I became an avid supporter of the pro-life movement back in the mid-1980s. At the time, I was an enthusiastic supporter of pro-life groups like Last Days Ministries. And in high school, I proudly wore an Operation Rescue t-shirt to school. Then I went on to university where I completed a BA followed by an MCS in the late 1990s with a focus on bioethics: my master’s thesis was on contraception and the Catholic Church and touched on such varied topics as fetal development, theories of human personhood, the concept of rights, the distinction between contraceptives and abortifacients, and so on. While I retained a fundamentally pro-life position, I came to recognize how complex these issues are through study of the modern ethical debate including such varied voices as Judith Jarvis Thomson, David Boonin, Francis Beckwith, and Peter Kreeft.
If I have learned anything in my years thinking about abortion it is that the issue is complex, the debate is currently intractable, and if progress is to be made, people must find a way to talk–and listen–to each other.
With that in mind, yesterday, I posted some tweets on the topic. This tweet was targeting those who are pro-choice and seek to marginalize other voices in a bald non sequitur and ad hominem:
One does not need to have been pregnant nor to have the ability to become pregnant in order to have a justified belief about the moral status of elective abortion.
— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) December 2, 2021
I also posted a tweet for the pro-life side and pro-life Christians, in particular:
Christianity entails a range of ethical commitments. Insisting that women should never have the right to elective abortion is not among them. In other words, Christians can, in good conscience, disagree with one another about the topic of abortion.
— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) December 2, 2021
This second tweet elicited some vociferous responses from people who ostensibly identify as Christians. (Otherwise, why would they care?) One of them replied that I was the “voice of Satan.” Another compared me to Hitler. And so on. And what was my crime? What warranted comparing me to Satan and Hitler?
Before proceeding, let’s be clear that this is not a “pro-choice” tweet. Rather, it’s a tweet about intellectual freedom. I am a pacifist as well (at least most days). But even though I believe pacifism is the correct ethical position for a Christian, I would never insist that one must be a pacifist to be a Christian. One can consistently defend an alternative view such as just war theory and still be a Christian.
I was making the same basic point here. My claim was not that a Christian should be pro-choice but only that a Christian could consistently support legal access to elective abortion services. And if you want evidence of the fact, just consider how diverse opinions on abortion have been in the Christian church. In Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker writes:
“church councils, such as those of Elvira and Ancyra, which were called to specify the legal groundwork for Christian communities, outlined penalties only for those women who committed abortion after a sexual crime such as adultery or prostitution. Most importantly, perhaps, from the third century A.D. onward, Christian thought was divided as to whether early abortion–the abortion of an ‘unformed’ embryo–was in fact murder. Different sources of church teachings and laws simply did not agree on the penalties for abortion or on whether early abortion was wrong.
“In the year 1100 A.D., this debate was clarified, but hardly in the direction of making abortion at all times unequivocally murder. Ivo of Chartres, a prominent church scholar, condemned abortion but held that abortion of the ‘unformed’ embryo was not homicide, and his work was the beginning of a new consensus. Fifty years later Gratian, in a work which became the basis of canon law for the next seven hundred years, reiterated this stand.” (University of California Press, 1984, 12-13)
Interestingly, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Southern Baptists were generally pro-choice. And when I was studying bioethics in the 1990s, one of the important voices on the pro-choice side was evangelical Christian ethicist Robert Wennberg (See Life in the Balance: Exploring the Abortion Controversy (Eerdmans, 1985).)
You may be a pro-life Christian but to say the least extraordinarily uncharitable to insist that those who acknowledge this historical diversity in the Christian tradition on the question are in league with Satan and Hitler.
Here is the tragic irony of it all. When you demonize not only pro-choice people but even pro-life people who take a stance different than yours, all you do is further poison and polarize a debate that is already infamously poisoned and polarized. And a debate that is further poisoned and polarized harms everyone, most of all the very unborn fetuses that you claim to value.
