In Italy, there is yet another scandal around Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This time, according to the New York Times (May 29), it involves allegations that Berlusconi, 72, invited about 40 girls, many of them 18, to spend New Year’s Eve at one of his villas in Sardinia. I don’t particularly like Berlusconi. But, for the moment, it has not been charged that he did anything especially outrageous, nothing, certainly, that compares to our previous president’s legitimizing torture. Yet, for reasons that I’ll come to in a moment, the potential implications are enormous, not least, as it happens, for the abortion question and the role of various forms of institutionalized religion in opposition to a woman’s right to control her body.

In the case of Berlusconi, it is the Catholic Church’s position against abortion –and the basis of that position—that concerns me. Despite assertions that Church doctrine in such matters flows from god –although that same god (presumably it is the same) seems to give different advice to non-Catholics—its doctrinal position is neither eternal nor consistent. The Church lives continually in a world of moral contradictions. This applies to almost anything related to sex. Thus, Pope Benedict describes homosexuality as a “tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil,” while Catholic priests have been accused of being sexual predators, largely (but not exclusively) on young boys, and the Church has spent years covering up such behavior.

Of course, Catholic priests are supposed to be celibate. Technically, this means that they don’t marry, not that they don’t have sex. But, it is also important to remember that celibacy was not always a requirement of the clergy. As a result of a rather complicated history on this and other matters, Catholic priests in what is known as the Eastern Rite, in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, the Ukraine, etc., although they come under the authority of the Vatican, can marry, as long as they do so before ordination. The tradition of clerical celibacy developed slowly during the middle ages, but only became a formal part of canon law in 1917. In the meanwhile, over the centuries, many popes were sexually active and openly fathered children. I don’t say this to cast aspersions, but only to underscore the contradictions and hypercritical stance of the contemporary Church. Catholic priests would probably be much better off if they were women as well as men and were allowed to marry. It would give them greater humanity. The current president of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, conceived at least one child when he was still a Roman Catholic bishop. He is, by any measure, the best president the country has ever had.

But, among the most notable changes in Church doctrine has been in regard to its position on abortion. In recent times, the Catholic Church has been a leading force in the campaign against abortion. But, this has not always been its stand. As Karen O’Connor observed in her book, Neutral Ground: Abortion Politics in an Age of Absolutes (1996), the Church “allowed abortion before quickening, the time when a woman first feels movement of the fetus in utero –usually between the sixteenth and eighteenth weeks of pregnancy.” Catholic doctrine on this, as on so many other issues, evolved against the background of changing political and economic conditions. But, in the process, it has had interesting and curious qualities. Thus, an older Aristotelian view was that the soul did not enter the fetus at conception, but at 40 days for the male and 80-90 for the female! Sexism in the Catholic world was not content to wait until after birth. But, at least Thomas Aquinas was more equitable. He argued that the “rational soul” entered the developing fetus of both sexes at quickening, an idea that carried tremendous force until well into the 19th century and is still influential.

Back to Mr. Berlusconi. Referring to his current problem, the Italian Bishops Conference has refused to regard his behavior as immoral. Indeed, it went so far as to say that each person’s conduct was a matter “of individual conscience.” Unless the Bishops somehow mean this to apply only to the Italian Prime Minister, it amounts to an implicit endorsement of a woman’s right to choose. They are saying that a woman has the right to seek an abortion as a matter of “individual conscience.”

So much for the Church. What is god’s view of abortion? Of course, if we were the great H.L. Mencken, we would ask, which god? Which of the hundreds of once omnipotent and omniscient gods that are now dead and unremembered do we have in mind on any given day? Well, with apologies to Henry Mencken, let’s be parochical and limit ourselves to the Christian god. Do we have any idea how that particular deity regards abortion? As a convenient starting-point, I will focus on the god of Christian evangelical sects, which cherish the belief that human beings are not the product of an evolutionary process, but of god’s design. I personally don’t think that human anatomy is the best candidate for intelligent design–it’s a bit like saying that god designs American cars– but, let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that we are, from soup to nuts, god’s handiwork.

