In July, 1989, Elder Grotheer wrote:

ROE vs. WADE

The issue of abortion "has become the single most controversial and volatile issue in America since the Civil War." Thus reads the first sentence of a research paper recently received by this editor. Written by Elder John V. Stevens, Jr., Director of Public Affairs & Religious Liberty of the Pacific Union Conference, it is the best yet summary of the issues underlying the present challenge to the Roe vs. Wade Decision which is now before the Supreme Court as a result of legislation passed by the Assembly of the State of Missouri. This research paper presents the last day implications of this whole litigation and its meaning to and for Seventh-day Adventists.

It is "must" reading for everyone who wishes to be truly informed about the behind-the-scenes working in this abortion controversy.

While many have tried to project the Sunday Closing Laws issue for personal gain, the enemy has subtly introduced the first of the two great errors - "the immortality of the soul" - which he is using to bring the world under his deceptions for the battle of the great day of God Almighty. (See GC, p. 588)

You can write for your copy to Elder Stevens at 2686 Townsgate Rd., Westlake, CA 91361. Do it today, and I would suggest that you include a dollar to help cover postage - US, Canadian, or Australian. It will be the best dollar you ever invested to inform yourself as to the basic issue in this abortion controversy.  (WWN7(89; (Underscored emphasis added.))

[N.B. The current address for contacting Elder Stevens is P.O. Box 1716, Sun City, AZ   85372-1716; E-mail theabortioncontroversy@gmail.com, also at http://TheAbortionControversy.com.  It is not known whether the research paper is still available; but Elder Stevens has written a book titled The Abortion Controversy, which is.]

THE OFFICIAL SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST POSITION

THE RELIGIO-POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

"The Roe decision was a direct blow to the religious doctrine and the power of the Roman Catholic Church. That religious institution has exercised almost unbelievable power in the political world since before A.D. 300—more than seventeen centuries. The role of the Church in the international community of states was expressed at the United Nations by Archbishop Agostino Caseroli, Secretary of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church. In part, he declared:

It's right to belong to the international Community' even though it is `only the Holy See'—and no other Church or religious body who is 'recognized as a full member of the Community ... admitted to take its place and act in it like the States'.... That 'right' rests upon the fact that the Church is posed with outstretched wings covering the whole globe, an independent and sovereign power ... which imposes itself because of its stature, its history, its influence.

The sovereign power, thus imposed upon the States, is ... spiritual in nature' and 'its real kingdom is the kingdom of conscience' Therefore ... when one accepts the Catholic Church in this way, almost as the conscience of humanity' it follows that all mankind is asked to accept the Catholic Church as 'everybody's friend: its voice of conscience in international affairs.'

On his first trip to the United States, Americans got their first look at Pope Benedict XVI, who clearly told us how we ought to live, speaking as our conscience. On the third anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II, speaking of his pending sainthood, Varkey Cardinal Vithayathil, one of the first to request his beatification process, proclaimed, "He was the conscience of the world:' 2 Is
it appropriate for any person to proclaim himself—or for any organization to assume itself—to be the conscience of the world?

The most sacred attribute any human being possesses is his or her conscience. And it is not subject to anyone—not even to God, unless one willingly submits it to Him. No religious institution, no political institution, no social in- stitution, including the family, is to force anyone's conscience in religious mat- ters, for to do so is a direct violation of God's law, which is, "love your neighbor as yourself!' Since people do not want their conscience forced, it goes without saying that they have no right to force anyone else's conscience. For a religious institution to claim it has the right to be the conscience of the entire world and everyone in it is blatant blasphemy, which is taking the place of God. For it is the Holy Spirit who directs but does not force our conscience—not that of any man, any woman, anyone, high or low.

Those opposing abortion picked up on the choice language of the decision  and agreed that women had a choice—a choice of whether to get pregnant or not. Once pregnancy occurred, choice ended. They also proclaimed loudly and clearly that while the members of the Court may not have known when life began, they did, and it was at conception.

Language became a tool in the controversy in a most masterful manner. Scientific terms such as zygote, embryo, and fetus were readily replaced with the finished product—baby—and used at every stage of the pregnancy. Revisionism blurred distinctions and confused the public. And we can understand from personal experience that our conceived children were "babies"—at least to us. While not scientific, it satisfied our emotional needs, and it seemed natural. But to use such language when the debate on abortion raged only served to blur the white with the black and produce gray areas.

