Spirit in Action
Toward Taking Away the Occasion of Abortion - Rachel MacNair and Stan Becker
A thoughtful dialog about abortion, peace witness and care for creation. Guests are Rachel MacNair, Phd. in Psychology and undergraduate in Peace & Conflict Studies, and Stan Becker, Phd. in Demographics at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he is currently professor in the Dept of Population, Family and Reproductive Health.
- Broadcast on:
- 22 Jun 2008
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(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today's Spirit in Action program will take a different form from most of my programs. The topic today is abortion, a subject susceptible to strong feelings, entrenched opposition, and a lack of open listening. And that is absolutely not what our world needs. I found two guests who can both listen and share deeply about a number of aspects of the concerns surrounding abortion. As usual, our format is to avoid word bites and the gnashing of teeth and to invite dialogue instead of diatribes. Why talk about abortion? There are many reasons, but the primary influence, in this case, was a series of three full-page advertisements carried in the monthly Quaker publication called Friends Journal, sponsored by Friends Witness for a pro-life peace testimony. There were a number of rather harshly-phrased letters to the editor about the ads, so I thought it would be good to invite two different perspectives on the abortion concern to the table for thoughtful interchange. My guests for today's spirit and action program are doctors Rachel McNair and Stan Becker. Rachel McNair received her PhD in psychology from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, that degree built on her undergraduate degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, received from Merleham College. She's the former president of Feminist for Life, and active as part of the Consistent Life Organization, and also with a Quaker group called Friends Witness for a pro-life peace testimony. Stan Becker has his doctorate in demography from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In addition to eight years' work in the field overseas, he spent three years with the Center for Disease Control. Stan has been an active member of a group formerly known as Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, or FCUN, and now called Quaker Earth Care Witness for 20 years. Stan carries a specific concern for population issues and how they affect our care of creation. He was closely involved in developing Quaker Earth Care Witnesses pamphlet called Toward Taking Away the Occasion of Abortion. Let's go to the phones now and talk to Rachel and Stan about their concerns relating to abortion. - Rachel and Stan, thank you so much for joining me for spirit and action. - My pleasure. - My pleasure, yeah. Stan, you're on vacation now, over there in New York Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Rachel, joining us from Kansas City, Missouri. I want to introduce people to the concern that we want to talk about which relates to abortion. Rachel, could you share with our listeners your background and how you came to this concern? - Yes, well, I got my degree from Erlen College in Peace and Conflict Studies, and I've been interested in the peace studies field ever since. When I got my PhD in psychology, I then did an introductory textbook in the psychology of peace, as well as doing a lot of work on what I call perpetration-induced traumatic stress, which is that form of post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma that causes it is the act of killing. So I looked a lot into that with combat veterans, people carry out executions, and people who work in abortion clinics, and various other groups with the idea that that would be traumatic to people. - And Stan, talk to me about your relationship to this concern. - I came to this concern through SCUN, friends coming into a nature that formed in 1987 at the gathering. Marshall Massey spoke, and he spoke about how we're destroying the planet and this and that. He went on for an hour and inspired friends before SCUN, but in his talk, he never mentioned population. So I went up to him after, and I said, Marshall, you know populations related to this, may not be one-to-one, but you know it's related. Why didn't you raise it? He said, well, it's too controversial among friends. So that really bothers me when I hear that. And when SCUN formed, they recognized population as a very important aspect. It took us a few years to realize that we needed to tackle some tough questions, and one was abortion, another was sexuality, and the other one later we did a pamphlet on immigration. So I came to it through that, and we worked for three years on that abortion pamphlet. At one point, I missed a meeting. I think I was clerking the population committee at the time, and I got the minutes, it said they decided they weren't gonna pursue it, and I was in tears because we'd worked for over a year already, and called up and they said, well, we decided, we don't wanna alienate FUM friends because we're trying to be open to all friends, and this, we thought it might do that, so we decided not to pursue it. And of course, seems to me that we need to labor with each other if we have differences, not avoid problems or differences. Well, they said, why don't you call FUM and C? So I called, what's his name, Leon Mauer? And he said, sure enough, well, Stan, it's best you put out a pamphlet, which doesn't take a pro-life. I don't like to use those words, but anyway, it just doesn't take that position and then it probably would do more harm than good in FUM. So he'd been right, the friends who said, be careful, but anyway, I did prevail in the sense that in other friends, obviously, we reached unity on this pamphlet we have. We changed the title from seeking clearness on abortion with the original title to this title we have now on toward taking away the occasion of abortion. So it is an attempt to listen to all friends, written in FGC rather than FUM, it obviously has a perspective of folks who support legal abortion, that sort of thing. But then Rachel has given me comments on the pamphlet and we're gonna be revising it, hopefully you later this summer. - My interest in inviting you to on my program happened when in Friends Journal, I saw over three months paid advertisement sponsored by pro-life Quakers that talked about the need for a consistent pro-life peace testimony, peace testimony being central to Quakers, to Friends. Rachel, talk about the impetus for