Trump and Arizona on Abortion are in the news.
We have become used to hearing from 2024 US presidential candidate Donald Trump the language of denigration, castigation, and polarization. When it comes to the abortion controversy, we hear Trump’s own self-preservation tempered with prevarication. After bragging about stacking the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, now Trump shrinks from supporting a national abortion ban. Leave it up to the states! After all, Trump told supporters on April 8, 2024, our first job is to win the election.
One state, Arizona, then decided to ban all abortions except in those cases where the life of the mother is at stake. This is the decision of the Arizona Supreme Court on April 9, 2024. This decision nullifies a 2022 ruling allowing doctors to provide abortions up to 15 weeks into a pregnancy. The new Supreme Court ruling says Arizona should follow an 1864 law — passed during the Civil War before Arizona became a state and before women gained the right to vote — banning abortions in almost all cases with no exceptions for rape or incest. It makes performing an abortion punishable by two to five years in prison. Now 16 states have near total abortion bans.
Arizona US Senate candidate Kari Lake, according to the Daily Beast, announced: “I am the only woman and mother in this race. I wholeheartedly agree with President Trump—this is a very personal issue that should be determined by each individual state and her people.” In short, Republicans are now hiding behind ambiguity, equivocation, and muddying the water.
By slipping into the shadows of the abortion mayhem, Trump thinks he can garner more votes. Maybe he’s right. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — an Ever Trumper and opponent of abortion — manages to side with Trump, telling reporters “it’s the voters who decide,” not an unelected Supreme Court “decreeing a rule for everyone and disenfranchising the voters,” reports the Daily Beast.
Curiously, this applies to Never Trumper Republicans as well. “It’s actually a savvy take,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House strategic communications director, co-host of ABC’s The View, and contributor to the Daily Beast. “He can claim the conservative mantle that he’s for states’ rights. And he avoids the political liability of calling for 15 weeks, which Republicans see as a betrayal on the life issue and Democrats will frame as a national abortion ban.”
Trump has now been criticized by both right and left: from the right because he didn’t advocate for a national abortion ban, and from the left because he left it to the states. In short, Trump’s procrastination over standardization produces tergiversation (equivocation).
What to do about Trump and Arizona on abortion?
I have been looking at the medium between the two lanes of traffic. Democrats have been highballing reproductive rights in one direction, while in the opposite direction Republicans have been line-hauling a pro-life payload at breakneck speed. By delivering solely on the rights and health of the pregnant woman, Democrats don’t even look in their review mirror at the wellbeing or rights of the unborn child. By loading their trucks solely with protection of the unborn, Republicans ignore risks to the mother even in cases of rape or where health is threatened. It appears that there is nothing left in the boulevard’s medium.
Even though I am no expert on the abortion question, I’ve been driving this turnpike in search of a crossroad. It has seemed to me that if the Democrats could acknowledge the protective dignity of the unborn child and propose an elective abortion ban after a certain date, middle-of-the road Republicans could hitch a ride on the Democratic bus. I have been floating the threshold at 20 to 24 weeks after conception, prior to which elective abortion would be permitted. After this threshold is crossed, then late term abortions would be proscribed except when necessary to protect the mother’s health. Currently, only 1% of abortions fit the late term category.
What Trump has just done, sort of, is claim the turnpike medium for himself. Did he beat Biden and Harris to it?
Karen Lebacqz’s Challenge to Trump and Arizona on Abortion
Recall in a recent post, Karen Lebacqz’s Christian Viewpoint on Abortion, she warned me: don’t let the Vatican set the agenda! (Vatican, 1974). Don’t try marking a threshold within pregnancy with a red line! No matter where you draw this line, she argues, an abortion always takes the life of a human person-to-be. The proper way to formulate the issue, Lebacqz contends, is to ask when taking the life of the unborn child is justifiable. And it is justifiable in the case of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.
What makes her conclusion distinctively Christian, Lebacqz says, is that the decision to abort is carried out within a context of relationships, within the church community supporting the woman making the decision.
Now, as a public theologian I ask this question: how can we move from what Doctor Lebacqz claims is the church’s responsibility to what is the government’s responsibility? Might I still have good reason to appeal to a threshold within a pregnancy before which abortion would be legal and after which it would be illegal? Let me try this on for size.