The Catholic bishops were aware of their theological and political affinity with Evangelicals on the subjects of abortion, prayer, and the teaching of the Bible in the public schools. They also were pushing to secure tax funding for their religious schools. They expected they had a strong ally in their quest to reshape America into their mold, socially and religiously. And this was to come about through a strong religio-political alliance. They were not to be disappointed.

Consequently, the movement advanced by the Catholic bishops got a powerful ally when the Evangelicals joined. It is well known that Evangelicals may well be the most powerful public-shaping communications network on television, as well as radio. At any given time, as one surfs television satellite offerings or turns on the radio, one finds conservative channels and stations promoting religious presentations, while mixing in their political agenda. Before their transformation, they waved the Bible. Now it's the flag and the Bible.

Their early Evangelical allies made and continue to make the movement most formidable. Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, the late Dr. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, Dr. Robert A. Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral and Hour of Power, along with numerous others, have commanded audiences that number in the millions, while their fund-raising ability is staggering. The transformation of the Evangelicals—who most as- tutely avoided political involvement, because they preached that Christ's king- dom was not of this world—took place almost suddenly. Traditionally, they opposed tax funding for religious schools, as well as religious exercises in the public school system. The dramatic changes came virtually overnight, because of the abortion issue. It is unlikely that they will ever surrender their newly acquired political power. Historically, religious powers have never voluntarily surrendered their political power—they have only sought to increase it. But then, that is human nature, isn't it?

The creation of the abortion issue gave the National Conference of Catholic Bishops the opportunity to politically mobilize in America, by seeking to impose their dogma on society. The abortion issue enabled "regular" physicians to gain credibility, eliminating competition through licensing laws, which a century earlier gave them a monopoly control in medical issues. This they did through lobbying to outlaw abortion. The Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, issued by Catholic Bishops in 1975, called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Ultimately, such mobilization would serve as a catalyst to unite church and state and implement papal/Evangelical dogma into public policy, with which the majority of Roman Catholics disagree.' Those steps will effectively give to the Catholic Church and its Evangelical allies the monopoly control in the area of morality, both in social and religious issues, in public and in private."  THE ABORTION CONTROVERSY - EFFORTS TO IMPOSE DOGMA,  By JOHN V. STEVENS, Sr., Pp. 2-4

"THE VATICAN has had a tremendous influence on White House policy with respect to foreign affairs and such issues as abortion and birth control, according to Time magazine, Feb. 24, 1992. In “The Holy Alliance,” Time described the way in which a group of Roman Catholic members of the Reagan administration collaborated with the Polish pope to overthrow the existing government of Poland.

However, in a subsidiary story in the same issue, “The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control,” Time described the Vatican’s success in changing U.S. policy on birth control, quoting Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson: “American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy.. . . American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I’d accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family and in long discussion they finally got the message.” “They” means personnel from AID. This is the first major disclosure in a widely-read magazine of what the Vatican has been doing for years. The Vatican has intervened in American politics to determine U.S. policy with respect to sex, reproduction and other matters. In addition to “behind-the-scenes” work with the CIA and top administration officials, the Vatican has lobbied Congress through Mother Theresa and the Vatican-appointed bishops in this country."  Political Power of Roman Catholic Bishops, By JOHN M. SWOMLEY

(Cf.  Bishops to Congress: At a Time of Painful Budget Cuts, Defunding Planned Parenthood ‘Not One of Those Hard Choices’, an attack on family planning services in general.  Cf.  A Catholic Perspective – Abortion & Contraception’:"The Catholic Church has always opposed contraception. Never has the Church wavered on its stance on Contraception unlike the other Christian denominations. Artificial contraception is considered a mortal sin. This has been explained and expressed by Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae in 1968. Some methods of natural family planning are morally permissible, as they do not oppose the natural way of conception.")

