By Gretchen Keiser

What do peace and abortion have to do with each other? Isn't one the issue of the political left and the other the unifying cause that rallies people on the right? If you're against nuclear arms and nuclear power, aren't you a long-haired, bearded, perhaps aging hippie? And if you're against abortion aren't you a part of the "moral majority" who only care about the unborn and not the born?

Those stereotypes started a talk recently at St. Anthony's Church given by Juli Loesch, a young Catholic laywoman who is coordinator of a fledgling organization made up of people defying those pigeonholes. Pro-lifers for Survival began about two and a half years ago and is described by Ms. Loesch as a network of people who oppose both abortion and nuclear arms. Like the organization she coordinates, Ms. Loesch doesn't fit precisely any of the descriptions that might be used to draw a picture of her. She says that she considers herself a feminist, is a veteran of anti-war and civil rights activism and that she came to be opposed to abortion as she spoke against the dangers of nuclear weapons and became more and more aware of the particular danger of radiation to the unborn child growing in a mother's womb.

Her analysis of the Supreme Court decision of 1973 which legalized abortion is that in its failure to define what a human being is, the nation's highest court failed to do what a child could do -- recognize the humanity of the fetus. In its failure "I think the Supreme Court taught people murder," she said.

Yet Ms. Loesch, who came to Georgia as part of a trip through four Southern states (by bus) speaking about Pro-lifers for Survival, said that as an activist who had been involved for many years with anti-war, pro-civil rights causes she only gradually came to acknowledge the wrongness of abortion. "I had feelings about abortion, but I had buried those feelings," she told a gathering of about 20 people who heard her speak Veterans Day night at St. Anthony's.

Her feeling emerged as she traveled to people's homes talking about the dangers of nuclear arms and, specifically, what physical damage radiation can do. While there are effects on adults from exposure to radioactive poisons, the effects on the developing child are much greater and more devastating, she said. Because cells are dividing while the child is growing in the womb, and because each cell division leads to the further development of limbs and organs, the "unborn child between conception and birth is far, far, far more susceptible to sub-cellular violence" than adults, Ms. Loesch said. This susceptibility is the reason why during the Three-Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania, which did not pose a threat to the general population, pregnant women from six counties were evacuated, to be spared the presence of radioactive iodine which could have been devastating to the babies they were carrying.

What July Loesch was trying to communicate to her audience was that, through nuclear arms and radiation, violence would reach new dimensions -- "stabbing the children, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren" of the present generation through genetic damage. Even if this generation fails to resolve its difference peaceably, she says, "those human lives should be immune from our destruction."

Perhaps inevitably, at one of her talks, a pro-life person in the audience asked her about her stand on abortion. And she began to move toward a recognition that if she was opposed to damage to the unborn child from one source, she was being called to oppose the killing of the child. Gradually, Ms. Loesch said, she became s "pro-lifer for survival" who opposed both nuclear arms and abortion. She describes the transition as a "healing" which brought to the surface the doubts about abortion that she had been pushing back at an earlier time in her life. And she began to look for and find other people who were seeking a unified stance on life that did not shut them off in the "left" or "right" stereotypes.

In her stories of crossing those political boundary lines, it is clear that it has been lonely and painful at times. On the positive side, Pax Christi USA, the Catholic peace organization, unanimously passed a resolution she drafted two years ago that opposed abortion. And, Ms. Loesch noted, Sojourners, primarily a Protestant peace group, devoted a recent issue of their magazine to the question of being "pro-life." However, she said, the reaction from the "secular, white left" to the organization's anti-abortion stance "ranges from cool to frigid."

On the other side, "the happy surprise of my life has been how receptive mainline right-to-life people have been" to information about the anti-nuclear cause, Ms. Loesch said. Pro-lifers for Survival have been invited to set up informational tables and hand out leaflets at right-to-life conventions.

The organization has grown in the last two years to 1,500 dues-paying members who subscribe to a newsletter called P. S. and take part in educational activities and other works. The organization has developed a library of articles, reprints, bumper stickers and audio-visual material supporting pro-life and anti-nuclear stands.

In an article she wrote for Sign magazine, Ms. Loesch described the connection she sees: "It seems to me there is a cross. Abortion is its vertical upright beam: so private, so lonely, one by one, one minus one -- the violence goes straight up and down and stabs deep like a stake in the heart."

"And the horizontal bar of this cross is nuclear madness: the global, the en masse -- a violence that races straight out from the extended arms, circles and murders the whole round earth."

(For more information on Pro-lifers for Survival, write to the organization, 345 E. Ninth Street, Erie, PA, 16503)