that and what you were saying in those advertisements, I believe you were the architect for them. - I read the rest draft, yeah, and other people of course help to refine it. The first one was about the idea that when you look at the dynamics of how people justify violence or what they do when they practice violence, that it does apply to the abortion case. And if you've ever seen the silent scream or an ultrasound of an unborn child, you know that going after that child with a sharp instrument could reasonably be said to constitute violence and the kinds of justification to use the dehumanization of the child and so forth. These we recognize and when people are talking about war and when people are talking about executions and what we need to do is to see that there are connections among all these issues of violence and that we become more effective if we oppose violence across the board rather than saying that, you know, we're against killing children in Iraq with bombs but we're not against killing children in a clinic with curets. The second one then dealt with the question of, well, what about women? I mean, obviously the unborn children aren't just kind of floating in outer space out there. They are inside but the people there inside are their mothers and I was particularly perturbed, see when Roe v. Wade first passed, my original reaction was, oh good, you know, this will get rid of the back alley butchers. But what I found over time was that switching from back alley butchers to assembly line clinics was not that much of an improvement for women. And in fact, I know of a case here in Kansas City where one of these illegal abortionists had killed a woman in a horrific case which I will spare. Listen, there's the details of, he got a 10 year sentence for manslaughter and he got out early because he was rich but his license was gone so he opened up an antique shop. When Roe v. Wade passed, he literally set up shop on Main Street. He got his license back because of Roe v. Wade. So I thought, no, wait a minute, the whole point was to put them out of business and now it just put him back into business. That's why I mentioned particularly my work on abortion staff is these people are in fact traumatized by the work they're doing. Then it makes sense that the legal status of abortion is not the point, it's the nature of abortion itself. The post trauma symptoms include detachment and estrangement from others, emotional, numbing, concentration problems. These kinds of things are naturally going to lead to poor medical care for women. And meanwhile, the pressures that are pushing women into abortions are ones that are a lot of sexist pressures like sexually irresponsible men, employers that want their employees to be good cogs in the machine and not be interfered with by little things like pregnancy and the pressures on women are basically a way of having pregnant women not being able to get the needs to which they are entitled. And the final of the three was focused on how much we as a peace movement are hurting ourselves in trying to advocate against war because the pro-life movement is full of people who I find this all the time. They will listen to me as another pro-lifer because they don't see me as being a hypocrite when I say that I'm against war but not against killing children so long as it's done in a clinic. Particularly, we are hurting ourselves with elections by what's called the pro-life increment which is you take the number of people who vote for a candidate because here she opposes abortion minus those who would vote against that candidate for that reason. The pro-life voters outnumber the pro-choice voters. So typically in any election, I'll be about three or 4% of the voters. Once you take the ones who vote one way and subtract the ones who vote another way. So you're talking about a three to 4% advantage for the anti-abortion candidate that of course doesn't matter if the election isn't close as with Clinton in this second one but in the last two elections, it's been crucial and it's been very painful for me to watch. - Well Rachel, there were a lot of letters in reaction to the ads there and some of them were very, very strongly reactive against the fact that the French Journal even carried the paid advertisement about this. I've decided to do this interview because I thought it was an issue that deserved some close listening as opposed to reactive, you're right, I'm wrong, you're good, I'm bad. One of the issues that struck me as most deserving of our focus is whether our peace testimony, whether we are treating it as a whole cloth or whether we are in fact being inconsistent and you wrote about that in one of the ads, certainly from a liberal point of view, there are people who say, you say that you're pro-life but you support the war and you support capital punishment, you are not consistent. And of course that same microscope can be turned on us and say, well you say you're pro-life because you are opposed to war and opposed to capital punishment but you support the killing of the child while it's still within its mother. That deserves some analysis but that's a spiritual question to some degree because there's the value of life that's involved. Do you wanna say anything more about that, Rachel? - I think that this is a crucial point that the peace testimony does not just cover war, it doesn't just cover executions even, it also would include, for instance, domestic violence. I mean, this has been one of the movements in peace studies is to say, well, it doesn't have to just be countries deciding and governments deciding to do this when you have riots and lynchings, people beating up their family members, that also is a threat to peace. And therefore, the idea that children in the womb should also be included makes sense. - There's a very thorny issue which is a part of this which is what is life and what is sacred life? When do we call life? Certainly the Supreme Court talked about viability as being the determining point of when we had to consider this as a viable human being. I'm gonna turn this over to Stan, not because you're the standard of the universe with respect to when a human life starts but you have a concern for the broad picture of life on this planet. So do you care to talk about that all, Stan? - Oh goodness, we're to start. With the beginning of life perhaps, I don't use the language Rachel did. In terms of children in the womb, we define it as a fetus up until a certain point and I think that's probably up to birth. We talk about potential life and the conception of course occurs mid-cycle