WHAT IS PRO-LIFE?

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court rendered the decision for the Roe v Wade case. That decision made abortion legal in the United States. Not long thereafter Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, started the pro-life movement to work in opposition to abortion. Since most pro-life political candidates were conservative, this movement was not popular with politically liberal Christians.

Ron Sider, an Evangelical Christian who is politically liberal, wrote a book in 1987 entitled “Completely Pro-life.” In it he asserted that Christians should be pro-life on abortion, but also on other issues such as nuclear arms, social justice, and feminism. In a final chapter he even brings in tobacco, alcohol, racism, and environmentalism.

In the years that followed other politically liberal Evangelical Christians such as Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and Brian McClaren have repeated and expanded the idea of being totally pro-life, sometimes rephrasing it as “consistently pro-life,” or “totally pro-life.” In so doing more issues have been added to the pro-life list. War, poverty, and capital punishment are all presented as pro-life issues.
It is not surprising that as more ingredients are tossed into the pot called pro-life the clarity of what is pro-life gets obfuscated. Two clarifications will help us regain our focus.

TWO CLARIFICATIONS

1. LIFE & DEATH VS QUALITY OF LIFE

First we must distinguish between life & death issues versus quality of life issues. War, abortion, and capital punishment are examples of true life & death issues. Poverty and justice are examples of quality of life issues and as such they should not be assigned to the pro-life category. This is not to say that they are not important. The word “poor” appears in the English Standard Version of the Bible 173 times and most of those references are to people in poverty. Historically Christians have shown great sensitivity to the poor but we must observe that in the twentieth century, for a variety of reasons, Evangelical Christian concern for the poor ebbed. Fortunately we are seeing significant resurgence of compassion for those in poverty. Nonetheless, this issue in the United States is not a matter of life and death and thus should not qualify as a pro-life issue.

2. RELATIVE IMPORT

Second, once we establish which issues are pro-life we must ask ourselves if they are of equal import. If abortion, war, and the death penalty are in this category do they merit equal attention? The notion of moral equivalence needs to be explored.

In 1986 Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Moral Equivalence. She pointed out that some people look at two flawed nations and call them morally equivalent. Nation A is totally dictatorial with no free elections while nation B has free elections but an instance of voter fraud has been found. Thus the two nations are morally equivalent say the critics. Nation A keeps tens of thousands of its own citizens imprisoned for decades for political reasons. Nation B abused its principles and kept a journalist in prison for a year, unjustly. Thus the critics claim the two nations are morally equivalent. You get the idea. The myth of moral equivalence wrongly equates two things that are not equal.

In pro-life matters there is a sad myth of moral equivalence. Ron Sider and the other writers never actually say that a particular issue is as compelling as abortion but they imply it by widely sidestepping any discussion of which issues are more morally salient. Because in recent years I have turned against capital punishment in the United States, I will use it as a comparison issue with abortion. I believe both are wrong, but abortion is the greater injustice. My analysis will be for the United States only.

(1) First consider the number of victims. Since 1973, 1,146 people have been put do death via the justice system. In the same period there have been over 49,000,000 babies aborted.

(2) Second consider innocence. By human standards all babies aborted are innocent of any crime. We cannot say that all people put to death via the judicial system are guilty but surely at least 95% are.

(3) Finally consider defense. All people who lost their lives via the capital punishment have received multiple defenses in courts of law. Compare this to the unborn who are the most defenseless human beings in existence.

So the comparison is this: 49 million defenseless, innocent persons die via abortion. 1,146 defended and mostly guilty persons die via capital punishment. There is no moral equivalence between these two issues. Abortion is dramatically and overwhelmingly the worse tragedy.

For the war issue I will consider the war in Iraq. The death toll for American soldiers is approaching 5,000. These are volunteer soldiers bearing arms so we cannot call them innocent. The defense they have is among the best in military history. Any outrage for the fatalities in this war does not compare with the offense we should feel from abortion.

But some would say. "What about the fatalities of the other armies?"  What about citizen fatalities? The Associated Press estimates that there have been 110,600 violent deaths, through April of 2009, due to the war.

Four thoughts:

(1) If the U.S. had not gone to war in Iraq there would still have been thousands of deaths, possibly more than 110,600.
(2) Citizen deaths must sadly be considered the loss of innocent people, but not so with military deaths.
(3) Citizen deaths in Iraq may come from very little defenses for noncombatants, but whatever defense they have it is more than abortion victims.
(4) This number, 110,600, which is the total for the war since its beginning in 2003, is approximately equal to the deaths due to abortions in a single month in the United States.

It’s all bad so why do such an analysis? The answer is that Christians have a certain amount of resources at their disposal; things such as time, money, votes, influence, compassion, and energy.  Ron Sider and other politically liberal Evangelical writers have led American Christians to believe that these resources should be distributed fairly among all morally equivalent concerns. My conclusion is this: Christians should give their resources most heavily to the worst moral pro-life issue which is abortion, and it is not even close. Just like slavery was the issue that ultimately determined the character of nineteenth century America, it is abortion that will signal our moral fiber.