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''Editor’s Note'': Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. D. A. Carson, Gregory
Alan Thornbury, James Parker III, and Chad Owen Brand have been asked specific
questions to which they have provided written responses. These writers are not
responding to one another. The journal’s goal for the Forum is to provide significant
thinkers’ views on topics of interest without requiring lengthy articles from these
heavily-committed individuals. Their answers are presented in an order that hopefully
makes the forum read as much like a unified presentation as possible.

'''SBJT: What are some practical strategies for addressing the abortion issue? '''

'''D. A. Carson:''' We have just “celebrated”
(“endured”?) the thirtieth anniversary of
''Roe v. Wade''. Countless commentators have
weighed in to express their thanks for the
Supreme Court’s decision, and voiced
their determination to preserve it; no
fewer have articulated their resolution to
keep pushing for court appointments that
will ultimately bring that decision down.

Transparently, the mood of the country
has changed somewhat during the last
three decades. While many pro-choice
voices still defend the Court’s decision
with virulent rhetoric, and while the
media, by and large, hue that line, only a
deaf ear could fail to pick up other voices.
On many university campuses today, one
can hear students refer to themselves as
“survivors”: they are painfully aware that
they could as easily have been aborted as
the tens of millions who were actually
destroyed. In 1999, the Higher Education
Research Institute published a survey of
275,811 incoming college freshmen, which
showed that only 52.5% of the men and
49.5% of the women thought abortion
should be legal. This represents a 14%
decline since 1990. A poll published in
2000 by the ''Los Angeles Times'' showed that
only 43% of Americans support a simple
continuation of ''Roe v. Wade''—down from
56% in 1991. It has been widely reported
that during the last presidential elections,
27% of those polled said they were more
likely to vote for George Bush because he
was pro-life, while only 18% of those
polled said they were more likely to vote
for Al Gore because he was pro-choice.
Some high-profile feminists, such as
Germaine Greer in her 1999 book ''The Whole Woman'', are now arguing that
abortion has become just one more tool
of oppression in the hands of the maledominated
medical community, which
has consistently failed to inform women
of the risks. Greer speaks out of bitter
experience: several abortions have left
her sterile.

In the entire field of bioethics, questions
surrounding abortion represent only one
tiny part of the complex issues that must
be addressed. In terms of the number of
people affected, however—not only the
aborted, but also the mothers, family
members, and those touched by the decisions—
no subject in bioethics is more
far-reaching.

I do not intend to lay out the case
against easy abortion. That has been done
by many writers. Most Christians, and
many others, find the arguments convincing.
What I shall do in the space allotted
me is to offer some practical suggestions
about how those of us who hold such
views should proceed from here. For this
is not the time to do nothing more than
wring our hands in despair and bemoan
the wickedness of the age.

(1) Circulate hard facts. Whether in private
conversations, or (for those with
broader influence) in more public arenas,
focus on the facts, those stubborn pieces
of data which, on the long haul, turn out
to be strangely convincing. Back in the late
sixties and early seventies, abortion rights
advocates insisted that abortion would
make illegitimacy dwindle away, and that
every child who actually then came to
birth would be “wanted,” not unwanted.
In consequence, it was argued, large social
problems would diminish; child battering
would become a thing of the past; young
couples would not be trapped in miserable,
forced marriages; women could
remain in university or in the workforce
if they unexpectedly became pregnant.
The social gains would result in a massive
reduction of welfare: we were asked
to believe that abortion is in part an economic
issue. And in any case, experts were
predicting that without abortion, human
overpopulation would usher in scarcely
imaginable disaster. Paul Ehrlich, an
expert on the Checkerspot butterfly, wrote
''The Population Bomb'', a 1968 best-seller, in
which he argued that in less than two
decades, all ocean life would die of DDT
poisoning, and thousands of human
beings would die of smog in New York
City and Los Angeles. Pollution would
reduce life expectancy in the US to fortytwo
years. We were constantly bombarded
with stories of some innocent,
young girl going to a back-room abortion
quack and then dying of the internal
bleeding. Besides, wealthy women could
always find a proper doctor to do the job;
it was the poor who were disadvantaged,
so that access to abortion was simply a
matter of social justice.