sort of thing and some people start things at conception, other people start them at implantation and other people start them when the fetus is viable outside the mother. I found an interesting thing in NIH had a study panel about stem cell research, which many countries are doing but we're not because of policy of administration. Anyway, that they did a panel on this to scientifically when should we be concerned. And the fascinating finding came out there I felt was that before about 14 days post-conception, it's not an individual. In the sense that the blastocyst or whatever's there can divide and you get twins. About 14 days or so, you get a backbone and then it's one individual. But I found that intriguing that there's not really a single life before 14 days or so. I come at this from a public health perspective and also from a friend's perspective. I was staying with the public health perspective for a minute. There are many millions of conceptions that don't make it to implantation even. Some estimates are that about up to 50% of conceptions spontaneously abort before the woman even misses the period. And so the concern about saving this potential life, if we really were concerned about those lives then we would have women stay in bed, for example, after a certain month of pregnancy or not go running or jogging and things like that because there's potential that detach from the uterus and that sort of thing. So that's one angle and then as you say, I come at this from a perspective of population and we have to think why women want to abort and what that means. And I guess to go to a deeper level, I would suggest that when we think of sexuality as every act of intercourse being open to a conception and a birth and we educate each other to that end, then we wouldn't have this problem. The problem comes that sex is very enjoyable and people do it whether they want a birth or not and they do it even if they don't want a birth and don't use contraception and then they get stuck with the consequences and the consequences aren't nice. In our species, it takes 18 years for the infant to be on his own, whereas the chimpanzee, it's two years or something like that. So it's their major consequences to the act of sex. So women are gonna have abortions anyway, we know that. And then to stand here, I guess, come back to the public health perspective of the safety of the procedure, of the 50 million or so abortions there are in the world each year and we don't know plus or minus 10 million probably. I don't work with those figures, but I know they're ballpark. Of those, the majority are in places where it's illegal and the risk of maternal death is somewhere between 10 and 100 times higher for where abortion is illegal because women tick coat hangers up their vagina or they take potions or they do all kinds of things and diapsepsis and many other things. So one of the things I study is maternal mortality. And around the world where abortion's illegal, we have 10 to 15% of maternal deaths that are due to induced abortions. So women have them anyway and take the risk of killing themselves, if you will. So it's not a thing done lightly, typically, it may be lightly. Some women use it as contraception and we have to, that's where this education and talking about sexuality, I think, are so important. On the population level, say a few words there, we came at this because abortion is one way people limit their family size. Actually, in the demographic transition in Western Europe, a lot of the decline in fertility, if you will, occurred because of abortion, well, not abortion, but infanticide, as well as quite as the inarupitous. That's the famous one, but both of those played a role. So women have this desire at a population level if they can't support children than they resort to abortions. But as a population person, it's not that crucial. We didn't come at this because we want to have abortion legal so we have fewer people on the planet or something. It actually, abortion is very inefficient, means a population control, if you have a population stabilization, because women resume ovulation within a couple months after an abortion, whereas if they have a live birth, it's maybe 10, 12, 20 months. So it takes two or three abortions to prevent one birth at a population level. So it's not very effective in terms of reducing population growth. Contraception is so much more effective and indeed contraception prevents abortions. And so that's the more global perspective. But we did come at it because people mention this when you think of population concern. In fact, people said I shouldn't go out to Iowa yearly meeting because people equate the population concern with abortion, which is very sad, of course, but that's what has come to in this country with our polarization. - I'd like to define some of the things that I think that we all agree on. Number one, is it safe to say that all three of us agree that birth control is desirable and should be generally available? Do we all have three agree on that? - You have to be careful of the definition. Birth control includes abortion, contraception is the word. - As soon as you say that, though, I feel a need to point out that both members of the couple are to be responsible for it. And that it's going to be more effective if that couple is sensitive and loving to each other and less of a disaster if it, quote, fails. And I do also want to be very clear that the couple should go into it with the attitude that they are cutting down their chances of a conception, but be aware that they are not cutting them out because there is no technique other than total abstinence that assures that and it's not fair to the child, to call that child a failure by virtue that she got herself conceived, you know. That's a little weird way of treating a child. So if you just take the attitude of, well, my goodness, we put up all these obstacles and she showed up anyway, then she must really be meant to be here. Then that would be some sense to that. - I do have one caveat to that. And that is, and the political spectrum, since we have touched on that, there is a problem that many people who are anti-choice if we use that word, I guess, they're opposed to abortion, also opposed the availability of contraception to unmarried persons. And that is an awful problem. And we have the example of our own country, which is the saddest thing, that we have the teen sexual activity rate here and in Western Europe is about the same, but our pregnancy rate is double what it is in Western Europe because they treat sexuality as a more natural