THE THEOLOGICAL DIMENSION

Elder John V. Stevens, Sr. points out in The Abortion Controversy, that the Roman Catholic position on abortion is rooted in the dogma of the immortality of the soul.  Growing out of that dogma are the metaphysical (and unscriptural} concepts of "Eternal Beatitude" and "Limbo":

'Has Limbo really disappeared? Has the Catholic Church now definitively rejected the theological opinion held for centuries by an imposing array of eminent theologians (including St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and St. Alphonsus Liguori) that there is a "Limbus puerorum"? They held that the "Limbo of infants" is the state or "place" where unbaptized babies and those who die in original sin are deprived of the Beatific Vision of God but share a perfect state of natural happiness. It is true that the existence of Limbo has never been a definitively defined doctrine of the Church and taught by the Magisterium of the Church as certain doctrine. Nevertheless, in recent centuries the teaching on Limbo was included in local catechisms (e.g., the 1949 Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, n. 3). . . .

The most recent official treatment of the issue of unbaptized infant, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, leaves the question unresolved. On the one hand, CCC n. 1261 and n. 1283 allow the faithful to hope that in the mercy of God such infants may be admitted to the Beatific Vision, while n. 1257 recalls that we do not know that they are so saved, stating that "the Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude." CCC n. 1261 adds: "All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism."'  Abortion and Limbo. 

We now live in a country where public policy is dictated by these strange Roman Catholic doctrines and imposed on the whole nation, including Seventh-day Adventists who reject the dogma of the immortality of the soul.

A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE

"Both sides of the religious controversy over abortion generally recognize the Bible teaching that God is the Author of life and forms humanity in the womb, both fearfully (with great respect) and wonderfully. Without Him there is no  life, not even for birds, fish, and animals—or for the vegetation on the face of the earth. Both sides also believe that the Scriptures are inspired, come from God, and should be followed.

Many who oppose abortion believe that the sixth commandment, "You shall not murder" and Psalm 139 clearly prohibit abortions of any kind following conception. Inasmuch as most religious denominations take stands against abortion based on their understanding of the Holy Scriptures, it may come as a surprise that only two passages in the entire Bible deal with an induced miscarriage — one accidental, and the other planned. No other references deal with abortion, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament. We shall do a detailed examination of those two passages.

Religious adherents who favor choice cite these two passages that deal explicitly with abortion—one accidental, and one induced. They point out that biblical law mandated only a misdemeanor fine against one who accidentally caused a woman to have a miscarriage. The induced abortion performed by the priest was the result of a pregnancy that arose from infidelity, and no punishment was imposed for inducing the abortion. Rather, a command came from God to cause it to take place.

Of special significance is that both references are part of the law given at Mt. Sinai by God, or Jehovah, as He is referred to oftentimes in the Old Testament Both references are not only laws, but God spoke them directly, so it was not someone simply recording a law."  The Abortion Controversy - Abortion Law in the Scriptures_Accidental and Induced  By JOHN V. STEVENS, Sr., Pp. 157-162

JEWISH PERSPECTIVES
(In part based on Scripture)

"How can a single legal system [Jewish] engender such disparate perspectives? To understand that, you have to grasp a central fact about the Jewish legal code, which is that it's not a set of policies. It's a compendium of debates about possible policies. It is commonly believed in the non-Jewish world that the Talmud is the Jewish book of laws, but that's not quite right. The Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses--that is, the first five books of the Old Testament--contain the 613 mitzvahs, or commandments, by which Jews live. The Talmud is an anthology of abstruse and (to Culturebox, anyway) weirdly fascinating conversations about those commandments, as well as a slew of other biblical and extrabiblical passages that appear to the uninitiated to have nothing to do with the principles of conduct extracted from them. You cannot compare the Talmud to, say, the United States civil code, a series of prescriptions issuing from Congress, or to Catholic doctrine, which comes directly from the pope. The Talmud is more like the minutes of religious study sessions, except that the hundreds of scholars involved in these sessions were enrolled in a seminar that went on for more than a millennium and touched on every conceivable aspect of life and ritual. It would be hard to overstate the Talmud's amorphousness. The more closely you look at it, the harder it is to pin down. How did the rabbis choose which verses to analyze? What's their system of logic? The rabbis derived their rules from the sacred narratives by means of induction and deduction and syllogism and whimsical etymologies and literary hermeneutics, but those weren't their only methods. They also incorporated folkloric glosses that had been passed down orally over hundreds of years, in part to ensure that these stray ideas got written down. And then they argued ceaselessly among themselves about which interpretation was right. . . .

