THE REV. CARLTON VEAZEY is an abortion fanatic. The middle-aged Baptist preacher looks like someone you might see at an Operation Rescue protest. And indeed, Veazey has spent some time at rallies outside abortion clinics, though hardly on behalf of Operation Rescue. Veazey is part of a new strain of religious abortion zealots — the pro-choice ones. As acting director of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Veazey maintains that the fight to abortion is protected not only by the Constitution, but by God. Legal abortion, he says solemnly, “is part of the basic tenet of our church.”
Actually, in a strict sense, Carlton Veazey doesn’t have a church. In the early 1980s, as pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., Veazey was photographed in a nude embrace with a woman who had come to him for ” spiritual help.” A scandal ensued and the woman killed herself by jumping out of the ninth-story window of her apartment building. Several years later, Veazey was fired by a vote of his congregation.
Veazey’s firing made news in Washington, but that doesn’t seem to bother the directors of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an umbrella organization of pro-choice Protestant churches and Jewish denominations. Veazey is still an ordained minister, and that’s what counts. After years of picking public fights with Bible-toting pro-lifers and being relegated to the moral low ground in arguments with the Catholic church, the pro-choice movement has decided to retaliate with religious rhetoric of its own.
From a PR standpoint, it’s an inspired strategy. As a political issue, abortion may be divisive; as a medical procedure, it is disquieting and often gory. Elevate it to the level of a religious sacrament, however, and abortion becomes untouchable, a sacred expression of personal faith.
That faith was on display in February at a coalition-sponsored event at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington. Billed as a “Faithful Witness for Choice,” the gathering was a celebration of legal abortion, with all the trappings of a Sunday service. Ordained clergy offered blessings to doctors who perform abortions. Prayers in the liturgy gave thanks for “the pro-choice legacy of courage and commitment.” The recessional hymn hailed the gift of ” rightful choice.” One of the “worship leaders” was the Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest from Boston and the longtime president of the coalition. To hear Ragsdale tell it, the coalition’s religious orientation makes it uniquely qualified to weigh in on the subject of abortion. “We take decisions about abortion very seriously,” she says, “because of course they involve how we handle the gift of life that is before us.”
At the core of the religious debate over abortion is the question of whether fetuses have souls. Pro-life people say they do; pro-choice people say they don’t. Carlton Veazey finds himself in both camps. According to Veazey, who has a divinity degree from Howard University, fetuses “who can survive outside the womb” have souls. And fetuses who can survive outside the womb but get aborted first? “I just don’t think” they do, Veazey says. He and others at the coalition talk a lot about what a “profoundly complex ethical and moral decision” abortion is, but they don’t seem to have pondered its profound complexities all that much.
Katherine Ragsdale seems equally baffled by basic questions about abortion. Asked to name a single instance in which abortion might be considered morally wrong, Ragsdale is struck silent. “Man, that’s really hard to take that out of context,” she says, finally. How about abortion for the purpose of sex selection? Or abortion performed at the end of the eighth month of pregnancy with no medical justification? Would she describe these as morally wrong? “Uh, ” she sighs, “let’s see. No, I really can’t.”
Listen long enough to representatives of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and it becomes unclear what, exactly, religion has to do with the group’s stand on abortion apart from being a handy rhetorical device. At a 1988 rally, Ragsdale referred to “the illegal and immoral activities of Operation Rescue” as “a blot on our nation’s conscience. In the name of God, I call upon them to repent.” Veazey, for his part, does not hesitate to employ religious language to describe abortion. “There are some instances with teens that call out for termination,” he says in preacher’s cadence.
Yet when it comes to anything deeper than sloganeering, the coalition’s theologians come up embarrassingly short. Here’s Carlton Veazey, for instance, on how his faith in God has informed his pro-choice position: “Well, I just believe that, that I don’t, um, my conviction is based on that the person, the woman has that right based on her religious beliefs. I believe in a woman’s right to choose to make that decision, and it’s not shaped as far as the abortion itself because that’s a whole other issue dealing with philosophical leanings and medical understanding.”
Confused? A coalition tract helps shed some light on what religious pro- choice advocates believe. Entitled “Abortion: Finding Your Truth,” the pamphlet describes the process of choosing abortion as a “gift of learning and growth,” “an invitation for you to develop a larger vision of yourself and to practice compassion and loving kindness toward yourself.” To celebrate her abortion, the faithful pro-choicer is advised to partake in “rituals” designed to “say goodbye to the pregnancy and send the spirit of that life on its way with love”: “Light a candle. . . . Dance your feelings. . . . Take yourself for a walk. . . . Open your heart to yourself.”
Other coalition literature warns religious people to be careful of the language they use when discussing abortion. “Labeling pregnant women ‘mother’ creates images of babies, again defining the decision to terminate a pregnancy as negative,” cautions one section. “Abortion rights opponents consistently refer to a fetus as a ‘baby,’ ‘unborn child,’ or ‘preborn.’ The use of humanizing terms such as ‘this little guy’ is also encouraged.” (How dare abortion-rights opponents use “humanizing terms.”)
According to its last available tax statement, the coalition is not supported in any significant way by religious bodies. Instead, the bulk of its 1995 budget — about $ 400,000 — came from private, secular trusts, such as the Ford Foundation. But then, church groups are not the focus of the coalition’s efforts. Last year, the coalition released a statement in support of President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth-abortion ban. Signed by about 30 members of the group, mostly ministers and rabbis, the letter explained that “we, too, hold human life sacred, yet we respectfully disagree with this legislation.”
The government, it went on to demand, “must not legislate and thus impose one religious view on all our citizens.” The idea that restricting abortion in any way is an infringement on religious liberty has proved to be the coalition’s most successful argument so far, the one most often repeated in the many news stories in which the group’s spokesmen appear. Katherine Ragsdale finds it particularly compelling. The partial-birth-abortion ban, she explains, “infringes on religious freedom for Jews, who are required by Jewish law if necessary to preserve the life of the woman. That’s back in the Mishnah, the most ancient of texts. It’s always been an understood religious obligation.”
The Mishnah is nowhere near “the most ancient of texts,” and though it is true that the “life of the mother” exception to abortion is Talmudic doctrine, abortion is never deemed an “obligation.” A number of Orthodox groups, including Agudath Israel, came out against partial-birth abortion last year.
Ragsdale doesn’t dwell on such details. Instead, she moves on to the latest frontier in pro-choice public relations: getting the word out that abortionists are deeply religious people. “It just dawned on us that we’ve got to ask [abortion providers] to talk about the religious convictions that undergird their work,” she says. “Because what we’re finding overwhelmingly is that the people who do this kind of work are people who are in it because of deep moral convictions and religious roots. And we’re asking them to talk about that.” In the meantime, Ragsdale is busy making the point herself. At a 1993 “healing service” to commemorate the murder of Florida abortionist David Gunn, Ragsdale explained that Gunn had spent his life “busy doing the work God had given him to do.”
God had directed Gunn to perform 30,000 abortions? Is the public ready for this kind of theology? Ragsdale seems sure it is. “Certainly the leadership of the more fundamentalist churches leads its people down the anti-choice path,” she points out. It’s time for the pro-choice movement to do the same. The task shouldn’t be hard. “As a parish priest,” says Ragsdale, “I’m constantly amazed by how willing people are to be led by their clergy.”
Staff writer Tucker Carlson is also the author of this week’s Casual, which appears on page 6.