sort of thing and the kids are going to experiment and therefore they make contraception available. And here it's very hard in some places because of this anti-sex side of marriage came into union there. And therefore we have more of these abortions because contraception is not available. - I am going to have to object to the use of the term anti-choice. I remember a fellow who came by a table once the feminist for life had a table and he said, well, if my girlfriend is stupid enough to get pregnant, she's going down to the abortion clinic that afternoon and that's that. Well, I looked at that and said, well, that's an anti-choice statement. I would say that one of the major methods of reducing abortion is to give women more choices. There's a lot of women are doing this as an act of desperation. They're doing it because they feel it's their only choice. Well, one choice and no choice are the exact same thing. - I want to make sure I think, Stan, you alluded to the fact that there is some overlap. I'm not sure exactly what percentage is and maybe Rachel, you have information about this. People who are anti-abortion, who are also anti-providing contraception to unmarried or young people. Is there a significant overlap? - The first person that springs to mind when you say that is Judy Brown of American Life League. And if you think I have any influence over changing her opinion on that. - Right, we haven't said spoke from both sides. - It's been, well, you know, if ever I haven't spoken during a good long time, I have spoken to her, but I'm going to use my time on things where she's amenable to hearing what I have to say, which will be some feminist matters and some anti-war matters and things like that. There will be a lot of pro-lifers that will hear me on that. But, you know, it's just the normal Quaker listening thing. I'm going to listen to where they're coming from and see where it is that there is an agreeableness and deal with them on that. - In terms of the statistics of the overlap between those who are anti-abortion and anti-provision of contraception to unmarried, I don't know either, but as a society, we have failed in this regard and where we can point to finger is not clear. I think certainly our Puritan Protestant heritage or something has a lot to do with it, where sexuality was not acceptable outside of marriage. And the Europeans have rid themselves of that earlier and realized human nature is what it is. And they say the teens are going to experiment, so let's make sure they're protected. And we can all take responsibility for that lack of caring for our teens in the sense of protecting them and leading to abortion. It's something we really need to work on. And that's really one of the main thrust of this pamphlet on taking away the occasion is to make it available. I went to a friend's school and I was speaking in Philadelphia and I asked about availability of condoms in high school in the nurse's station or whatever. So, oh no, we wouldn't do that. Well, I would send the wrong message. The boys know they can get it down in the gas station on the corner if they need one. Well, what message is that sending? What message is that sending? - That was a rhetorical question, so I'm not going to answer that. I hear substantial agreement between the three of us, that contraception and provision of it, availability of it, and very aware and open ideas about sexuality, we hold that in common. Another area where I think that we have agreement, and I'm just going to test and see if we do have agreement here is, I think that all three of us believe strongly that it would be desirable to reduce abortion to whatever minimum we can. I realize there are consequences that could be added on in this, but just in and of itself, none of us favor abortion or like abortion, although perhaps amongst the three of us there, some of us find that there are occasions where it might be necessary, but we all dislike abortion and would like to reduce it if the consequences are not horrific or major. - Is that fair statement? - Pretty close. I never would use the word dislike, per se. It's a necessity in some cases, save the life of a woman, things like that, and I worked with a abortion provider at one point, and she was arguing that condom used backed up by early abortion is the safest contraceptive. I mean, she's stretching the word contraceptive there, but anyway, it's safer than any other thing that women or couples could do, but the point is that it is a backup for failed contraception, and I suppose you could use the word dislike. I'd have to think about it. I wouldn't use it myself, but I don't feel, I don't feel that averse to it, but I wouldn't use that word myself. - And Rachel, obviously for you-- - Well, and I said that might be it stronger. - I would say it's stronger, and I would say, people get hung up a lot on the legal ban idea, but there's also a long list of things that we need to do, and we've talked about the technology of it. We need to also talk about the social dynamics of it, like people having substance abuse problems, all these kinds of things, are going to affect how the technology is used, but the fact of the matter is, like Stan said, people are going to get pregnant, and at times that are not unfailingly inconvenient, it's female biology, and I don't regard that as a problem that we need to use violence to get rid of, and I, of course, think abortion is violence, and one of the major things we need is to be paying attention to the needs of pregnant women, to, for instance, not having bigotry against children who are born with disabilities, and having services available that they need, doing things like reducing poverty will lower the numbers of abortions. So we need to be looking both at preventing pregnancies and dealing with the pregnancies in a positive manner, and what should they do, in fact, show up anyway. - And make a clarification there. I guess one reason I wouldn't use the word dislike is the morning after pill. I guess, Rachel, you consider that abortion or not? - Works after conception, yeah. - Well, it doesn't. Before conception, I mean, the-- - It could work anyway. It can work by preventing ovulation, in which case there's no problem. - Yeah, yeah. I have no dislike for that method. I would promote it to prevent later abortions, if you will. So depending on how people lump abortion methods, either certainly dislike later abortion, certainly it becomes more dislikeable than later in the pregnancy it is. And the other thing, we gotta clear up the language here. We don't have a pregnancy until there's