Quakers Taking a Position on Abortion: An Alternative View

 

Response to: “Quakers Must Take a Position on Abortion,”, by Erick Williams, Friends Journal, August 8, 2022.

by Rachel MacNair

Erick argues we must take a side on abortion through our U.S. federal lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The current position, in FNCL’s wording, is: “Some Friends are strong advocates for abortion rights, recognizing that a woman’s choice is a matter of individual conscience to be taken in relationship with her God as she weighs the multiple impacts of pregnancy.” The alternative approach: “Other Friends feel their commitment to nonviolence and honoring the Light of God in all human beings requires them to limit abortion options or oppose it outright.”

Erick says the latter view is “anachronistic.” To the contrary, it’s a common view of those of us who hold the Consistent Life Ethic.

I offer thoughts on what he said, but you don’t have to read the original article to follow what I’m saying.

 

Violence is Not a Problem Solver

The genius of Friends’ Peace Testimony is the understanding that using violence as a problem solver is deceptive. In the long run, it leads to more problems than it solves. Here are some of the problems that are a side-effect of readily available abortion.

 

• When minors are sexually abused by adult men, impregnated, and taken by that man to an abortion clinic, this covers up the crime. Sexual abuse continues. Cases we can document are surely the tip of the iceberg – efforts to conceal are mainly successful. Men are more likely to commit this abuse when they have abortions readily available. More such abuse is one of the prices paid for ready abortion availability. This is a case where men use abortion to control women’s bodies.

 

• Sex-selection abortions – a fetus is killed because she’s a girl and wouldn’t have been if she were a boy – are quite common world-wide. According to the Gendercide Awareness Project, each year around 3.5 million women and girls are “missing” because of their gender. About half is due to sex-selection abortions. This is another case where men use abortion to control women’s bodies.

 

• Once giving birth happens not because a couple had sex, but because a woman chose not to have an abortion, many see the baby as her responsibility alone. The father thinks it’s justified to abandon her and the baby – the birth was her choice, not his. This might be one factor for why the feminization of poverty increased after Roe. Any speculation about women escaping poverty by abortion rather than child-rearing is countered: women blamed for not aborting might be in far worse shape financially. Men use abortion to feel entitled to women’s bodies.

 

As for racism, the history of eugenics and other forms of disdain for reproduction by the “wrong” people is deep. Planned Parenthood recently took Margaret Sanger’s name off their Manhattan center because of her eugenics advocacy. They admitted to a long history of racism. Activism and lawsuits from their own employees indicate this is still an institutional problem. While Erick is right that under slavery women weren’t consulted about whether they wished to have babies, nowadays the most vicious racists want fewer Black babies and so encourage abortion.

The arguments on mental aftermath for women are still ongoing. I served as one of the reviewers for the American Psychological Association’s report on this and remain markedly unsatisfied with it. But this much we do know: women who’ve had abortions and understand themselves to be traumatized are a major constituency group of the pro-life movement. You can expect pro-life events will include their voices. For those wondering why the pro-life movement continues so strongly, that’s a major part of the answer. If the movement were merely based on a philosophical premise about when life begins, it would have shriveled long ago.

 

Violence of Social Movements

Because Erick brought up fringe violence, and only because he did, I point out that a set of groups called “Jane’s Revenge” has taken credit for widespread vandalism, including firebombing, of pro-life aid centers and churches. There has been one person murdered while protesting abortion, and a man was caught in an assassination attempt for Brett Kavanaugh last summer. That pro-choice people engage in threats of violence and actual violence is something I’ve experienced personally over decades. Stories of more vandalism and assaults are ones I see fairly frequently.

But I defend both pro-choice and pro-life movements against the charge of violence when people commit violence in their names. There were riots with Gandhi, civil-rights era riots, Vietnam-era anti-war bombings, and more recently, riots with the George Floyd protests. I think blaming any assertively nonviolent movement for its violent fringe is unfair.

Assertive nonviolence isn’t merely an alternative to violence. It’s also an alternative to apathy. Nonviolent movements tend to get people excited, and in cultures that still regard violence as a problem-solver, some will commit violence. This is why a violent fringe often accompanies large movements, despite the denunciations of its leaders and activists.

 

What’s Best for FCNL? 

I’m not advocating that FCNL should take my perspective on abortion, or any other, as a matter of official policy. FCNL is a lobbying group.

We’re small, always have been, and will be for the foreseeable future. Legislators tend to see us pacifists as naive but well-meaning. We can offer good information on peace and justice perspectives they accept, knowing we have integrity and are thorough in our research.

I’m from Missouri, so I deal with two Republican senators, and I’ve done so in D.C. while lobbying with FCNL. I’ve seen personally that they do respect FCNL.

But if FCNL takes a position favoring abortion availability, it will lose that credibility. Many Republicans will see this as FCNL making an exception on advocating only for nonviolence, an exception that swallows up everything else. This could sabotage our ability to work with them on other issues.

But there is at least something that FCNL can do now with the new situation. One of the post-Dobbs realities is that prominent pro-life leaders are far more focused on the economic supports that pregnant women need. That can be part of the research offered to those Republicans who respect the pro-lifers to get those legislators to support the policies.

See PostRoeFuture.com, a statement published January 19, 2023. Suggested policies include: accessible and affordable health care, expanded child tax credits, paid parental leave, flexible work hours, affordable child care, and prenatal child support laws.

See also Make Birth Free: A Vision for Congress to Empower American Mothers, Families and Communities is a White Paper by Americans United for Life and Democrats for Life of America. It explains the need for measures to fund prenatal care and obstetrics; one suggestion is to expand Medicare to cover that.

Many Friends will react by pointing out that Republican politicians who claim to favor life are glaringly inconsistent on killing with the death penalty and war.  And if Republican legislators were sincere, the above policies would already be law, not something still needing lobbying. To which I say: amen.

But lobbying means working with politicians and their mindsets as they are.

Importantly, it works both ways. Trying to convince people to oppose war, the death penalty, and the structural violence of poverty, racism, and other lethal bigotries is a lot harder to do when we’re inconsistent. We lose persuasiveness when we say we’re going to stick with our “born privilege” and allow one group of human beings to be targeted as an exception to our testimony against killing.