We Don’t Have Another 400 Years

I hesitate to answer Peter Wolfgang's tirade [The Pro-Choice Movement's Intellectual Lineage, June 21]. This tit-for-tat exchange does not change anyone's opinion; we are each preaching to our own choirs and will probably be reduced to which of us can quote the most obscure 12th century monk. As a student of early church history, I must say I have never encountered the 1st century Didache's harangue against abortion, but I'm quite sure that if one examines the documents of those early turbulent years of Christianity one could also find married priests, women priests, and a communistic sharing of worldly wealth that would shock modern-day Catholics.

I am writing because conservatives have three effective weapons to try to silence critics. One is the accusation of bias, in this case anti-Catholicism. The second is inferring that the opponent is either a moral imbecile, a psychopath or stupid. The third, closely connected to the first two, is bullying.

Nearly all of my data and criticism [Homegrown Religious Fanaticism, June 7] come from Catholic sources, women and men who care passionately about their faith: Gary Wills, Ute Ranke-Heinemann, James Carroll, John Cornwell. For example, the controversy about AIDS and condoms has been reported with quotes from church officials for at least the last three years in the National Catholic Reporter. (NCR was the only paper to breach the original pedophile scandal story in 1981.) The data on fetal survivability comes from the New York Times: "One of the most surprising 'events' of developmental biology in the last 20 years is that this [survivability] limit has not changed at all. A 25-week fetus now has about a 50% chance of surviving outside the womb. But a 23-week-old has virtually none." So the Roe v. Wade 26-week cutoff for survivability still stands.

Nowhere in my letter did I say that Catholics should practice birth control (although judging from my Catholic friends and relatives, I suspect 100% of them do). Nowhere did I say that Catholics should be forced to have abortions. What I said was that Catholics may not, as they have in the past, through state and federal laws, force non-Catholics to live by standards that are morally repugnant to them. Why? In Connecticut until 1965 (Griswold v. Connecticut), married women were denied contraceptive services. It was not until 1972 when Bill Baird got himself arrested on the Boston Common for distributing birth control pills that all women could receive such services. In a publicly funded clinic where I worked, desperate woman with several postpartum psychoses were denied access to contraception because of local Catholic political power. That is what I meant by reprehensible religious coercion.

Many Catholics are now saying that if the church wants to have any moral credibility about abortion, it must abandon its cruel, archaic, misogynist position on birth control. Gary Wills in his book Papal Sins writes about the politics of Humanae Vita, the 1968 papal encyclical that banned artificial contraception. Remember, this was still in the glow of Vatican II when Pope John XXIII opened up windows, changed the unchangeable. The long fight begun in 1870 by Vatican I against "modernity," i.e. democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press (does anyone remember the Vatican Index of forbidden books?) was over. I still remember a famous cartoon of the devil calling up to St. Peter: "What should I do with all the people who are down here for eating meat on Friday?" In 1968 it was a foregone conclusion that Paul VI would approve Catholic use of contraceptives. His experts were overwhelmingly in favor. The birth control pill was developed by a Catholic physician. In the end, says Wills, Paul VI decided against all his advisors because to admit error meant the whole network of infallibility could collapse.

Which brings us to Galileo: Not until 1992 did the Vatican admit that the earth revolves around the sun. Too bad for Galileo, a devout Catholic, who never again saw his Franciscan nun daughter, spent the remainder of his life under house arrest and died a blind, humiliated old man. And only recently has the Vatican recognized (sort of) that its 2000-year reign of terror against the Jews was a mistake. The Jews did not kill Jesus! The Romans under the brutal governor Pontius Pilate did! (The grandfather of the great St. Theresa of Avila was a Jew. In 1485, when Theresa's father was six years old, her grandfather had the choice of converting to Catholicism or the whole family being burned alive.)

Why resurrect these horrors? My point is that the church has made horrific mistakes in the past. Pushed by enlightenment ideas it so long despised, it has begun to acknowledge them and make amends.

Why is birth control so difficult? I can only assume because it deals with women. Controlling female sexuality seems to be at the phobic center of reactionary monotheism. Catholics are not unique. Just last week I read about a Pakistani woman threatened with death by stoning because her brother-in-law raped her (sex outside marriage …).

I make no apologies for being pro-abortion. The ideal of every child being wanted and cherished is a courageous, honorable, moral position. Also, I'm not an agnostic; I'm a rather pleasant, happy atheist. So why—being clear of religion—do I continue to fight these religious wars? Are they my business? Women, said Virginia Woolf, experience history through their mothers. I am the daughter of a mother who had seventeen pregnancies with nine living children. I defy any man from the Pope to Nat Hentoff to understand what life is like for women like my mother.

But men, I've decided, don't really get that argument. Try this one: When I was in high school, the world population was 2 1/2 billion. It is now 6 billion and will double in the next fifty years. One hundred years from now, as the planet is collapsing under the weight of twelve billion starving, diseased people and an exponential increase in male violence, will some future Pope (a woman perhaps?) admit to being in error about birth control and abortion as the church was in error about Galileo, the Jews, and eating meat on Friday?

We don't have 400 years.