implantation, technically, so we can't call it a pregnancy before what is it, dates 12 or something anyway. We'd have to check the biology there, but I don't know if that makes a difference to you if you're defining life as a conception or not, but it certainly isn't called a pregnancy before implantation. - Well, getting it at the point of implantation, every method that does that is less safe than the methods that prevent conception in the first place. Like my aunt said about the IUD, the way it works is to give you cramps of that, you don't wanna have sex. There's a congruence between that, which is safest and that which gets it before conception. And when you were talking about potential life and all that, you put it up to 14 days, but when we're talking about surgical abortion, we are talking about after implantation and we are talking about most of the time, if you took a sonogram, you'd see a recognizable baby and there's a beating heart. - Yeah, but the move now is to move back earlier if women will avail themselves of services and not have to run across states or something to get an abortion because they're underage and God knows what the restrictions might be, but if it can be made available early, that would be better and the limit in that is the day after pill or the emergency contraception sorts of things that act right away. And certainly I think on your scheme of things that that would be more acceptable than later abortions too, right? - I'd need to see the studies to know if that even worked because from my understanding, there's simply more going on than the technology of it. As Mark was saying, there's a spiritual aspect here. And if you are being mindful at the beginning, then all of these techniques are trying to deal with not having been mindful at the beginning. - Yes, yes. So it would be good if we go back to sexuality, maybe and I agree with things you said there, no problem, but the point I think we could agree on is that the later in after conception that the pregnancy is terminated or the life is terminated if you want, the more we dislike it. - The more it turns our stomach, yes. - Yeah, so and the emergency contraception, I don't know if any of the pro-life groups can support that, but if they could, that certainly is more acceptable than the second trimester abortions. - Well, I think it's also something that we need to, we need to understand the dynamics of what happens when a woman gets pregnant and didn't intend to. In my first trimester, I kept having a feeling like, what the heck have I gotten myself into? And I thought, I mean, it didn't feel like there was a baby there, it felt like there was nausea there. I thought, man, just imagine what it is to a woman who wasn't planning it and who has all these people pressuring her, this is terrible, you need to go get it taken care of in a medical way. And I had more of a sense of what it is that's pushing women there. But one of the biggest antidotes to that is to see the sonogram. So that you are not sitting there feeling like, what is this and feeling only the potential, but seeing the actuality. The ultrasound shows the real baby and huge numbers of women choose against abortion once they see that ultrasound. The tragedy is that women who are not given that information at the time of the abortion will find it out later when they have children and see an ultrasound later. And large numbers of them are freaking out. Women who have had abortions are a major constituency group of the pro-life movement. If you go into a pro-life conference, it will be a common thing to hear a woman saying, well, when I had my abortion, this and this happened. It's like Vietnam veterans against the war and of course, now Iraq veterans against the war. People who've actually been involved in it are feeling traumatized by it. Then that is a clear sign that something is wrong here. - That was Rachel McNair, a former president of Feminist for Life, now active with the Friends Witness for a pro-life peace testimony. Rachel's undergrad was in peace and conflict studies and her PhD is in psychology. Also with us today is Stan Becker, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Health. Specializing in Demography and Biostatistics, longtime activist with Quaker Earthcare Witness. And I'm Mark Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio, your host for Spirit in Action. And the subject today is abortion, but we're talking about it here without word bites and without drawing swords. An unusual approach to a potentially explosive concern. Again, I was mobilized to set up this interview by a series of ads in a national Quaker publication called Friends Journal and the reactions to them. The ads were sponsored by Rachel's group. So let's go back to the phones and talk a bit with Rachel about the reactions to those ads. - I saw the reactions of the letters to the ads in Friends Journal. There were some people who were, this side should not be permitted to speak. It was almost the essence. And I'm sorry if I unfairly characterize anybody's opinion there, but it had of the humans that was to that degree. Is this the biggest reaction you hear from, particularly I'm thinking women who say you can't advocate that policy? - I heard a lot more of it in the 1980s. And this was when I was really getting into it, because of course I've been in the peace movement, feminist movement and various and sundry social justice movements and I was being drawn into this one. And I realized that even among Quakers, the roof could fall in on me if I brought it up. And I actually became rather timid about it. And that will startle people who know me well. I'm not generally the timid type. But that was actually one of the reasons that I did get into it. Isn't it? Wait a minute. I mean, even if I'm completely wrong on this, I should be allowed to say so when people would, you know, can sit me down and patiently explain to me why I'm wrong, but if they're laying hostility on me, then that is another inconsistency in terms of how Quakers normally are about, you know, laboring with each other and all. And in addition to being an inconsistency, it suggests that people really deep down know that we are talking about violence because if they really had confidence in their position, they'd be willing to sit down and patiently explain instead of doing what I call cognitive dissonance induced politically because cognitive dissonance is known to induce this kind of belligerent attitude. Now, of course, there are plenty of people who are exactly like that. Stan, obviously, is being right even as we speak. And