Three decades later, what are the facts?
Illegitimacy is a much greater social problem
today than it was in the early seventies.
In 1970, 10.7% of live births were to
unmarried mothers. By 1975, only a
couple of years after ''Roe v. Wade'', the rate
was 14.5%. Today the rate is 33%; among
black children, the rate today approaches
70%. Paul Ehrlich doubtless knew a lot
about the Checkerspot butterfly, but
his projections regarding human population
trends were not only wrong, they
approached sheer silliness. The claim that
failure to secure court-protected abortion
would result in tens of thousands of mothers
endangered by back-street butchers
was not true in 1972; ironically, it may be
closer to the truth now. In 1940, the
National Center for Health Statistics said
there were 1,313 deaths from illegal abortions,
most from infections, not bleeding.
By 1966, the figure was 159 deaths: antibiotics
had come a long way. By 1972, the
last statistical year before ''Roe'', the figure
was 41. Of course, abortion activists
insisted that most of the deaths took place
in secret, and were not counted in the
statistics. Probably there was some truth
to the claim, but it is hard to overlook the
sharp drop anyway. Nor is it all that clear
that those who practiced abortion were
untrained: not a few doctors broke the law,
but they were still doctors. Former medical
director for Planned Parenthood, Dr
Mary Calderone, estimated in 1960 that
nine out of ten illegal abortions were being
performed by licensed physicians. Estimates
of how many abortions took place
per year range from about 200,000
to 400,000. The contemporary figure is
many times higher, and it is far from clear
that the standard of care has improved.
Approximately two-thirds of contemporary
ob-gyn doctors refuse to do abortions;
a majority of the remaining third perform
no more than four or five abortions per
year. This has encouraged the multiplication
of abortion specialists, and because
abortion is such a sensitive subject, the
supervision of their clinics is woefully
inadequate. A probing series in ''The New York Times'' in 1991 uncovered “filth” and
depicted “butchery” at dozens of dirty,
unlicensed clinics. This paper, so “liberal”
in its leanings, was prompted to write
the exposé after several hideous abortion
deaths hit the national headlines.
Several writers have pointed out that if a
researcher takes the time to look, it is easy
to pull up hundreds of newspaper
accounts of documented abortion deaths
that have occurred during the past decade
in walk-in abortion clinics in all our major
cities. And does ''anyone'' still think that the
prevalence of abortion reduces welfare
rolls? Has the number of battered or
unwanted children declined? We have
merely made our society coarser than it
was some decades ago, more self-centered,
less concerned with any human life
other than my own. And there are costs
beyond the public “social” costs. In addition
to the awful guilt that many women
feel, a Wirthlin poll, published in 1998,
discovered that 56% of women felt that
abortion had hindered their relationships
with men. Circulate the hard facts.

(2) Present such facts as the ''moral'' position,
but never with a self-righteous or
triumphalist stance. Quite apart from the
fact that any informed Christian is aware
that self-righteousness and triumphalism
are morally repugnant and deeply offensive
to Almighty God (who would much
rather witness our contrition, poverty of
spirit, and self-conscious dependence
upon him), we ought to remember that
self-righteousness in the political arena
is often self-defeating, and triumphalism
is a turn-off. In short, while presenting
the facts, we must take great pains not
only to present them as the intrinsically
''moral'' position, but also to articulate that
position with persuasive humility. And
that means, among other things, that we
should be careful not to make this primarily
a ''Republican'' position, making it almost
impossible for a committed Democrat to
join us. This distinction is all the more
urgent when we reflect on the politics of
the African-American community. A
higher percentage of African-Americans
are pro-life than is the percentage of
European-Americans. But if we drum the
abortion issue as primarily a Republican
issue, then African-Americans, the overwhelming
majority of whom vote Democrat,
will simply ignore the argument and
continue to vote Democrat. The issue must
be seen in terms of hard facts, and in terms
of their intrinsic morality, without much
reference to a political party at all.

