The Light Passing Through the Seamless Garment
The grave price of pro-life victory, and the contradictions of Catholic pacifism
In the current climate, it’s easy to forget that the pro-life movement did not start among right wing Evangelicals-indeed, until the early 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention repeatedly voiced its support for the loosening of legal restrictions on abortion. The origins of the pro-life movement, rather, are distinctly Catholic.
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) was originally formed and managed under the direct supervision of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). The involvement of Protestant sects didn’t come until later, when the NLRC split from the NCCB in hopes of making the pro-life movement more appealing to non-Catholics.
Whatever the pro-life movement’s origins, its outcome has been clear: it has been one of the most effective political movements in American history. But where it has and likely will continue to succeed in changing policy, we must also remark upon its colossal failure to function in accordance with its core values.
It has always been a rather absurd mischaracterization by pro-choice critics that the pro-life movement is motivated by a desire to “control women’s bodies.” To make this claim is to mistake the symptom for the illness. The pro-life movement, in its origins and among much of its rank and file, is quite sincerely motivated by the Christian faith, and by one of its best aspects: the value it places upon the sanctity of human life. Even the cynical reality of the pro-life movement-that it is in practice a prop wielded by the Republican party to assure it electoral success-is driven at its absolute worst by the desire for political power and the mobilization of the state to best plunder the American working class, through dismantling the welfare apparatus and public education, diverting tax dollars instead to the manufacture of foreign wars, assist in the capitalist exploitation of natural resources, and remove any vestige of popular democracy. While the frat boy bro culture will always instinctively gravitate to the right, people in this crowd have little real interest in the abortion issue, and quasi-Freudian allegations of trying to control women utterly miss the point when looking specifically at the pro-life movement.
To even discuss the religious motivations behind the pro-life movement in any meaningful way, we have to look at those for whom their opposition to abortion is at any rate part of a coherent moral framework. We are not here interested in those for whom opposing abortion is just an implied part of their political identity-the typical Fox-consuming republican who sees no contradiction between the supposed sanctity of life on the one hand, and free market individualism and the military industrial complex on the other. If someone can simultaneously believe that abortion should not be performed because every life is precious, but those children, once born, should be allowed to go undernourished, undereducated, exposed to harmful chemicals, or denied medical care because their parents don’t make enough money for them to “deserve” such things as the children of wealthy parents evidently do, then they have adopted a position which is as pitifully stupid as it is alien to human compassion. To try to tease out the contradictions in this viewpoint is like trying to discern the compositional shortcomings of a Jackson Pollock painting. There’s no point trying to make sense of that which is content to be nonsense.
Instead, we should look at the far more defensible pro-lifers of the “Consistent Life Ethic” or “Seamless Garment” variety. The term “Consistent Life Ethic” was popularized by the Cardinal and Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, who gives an instructive explanation of its values and implications in his 1983 lecture A Consistent Ethic of Life: An American-Catholic Dialogue:
The principle [of respect for life] is at the heart of Catholic teaching on abortion; it is because the fetus is judged to be both human and not an aggressor that Catholic teaching concludes that direct attack on fetal life is always wrong. This is also why we insist that legal protection be given to the unborn.
The same principle yields the most stringent, binding and radical conclusion of the pastoral letter [against nuclear war]: that directly intended attacks on civilian centers are always wrong. The bishops seek to highlight the power of this conclusion by specifying its implications in two ways: first, such attacks would be wrong even if our cities had been hit first; second, anyone asked to execute such attacks should refuse orders. These two extensions of the principle cut directly into the policy debate on nuclear strategy and the personal decisions of citizens. James Reston referred to them as “an astonishing challenge to the power of the state.”
The use of this principle exemplifies the meaning of a consistent ethic of life. The principle which structures both cases, war and abortion, needs to be upheld in both places. It cannot be successfully sustained on one count and simultaneously eroded in a similar situation. When one carries this principle into the public debate today, however, one meets significant opposition from very different places on the political and ideological spectrum. Some see clearly the application of the principle to abortion but contend the bishops overstepped their bounds when they applied it to choices about national security. Others understand the power of the principle in the strategic debate, but find its application on abortion a violation of the realm of private choice. I contend the viability of the principle depends upon the consistency of its application.