his letter was that way as well. But I have noticed that this is dissipating over time that the kind of hostility that I was constantly getting in the 1980s is considerably less. The kind of sense that how dare you even bring up that opinion is not nearly what it used to be, but it startled me that it was ever there at all. - I think one of the things that we certainly agree on, all three of us is that we're Quakers, we oppose violence, that we want to reduce violence in its many forms. And it's possible that if you reduce it one place, it increases another place. I understand there's that kind of consequence. But overall, what we want to do is reduce violence. There's a very thorny issue here. And when you were talking, Stan and Rachel, about when this life needs to be protected, you know, at conception or at implantation or how far along in the pregnancy, we're talking about gradations of valuing of life. Certainly at conception, there's a living thing there. One cell for the first moment, right? Some people say it's a human life whenever it is, from when it's one cell on, and that's sacred, and that's what's important. In the meeting room here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I'm sitting, we have a poster on the wall that was sponsored by Quaker Care Witness that says everything that lives is holy. And I certainly feel an affinity in myself and notice it in many friends in that direction. So yes, human life is sacred. We want to treat it with special consideration. A number of people extend that beyond just our species. And I think that this is very important in terms of which is horrible, because certainly there are any number of people and certainly Quakers who eat animals, kill animals, eat animals, and don't seem to have any PTSD for having killed an animal. Although someone who works in a slaughterhouse maybe does have PTSD from that experience. - I have found evidence of that. - Yeah, so let's talk about the sacredness of life from a Quaker conception. And Stan, I'd like to start with you. - I think the problem is about life there because I use the word potential life. In some perspectives, I wouldn't say this myself, but I have heard medically you can consider that pregnancy is a parasite to the woman's functioning and that sort of thing. It detracts from her ability to function as an organism. And the fetus is a potential life. This is where I would draw the line, I suppose, if I were making the loss, it's about where it is with viability. If the fetus can live outside the mother, then it's the life that we need to protect. And before that, the woman's choice is primordial in my estimation, that she's the one with it. And if she feels burdened by it and doesn't, for whatever reasons, in the ideal case, she makes a decision before that point. And after that point, the state does have an interest and that's why the law is where it is, that late third trimester abortions are only permitted under certain circumstances. So I do differ with the definition of life at conception. It's a potential life. And there, as I said, there are probably twice as many potential life as there are pregnancies because most of them spontaneously abort before the woman even misses her period. So maybe we need to back up and deal with that one before we talk about vegetarianism and those things. - Well, I certainly understand about viability and all that kind of thing. When I think of something as life, the duration of that life is not relevant. And in fact, a plant or an animal that lives, as you say, as a parasite, is also alive, in my opinion. - What about a seed? What about an acorn seed that falls from the tree? The acorn is a potential life. If you put it in the ground and let it grow, it'll grow, right? - I heard an interesting commentary about this from John Lameral, who was a guest on my program a couple of years ago. And he said that he had friends who were vegan who would not eat an egg because it's potential animal life, but who had no opposition to abortion. And he found that very inconsistent. So I've heard that kind of inconsistency as a concern from someone who was, as they phrased it, pro-life. So I do see it as life and you say potential life. - Yeah, is the walnut, is the walnut of the life? It's not a life that you put it in the ground and watered or have it watered sort of thing, right? - Because it's in a dark stage. - Well, it needs a certain environment in order to survive. And I think the potential life idea is that, indeed, if there's nothing in its way, if there's no induced abortion or spontaneous abortion or stillbirth, this can become a child. It is not a child, it's a potential child. And it is, in the same sense, before viability, to me, it's a potential life. It can't live outside the woman. And the woman is, that's why the woman's decision is primordial there because she has to decide and she will decide, regardless of what we do with the law, whether to continue the pregnancy or not, and whether to bring that potential life to a real life. - I guess I'll toss in a bit of my own personal perspective and experience. - You already have, friend. (laughs) - Well, this was very specific with respect to abortion. I think I had always considered myself pretty much pro-choice until my son was born. And actually, on the moment that he was born and his head crusted and came out and I saw him and I held him in my heart-lapped with my deep love and appreciation. It was amazing to me the experience that I had of it. I was aware that from certain points of view, it could have been defined that one day or maybe two days before that, he wasn't alive. He was not a person. But I was aware that it was just that close and that he could have been prevented from existing, if under some dire circumstances, as our law has it now, that he would have been defined as just a fetus to be aborted as opposed to a person who I now held in my hands. And so, while that didn't make me flip dramatically in terms of what I thought the law should be, it did make me have a greater compassion and understanding for certain people who were very concerned about that life before it came out into the open air. So I felt a dramatic increase in my empathy for the other side at that moment. - But if your wife's life had been in danger, I think something else might have happened, right? - And I certainly accept that. And what I speak of here is not what the law should have been or what anyone else should have been forced to do. My experience was an increase in understanding for people who hold a concern for that not yet emerged individual. That