Here are the outer limits of the Jewish positions on abortion: 1) Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism the fetus isn't a legal person until it's born, so abortion can't be murder. (This isn't even as different from Catholicism as it seems. The Catholic Church itself didn't insist that life began at conception until 1869. Before that, the Church tolerated abortions through the 40th day of pregnancy.) 2) The fetus, although perhaps not a legal person, is a potential one with a limited number of legal rights (such as the ability to inherit property in certain cases), so abortion is like murder, even if it isn't exactly the same thing.

Naturally, depending on where you're disposed to end up on the abortion question, you'll start with a different biblical text. If you're basically willing to tolerate the practice, you'll cite a passage in Exodus (Ex. 21:22) in which two men fight and one of them accidentally hits a pregnant woman in the belly, causing her to miscarry. If she is not harmed in any other way, the Bible says, then the man who struck her has to pay her husband damages. From this one can deduce that feticide isn't murder, because the penalty for murder is death. Rather, removing a fetus is said to be like amputating a limb--which a woman is still not allowed to do for mere economic or cosmetic reasons, since that would be self-mutilation, which is forbidden.

If you sternly oppose abortion, you'll point to Genesis 9:6. This verse is more of a stretch, but by Talmudic standards, it works. It reads: "He who sheds the blood of man through man [that is, through a human court of law], shall his blood be shed." In Biblical Hebrew, "through" can also be "in," so one Roman-era rabbi who was probably disgusted by his country's occupiers' practice of experimenting on fetuses re-interpreted the phrase as saying, "He who sheds the blood of man in man [that is, kills a fetus], shall his blood be shed." That made abortion a capital crime, but for reasons too complicated to get into here, one whose penalty can only be imposed by God, not man. (Since the rabbis all but abolished the death penalty by making it impossible to enact, saying a crime was capital didn't have much effect anyway.)

The one thing everybody agrees about, whether abortion resembles murder or not, is that in the case of a threat to the mother's life, Jewish law requires you to save her rather than the fetus. (Catholics save the fetus, on the grounds that the mother bas been baptized and will go to heaven, whereas the fetus has not and is condemned to limbo, if not to hell. Jews don't worry as much about the afterlife.) Opinions diverge again, however, over how elastic to make this notion of threat. Rabbis who think abortion is like murder believe that only imminent physical or psychological danger--such as a suicide threat accompanied by clear signs of psychosis and a psychiatrist's evaluation--constitute sufficient grounds for an abortion, because then you can argue that the woman does it in self-defense. Rabbis who think abortion is like cutting off a leg will permit abortion in cases of less physical threat to the woman. When the justification is psychological, they'll accept that mere anguish might be reason enough to warrant the procedure, rather than require her to show that she is insane. (Having been raped might be one such cause for distress; the prospect of raising a seriously deformed child might be another.)

Rabbis also offer a dizzying menu of views about how early or late into a pregnancy the procedure can be performed, ranging from only up to 40 days after conception to up to the beginning of the third term. (If the birthing process seems likely to be fatal for the mother, you can remove the fetus at the very last moment--until the head crowns, at which point the fetus becomes a person with a soul and a full legal identity.) These debates derive from different verses than the ones cited above. . . ."  What Do Orthodox Jews Think About Abortion and Why?

Wherever we fall within the spectrum of views on abortion, it is every individual's right before God and under the Constitution of the United States to freedom of conscience in what is believed and practiced.  The Church of Rome has no right to impose its doctrines and practices on non-Catholics.  No man is entitled to rule over the conscience of another; even Catholics have the right before God to choose.  God endowed man with the capacity and freedom to choose: in defiance of God's principles of governance Rome seeks to control minds and deny the God-endowed freedom of choice. The US Constitution guarantees an individual's freedom of conscience, and also choice of conduct within legitimate boundaries: the Roman Catholic hierarchy is destroying the individual's freedom of choice and conduct with accelerating urgency.  In the enforcement of Rome's dogmas by legislation and judicial action in the United States, the form of the Image to the Beast is clearly seen.

