Chapter
38
I
Cause a Near Riot in Synod
A funny thing happened just before the
1988 Diocesan Synod.
I was tending the roses in the big
circular rose bed I had made at the Lang Lang Rectory. I don’t
think I was thinking anything of note. Suddenly I was sure God was
telling me he wanted to put a motion to synod. That in itself was a
worry. But the content was worse. He wanted me to put a motion saying
that “abortion on demand” which was the catch-cry of the day was
wrong. I had not previously even thought of activism on this issue. I
was not sanguine of success. But I was obedient and I sent in the
motion.
When the time came to speak to my
motion I was rather nervous. I started my speech. I never got to
finish it I was howled down by shouts of rage and fury. How dare I
question “a woman’s right to abortion”! As I recall Gideon got
a similar response when he pulled down the altar to Baal in his home
town!
The motion never went to a vote. The
bishop suggested Synod refer the matter to the Social
Responsibilities Committee for a report to the next Synod. I was
seconded to the Committee.
The Chairman of the committee was a
very deft politician and knew how to manipulate a committee. He made
it quite clear at the first meeting that the final report would be
unashamedly pro-abortion. But we went through the motions of looking
into the topic. Several reports from other Anglican dioceses were
circulated. Apart from the Sydney diocese one (which incidentally was
well and intelligently written) they were all pro-abortion and all
complete rubbish.
These Anglican reports got to me in a
big way. They were all complete balderdash! Worse, they were smugly
self satisfied with woolly thinking and sheer obstinate ignorance.
I had been going back to the Monash
University library to read up on this topic. Monash was the home of
professor Peter Singer and Helga Khuse who were noted pro-abortion
and pro-euthanasia campaigners, so the library was well stocked with
pro-abortion writings. But at least these writers had thought about
the issue. I might think they were wrong, but I would not accuse them
of being ignorant.
By contrast the
Anglican papers were so poorly thought out and so lacking any attempt
to find out what the argument was about that they would have got an
instant fail as a first year essay! These Anglican writers could and
should be accused of “pig ignorance”!
I thought: “This is not good enough!
The church should have something to say on moral questions affecting
large proportions of the population! The church should have people
who have at least understood what secular moralists on both sides
were saying. The church should not be smugly self satisfied at
putting out drivel that a first year student would be embarrassed to
write!” I was angry!
I spent more time in the Monash
library. Yes they did have books on both sides of the question, but
more importantly for me they had statistics! A lot of the
pro-abortion arguments had been special pleading “Oh the terrible
plight of the woman pregnant due to rape” …. Well how often does
that happen? Should that be what the rules are based on, or should it
just be an “exceptional circumstance” in which the rule is
waived? Or again “Oh, the mothers who die because they are not
allowed an abortion by heard hearted (male) priests”. Well that
would be indeed terrible, but just what proportion of abortions
currently are on the grounds of medical necessity to save the mothers
life? Does anyone know?
There is an old adage “Hard cases
make bad laws”. Was this happening on this issue, or were these
“hard cases” the norm. Untill then writers world wide didn’t
really know because there were just no reliable statistics. I found
they did exist, and that they existed in Australia!
South Australia had made abortion
legal, but they had required doctors to submit certain details for
statistical analysis. This had been done over a period of I think
about ten years and the statistics were analysed and published by the
government medical officers involved. The results were stunning. In
Australia at the most generous assessment 95% of abortions were
carried out not for any of the “hard case” reasons given by
lobbyists, but because it was economically or socially inconvenient
for the mother to give birth to a live baby.
I also found that
even communist governments were concerned at rising abortion rates –
not out of any moral qualms but just as a women’s health issue, and
researchers had been looking at changes needed to be made in working
and domestic conditions to reduce the abortion rate. Given
this I found the Anglican Church’s fanatical pro-abortion stance
puzzling. They were not truly helping women by their dogmatic stance.
I am jumping forward a bit but I
prepared a “dissenting report” which detailed the results of my
research, I sent a copy to the bishop but I heard no more. Its style
is much more analytical and reflective the style of the research
papers I had been reading at that time than the later one which I
wrote while studying moral philosophy at Melbourne University, but
you can download both from www.Anglicanfuture.org
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