Choosing Life

"Therefore choose life." The peace movement has made that familiar scriptural appeal a basic principle of action and, in most respects, has been faithful to it. Not only have pacifists chosen life by rejecting war and its increasingly murderous weaponry, but they have carried that principle over into their opposition to capital punishment and refusal to support racial and other forms of entrenched discrimination. More recently that same commitment has given rise to an active concern about the threatened despoilation of the environment upon which our very existence and that of future generations must depend.

Only on this issue of abortion--and, to a lesser but growing extent, euthanasia--does one encounter a strange reluctance on their part to speak out in favor of choosing life. More disturbing still, this pattern of cautious avoidance is broken by unquestionably sincere opponents of war who somehow find it possible to justify and openly support the intentional destruction of human life in its earliest stages of development.

If we are honest about it and dismiss the euphemisms that are often advanced to hide the ugly truth, this is precisely what abortion involves, quite apart from whatever "beneficial" personal or social purposes may be claimed for it. We begin with the incontestable fact that life is present from conception on; indeed, if there were no life, there would be no need for "procedures" to terminate it and, it would follow, no controversy to concern us here.

That it is human life is also beyond challenge. The processes of biological generation, supported by chromosomal structure and analysis, should be proof enough. Though some may argue the significance of the recapitulative stages of prenatal development, even they must admit that it is always a human organism that is "recapitulating." At a given stage it may be like a fish or some lesser animal, but we know it is not a fish but a human being in the process of developing its full measure of human nature and potential.

This, of course, is the crucial point in any discussion of the abortion issue, and its implications go far beyond the elementary biology upon which it is based. It is never just a fetus we destroy or save; it is a human fetus and should always be carefully referred to as such. Pacifists should be particularly sensitive to the abuses of language intended to mask actions which might otherwise be rejected as unworthy or immoral. Thus decent, ordinary people are led to accept and even rejoice in the slaughter of "Huns" or "Japs" or "Gooks" and all the other terms which, by dehumanizing the victims, convert wartime atrocities into glorious victories. It works that way with abortion too. To speak of removing "the products of conception" or "an inch of tissue" is to dehumanize the human life that is present and developing. We are all, ( whatever our present age or condition of life, "products of conception" and each of us, at some point in our unbroken life process, was that "inch of tissue"--but that is never all that we were. At every stage we were, in potential, everything we have been, what we are, and what we will yet be. That is what we destroy when we destroy the not-yet-born human being.

Pacifists, for the most part, tend to be liberal or progressive or even radical Left in political orientation and, as such, they are prepared to accept a protective and supportive role for society. This is particularly true with respect to those members of society who are weak and vulnerable because of some physical, social, or moral disability. It should follow then that pacifists would be most sensitive to those whose needs for protection and support are greatest precisely because they are at the most vulnerable stages of that continuing life process--above all, to the not-yet-born whose dependence upon the mother is total and, at the other end of the scale, the helplessly infirm and aged. It is a reversal of right order for society or its political instruments to approve and even assist in the destruction of human lives at those stages of total vulnerability.

Of course consistency has its problems too. I have already referred to the liberal political orientation usually associated with a pacifist commitment. It can be something of a psychological strain to find oneself allied with a pro-life movement notoriously conservative, even reactionary, in its general social and political outlook. But if the pacifist's rejection of war ultimately rests upon the reverence for life, that same principle should govern our thinking about abortion regardless of the company we might have to keep as a result.

In the days before the civil rights crusades of the 1950s, those of us who were actively opposed to racial prejudice and discrimination faced a somewhat parallel situation. Constantly challenged to justify our support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods (not to mention churches!) and our demands for fair employment practices legislation when these were so obviously part of "the communist line," our answer then was the one I would propose now: We stand on principle, not on the comparative merits or demerits of prospective allies and opponents.

We may take some consolation in the thought that, difficult though it may be for the pacifist, this problem of consistency has to be even more troubling for those who profess a pro-life commitment and yet are willing to accept the threat of nuclear holocaust as national policy, who are vocal in their support for capital punishment and their opposition to gun control, and who reject virtually every social program designed to make sure that the lives they are so intent upon saving are worth living. And if they are not troubled, we bear a large part of the blame. The identification of such right-wing politics with the opposition to the killing of the not-yet-born has been possible only because we have not assumed the leadership role that should be ours if we are truly committed to respect for human life.

In the final analysis, though, we are concerned with something far more important than simple consistency. At the end of World War II, a German writer found a connection between Auschwitz and Hiroshima that has a bearing upon our discussion here. As he saw it, both events, each an atrocity in its own right, testified to a frightful human capacity to create justifications for large-scale slaughter of human beings. Any mind, he argued, which is able to contemplate such justifications has to be corrupt--to which he added his grim warning that "the corruption is general."

It is not difficult for pacifists to recognize the corruption in planning and carrying through the destruction of six million and more lives in the Nazi extermination camps and "justifying" that slaughter in terms of racial "purification." Nor is it hard for us to recognize it in the mass slaughter conducted in our name as German and Japanese cities were "taken out" one by one and that was "justified" in the name of preserving freedom. Why, we must ask, is it so hard to see the same corruption in the personal and social "justification" for the intentional destruction of more than a million human lives in this country alone, year after year?

Gordon Zahn was professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi, USA when this article appeared.