Religion: The Anti-Abortion Campaign

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ABORTION IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS. A Pittsburgh woman, Mrs. Norbert Winter, 36, heads a group of 1,000 called "Women Concerned for the Unborn Child." Says Mrs. Winter: "Young mothers are the most logical defenders of unborn children. We believe—with the Women's Liberation groups—that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body, but we also know that the child is not our own body."

Sons of Thunder. Some of the harshest words against abortion have come from church spokesmen. After New York State passed one of the most liberalized abortion laws in the country last year, the Roman Catholic bishops of the state warned Catholics in the medical profession that participation in an abortion would earn them automatic excommunication. In Boston, Archbishop Humberto Medeiros caused an ecumenical fuss by calling abortion "the new barbarism." Yet the conservative Protestant journal Christianity Today went further, describing abortion-on-demand as "mass homicide." Such language, argues Lawyer John Noonan, an articulate foe of abortion (see box), obscures the issues. "Abortion is not murder; it is abortion," he says, "just as manslaughter is not murder; it is manslaughter."

None of the angry words have equaled the angry action of the ultra-right Sons of Thunder in Washington, D.C. Dressed in khaki shirts and red berets, they invaded a Washington clinic last May to protest the abortions performed there; among the invaders was L. Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of William F. Buckley and, along with Buckley's sister Patricia, an editor of Triumph magazine. Triumph's editorial support of such activism caused William Buckley last week to write that "such analyses discredit the anti-abortion position." It is the gentler arts of persuasion, so far, that have won some victories for the anti-abortion forces. Liberalized abortion has been thwarted either in the courts or legislatures in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, North and South Dakota, Indiana, Kentucky and Massachusetts.

Though Catholics dominate in most anti-abortion groups, the campaign has gone well beyond sectarian boundaries. The California Mobilization for the Unnamed is headed by an agnostic Jew. The chief of the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life is a Methodist, Dr. Fred Mecklenburg. The Rev. Charles Carroll, an Episcopal priest who is chaplain to the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, says his involvement is a natural outgrowth of his other liberal beliefs. "Men who have been with me in Selma and who opposed war with me and have known me to speak out against capital punishment could not quite figure out how I could get into this conservative bag by being against abortion," he says. "But to me all these positions fit into one bag: you can't respect life at one end of the spectrum and not respect it at the other."