Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching people to love, but to use violence to get what they want. That's why the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.
 Evangelicals for Social Action Feminism and Nonviolence Studies Consistent Life (Seamless Garment Network)
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 "The Importance of Pro-Life Progressivism" (PDF file)
Abortion-rights supporters often ridicule pro-lifers as people concerned about human existence only before birth. We are branded bigots whose outmoded religious and political views restrict basic human rights and impede human progress. There is
some truth to these charges.
However, an examination of Internet pro-life resources like LifeLinks reveals that we are not a monolithic group. Not only that, but in our defense of the vulnerable, we stand squarely in the mainstream of the humanistic tradition, Eastern and Western.
Historically, respect for life from conception until natural death was basic to the nonviolent religions and philosophies of the East. Invoking this tradition, human rights leaders from Gandhi to the Dalai Lama have condemned abortion as a form of violence akin to other practices which destroy human life and debase human dignity.
In The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, 1996), Rodney Stark argues that the radical egalitarianism of Jesus won over even the powerful of the ancient world because Christianity offered a humane alternative to such barbaric practices as abortion and infanticide. Contemporary Christians from traditions as diverse as Roman Catholicism and the American Social Gospel Movement have united behind what the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago called a "seamless garment" or "consistent ethic of life" in support of peace and justice.
Until only recently, as
an insightful article in The American Reporter argues, this was the position taken by most Americans who considered themselves progressive. Its proponents today include humanists like civil libertarian Nat Hentoff and liberal historian
George McKenna, as well as New Deal Democrats like former Pennsylvania
Governor Robert Casey.
Cardinal Bernardin urged abortion foes to find common ground with others who work for causes that affirm human life. These include advocates of disarmament and world peace, economic justice, fair and compassionate treatment of prisoners, shelter for the homeless, care of the
disabled and terminally ill,
racial reconciliation, respect for lifestyle diversity--and, above all, attention to the welfare of women and the rights of children. The Catholic peace movement Pax Christi seems to me to put abortion in an appropriate social and moral context. Similar groups of nonviolent proponents of social justice have come together here and in Canada in the Seamless Garment (recently renamed Consistent Life) Network.
Grateful for the precious gift of our own children, my wife and I now support the work of several of those groups. I am especially proud to have been part of a group of liberal and other non-traditional pro-lifers
called Leftout.
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