is for the guilty. We can’t be callous in these circumstances, or our arguments about the life of the most innocent might not be heard. I understand why the governor did what he did, but the death penalty should prompt more of a cultural examination of conscience. It could bring a lot of people of good will — those “pro-life” and “social justice” groups that seem strangely divided — together.
Ann Marie Bowen
Nebraskans United for Life (writing on the Retain a Just Nebraska website)
The Sacredness of All Life, April 21, 2016
In debates over life, questions inevitably come up asking whether those working tirelessly to defend life are motivated by a concern for all life. A growing movement of pro-life lawmakers and citizens in Nebraska have left no doubt where we stand: we are committed to ending all policies that unnecessarily threaten life, from abortion to the death penalty to euthanasia. Ultimately, no message is more powerful than this straightforward consistency.
In November, all Nebraskans are going to have a chance to vote on whether or not to bring back our state’s death penalty. I encourage you to think of that vote as an opportunity to vocally proclaim a consistent ethic of life in all we do. I implore Nebraskans to help promote a culture of life and reject bringing back our broken death penalty.
Richard A. Viguerie
When Governments Kill: A conservative argues for abolishing the death penalty
Sojourners, 2009
Conservatives have every reason to believe the death penalty system is no different from any politicized, costly, inefficient, bureaucratic, government-run operation . . . But here the end result is the end of someone’s life. In other words, it’s a government system that kills people. Those of us who oppose abortion believe that it is perhaps the greatest immorality to take an innocent life. While the death penalty is supposed to take the life of the guilty, we know that is not always the case. It should have shocked the consciences of conservatives when various government prosecutors withheld exculpatory, or opposed allowing DNA-tested, evidence in death row cases. To conservatives, that should be deemed as immoral as abortion . . . But even when guilt is certain, there are many downsides to the death penalty system.
Laura Hollis, conservative columnist
Death is Not the Answer
Creators Syndicate, August 22, 2019
The embrace of death as solution is not a phenomenon that admits easily of “left versus right” political — or even cultural — divisions. Americans on the right often defend the death penalty just as vehemently as the left cheerleads for abortion. (Euthanasia and assisted suicide seem to have advocates and opponents in every conceivable political camp.) . . .
How easily we accept the conclusion that death is the answer to our most serious problems. Unwanted baby? Kill it. Have an incurable disease? Kill yourself. Commit a heinous crime? Th government should kill you. These precedents — and the assumptions about human life that underlie them — should frighten us. Instead, we find ourselves pushed into accepting them as normal — even as positive.
Nicholas T. Wright, former Anglican Bishop of Durham, England
(and author of several books as N.T. Wright or Tom Wright)
September 15, 2011, Washington Post blog
You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world. As far as they were concerned, their stance went along with the traditional ancient Jewish and Christian belief in life as a gift from God, which is why (for instance) they refused to follow the ubiquitous pagan practice of “exposing” baby girls (i.e. leaving them out for the wolves or for slave-traders to pick up).
Mind you, there is in my view just as illogical a position on the part of those who solidly oppose the death penalty but are very keen on the “right” of a woman (or couple) to kill their conceived but not yet born child.
Sam Brownback, Republican United States Senator
U.S. News and World Report, April 11, 2005. p. 34
If we’re trying to establish a culture of life, it’s difficult to have the state sponsoring executions.
Tom Neuville. leading Republican on the Minnesota’s Senate Judiciary Committee,
speaking about Governor Pawlenty’s efforts to reinstate the death penalty
Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 7, 2003
Life is a gift from God. It isn’t up to us to take it away. Whether you take an innocent life of a baby, or of a person who has committed a heinous act, it is still an act at our hands, and it makes us a less caring and less sensitive society.
State Senator Tony Blair, Republican of Ohio
From an article in the Dayton Daily News, August 21, 2011:
There’s been a summer pause in the execution of Ohio’s death row inmates and state Rep. Terry Blair would like to see that pause made permanent.
“I don’t think we have any business in taking another person’s life, even for what we call a legal purpose or what we might refer to as a justified purpose,” the Washington Twp. Republican said. . . He’s one of just two Republican cosponsors of House Bill 160, legislation to abolish the death penalty in Ohio and replace it with life imprisonment without parole for the worst crimes.
For Blair, it’s a matter of living out his Catholic faith. “The creeds of the church say that life is to be protected all along, from natural birth to natural death,” said Blair, 64.
He’s also a cosponsor of the “Heartbeat” bill, which would ban abortion once a heartbeat is detected.
In 2009, he was one of just five House Republicans — along with Rep. Ross McGregor of Springfield and then Rep. Peggy Lehner of Kettering — who joined Democrats in a historic vote approving gay rights legislation banning discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation or gender identity. . . .
