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Margaret Hope Bacon:
“In 1969 the American Friends Service Committee published a book, Who Shall Live: Man’s Control over Birth and Death, written by a committee of Quaker doctors and ethicists, including Henry Cadbury, arguing that abortion in the first trimester is acceptable, as well as that persons had the right to choose their own time of death. Later, with the rise of the women’s movement, many Quaker women of liberal persuasion advocated a woman’s right to choose, and participated in public marches and organizations taking this position. Some liberal Friends, male and female, objected, feeling that the concept of life as sacred, so essential to the peace movement, should not be compromised. But to the evangelical and biblically oriented Friends, the issue was absolute, and the actions of liberal Friends deeply distressing.”
— from historical update & notes, Friends for 350 Years by Howard H. Brinton (2002, Pendle Hill Publications), p. 279
Richard Foster:
I must give witness “for life” as consistently and as unambiguously as possible.
This witness needs to weave its way throughout all human experience, from the womb to the tomb. This means seeking ways to protect the unborn. This means standing against all forms of prejudice which would dehumanize people precious to God. This means working to eliminate poverty and other dehumanizing social conditions. This means witnessing for peace and reconciliation everywhere possible and laboring hard for genuine alternatives to war. This means seeking out creative alternatives to capital punishment. This means rejecting euthanasia and instead working for a more compassionate end of life environment.
— from “Growing Edges”, an article on civic responsibility in Renovaré’s Newsletter for October 2004 (www.renovare.org)
George Ellis:
(discussing the aspect of science dealing with its limitations — “because there is no scientific experiment which can determine any of them” — in this case, ethics)
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology produce arguments which claim to give complete explanations as to where our ethical views come from. There are many problems with those attempts, the first being they do not explain ethics, they explain it away . . . The second is that this is a typical fundamentalist argument which looks at some of the causes in operation and ignores others . . .
The third is that if you did follow those precepts, you would rapidly end up in very dangerous territory, namely the domain of social Darwinism. That has been one of the most evil movements in the history of humanity, causing far more deaths than any other ideology has done . . . Yes I know there is a substantial literature on the evolutionary rise of altruism, but as a historical fact the influence of evolutionary theory on ethics in practice has been to provide theoretical support for eugenics and social Darwinism, not for any movement of caring for others. The historical record is quite clear on this: see Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially the view that human life is sacred. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary “fitness” (especially intelligence and health) to be the highest arbiter of morality. Darwinism played a key role in the rise not only of eugenics, but also euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination.
— from Science in Faith and Hope: An Interaction (2004, Quaker Books), pp. 20-21