Abortion: A Moral Choice

Abstract

among us. Moreover, we look especially to women's lives for signs of God's work in the world. We look primarily to women as that massive group of human beings who historically have been overlooked in the building of theological and moral systems. We work on the assumption shared by other liberation theologians in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and here in North America, that good theology and good morality go hand in hand, and that both are rooted in the experiences of those persons in society who historically have not been accorded the dignity or the rights to live as subjects of their own lives. What distinguishes feminist liberation theologians from other liberation theologians is the extent of our commitment to the well-being of women as those who, in the vast majority of cultures, nations, religions, and classes of the world, have been posited near the bottom of the hierarchy of social, economic, and political control. Feminist liberation theologians are aware, moreover, of the extent to which the control of women's lives has been exercised in a fundamental way by the control of women's procreative options and choices. This, then, is the backdrop from a feminist liberation perspective of developing a moral perspective on abortion. Although I am not Roman Catholic, my own church tradition, Anglicanism, shares with the Church of Rome a basic catholic respect for the sacramentality of life in the world. As a child I learned that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. This is, I think, a simple and uncluttered way of suggesting that a sacrament is a sign that the Holy One is at work here and now. To view the world through a sacramental lens is to see that the seeds of goodness and truth and beauty, even as we gather here, are being sown; and to recognize that the presence of God at work may be as simple, quite literally, as looking carefully at the lives and choices, work and play, difficulties and commitments of our sisters, brothers, and selves. The question of the morality of abortion is steeped in the catholic sacramental fabric of life at once human and divine, created and creative, sometimes simple, sometimes complex. Like all moral matters-those in which human decision may play a decisive and critical role for better or for worse-abortion is, at the level of personal decision, embedded in a matrix of ambiguity and complexity.