(3) Go for the small gain. And then keep
going. Some strategists have advised conservatives
to vote ''against'' a ban on partial
birth abortions and other steps, on the
ground that by removing from public
view the most ugly and repulsive of the
various facets of abortion, it will be harder
in the future to arouse public sentiment
to ban all or most abortions. But this “all
or nothing” strategy often comes up dry. It
makes sense ''only'' if one is certain that the
strategy will work. Failing that, it is merely
a recipe for continued legislative defeat.
Politics is the art of the possible. The
“all or nothing” approach rarely works.
Moreover, sometimes it is the persistent
plodder who keeps gnawing away at a
problem who eventually gets even the big
piece of legislation passed.

On the short haul, then, we ought to
go after a complete ban on partial-birth
abortions. In this procedure the physician
partly delivers the late-term baby, then
kills it by piercing his or her skull and
attaching a powerful suction device that
sucks out the baby’s brain. It is surely an
encouraging sign that President Bush, in
his State of the Union address, promised
to send to Congress legislation that will
ban this ghastly brutality. Similar legislation
failed to get by Congress six years
ago, and then-President Clinton said he
would veto the legislation even if it
passed. But here there is an opportunity
to make a small but important gain. Take
it. It is not everything, but it is better than
nothing, and all who work to pass such
legislation should be strengthened and
encouraged.

(4) Make sure that opposition to abortion
is married to support for unwed
mothers, counseling centers, practical
help for under-age moms, and the like.
Not only is such care mandated by the
most elementary Christian compassion,
but it also undercuts the arguments of
those who say that confessional Christians
neither understand nor care about the
plight of women who, often out of something
close to desperation, think that
abortion is the only reasonable choice
they have.

(5) Expose the emptiness of “hard case”
legislation. Every time that a pro-choice
spokesperson and a pro-life spokesperson
enter into debate, it is not long before the
former brings up the horrible problem of
a fifteen-year-old who has been raped and
become pregnant. That does happen, of
course, and those who have never been
brutalized in this way cannot possibly
appreciate its full horrors. Nevertheless,
the reason why the expression “Hard
cases make bad laws” is so common a truism
is because it is true! People are being
manipulated to allow abortion in the overwhelming
majority of instances where
there has not been rape by appealing to
the smallest fraction of 1% where rape has
occurred. One should not legislate for the
hard case; rather, if need be, one makes
exceptions for the hard case. Regardless
of what one thinks is best in the case of
rape, it would surely be an astonishingly
important step forward if abortion were
legally banned in all cases ''except'' rape. And
one of the most obvious ways of nullifying
the “hard case” arguments that are
regularly advanced as irrefutable prochoice
arguments is by exposing their
emptiness. Demonstrate not only the
axiom that “hard cases make bad legislation,”
but call the person’s bluff by allowing
that you could support legislation that
banned abortions in all instances except
the “hard cases” that the other party has
in mind. It will quickly become transparent
that the appeal to “hard cases” is often
little more than a rhetorical ruse to maintain
abortion in its present form.

(6) Recognizing that the activist court
of the last few decades is ultimately going
to call the shots on these matters, the business
of judicial appointments has become
more and more important. Small wonder
that the process of Senate ratification
of judicial appointments during the last
couple of years has become more and
more politicized. That means, in turn, that
informed Christians should give careful
thought to the ways in which they may
strengthen the resolve, the insight, and the
influence of those who are determined to
appoint, or ratify the appointment of,
judges who will be less than eager to turn
the judicial branch into a legislative
branch, and who do not think ''Roe v. Wade''
is the moral high ground, but an indefensible
judicial intrusion into the responsibilities
of both houses of Congress. In the
nature of the case, we are not going to get
there quickly. But that is why persistence
and perseverance may, on the long haul,
by God’s grace, prove to be the crucial attitudinal
stances needed to bring about the
end of this inhumane and sometimes barbaric
evil.

The SBJT Forum: Engaging the Abortion Issue - Revision history

JoyaTeemer: Created page with '{{info}} ''Editor’s Note'': Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. D. A. Carson, Gregory Alan Thornbury, James Parker III, and Chad Owen Brand have been asked specif...'