Church and Law
We in the Christian church cannot ask our secular government to carry out the church’s mission for us. Whereas the church can guide itself by compassion, the government can be guided at most by justice. And justice usually begins with the passing of just and life-enhancing laws. What the United States badly needs right now – in addition to a large dose of compassion – is a set of just laws that reduces acrimony and vindictiveness.
Here is our Vice President Kamala Harris, who speaks for the Democratic Party platform.
“The President and I stand with the majority of Americans who believe women should have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and their own lives. We remain committed to defending access to reproductive health care, including medication abortion.”
Harris and other Democrats, I believe, should continue to support access to women’s health-care and to protect reproductive rights. Yet, I ask, could the Democrats add another concern? The concern for the well-being if not the rights of the unborn child? If so, those within the Republican middle who are motivated to protect unborn children might just sit up and listen when a Democrat speaks. President Joe Biden’s commitment to overseeing legislation that would reinstantiate a Roe v. Wade type of law might draw centrist Republican support.
Science and Law
My medical colleagues who have thought a great deal about this would set the threshold at 20 to 24 weeks following conception. At this point the frontal cortex of the fetus’s brain is forming. Harold J. Morowitz and James S. Trefil ask science to help us discern when morally protectable human dignity – what they call humanness — is established.
“There appears to be a well-defined period in the third trimester of pregnancy when the great majority of connections between nerve cells in the cortex are made. It is this period that we propose to identify with what we have called the acquisition of humanness” (Morowitz & Trefil, 1992, p. 106).
The acquisition of the large cortex distinguishes humans from nonhumans. So, might it also distinguish the pre-human from the human? This seems to be the logic of Morowitz and Trefil.
Would a red line at brain development on the cusp of the third trimester provide an exact demarcation between pre-humanity and morally protectable humanness? Alas, not completely. Nature does not draw moral red lines for us. We must bite our lips and make ethical decisions within a messy and unclear set of options. We are condemned to choose. Perhaps this stage at 20 to 24 weeks is simply more supportable than other options.
Might our state legislators justify an appropriate legal formulation that considers both the protection of the unborn child and the pregnant woman’s need for access to health services? Might Vice President Kamala Harris consider such a compromise position that could stop for hitch-hiking thumbs of those Republicans sitting in the highway median?
Conclusion
Trump and Arizona on abortion should provoke a thoughtful response from the public theologian and from all responsible citizens.
Like Lebacqz and my Lutheran colleagues, I begin our search for guiding moral and legal principles within a context where everything is already messy. There is no option to choose what is purely good and avoid any evil fall out. So, we must sin boldly – that is, rely on our own best judgment for the concrete situation (Peters, 2015).
Here I sin boldly by asking the Democratic Party to (1) maintain support for a woman’s access to health care and protect her reproductive rights; (2) add a public concern for the well-being and moral protectability of the unborn child; and (3) encourage state or even federal legislatures to pass creative legislation that that addresses both.
Patheos SR 5105. Abortion 5. Trump and Arizona on Abortion
Patheos PT 112. Abortion Access for Women’s Health. What about the Baby?
Patheos SR 5101. Abortion 1. Are frozen embryos really children?
Patheos SR 5102. Abortion 2. Protecting Embryos in the Vatican
Patheos SR 5103. Abortion 3. Paul Lange on Abortion
Patheos SR 5104. Abortion 4. Karen Lebacqz’s Christian Viewpoint on Abortion
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Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He tackled the implications of genetic innovation for the future of humanity in Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as For the Love of Children: Genetic Technology and the Future of the Family (Westminster/John Knox 1997). His essays are collected in Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003) The Voice of Public Theology (ATF 2023).
See his espionage spy thriller series featuring a woman pastor, Leona Foxx. Try For God and Country. Also, visit Ted Peters’ website, TedsTimelyTake.com.
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References
Lebacqz, K., 1982. Abortion: Getting the Ethics Straight. Logos 3, pp. 47-60.
Morowitz, H. & Trefil, a. J., 1992. The Facts of Life: Science and the Abortion Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peters, T., 2015. Sin Boldly!. Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press.
Vatican, 1974. Declaration on Procured Abortion, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19741118_declaration-abortion_en.html: s.n.
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