Sociology and public theology: a case study of pro-choice/ profile common ground - 1998 Presidential Address

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1999 by James R. Kelly

Similarly, a consistent ethic public theology illuminates some of the advances required in moral sophistication and integrity among prochoice supporters. Academic abstractions like "reproductive freedom" don't persuade voters and even welfare women themselves favor prolife sentiment. The term "prochoice" evokes a libertarian vocabulary that further weakens sentiments of human solidarity. Also, in terms of movement honesty prochoice supporters should renounce the polemic that grassroots prolife activists support life only until birth and then lose interest in both child and mother.

For both, common ground and consistency are long-run movement tasks with long-run cultural significance. We will miss their significance if we ahistorically measure a consistent ethic public theology and common ground efforts solely by immediate and measurable impact. Both the consistent ethic and common ground predate Bernardin and have origins in the Vietnam era peace movement. I'll begin with the pre-Bernardin and pacifist origins of the term common ground.

THE GRASSROOTS SOURCES OF A CONSISTENT ETHIC AND COMMON GROUND

On 3 July 1989 in a narrow (5-4) decision the Supreme Court upheld Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which allowed public hospitals in St. Louis to perform abortions only for reasons related to maternal health and required doctors to test for fetal viability after 20 weeks gestation. The long-term Webster significance was not in its details but in the reintroduction of some more democratic, state-level deliberation about abortion regulations. Into this post-Webster period of a more democratized and even more polarized abortion controversy, Andrew Puzder, a prolife lawyer who had helped draft Webster, contributed the unlikely term common ground to abortion discourse.

The day after the Supreme Court upheld Webster, a St. Louis Dispatch reporter challenged Puzder, asking "Is there anything positive about this for anyone?" She anticipated that Webster represented only more dead-end polarization. Puzder accepted her challenge and wrote a 26 December 1989 St. Louis Dispatch op-ed essay he entitled Common ground on abortion. He told his readers that by now it was clear that neither side in the abortion controversy should expect a final victory. Anticipating the Supreme Court's own judgment in its 29 June 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey decision, Puzder was the first prominent right to life activist to publicly acknowledge that there would always be legal abortion in America but that abortion would never be widely accepted, neither politically nor morally, as simply a private medical decision.(23) Puzder importantly added that while neither side could win, neither would abandon their core principles. In abortion politics the word "compromise" might be used by politicians, but never by principled activists in either movement. It was morally and politically significant that Common ground challenged activists precisely in terms of their movement integrities.