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I was working in New York in 1992,
when the Democratic National Convention was held in that city. One day I
strolled down to Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention. It was
during the afternoon, and there was nothing going on inside. On the sidewalk
across the street, two areas had been set up for demonstrations about 25 yards
apart. I can’t remember what topics were being demonstrated about when I
first arrived, but sometime during the afternoon, the abortion debate took
over. Folks looking like everyday people, couples, singles, moms, dads, some
children, clerics, all with their props and signs and bullhorns, took up their
respective places behind barricades marked out for the two sides of the debate.
For the next half hour or more these ordinary folks were transformed into
screaming maniacs. Across that 25-yard divide they screamed. And screamed. They
yelled chants and barbs and insults and slogans. The only constant was that
they screamed. At each other, at passersby. Sometimes a few would enact a skit.
And sometimes new signs would appear. But through it all they kept screaming.
And screaming.
A few years later, after moving to
the Midwest, I went back East on two occasions, to Washington, to attend
meetings of the nation’s Catholic bishops.
On each visit, I had the chance for private conversation with a
leading figure in the Catholic antiabortion movement. In each case -- once it
was a bishop, once a lay person -- the leader told me that the church had been
badly used by politicians during the Reagan administration and the first Bush
administration.
They admitted that the Catholic hierarchy had given tacit approval
to certain candidates on the promise of pro-life votes, but ultimately had
received little for their efforts. They further volunteered that support for
those candidates was costly in other ways. Many of the candidates the bishops
implicitly endorsed had no inclination toward any of the other elements on the
bishops’ social agenda. In the end, the bishops spent an enormous amount
of political capital courting pro-life votes from politicians who took the
support with little intention of delivering on anything the bishops
supported.
The bishop and the lay person made clear they would never say such
things in public, and they would keep fighting the same battle.
In hindsight, I think the scene of
the screamers behind the barricades was as fitting an image as any one might
conjure for much of the political debate about abortion that has occurred in
this country during the past 30 years.
Unfortunately, Catholic leaders have allowed themselves to be
sucked into this political face-off, a national screaming match where few real
changes occur and few hearts are changed. The Catholic church’s unyielding
defense of human life in all of its dimensions actually gets submerged in the
overheated rhetoric. And, as our stories point out in this issue, it is
unlikely any significant changes will occur anytime soon. Certainly not even
Republicans, political speeches aside, are going to really push to overturn
Roe. It just isn’t in their political interest.
We return to the debate this issue
on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade not because we have any
magic answers but because we think that as a culture and a church we might yet
find a way around the public standoff. Maybe some of the voices in these
stories, voices that don’t often get a hearing, convey wisdom that might
allow us to get beyond the stalemate of old enmities.
That hope gets a boost from the perspective that Washington writer
Joe Feuerherd brings to the topic in his political analysis and the insights
from women’s research and work on abortion surfaced by the reporting of
Margot Patterson.
Too much has already been sacrificed to a futile political
battle.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 17,
2003
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