Not long ago I met a man who has dedicated much of his time and energy to a pro-life group. He was discouraged at the results of that work. The acceptance of abortion in American society has grown since his pro-life activity began, about 10 years ago. He was puzzled by this downward trend in Americans' attitude toward the taking of human life. In the course of our conversation, I learned what my friend's job is: He is a nuclear weapons technician at a military facility.
I share my friend's concern about the taking of human life through abortion. But his puzzlement at its acceptance in America puzzles me. As long as we prepare each day in our research institutes, corporations, and military bases to incinerate millions of children and adults abroad, why should we be surprised at an acceptance of the killing of unborn children in America? Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race.
The people who believe in nuclear weapons as a necessary evil and the people who believe in abortion as a necessary evil are often very different politically. But what we all seem to hold in common in America, from pro-life weapons technicians to pacifist abortionists, is a willingness to take human life on a massive scale for the sake of a particular freedom. Human life is not held sacred in this country. Regardless of political differences, our overall attitudes as a people have a deadly consistency.
As Adrienne Rich points out in her book, Of Woman Born, abortion is a final, desperate act of violence for women who can see no other choice: "No free woman, with 100 per cent effective, non-harmful birth control readily available, would 'choose' abortion....In a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no 'abortion issue.' "
The point is that patriarchy (the systematic, institutionalized control of women by men) and its consequence, unwanted pregnancies, are the reasons why women get abortions.
I would want to add to Rich's analysis that the availability of adequate contraception is both necessary and illusory: illusory because it may not always work, and whether it works or not, may seem to remove all personal responsibility from an act of love whose transforming depth of unity--two in one flesh--is consistent only with the mutual intention of living a life together. If as men or women we are unwilling to take responsibility in love to care for the full life of our lover (and for a possible new life), then the incredible gift of making love is making death--an act whose uncaring contradiction kills spiritually and physically. To contraception as a genuine social priority should be added the need for a radical awakening, especially in men, to chastity as an alternative to the uncaring sexuality which is a psychic, spiritual death, and results in abortion.
Abortion is a threefold violence. The first two stages of abortion's violence are a patriarchal violence done by men to women and the violence which a woman inflicts on herself in abortion. The third stage of abortion's violence is the killing of an unborn child.
I think I am only beginning to understand, as a man, why women are driven to the desperate violence of taking life in their wombs--in a society where men accept virtually no responsibility for their sexuality with women or for the personal care of their own children. In a patriarchal society whose overall respect for human life can be measured by its nuclear stockpile, abortion is a desperate counterviolence seen as a form of self-defense by women, in much the same way as some Third World people see terrorist violence as a means of survival.
The killing done through terrorist violence will not be stopped by the use of greater force by affluent nations. Killing by Third World revolutionaries will end when justice for them and their people is no longer blocked by the rich and powerful nations.
Killing done through abortions, in a patriarchal society fortified by nuclear weapons, will not be stopped by anti-abortion laws but by a double conversion in the American people: a conversion to the underlying sacredness of human life and a conversion to a view of women equal to men in their rights and dignity. The destruction of life in their wombs by desperate women will cease as their society becomes one in which women are respected, life is recognized as sacred, and men assume equal responsibility with women for the care of their children.
Reading of the deaths of aborted children gives me the same sick and helpless feeling that I get from a news report on a terrorist bombing of a school or bus filled with children. Regardless of sympathy for the previous victims of violence in each of those cases, I am sickened by their further taking of innocent life. Yet my feelings are of no help to any of the victims at any stage of those violent cycles unless I resolve to struggle and remove the causes of violence and counter-violence--unless, in the case of abortion, I struggle beside women and men to transform our patriarchal, militarist system into a just society revering human life here and abroad.
Christians are profoundly responsible for the two closely allied institutions, patriarchy and the Pentagon, which have created and justified the abortion clinic as a necessary evil in America. If a couple of miracles were to happen (as they do regularly through our acceptance of God's will), if the Christian church in this country were to become both nonviolent and feminist, then a Christian concern about the taking of life in abortion would no longer be viewed by others as hypocrisy. Until we as Christians turn from our oppression of women and our support for nuclear weapons, our pro-life campaigning will simply deepen America's acceptance of abortion. Our support of patriarchy and the Pentagon makes abortion inevitable.
Jim Douglass was a staff person at Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Bremerton, Washington, when this article appeared. He is the author of Lightning East and West.
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