BEING REALISTIC ABOUT EFFECTIVE PRO-LIFE WORK

NRLC's goal is to secure the full legal protection of the right to life. A constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to life and the personhood of children in the womb would be the most desirable way to achieve such legal protection. Another way, less ideal but still vastly preferable to the current situation, is to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions and get Congress and the state legislatures to pass laws safeguarding the right to life.

Working towards these goals is the pro-active part of our work. The defensive part is to combat all attempts to promote and expand anti-life policies.

Moreover, the battle is in the "public square" because it deals with public policy and laws and judicial decisions. As a moral right--as an endowment from God--the right to life already exists; what we are fighting for is the public and legal recognition of that right. This requires us to participate in the process of formulating public policy--and to work with "real" public officials and candidates for public office. Some pro-lifers have reservations about that.

Professor Nathan Schlueter of St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, examines the matter in the October 2001 issue of First Things ("Drawing Pro-Life Lines"). To illuminate the problem, Schlueter quotes a pro-lifer who has become well-known through her intensive fundraising campaigns:

"Every abortion is a direct attack on God, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae, and therefore a politician who favors this violence, even in only limited circumstances, is not pro-life. He or she is at odds with God's commandment: 'Thou shalt not kill.' I cannot in good conscience cast my vote for someone who favors the total destruction of even one baby, even when I am challenged with the argument that the 'other guy' is even worse. It is not our job to get 'the lesser of two evils' elected."

Professor Schlueter observes that this sentiment, while "attractive" on the surface, "is based on a principle that is deeply flawed and therefore politically dangerous." And under "the seductive guise of moral purity, it represents a failure to distinguish between degrees of cooperation in moral choice and collapses an ethic of political choice into an individual ethic. In doing so, it virtually removes pro-lifers from effective engagement with politics, and surrenders 'the world' to moral evil." (It is worth noting that Evangelium Vitae is not guilty of such simplistic thinking.)

He then applies the tools of moral theology and logic to (1) lay bare this confusion about "degrees of moral cooperation" and (2) demonstrate that a vote for George W. Bush (whose pro-life stand was not quite "pure" enough for the pro-lifer quoted above) was morally justified. Along the way, he demonstrates that the failure to grasp the moral categories under which voting in an election operates and the expectation of "perfect consistency and goodness as necessary attributes for office" would lead to practically every vote being "sinful."

Schlueter bends over backwards to accommodate those whom we might call the "election purists" by subjecting the actions of pro-life Bush voters to careful moral scrutiny using the criteria of "double effect." He does not judge the "election purists" by the same standards, but finds it sufficient to demonstrate that the Bush voters did not act in a morally illicit manner. Thus the "election purists" may not claim moral superiority.

Schlueter is content to arrive at this conclusion without referring to the broader context of the last election, namely that Al Gore, George W. Bush's main election opponent, was absolutely committed to preserving the right to abortion on demand. The eight years of the Clinton presidency should have erased any doubts about how much a committed pro-abortion president can obstruct progress on the right-to-life front. Being an "election purist" in this context hardly meets the double-effect criterion of "proportionate reason" for one's actions: The satisfaction of having made a principled "statement" is a disproportionately small "good" in comparison to the damage done if withholding the vote from a supposedly less than "perfect" pro-life candidate gets an activist pro-abortion candidate (like Al Gore) elected. Given this more complete context, the position of the "election purists" during the last election appears, in fact, morally inferior.

I encourage you to read Prof. Schlueter's article and absorb his careful analysis. He makes an excellent case for his conclusion, that "our common work on behalf of the unborn cannot tolerate divisiveness based on a false understanding of prudence and a misguided quest for moral purity."

For us who labor in the "trenches" of the right-to-life battle, Schlueter's conclusions are not surprising. But we can add that the attacks on NRLC's strategies by the "election purists" often appear in fundraising letters. Given Schlueter's demonstration that the stance of the "election purists" would "virtually remove pro-lifers from effective engagement in politics" and practically make every vote "sinful," the obvious question then is, "For what purpose are you raising money, when you effectively have removed yourself from the struggle to secure public and legal protection of the right to life?"

Consider the attacks NRLC suffered from the same quarters over our efforts to pass the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (PABA). Supposedly, the PABA was not "truly" pro-life because it would not have protected all children in the womb. The pro-abortionists, of course, fully understood what a powerful attack on abortion rights this legislation was. They fought us tooth and nail. Unfortunately, some pro-life "election purists" attacked us too, and used their opposition to fuel fundraising appeals. We came within two votes in the Senate to passing the PABA over Clinton's double veto. Without this diversion of financial contributions from pro-lifers we might very well have had the resources to generate enough pressure from the electorate to get those votes. But it didn't happen. Because of "a misguided quest for moral purity"?