Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 11, 1990                   TAG: 9007110400
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: EUGENE McCARTHY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE PRESS IS A KEY PLAYER IN ABORTION DEBATE

The anti-abortionists can find ready and strong texts to support their position in the Old Testament, in the Oath of Hippocrates, in the early texts of the Apostolic Age, and in those of the later church fathers. Tertullian, in the trird century, declared that the embryo becomes a soul "the moment it becomes whole." He did not say just when the embryo becomes a whole.

A congressional subcommittee has gone beyond Tertullian and medieval theologians in declaring that human life in the embryo begins at the moment of conception. A proposed constitutional amendment against abortion may affirm what theologians have failed to affirm, thus taking into the range of civil power what has historically been reserved to the religious estate.

Abortion rights advocates can point out that the practice of abortion has continued over the centuries despite civil and religious disapproval and condemnation, and that there has been no reported decline in the numbers performed during the Reagan and Bush administrations despite their statements and measures against abortions.

They can also point out that, over the centuries, philosophers, theologians and physiologists have disagreed as to when the fetus becomes viable.

Oswald Spengler concludes in his historical study, "Decline of the West," that no more than two estates are ever the real sources of power in a civilization. Situations in which a third estate, such as the bourgeoisie, is identified, he asserts, are either temporary or merely apparent. The two enduring estates he defines are, first, the religious and, second, the civil.

If the religious estate fails to exercise its powers or to hold onto them, those powers, Spengler notes, will be assumed by a transitional estate or by the civil power. The converse, he says, is true if the civil estate neglects its powers or abandons them.

In our time, the religious estate has been losing its powers in Western culture. (This is not true in Islamic countries.) Some of those powers have been picked up by the state, and some by the press - print and electronic - which is well on its way to becoming a secular substitute for the first estate, religion.

Today, infallibility is rarely claimed by the church. The press, however, has moved inexorably to speak authoritatively on almost any subject.

The press has taken upon itself the administration of the secular equivalents of "beatification" and "canonization," and also of "condemnation" if not "excommunication." In the name of protecting its sources, the press exercises, or claims the right to exercise, a version of the "seal of the confessional." Sometimes, by suppressing stories involving newspaper persons, it also protects the public from being scandalized.

In his threat to excommunicate public officials who do not support the church's position on abortion, Cardinal John O'Connor is reclaiming from the press and reviving, at least in its political application, a power the religious estate once used against monarchs, and lesser civil authorities, with mixed success.

The competition between the cardinal and the politicians is traditional. It may also demonstrate that the only safe position for a politician is to assert that he has, as theologian William Miller said of President Eisenhower (and which might have been said of President Reagan), "a very vague religion very strongly held to" - or a strong religion vaguely held to.