The issue of consistency is tested in a different way when we examine the relationship between the “right to life” and “quality of life” issues. I must confess that I think the relationship of these categories is inadequately understood in the Catholic community itself. My point is that the Catholic position on abortion demands of us and of society that we seek to influence an heroic social ethic.
If one contends, as we do, that the right of every fetus to be born should be protected by civil law and supported by civil consensus, then our moral, political and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker. Such a quality of life posture translates into specific political and economic positions on tax policy, employment generation, welfare policy, nutrition and feeding programs, and health care. Consistency means we cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.
This teaching has alternatively been termed the “Seamless Garment,” a term coined by Catholic peace activist Eileen Egan in 1971, likening the idea of a consistent interpretation of Catholic doctrine towards respect for life with the seamless robe of Jesus described in John 19:23.
I have written before about the admirable moral clarity of the Christian pacifism advocated by Leo Tolstoy, and like Tolstoy, CLE is equally admirable, and prone to the same shortcomings. Of course, the challenge of any pacifist movement based on a universal sanctity of human life is which lives you choose, when, as is always true in the real world, you can’t protect all of them. When the decision is made that a fetus is the equivalent of a human being, the moral calculus suddenly shifts massively. Pedro Gabriel, in writing about the CLE in Catholic Outlook, characterizes the “‘classical’ pro-life position” in contrast to the CLE as follows:
millions of unborn children are killed each year, a number that dwarfs the numbers of nearly every other human rights violation in the US or abroad
This is the statement which places pro- and anti-choice activists in seemingly alternate universes. To the pro-life movement, legal abortion constitutes an ongoing mass slaughter of innocents on a scale putting it far ahead of any other current human rights crisis in severity. If you really believed such a thing was happening in your country, what would you be willing to do to stop it? Conversely, to pro-choice activists, for whom a fetus which lacks consciousness, let alone an immortal soul, cannot possibly be compared to a thinking, feeling human being, and who find the idea of a state forcing a woman to deliver a child repulsive and dystopian, a movement propelled by such zeal is not only misguided-it strikes at the most basic concept of human freedom, the right to bodily autonomy.
On some level, I think everyone, no matter how idealistic or virtuous, is in fact a utilitarian. Biology forces us to be-no being can help others without first tending to its own survival. We are also faced with our own finitude-we cannot be everywhere at once, and we only have so many hours in a day. Priorities must be established, and whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, we put the wellbeing of some over that of others. In the pro-life movement’s zeal to end what it believes to be a slaughter of innocent unborn children, it cannot help but prioritize the lives of some over those of others. Even in its best corners, it has gone so far as to make alliances with the GOP, imagining that whatever the costs of the right’s nationalistic and militaristic mania and apparent desire to destroy the planet as fast as humanly possible, the lives of the unborn are ultimately of higher priority than those of, among others, those who will suffer and die for lack of a functional US healthcare system, the victims of a more draconian US foreign policy, and most catastrophically, the victims of total institutional inaction to even prepare for, let alone mitigate, the effects of runaway global warming. That this took the form of support (in a National Right to Life Committee endorsement) for someone like Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, and probably will again in 2024, is only to add a layer of parody to tragedy.
Proponents of CLE are not unaware of this conflict, and have long been dogged by the political imperative of choosing between a party which only cares for life inside a uterus, and one which demonstrates at least a marginal concern for life beyond it. Reflecting on then President Trump’s appearance at the 2020 March For Life, National Catholic Reporter contributor Michael Sean Winters wrote dejectedly of the state of the movement:
How to say this gently? The pro-life movement is the worst thing to happen to the pro-life cause. Aligning themselves with that moral grotesquerie of a man stained a movement that had already miscalculated and misjudged the culture in which they sought to make a difference.
