Life, Yes; but Is It Yet Human Life? : Abortion: This is no issue for legislators who undercut the well-being of women and children already alive.

AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS ON ABORTION * William Sloane Coffin and Thomas J. Gumbleton are both active in disarmament and social justice organizations and are friends. But they disagree, as do their respective organizations, on the right to abortion. In these public letters they discuss their views. Coffin, a United Church of Christ clergyman, is president of Sane/Freeze Campaign for Global Security, based in Washington. Gumbleton, a Roman Catholic bishop in Detroit, is president of Pax Christi U.S.A., the National Catholic Peace Movement, based in Erie, Pa.

Dear Tom,

Our two organizations have long collaborated closely even as you and I have personally. Our members see eye-to-eye on the urgent need for disarmament, greater economic justice and a life style more considerate of the environment. However, on abortion they disagree.

I worry about this threat to our warm relations. It is a continuing one, for abortion will be hotly debated in legislative and electoral battles across the land for some time to come.

So, not as a peace organization president but as friend to friend I’m writing in the hope that you and I might find language in common to help people think more clearly, and that we might even reach agreement on the government’s proper role in this matter.

Regarding abortion, the crucial question for many religious people is, “At what point, if at any, can unborn life be called human?” Complicating the answer is the fact that science can’t provide it. Science can tell us when a heart starts beating, as it can when a brain has stopped functioning. But science cannot tell us when it is morally right to cease all artificial supports for a dying person, because science is not in a position to declare, “This is no longer a human being.” It is the business of science to provide the facts of natural life, not the values of human life. In other words, when human life ends and when human life begins are moral judgments, not medical ones. So far, I think we are in agreement.

It goes without saying that a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus is human in origin and human in destiny. But is that enough to warrant calling a fertilized egg--as did a recent Missouri law--a human being with “all the rights, privileges and immunities available to persons, citizens, and residents of this state?” Doesn’t the traditional Roman Catholic developmental view of life make as much sense as the recent one that seeks to erase all distinctions between potential life and actual life? And, in fact, don’t we all act as if there were a difference between potential and actual life. When a fetus aborts spontaneously, we grieve for the parents, hardly at all for the life no one has seen. We don’t have funerals for unborn children. No one urges the same punishment for a mother who aborts a fetus as for one who murders her child. And no one, to my knowledge, has applied for Social Security nine months before his or her 62nd birthday!

In the absence of agreement on when human life begins, we have to agree to disagree--but hopefully with more clarity than is usual, and in a less judgmental fashion, so that disagreements don’t shade off into distrust.

I also hope that there might be greater consensus among us when we consider the advisability of criminalizing abortion. To call a crime something a great many people don’t even consider a sin is, to say the least, problematic. As a canon lawyer, you know that one of the criteria for a good law is its enforceability; that is why precisely, after they proved unenforceable, that the Prohibition laws of the 1920s were finally repealed in 1934.

Today a large number of Roman Catholics feel, as do many of the rest of us, that no one has a ghost of a chance of enforcing anti-abortion laws. Many have reluctantly reached Gov. Mario Cuomo’s conclusion, that abortion should be removed from the field of legislation. To pass laws that would significantly lower only the number of legal abortions but not the number of abortions themselves--such an action might be emotionally satisfying but hardly morally so. These thoughtful religious people are, in effect, anti-abortion and pro-choice.

While longing for unity on this position, I recognize that all will not be of one mind regarding the inadvisability of criminalizing abortion. If what separates us is only a judgment call, I have no fears for our future unity on the issues that unite us. And you know my admiration for the way all members of Pax Christi embrace the “seamless garment” doctrine, which seeks to affirm and protect life both within the womb and without. The Reagan Administration discredited the pro-life movement by first preaching the sanctity of even unwanted pregnancies, and then attacking nutrition programs for pregnant mothers, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps. Ironically, today, those states most inclined to criminalize abortion are those with the worst records for public health care, education and civil-rights enforcement.

Finally, I’m confident that I speak for both of us when I say that the chief enemy to life, inside or outside the womb, continues to be the arms race, which, despite the winding down of the Cold War, continues almost unabated. Because of the resources it saps, millions have died who could have lived, and the 50,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the superpowers, have, of course, the capacity to abort the entire human race.

As always, God bless you, dear Tom. I’d love to hear from you.