I attended the second iteration of the Life and Justice Conference this past weekend, just as I said I would in my last post. As happened last year, I feel like I left the conference with a number of fragmentary thoughts— puzzle pieces that I know make part of a bigger picture (or seamless garment), but I don’t yet know precisely how.
As I arrived on Saturday morning, there were about 6-8 people standing outside the venue, holding various hand-drawn signs accusing Sr. Prejean of distorting Catholic teaching. As I passed them, one informed me that Sr. Prejean supported pro-abortion politicians. I had been vaguely familiar with the idea that Helen Prejean is not particularly admired on the Catholic Right, though even now I have trouble understanding precisely why they hold her in such suspicion.1
The Speech Itself
Sr. Prejean mainly focused on capital punishment, discussing how she became involved in the issue and several arguments for and against it.
Ministering to and empathizing with death row inmates led her to recognize that the basic human dignity of death row inmates is not obliterated even by their heinous crimes. Furthermore, she saw that capital punishment brings no real comfort to victims’ families.
Two aspects of her criticism of capital punishment strike me as particularly pertinent and worth repeating:
1. Racism: 70% of executions today are in states that formerly practiced slavery, states in which Jim Crow laws attempted to perpetuate racial oppression. The majority of cases in which the death penalty is actually enforced, moreover, involve a poor defendant of color, often in cases where that person of color kills a white person. Whether intentionally or not, capital punishment seems like a continuation of Jim Crow.2
2. Collateral damage: it forces good people serving on juries or as prison guards and wardens to participate in killing a fellow human being who has already been rendered helpless and harmless. She spoke of jurors who are haunted by their choice and of prison guards who are unable to sleep after participating in an execution. Participating in capital punishment, in itself, can be deeply traumatizing.
Abortion’s Collateral Damage
During the Q&A session, one woman asked her about her stance on abortion. In response, Sr. Helen returned to a point she had made about murderers—that they are more likely to be motivated by panic or desperation than callousness—to suggest that it is important to have genuine empathy for mothers in difficult situations, and that we should focus on assisting them in their circumstances, rather than assuming that their choice stems from a callous disregard for the life of their child.
Sr. Prejean’s response to the abortion question struck me as incomplete in two ways. First, she missed what struck me as a natural extension of her discussion of the collateral damage of the death penalty: if the recognition of the inviolable human dignity of the death row inmate results in jurors and prison guards being haunted by the experience even years later, then ought we not expect that the recognition of the humanity of the unborn might lead to similar effects among all those involved in abortion?
Building a post-abortion society, ultimately, means more than making abortion illegal, and more than making sure that mothers and children have adequate care available to them. It will also mean recognizing and addressing abortion's collateral damage. Women may feel guilty decades later for getting an abortion. Men may have pressured their partners into abortions, or their partners may have procured abortions against their wishes. Parents might convince their daughter that abortion is her only chance at the future she deserves. Abortionists and abortion clinic workers are told by law and society that they are helping people exercise their own fundamental rights, but at the cost of innocent lives. These varying forms of guilt and grief are all wounds that will remain for decades after the end of abortion.
A Tired Canard
If post-abortion healing is an under-explored subject, the proposition that pro-life activists need to empathize with and support women in crisis pregnancies has been discussed to death. What troubles me about it is that this argument is often delivered as if it is novel, when in fact pro-life activists took it to heart long ago.
Saying that pro-lifers need to provide support and resources for women considering abortion is a bit like saying that the Catholic Church in America needs to implement practices to prevent the sexual abuse of children. The various institutional ministries of the Church in America have already implemented VIRTUS training to recognize all of the signs and grooming behavior associated with sexual abuse. Not everyone in the pews can identify grooming behaviors, and many bishops haven’t yet been held accountable for their failures, but to say that the Church isn't trying to prevent abuse ignores the diligence and vigilance of so many people who work in Catholic institutions.
Similarly, the pro-life movement on the ground is spending considerable effort and expense taking care of women in very difficult situations. Even if many supposedly pro-life politicians and pro-life voters haven't yet learned this lesson, Sister Helen's proposition was hardly revolutionary among the people in the audience who focus their activism on trying to end abortion.
Usually, when I hear people talk about how the pro-life movement needs to take care of women in crisis pregnancies, it comes across as a challenge to the movement or a reason for rejecting it, seldom acknowledging the degree to which their recommendations are already reality.3
Stepping Back
But perhaps I am not being fair in my interpretation of Sister Helen's statement. The woman who asked her seemed to be proceeding from a similar mindset as the half-dozen people who had been protesting outside-- namely, the assumption that Helen Prejean is not a friend of efforts to end abortion. The question was an attempt to extract an affirmation of the idea that abortion is, in fact, bad. I can't imagine how many times she has had to answer a similar question, and her response, on some level, was an articulation of what kind of pro-life activism she would be most comfortable with. She was asked to give a conceptual affirmation to anti-abortion efforts, and she gave precisely that.
But conceptual affirmations are not enough when we are talking about ministries that people pour their lives and souls into. Helen Prejean's ministry is deserving of admiration for her personal virtues and wonder at the way God has worked through her. The same is true of anti-abortion activism, especially to the extent that it involves empathizing with and accompanying women facing monumentally difficult situations.
We shouldn't be seeking affirmation from each other the way the woman at the conference sought affirmation from Helen Prejean, as if it were squeezing blood from a stone. Nor do we really gain anything by taking the approach of the protestors outside-- critiquing each other without for a moment appreciating the work God does in and through each of us.
At the risk of being even more insufferable than I usually am, I want to close with a challenge -- a challenge to look closely and charitably at a ministry related to a topic you're not entirely comfortable with. Look at issues of race or immigration or abortion through the eyes of someone like Helen Prejean who has dedicated their life to understanding the issue and ministering to people in their greatest need. Look for the ways the Holy Spirit is at work in their ministry, and hold on to that perception.4 Look for things to admire more than reasons to criticize.
1 This is also true of right-wing contempt for Fr. James Martin. I have no particular affection for any Catholic celebrity activists, but neither do I see much point in heaping contempt on someone just because they have the admiration of other Catholics whom I happen to dislike. Based on what other people at the conference said later, part of the excuse for disliking Helen Prejean is based on her signing on to a draft of an anti-war statement that was then revised to include support for abortion and published without notifying her of the changes. If she also happened to support politicians who happen to be pro-choice on abortion, that’s… a different issue, but not worth denouncing a person’s entire public ministry and activism.↩
2 The New Jim Crow has been on my reading list since college. Still haven’t read it. “Whoops” doesn’t seem to cover it.↩
3 It would be nice, just once, to see someone not involved in the pro-life movement acknowledge the existence of crisis pregnancy centers without accusing them of being absolutely evil.↩
4 Editor's Note: Here at The Restless Hearts, Erin has shared reflections on race, from her perspective as a white educator working with students who are people of color: Part One | Part Two | Part Three.
Also, I brought back some reflections from the US-Mexico Borderlands on immigration as well as thoughts on development from an immersion in Uganda.↩
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