THE OFFICIAL SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST POSITION

It is refreshing to find that on the issue of abortion the Seventh-day Adventist Church is in conflict with its own "back to Rome" policy, and is prepared to incur the wrath of the anti-abortion forces in the USA - Seventh-Day Adventists and abortion.  The reason is obscure.  The official Guidelines on Abortion neither addresses the crucial question of when life begins, nor the biblical definition of a "living soul."  This avoids a direct confrontation with the Roman Catholic Church; but it may well be that repudiation of the "immortality of the soul" is a root cause of the SDA Church's position, or at least strongly influences it.

There is more than adequate compensation for what is lacking in the Seventh-day Adventist Church's defence of its position on abortion in the strong advocacy of ministers such as Kevin Paulson - SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS AND THE ABORTION QUESTION: WHERE SHOULD WE STAND?  (Cf.  Coercion or Conversion.)

NPR's All Things Considered on Thursday, December 3, 2009, headlined one of the segments "On Social Issues, Bishops Flex Political Muscle."  Host Melissa Block opened with the following statement:

The legacy of Pope John Paul II is playing out in America politics: A generation of American Catholic bishops, selected by Pope John Paul, are very conservative on social issues and vocal about their views.

And they've been increasingly vocal recently, as NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty then stated as follows:

The night before the House of Representatives voted on health care reform last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi received some visitors. One was Congressman Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, who wanted to amend the House bill to permanently strip federal funding for abortion. He brought with him two representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said they would not support any bill without that amendment. . . .

The meeting was a turning point. Pelosi allowed a vote on the amendment the next day and it passed.

Democrat Rosa DeLauro, a pro-choice Catholic, says the bishops are elevating abortion over every other issue, and they're rejecting the tradition established by John F. Kennedy that Catholic politicians vote according to their conscience, not the dictates of Rome.  (Emphasis added)

The voice of Representative Rosa Delauro (Democrat, Connecticut) followed:

The activity that the Catholic bishops have engaged in implies that the church will determine and dictate public policy.  (Emphasis added)

Hagerty then interjected:

But John Myers, the archbishop of New Jersey, says bishops have every right to lobby Congress and influence laws.

Next came the voice of Archbishop John Myers (Newark, New Jersey) stating:

I don't think it was improper because what we talked about were moral issues. And if anyone has the responsibility and the right to speak out on moral issues, it's religious leaders.  (Emphasis added)

There was in fact not only intervention on Capitol Hill.  In a report on November 11, 2009, titled THE INFLUENCE GAME: Bishops shape health care bill, Julie Hirschfeld Davis wrote:

Catholic bishops have emerged as a formidable force in the health care overhaul fight, using their clout with millions of Catholics and working behind the scenes in Congress to get strong abortion restrictions into the House bill.

They don't spend a dime on what is legally defined as lobbying, but lawmakers and insiders recognize that the bishops' voices matter — and they move votes. Representatives for the bishops were in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Capitol suite negotiating with top officials last Friday evening as they reached final terms of the agreement. Earlier in the day, Pelosi, a Catholic and an abortion rights supporter, had been on the phone to Rome with Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Washington's former archbishop, on the subject.  (Emphasis added)

One further point needs to be noted in this preliminary presentation of this subject.  Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., a leading abortion foe was the front architect of the health measure's restrictions; however, behind him was the power of the Protestant Religious Right.  On November 10, 2009, an article in Salon.com by Jeff Sharlet titled The Democrats' new "Family" Values described the involvement of Representative Joe Pitts (Republican, Pennsylvania) as follows:

But if Stupak, a former state trooper from Michigan, provided the muscle, his partner, Joe Pitts -- a Pennsylvania Republican with decades in the trenches of the antiabortion battle -- may have brought the brains, and more, a new Christian right coalition custom tailored for the Democratic Party's growing religious conservatism. Stupak is Roman Catholic; Pitts is evangelical. Both are members of the predominantly evangelical organization called the Family; Stupak lives in its C Street house. Together, they're poster boys for the evangelical/conservative Catholic alliance known as "co-belligerency," a culture war strategy designed to take territory within the Democratic Party as well the GOP.  (Emphasis added)

TWISTED PRIORITIES ON LIFE:
Nun Excommunicated For Allowing Abortion