potential life as you were calling it. - I draw the line of viability. And that's months before the point you're talking about. - I'll just say quickly, the medical situation is that we're no longer choosing between mother and child if the child is old enough to make it. That used to be a big concern. Any more medically speaking, they can save both. And when the death of the mother is a danger, it's going to be earlier in the pregnancy. And yeah, that would be the one case where better one dead person than two dead people. And you're not doing it in order to kill the baby. You're doing it in order to prevent the death of the mother. But as far as the vegetarian is concerned, I've been vegetarian since 1975 and vegan since 1994. So I do hold that view myself and large numbers of people with a consistent life ethic, as you can imagine, we probably are disproportionately. Vegetarian is compared to the population as a whole. I have done over 100 radio interviews over the years, primarily when I was president feminist for life. And a couple dozen speeches at college campuses. What I do is I always assume that everybody understands that we're talking about killing a baby and go on from there to say why it is that this is not, in fact, good for women and not beneficial to the baby's mother. And society is set up to inflict injustices on pregnant women when we have the abortion clinic so readily available. - That's not good here. - And I wait, I wait for people to say, oh no, no, to do exactly what Stan is saying. It's saying, oh no, no, it's not killing a baby. It's just a potential life. That's what I'm waiting for people to do because you see, if you can establish that in fact we're not talking about killing a human being, then the case for leaving it up to individual options is complete. I'm waiting for people to make that argument. And it happens about one time in five, roughly 80% of the time, when I have simply assumed this, the audience also assumes it. And that is what really scares me because it's one thing to make the case that this is not the killing of a human being and therefore government shouldn't be buttoned in and the rest of it shouldn't either. It's another thing entirely to say, yeah, it's the killing of a human being but that should still be people's choice. And that is what is going on in our society. We should be aware that once we've established that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems in one case, we're going to find that people find it an acceptable way to solve problems in other cases, such as dealing with criminal homicide or dealing with foreign relations. See, these are all connected. It's not just a matter of trying to isolate violence to one instance. I mean, if you have a pro-choice position that says it's not the killing of a baby, leave it alone. And a pro-life position says it is the killing of a baby, therefore it is deception of women if government doesn't ban it because they're not making clear that it's the killing of a human being. If it's not banned, you have those two positions. Those both are internally consistent positions but large numbers of people are actually buying the arguments of both. Yes, it's killing a baby and yes, that's okay, it's an option. And that's the worst of both worlds. Do you have a reaction to that, Stan? Well, Alan, since again on the line of viability, if we're going to legislate anti-abortion against a woman's choice, the fetus cannot survive unless you force her to continue the pregnancy. And force in that instance is not very nice either. I wouldn't call it violence in terms of, you know, a knife or killing people, that sort of thing, but forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy against her will. Once viability is there, you can do that. You can say the state has an interest in this life. I'll define it as life at viability, this life. And therefore, if she doesn't want it, we're going to take it out and put it in a NICU or something or then that's fine. But before that, I will call it a potential life and not change on that because that's all it is, really. Well, I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever that the mother is going to be in control and that any law, if you make something illegal and the heart and minds of the people don't agree that it ought to be, is not going to work. I mean, a law against other kinds of homicide would not work if people thought, well, laws against lynching. The main thing we need to do in order to prevent lynching is to convince people that lynching is a bad idea. In fact, a horrifying idea, a stomach-turning idea, that that's probably going to do more to prevent lynching than to make lynching illegal. What we're concerned about is little children and if you show a picture of the embryo or fetus to a two or three-year-old child, that child will look at it and you say, what is that? That child will say, it's a baby. We all know as soon as we see it, it's a baby and the way we can get away with going after it with sharp instruments and cutting her into little pieces is by not paying attention to her existence. In other words, we're not being mindful. We're being mindless about what's actually going on, what's actually there. As soon as we're mindful, it's very clear. Stan, do you think it's desirable to just have more information? I'm not referring to propaganda. You refer Rachel to having a picture there. I can tell you that as a vegetarian of 32 years, I have been most, I don't know, concerned about people who said, yes, I'm going to eat meat. I love meat, but if I had to see the animal or kill the animal myself, I couldn't do that. They're by saying that they're willing to enjoy the fruits of an action that they consider hideous. And part of my thing is, well, if you're going to eat meat, you should be able to embrace the entire journey to your stomach. And so I actually find myself in favor of what you say, Rachel, but more information is better. I think there's a lot of information on both sides and I'm in favor of more information. Does that sound reasonable to you too, Stan? Of course, I'm in education. So of course, but with the caveat, because some of the states are trying to mandate that the girl has to see ultrasound. And it's education, but it's forcing at the same time. So there's enough distress in that decision, obviously in this culture, that for most women, by putting regulations, you have to get your parents to prove or you have to go here or you have to, those sorts of things, are not necessarily valuable in the sense of education. So forcing women to see