“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 meant to. The clarion calls of democracy. But using them in this fashion represents little more than the raising of banners of enemy camps. On thought that needs to be established and acknowledged from the start: 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 languaged.
On one side of the issue stands the Right to Life movement: displaying boundless compassion and a 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 an entire 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.
On the other side stands the Pro-Choice movement: people who possess a strong instinct to protect a woman’s right to determine what she does with her own body, with a compassion toward women and families who are financially and emotionally unable to support a child; concern for women and girls impregnated through rape; and concern for the mother and fetus when pregnancy imposes a physical danger for one or both; but a times coupled with an overall disregard toward the fetus that sometimes borders on negligence – the unintended consequence, and inconvenience, of unprotected sex. 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 deficient in what the other has to offer. Each side represents, if you will, opposite halves of a broken heart for a problem that will require whole-hearted effort to resolve. We will never find common ground as long as the adversarial posturing continues, and all 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.
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 discussion is inevitable because we are asking questions concerning the significance of what it means to be alive, and people living in a free society must face these questions head on, but not in the adversarial manner in which we’ve been conditioned. In that regard, we are all aiding and abetting in something that nobody claims to actually 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 spoken through the language of the heart.