God obviously allows the human reproductive process to commit rather serious errors in genetic replication, leading to chromosomal abnormalities. These, in turn, are one of the main reasons that as many as half of all fertilized eggs die and are aborted spontaneously, usually before a woman even knows that she is pregnant. If the human body is god’s design, then abortion –or miscarriage– has to be regarded as “god’s way” of ensuring that fetal development is stalled. If so, god apparently never felt that abortion contradicted his/her concept of what life was and when it began. That was for humans to tie themselves in knots over. But, certainly, by comparison with the number of miscarriages that occur globally each year, the number of human-induced abortions is minute. And they are an extension of a general model that “god” invented.

What is an affrontery –to me, at least—is the evangelical view that those who oppose abortion not only defend god’s design, but also are the sole champions of “life” itself. In their self-proclaimed characterization, they are “pro-life,” a term I’m personally as much, if not more, inclined to apply to people who support abortion. Yet, evangelicals, interestingly, only use this distinctive phrase in regard to their opposition to abortion, not when it comes to the question of unjust war and capital punishment, the state-sanctioned taking of human life. Look, for example, at the position of the National Association of Evangelicals. This is an organization that says of abortion: “We believe that all life is a gift of God, so that neither the life of the unborn child nor the mother may be lightly taken. We believe that God, Himself, in Scripture, has conferred divine blessing upon unborn infants and has provided penalties for actions which result in the death of the unborn.” In the last few weeks we acquired a better idea of what such “penalties” may be: they seem to include the killing of doctors who perform abortions by “pro-life” extremists.

But, the National Association of Evangelicals is not opposed to the idea of execution. It may proclaim that “all life is a gift of God,” but it supports capital punishment. The Southern Baptist Convention does as well. In 2000, it passed a resolution in favor of capital punishment, as long as it was “applied as justly and as fairly as possible.” While that sounds like a reasonable qualification, it has little regard for reality. There is nothing “just and fair” in the way we execute people in this country. Consider this: between September, 1985, and April, 2003, 22 people were executed (half of them in the state of Texas, all but one in the South) who were juveniles at the time of the crime for which they were sentenced –the Supreme Court finally struck down the death penalty for juveniles in 2005– while, from April, 1984, to May, 2008, 36 people were executed (all but 4 in the South) who were mentally retarded.

What is increasingly obvious is how many people on death-row in the United States are actually innocent. The Death Penalty Information Center lists 131 people who have been freed from prison between 1973 and the present. Far more tragic than the years they lost and the conditions in which they suffered, are, of course, the innocent people who were nevertheless executed. As the Center notes, “There is no way to tell how many of the over 1,000 people executed since 1976 may also have been innocent. Courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead. Defense attorneys move on to other cases where clients’ lives can still be saved. “ But, they report the details of eight cases where the individuals were executed, between 1989 and 2004, where there was “strong evidence of innocence.” Five were in Texas, one in Virginia, one in Missouri and another in Florida. So unjust and shameful is our justice system, with particular regard to capital punishment, that, on January 11, 2003, just before leaving office, the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, courageously commuted (to “life”) the sentences of everyone in the state who was on or waiting to be sent to death row –167 people—because he believed that the death penalty could not be administered fairly.

Yet, the overlap between those who support capital punishment and those who oppose abortion is fairly strong. That may be one of the reasons –though it is certainly not the only one– that those who vehemently oppose abortion seem willing to condone the taking of lives in order to see their views prevail.

Posted on June 14th, 2009

Eric B. Ross is a U.S.-trained anthropologist, who taught for 16 years at the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), where he specialized in the political economy of agrarian change, health policy and equitable development and was Chair of the Institute's MA in Development Studies. He currently is Visiting Professor of Anthropology and of International Development Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Among his books are Death, Sex and Fertility and The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. He is editor of The Porcupine.

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