This commentary is by Jeffrey Reel of Hartland, a writer and lecturer. A collection of his essays is titled “Uncommon Sense: The War on Hunger and Other Myths.”
“Pro-Life!” “Pro-Choice!” “Right to Life!” “Freedom of Choice!” One can almost hear the Liberty Bell swinging in the background.
These are words that go straight to the American heart — as they are designed to. The clarion calls of democracy. But using them in this fashion is dishonest because they represent little more than the banners of enemy camps.
Anyone jumping exclusively on one of two bandwagons has abandoned the better part of themselves. And the dramatic swing to the right among Supreme Court justices will result in tossing their robes over past precedent for future rulings on the subject.
One truth that we should keep in mind when discussing our differences over abortion: No one favors abortion. It is no young woman’s dream to experience one, nothing she aspires to.
But one wouldn’t know that from the way the conversation is framed. On one side of the issue stands the right-to-life movement: defenders of the sanctity of life and who display a truly boundless compassion and protective nature toward the unborn, coupled with an emotional violence leveled against many prospective mothers that borders on the physical — sometimes spilling over into it — and with an overall disregard, at times contempt, toward a class of women and families who do not possess the financial, emotional and educational wherewithal to adequately support life, much less nurture it and bring it to full bloom.
By slashing SNAP benefits, prenatal care and nutrition programs, and other social support programs to aid those struggling just to get by in today’s stalled economy, we deliberately make it more difficult for prospective mothers to choose birth over abortion.
Those critical of abortions speak of the sanctity of “life,” but nowhere in their vocabulary do I hear reference to the quality of that life. It seems inconsequential. “Just get them out of the womb, and then our work (and our concern) is done.” And God protect those same innocents who grow up to be gay or lesbian, because those same people insisting on their right to exist will make them wish they’d never been born.
On the other side of the issue stands the pro-choice movement: people who possess a strong instinct to protect a woman’s right to control her own body, and a compassion toward those women and families who are not financially able to support another mouth (they can be found at the frontlines of efforts to redress such inequality), as well as concern for the mother and fetus when pregnancy imposes a physical danger for one or both, and those impregnated as a result of rape and incest — but at times coupled with an overall disregard toward the fetus that can border on negligence.
Proponents of abortion relegate “consciousness” in the womb to simply one of “viability.” And, sadly, many otherwise enlightened and educated people shy away from discussing, and sharing enthusiasm in, the rapid advances in our understanding of fetal development and the profound and vastly underestimated level of consciousness experienced in the womb, even early on in the pregnancy. It is as if they feel they would be “giving ground.”
Each side of the abortion issue is the perfect complement of the other, each being woefully deficient in acknowledging what the other has to offer. Each side represents, if you will, opposite halves of a broken heart for a problem that will require wholehearted effort to resolve.
We will never find common ground as long as the adversarial posturing continues, and while both parties fail to acknowledge their own human frailties and shortcomings. We need to delve deeper into our conscience in order to maneuver around the minefields of deception we have laid for ourselves and each other. Each side of the abortion issue complements the other.
Today, the conscience challenges us on the issues of abortion, contraception, test tube babies (a recent advance in science, but which already seems outdated when measured against the possibilities of cloning and the development of designer genes) to the equally intense debate over the use of euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, and questions surrounding the dignity of dying and our attempts to control mortality.
The two most emotionally explosive issues today involve if, and by what means, we should bring a child into this world, and under which conditions we should leave it. The first stirrings of life and the last.
This is because we are asking questions concerning the significance of life itself, and it is inevitable that people who wish to live in a free society must face these questions head on, but not in the adversarial manner to which we’ve been conditioned. In this regard, we are all aiding and abetting something that no one claims to want.
As we cut through the rhetoric and make our way past our emotional reflexes, we will discover that the opposing camps have set up their tents on common ground. We all hold similar values when we speak through the language of the heart.