The legislation banning the death penalty may not get that far, but Celeste said it helps to have a Republican cosponsor in a GOP-controlled House.
Ron Paul, 2008 candidate for U.S. Republican presidential nomination, Libertarian Party presidential candidate, former U.S. Representative from Texas
Liberty Defined, 2011
The consistent right-to-life position should be to protect the unborn and oppose abortion, to reject the death penalty, and to firmly oppose our foreign policy that promotes an empire requiring aggressive wars that involve thousands of innocent people being killed. We would all be better off for it, and a society dedicated to peace, human life, and prosperity would more likely be achieved.
Christian Josi, former Executive Director, American Conservative Union
Washington Times, Monday, June 25, 2001
My fundamental problems with the death penalty began as a result of my personal concern, echoed by many on all sides of the political spectrum, that it was inconsistent for one to be “pro-life” on the one hand and condone government execution on the other.
Leszek Syski, activist
From Mary Meehan, America Magazine, November 20, 1982
(see Mary Meehan’s website)
Leszek Syski is a Maryland antiabortion activist who says that he “became convinced that the question of whether or not murderers deserve to die is the wrong one. The real question is whether other humans have a right to kill them.” He concluded that they do not after conversations with an opponent of capital punishment who asked, “Why don’t we torture prisoners? Torturing them is less than killing them.” Mr. Syski believes that “torture is dehumanizing, but capital punishment is the essence of fehumanization.”
Roxanne Stone
Quoted in Poll: Younger Christians less supportive of the death penalty
Religion News Service
This parallels a growing trend in the pro-life conversation among Christians to include torture and the death penalty as well as abortion. For many younger Christians, the death penalty is not a political dividing point but a human rights issue.
Some Consistent Life Network Blog Posts on the Death Penalty:
Open Letter to Governor Stitt: the Pro-life Case against the Death Penalty
The Death Penalty and Abortion: The Conservative/Liberal Straitjacket
Why Conservatives Should Oppose the Death Penalty
Is the Death Penalty Unethical?
Weaponized Drones
Jack Hunter
Pro-life Means Anti-drone
The American Conservative, 10.25.2012
“For pro-lifers, there must be a question: If life is sacred, how can we justify killing so many innocent children? Some might say, ‘Well, that’s just war. We make mistakes.’
Yet, I don’t know a single pro-lifer who would agree with rectifying the mistake of an unplanned pregnancy by making yet another mistake in terminating that pregnancy. If we justify the killing of innocent children abroad because their lives are somehow worth less, how is this different from liberals who dehumanize the personhood of a fetus?”
Troy Newman, Director of Operation Rescue
Comedian and TV host Bill Maher proposed (October 7, 2012) that it’s a good idea for more people to die by abortion, suicide (“assisted and regular”) and the death penalty because “the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death . . . The pope is consistently pro-life. I am consistently pro-death. . . . My motto is, ‘Let’s kill the right people.’”
In the December 2012 edition of Life Talk News, Troy Newman, Director of Operation Rescue, was discussing this with the panel and soon thereafter came this remark; The first few words are said with a tone of heavy sarcasm, and disapproval is clear throughout.
“And you know Mr. Peacenik Obama, who got the Nobel Peace Prize, is actually killing people now with drones. Just like something out of Star Wars. So they’re out there targeting individuals and murdering them with electronic equipment. Just following through with the same Bill Maher philosophy – “Kill the right people.”
Patrick Mahoney, Spring 2013
post on Facebook
As a pro-life leader, it is important for me to have a ‘consistent life’ message. So we must speak out when innocent life is killed in America through abortions, as well as innocent life that is killed overseas through drone attacks. Therefore I invite you to join with me as we pray at Planned Parenthood in Washington, D.C. on April 13 at 10:30 A.M. and then walk with me to the White House to speak out against President Obama’s use of drones and a large protest there at noon! We must be a prophetic witness for life!
Peace & Life Connections, 04.08.2106
(weekly e-newsletter of the Consistent Life Network; edited by Quaker Rachel MacNair)
On the April 3 Meet the Press, journalist Chuck Todd asked Hillary Clinton “when or if does an unborn child have constitutional rights?” Clinton’s response: “Well, under our laws currently, that is not something that exists. The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.”
The unborn person? Many abortion defenders were aghast.
CL Board member Thad Crouch comments: “Her articulation is consistent with her position on the death penalty and her foreign policy as Secretary of State. There are innocent persons in the womb, persons who pose no threat to the public while in prison, and non-targeted civilians are the majority of deaths from wars and drone assassinations.”