On abortion as an issue of natural law

[I wrote this in 2007. It still seems relevant.]

      "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

      Thomas Jefferson began his argument for independence with these words.

      Traditional Catholic theology held certain truths to be self-evident, and other truths to be true but not self-evident. The former were based on natural law, while the latter were known only by the light of revelation. For example, it was self-evident, a truth of natural law, that murder is wrong, but not self-evident that one had to be baptized in order to be saved. Natural law was known by all people of good will. Truths known by revelation were known only by people who had been exposed to revelation as taught by the Church.

      This distinction was central to the argument used by John Kennedy in his speech to Protestant ministers in 1960, the speech in which he defended himself against the claim that if he were elected president, he would have to enforce moral precepts held as true by the Church. He argued that a Catholic politician in this country was not bound to enforce moral truths that were known only by the light of revelation. Catholic politicians must enforce self-evident moral truths, but are under no greater obligation to do that than any other person of good will. Issues of natural law have to be decided by following the rules of political debate and decision.

      This argument broke with the traditional European understanding that political leaders had the right and the duty to enforce what they believed to be true, even when those truths were not held by people of other faiths. The maxim was "error has no rights." The argument had proceeded from the time of the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestants used violence to enforce their beliefs, through the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which could be translated as "whatever religion the king espouses, the people should also espouse." That was a principle that at least reduced violence. In John Courtney Murray's phrase, it was an "article of peace."

      The historical story could be told that the American colonies, through their experience of flight from religious persecution in Europe and of living in relative peace with people of competing faiths, had discovered a strategy that greatly increased the prospects of peaceful coexistence. Catholics could understand the strategy in terms of natural law versus revelation, and this is the distinction that freed John Kennedy and opened the way for his election.

      The distinction between natural law and revelation is central to the stance being taken by Catholic bishops on the issue of abortion. We are not, they say, trying to enforce our denominational beliefs on the rest of society. Everyone should know that abortion is murder, and that murder is self-evidently wrong. We have every right to attempt to punish the behavior by means of civil institutions.

      It is hard for those of us accustomed to a post-Kennedy tradition to appreciate how the discussion has imperceptibly slipped back into a pre-1960 mentality. We have slipped into the pre-1960 mentality by placing the Church in official opposition to a political order. The Church has become a player in the political game, not just in the sense that its members have personal beliefs that they attempt to realize, but in the sense of overt, structural attempts to control. Bishops are denying Communion to politicians.

      What we Catholics too often fail to realize is that many people are opposed to making abortion illegal because of their own sincere religious beliefs. We have become too convinced by the anti-abortion argument that anyone favoring the legality of abortion must be motivated by financial incentives. I have become convinced by conversation with pro-choice people that their statement that they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion, is sincere. They believe that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is not murder. (Recall that, in spite of what we have been told by Church leaders in recent years, for centuries official Catholic Church teaching held the same position. The term used was "ensoulment," which meant that there was a point in time, sometimes months after conception, when the fetus became "ensouled," possessed of an immortal soul.) Beyond that moral evaluation of abortion itself, there are additional reasons why one could be pro-choice. As Robert Drinan once argued, it is not always wise to attempt to enforce a moral principle by legal means. It can be argued that a law against abortion is unenforceable, because it involves behavior that is hidden--in fact, more hidden than almost any other behavior that is not now criminalized. Few people would want to see a woman imprisoned because she had procured an abortion, yet that is what making abortion illegal would do. One can only imagine the kinds of symbolic protests that would follow, similar to the protests in the 1960's that caused legislatures to overturn laws that made contraception illegal. Making abortion illegal would result in women using illegal means to procure the abortion, means which are by nature uncontrolled by open medical practice and which often result in injury or death to the woman as well as to the fetus.

      The bottom line of my argument therefore is that, in light of widespread public disagreement with the belief that abortion is murder, and that it is not wise to attempt to prevent it by law, our position is not based on natural law but on revelation. The belief is not self-evident to all people of good will, but it is a denominational belief, something not to be enforced on those of other faiths.

      By framing the argument in terms of natural law, we have allowed the Church to be dragged back into the same position that it traditionally had in Europe, where Church leaders defended their right to tell the State what it should do. The result has been the same here as it was in Europe: a divisiveness that poisons political discourse, causing people to accuse their opponents of bad faith, people to be dealt with not by political discussion, but only by means of naked political power.

      The smell and taste of power is seductive. Fundamentalist Protestants may be excused when they taste it for the first time, after a tradition of rejection of politics. We Catholics should have learned from our experience. Things go better when we refrain from trying to run the state. Abortion should be dealt with as a matter of faith, not as a matter of self-evident truth. We should concentrate on persuading our own people of the values that we believe are at stake. We are under no obligation to make everyone else come along.