It is no sin to be politically naive, but it is a sin to be morally irresponsible on behalf of a morally upright cause. Long before Trump disgraced the nation, the pro-life movement had become embedded in a kind of conservative politics that seemed incapable of exercising solidarity on behalf of anyone who had already been born. Only the unborn moved them to empathy.
Likewise, the predominately conservative pro-life movement has attacked CLE for “diluting the unique evil of killing unborn children” by suggesting that other lives (let alone the biosphere) were perhaps important, too.
It has been noted by some in left-wing circles that the end of Roe should serve as a call to return to a full-throated critique of religious belief that has waned since the New Atheist movement of the late aughts collapsed under the weight of its philosophical amateurishness and political disunity. I think these calls are made correctly, and that there is good reason to hope that seeing the real-world consequences of dogma may have made some more compassionate and inquisitive religious people waver.
The New Atheist movement failed primarily in their tendency to listen only to the most delusional believers, preoccupying themselves with charlatan Young Earth Creationists like Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and Ray Comfort, all of whom were so absurd as to be practically self-refuting. They thereby mischaracterized the religious impulse as simply the result of an inferior science, belief in which could be more or less boiled down solely to the intellectual inferiority of believers.
This was embarassing intellectual malpractice. Religion has maintained a foothold on the human mind because it offers something science cannot-a sense of meaning and moral certainty. It takes a chaotic and arbitrary universe and gives it a sense of order, and most importantly, a set of common principles upon which a community can form. Indeed, this dogmatic tendency has survived even the rejection of organized religion, as has been well demonstrated by the state religions of communism and Marxist-Leninism. But this moral certainty, at least in more credulous minds, has always produced conflict when such certainties are mapped onto a real world which provides a perilously thin atmosphere for platitudes.
When one comes to accept that the universe is not suffused with justice or moral law, that there is no overarching divine plan in which we play a part, there is a gaping void of uncertainty which cannot simply be ignored. I would never suggest we stop trying to convincingly fill that void, anymore than I would pretend it isn’t there. But I also cannot endorse the idea that we should fill it with a dogmatic theology built around beliefs which are, quite simply, rationally indefensible. If we are ever to truly solve this problem, it will first require moving beyond religious faith-while fully recognizing that it has much wisdom to offer, and may point us in some useful directions (as I’ve recently noted, I think there is much to be learned from the emphasis most prominent world religions place on love, an emphasis atheists and believers alike would do well to dwell on more than they do).
I have argued, in line with Murray Bookchin’s writings on dialectical naturalism, that there is a physical basis for objective morality, although I do not believe it can ever be scientifically derived in the way claimed by someone like Sam Harris. Rather, I think the important lesson is to recognize that even when you accept that there is no way of proving moral claims, you will still find you have moral inclinations which are overwhelmingly convincing. It is precisely the fact that you can feel something to be right without claiming that you know it to be right that makes this outlook superior in its resilience. Alternatively, there is unyielding dogmatism which ultimately leads to a moral collapse where, to remain adherent to a moral principle in one place, you are forced to violently breach it in another. Rather, we can instead view our moral beliefs fallibilistically-not without conviction, but also not without a healthy skepticism.
This skepticism is why I am not a Stalinist-I would never feel so confident in my beliefs as to feel comfortable forcing everyone around me to adhere to them “for their own good.” The same skepticism, I would hope, is the sort which tells us to hold back when, through our philosophical and religious convictions, we arrive at the conclusion that it is a moral good to use state power to force a woman to undergo a pregnancy against her will. It is also the sort of skepticism which may have at one time allowed us to step back and consider whether it wouldn’t be better to maintain a habitable planet, than to ensure the unabated progress of industrial capitalism to its present stage. It is too late for the latter, and now, it seems, also the former. But our present calamity will present countless moral dilemmas of a kind we haven’t often encountered in our state of relative material wealth. When those dilemmas arise, like every generation which has aimed to do better than its predecessors, we can only hope to avoid repeating the mistakes which led to them.