an ultrasound, I don't necessarily agree to. All of the laws I'm aware of are requiring that the ultrasound be available if she wishes to see it. I don't think she wishes to hold up in court. But the thing is, seeing the ultrasound is a matter of being in touch with reality. So asking a woman if she wants to see it, sure. A big effect, and it is very tragic for women who see it too late, didn't see it in time, and then have an impact on them afterwards. If we're talking about a woman who is pregnant at a time that is not helpful in her life, the thing we need to do is to do what we can to be loving and concerned, to help make it so that it is not so distressing. A lot of what happens is that women are being suffered around by unloving. Rachel, you talked earlier about some of the effects of having abortions or not having abortions, and whether this was caring for the mothers, for the pregnant women. What kind of statistics and information do you have about that, maybe on the international scene? There are two countries that have fairly recently had large numbers of legal abortions and then banned them suddenly. That's Poland in 1993 and Nicaragua in 2006. Poland had, in 1990 they had a report of 59,000 plus abortions, and then in 1994 they had 782, so that's a big downturn in the number of abortions. The women's deaths connected with pregnancy, there were 90 in 1990 and 57 in 1994. Total number of births also actually went down. In Nicaragua in 2006, they started off with 50 maternal deaths in 2006, and after the ban went in in 2007, they had only 21, so the immediate reaction is that the maternal deaths went dramatically down. There are several ideas of how that could happen, but my theory is that when you no longer have women who are going to abortion clinics where you've got abortion doctors that have to be hard-hearted because a lot of them in the waiting room are crying, this is a very common thing. That when you are looking at a pregnant woman, not in terms of, let's get rid of it, but in terms of, OK, how do we get her through? And when you no longer have the traumatizing that goes with killing of fetuses, fetuses Latin for unborn child, that you're going to end up with greater care for the lives of pregnant women, at least these two statistics in Poland and Nicaragua, there may be all kinds of other explanations for why they went down, but at least one thing we know clearly is that they did not go up, unlike what the back Ali Butcher's theory would suggest, yeah. It's interesting and unexpected stuff, and it'd be interesting to follow it. If people want to follow up on this kind of information, where should they be looking, Rachel? Well, we have a website called prolifequakers.org, and it also has a list of books and a list of other groups to contact, I mean other places like feminist for life and consistent life, pro-life alliance of gays and lesbians, those are all groups that can also be found with the search engine. In Stan, you've been doing some wonderful work since '88 with friends in Unity with Nature, now called Quaker Earth Care Witness. Is the pamphlet that you mentioned that is being revised, has been revised? Is that online? Yes, Quaker Earth Care on a dot org, publications, and then list them and list it toward taking away the occasion of abortion. So people can follow up on Quaker Earth Care dot org and prolifequakers dot org. So what can friends do, and I'm asking that both of you, Rachel and Stan, what can friends do? In the pamphlet, it has some suggestions, but I would emphasize after our conversation that to make contraception available to those who need it, period. And also, the most moving thing I've been to at the FGC Gathering is the worship sharing we had on abortion, where those who felt on any place on the spectrum, and that's how we opened it, I think, to say that everybody is somewhere on a continuum, and even those of us who are prolife would probably agree abortion is acceptable if the life of the woman is in danger and those prochoice would agree that infanticide is wrong or late trimester abortion, that sort of thing. So the worship sharing is the appropriate format for this because people do have very deep feelings and they need to be respected and not feel that because they're a minority or something their voice can't be heard. Very strongly, go along with that. I think that I would strongly encourage people to think about having worship sharing programs to work this through. Another thing that we did at our meeting actually one year is that we participated in a local diaper drive. So we, all of us, participated together in a diaper drive that was distributed to women from crisis pregnancy centers. That project, I think, went pretty well, and we all felt pretty good that we were, you know, as long as we were even disagreeing on the core issues, nevertheless, we could get together and do something about it, not just, you know, we were doing something and we were doing something together and that felt very good. So those kinds of projects can also be very helpful. And then there is also all kinds of legislation that we can pay attention to abortion prevention such as pregnant women who have substance abuse problems, not having to have a waiting list in order to get into treatment, services being available to women who give birth to children with disabilities or families who have the children with disabilities in them. All these various kinds of things, there will be a way that friends who have differing views on abortion itself could nevertheless take action on and do together. - Well again, I want to thank both of you for your witness, for your work. Rachel, prolifequakers.org is a site that I think you're primary in. I want to thank you for caring, concerned for peace testimony and for integrity and dialogue, challenging dialogue that is open and listening. Peace, conflict resolution, stuff. You bring a lot of good tools to it. And I want to thank you for that work, Rachel. And Stan, I want to thank you for your deep concern for the whole integrity of your work on population and with quicker care witness. It's something that more we have, the better off we are, as a religious society and as a society as whole. So thank you both for joining me for this thoughtful and considerate conversation about one of the most emotionally charged issues of our day. - Thank you so much. - Over and out. - This spirit and action interview was a visit with Rachel McNair of Friends for a prolife peace testimony and Stan Becker of Quaker Earthcare Witness. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]