Catholic and Pro-life: Not As Easy As It Looks

You’d think it would be a breeze, this business of being Catholic and pro-life. Well, it’s not.

I know. On Respect Life Sunday, nice flyers from the NCCB are stacked on the end of your pews, and a homily might be preached. Maybe your parish has a spot in the Life Chain.

So what’s the problem?

It’s this: In certain Catholic crowds, bringing up the issue of abortion can make for decidedly uncomfortable, if not outright hostile moments.

After twenty years of involvement in Church ministry, I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been in a study group or commission that is just terribly concerned with the plight of the oppressed in every corner of the world when some fool suggests adding the unborn to the list.

You can practically hear an egg get fertilized in the silence that follows such a recherche remark.

The offender might be taken aside and be spoken to in hushed tones. Of course we’re all personally opposed and deeply disturbed by the high incidence of abortion in this country. But, she's reminded, please remember that we live in a diverse society and it’s really not appropriate to try to control moral choices via the law. Tolerance, please – always tolerance.

The Tolerant One will probably misquote John Courtney Murray and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas. They will assume you are an ignorant clod and ask, as one woman did of me at a Diocesan Woman’s Commission meeting, “Have you ever considered the reasons women seekabortions, Amy?”

Before I could announce that yes, such musings had crept into my consciousness every so often in between my long-range planning of clinic bombings and programs mandating chastity belts, she continued, “Don’t you think you should be spending your time on trying to promote alternatives to abortion?”

Oh heavens. Why didn’t I think of that? Luckily the other 99.9 percent of the pro-life movement has –a reality which, of course, your “personally opposed” friend is apparently unaware of since her personal opposition doesn’t take her as far as any actual real, live pro-life group doing pro-life work. Too single-issue, you know.

Consider. Have you ever met a “personally opposed, but…” working at a crisis pregnancy center? It’s all very well, good and necessary to advocate legislation expanding access to prenatal care or anti-poverty work as a way of supporting abortion alternatives (which it is), but what about right this minute? What about the women desperately seeking alternatives right now?

No, the truth is that to my ears, when these people demean the work of those who are in the trenches dealing – ahem - personally - with real live women, educating and offering direct assistance, “personally opposed, but…” rings empty.

Returning to our group of professional Catholics (both volunteer and paid), we might also find some who are more than personally opposed, but who still hesitate at the inclusion of abortion on the list of justice issues. They are unwilling to speak on this for fear of “alienating” people, particularly women who have had abortions.

The concern is commendable in its intentions, I suppose. There’s no doubt that priests exist who have been responsible for making aborted women feel that the love of Christ is closed to them. However, to say that we shouldn’t mention the unborn or abortion persistently, openly and fearlessly is to say that there is a part of the Word that is unspeakable.

It drives me nuts, absolutely to the edge of madness that some of the very same people who call on the Church to be boldly prophetic when it comes to consumerism, militarism and the death penalty insist that we must cover ourselves in a shroud of sensitivity about more than a million deaths a year occurring in our own communities -- deaths brought about by rank and rabid profiteering “doctors” and clinic owners for piles of filthy and yes – bloody – lucre?

I don’t get it.

It might be getting better, though. The generation of earnestly fuzzy-thinking Church middle-management types who took over meeting rooms about 1970, haggled over mission statements for weeks on end, made us sit around and share our stories and wanted to stitch abortion deep into the inner lining of the “seamless garment,” is slowly fading out of the picture, either because of age or they just went Episcopalian on us all.

It’s my impression that those replacing them in leadership are compassionate, tough, and more understanding of the true nature of abortion. They know that if we refuse to speak, either out of ideological unease or a distorted definition of sensitivity, we become partially responsible for the lives lost and the pain of the aborted woman when she approaches us again in grief, years after our initial silence and asks amidst tears,

“Where was the Church?”