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Just another election issue?

Abortion threatened this week to embroil the Church in party politics. But it also risks overshadowing the rest of Catholic thinking on moral issues. It?s time it was sited more firmly in its wider fight against poverty

The coverage of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O?Connor?s comments about abortion this week is a reminder of the power of the media to shape political debate. Two separate events were combined to make headlines: the publication of Cosmopolitan magazine?s interviews with the three main party leaders in which they each gave their views on abortion coincided with the launch of the bishops? pre-election letter, and led to inevitable questions at the bishops? press conference about the comments of the politicians. The result: lead stories in many of the papers, and television and radio headlines too, all emphasising once more to the general public that the Catholic Church has a specific agenda about abortion.

In fact, the bishops? letter refers to abortion in the context of wider concerns to do with marriage and the family, criminal jus-tice, education, the treatment of refugees and migrants, the global common good and respect for human life in all its stages. It is such an all-encompassing vision of social and economic justice that no political party would satisfy all its criteria.

However, with the media reporting on the cardinal?s press conference by focusing almost exclusively on his comments on abortion, it appeared that he was lending support to the Conservative Party by endorsing Michael Howard?s proposal to reduce the time limit on abortion, and suggesting that working-class Catholics might no longer support the Labour Party. As a result, the Catholic contribution to political debate in the run-up to the general election risks being reduced to a single issue with the Church messily embroiled in party politics, even although it is quite clear from the bishops? letter that this was never their intention.

If the British Church is to resist being drawn into the kind of political interference that provoked such criticism during the American elections last year, then it is vital that Catholics take responsibility for ensuring that the full range of the bishops? concerns is represented at every level of politics; and this means resisting any attempt to portray Catholics as a narrow-minded interest group with only one political focus.

Catholic social teaching challenges the injustices inherent in modern society, and the bishops? letter reflects that. It is consistent with an integrated vision of human rights and social justice, based on the intrinsic dignity of the person, which has been taking shape in the Church?s teachings during the last hundred years, and particularly since the Second Vatican Council. This means that the question of abortion cannot be treated in isolation, for it always belongs within wider social and economic contexts. If the bishops are going to speak out against abortion, they must speak out no less forcefully against all the intrinsic evils identified by the council, including the sexual exploitation of women and children, inhuman working conditions and the mistreatment of refugees. From this perspective, all three of Britain?s main political parties fall far short of Catholic expectations, so that exercising our duty to vote will inevitably entail some level of compromise on issues central to Catholicism.

However, even if abortion should never be the only issue on which a Catholic decides how to vote, respect for the dignity of human life means that we must be prepared to challenge society on this as we would on any other issue. The main question here as in America focuses on legal time limits on abortion, but this also raises the question as to how far the law should intervene in one of the most difficult decisions that a woman is ever likely to face.

When Cardinal Murphy-O?Connor commends Michael Howard?s support for a reduction of the legal time limit for abortions ?on the way to a full abandonment of abortion?, is he expressing a hope that all abortion will eventually become illegal, or does he believe that at some stage this becomes a question of morality rather than legality? This is important because strictly speaking the Church?s absolutist stand against all abortion means that it is inconsistent to enter into a debate about time limits. One would not, for example, agree to a debate in which we discussed whether it was better to kill a five-year-old child or a 10-year-old child. As soon as Catholics do enter into such a debate about abortion, they are tacitly conceding that there is a moral difference between early and late abortion, and we might rediscover some of the wisdom of the Catholic tradition to support that position.

In 1869 Pope Pius IX abandoned the distinction between early and late abortion in Catholic moral teaching. Before that, early abortion was seen as a venial sin, while late abortion was seen as a mortal sin, tantamount to murder. To restore this distinction might allow the Church to maintain its moral position that abortion is always objectively wrong, while recognising that in early pregnancy it may be a matter for individual conscience, whereas late abortion becomes a matter of protecting human life by law.

Inevitably, it entails a conflict between the life of the unborn child and the psycho- logical or physical well-being of the mother, and there can never be an easy solution to this dilemma. But there must also come a stage when society has a responsibility to the unborn child as well as to the mother, and the best way of expressing this is to ensure that every mother and child are adequately supported, particularly those women who face the trauma of unwanted pregnancy and of caring for a sick or disabled child. When the late Cardinal Winning sought to establish this kind of care for unmarried mothers, he attracted derision from some feminists, but he was applauded by Germaine Greer.

Last year the publication of ultrasound images of a 12-week-old foetus in the womb created widespread public discomfort about late abortion, and Tony Blair acknowledged that it might become necessary to reconsider the time limit on abortions. Of nearly 200,000 abortions carried out in this country each year, pro-abortion campaigners point out that fewer than 1 per cent take place after 22 weeks. But this still means that nearly 200 late abortions are performed in Britain annually, and the practices surrounding this are deeply disturbing.

A baby becomes a person under British law when it takes its first breath outside the mother?s body, so that a priority in performing late abortions is to ensure that the baby is stillborn and is not protected by law. The preferred method, recommended by the Royal College of Obstetricians for terminations after 22 weeks, is an injection of potassium chloride into the foetal heart (a practice known as foeticide), with the option of anaesthetising the foetus first to stop it from moving. One cannot help but suspect that, if this procedure were regularly being carried out on laboratory rats, it would cause far greater public outcry than when it is carried out on human foetuses. It is right that the Church should ask why this is so, and should campaign for changes in the law.

But the Church?s legitimate concern for the unborn child must not be given priority over concern for the millions of women in the world for whom pregnancy and motherhood are far from the romantic ideal that still prevails in the Church?s theology of marriage and family life. The number of women who die for every 100,000 live births varies from an average of 27 in developed countries to an average of 479 in less-developed nations. An African woman is 500 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than a woman in Scandinavia. There are an estimated 20 million unsafe abortions each year and more than 70,000 abortion-related deaths, most of them in poor countries.

Unless the Catholic hierarchy situates its moral opposition to abortion in this wider context of poverty and despair, there will always be a suspicion that the issue is more about controlling women?s bodies than about a concern for human life. There is much more to being pro-life than being anti-abortion. Every woman in the world could be given adequate reproductive care for what the world spends on arms in a few days. Why did the American bishops not raise such issues during last year?s election, when America?s spiralling military budget should surely have caused as much concern to Catholics as its abortion rates?

There has always been a free vote on abortion in this country, so that it has not become a party political issue. The full spectrum of beliefs about abortion is represented by MPs in all three political parties. Yet in the cyn-icism of political debate today, there is a real risk that the parties will chase votes by pandering to the demands of what they perceive as significant minorities, and this includes Catholic voters. It would be to our shame if we colluded in the ongoing degradation of politics by becoming complicit in such strategies.

Tina Beattie is senior lecturer in Christian Studies at Roehampton University, South-West London.

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