A difficult day, a forever flawed decision

Hey folks. It’s been a busy week. We had the Superbowl on Sunday, the Iowa Primary on Monday, the State of the Union on Tuesday and the impeachment vote on Wednesday. It’s really too much material to work with, so instead, I would like to address something that our friend Dick Trail addressed in these pages on Tuesday.

Abortion is hard to write about. There is nothing pleasant about the topic. It is a painful, difficult thing to discuss, yet Mr. Trail tackled it and, agree or disagree, let’s show him respect for having the courage to do so. It’s easier to talk about flying, or farming, or politics or a variety of other things, but he stuck his neck out. His courage, combined with a snippet in the State of the Union speech have encouraged me to do the same. Here goes….

I am not the most religious guy you will ever meet. I have great respect for religion; the history and the buildings, and the political influence written into every line of the eucharist. I am also privileged to have some religious education, and I am, by any measure a cultural Christian. I would not call myself a practicing Christian, but I am a cultural Christian. My friends in the evangelical-charismatic tradition do not recognize that such an animal exists, but that’s how I define myself. If we can define our own gender these days, then by golly, I’m a cultural Christian.

While I am “pro-life” at heart, I separated with the pro-life movement many, many years ago for a variety of reasons. First, I am a product of the time when there was a tumultuous controversy surrounding sex education. Prior to cable TV, the Internet and oh, did I mention the Superbowl?,

At the time, there was a popular view that teaching kids about sex would inspire them to have sex. It was a hot topic of debate, and ironically enough, the people who led the charge were the same people who opposed abortion. It occurred to me then, as it does today, that one cannot be simultaneously against the prevention of unintended pregnancies and against abortion. Yes, I understand that some belief systems favor abstinence while others favor contraception. I get it. All are welcomed to make their respective arguments, but only someone intoxicated by a Victorian, prudish agnst would be against abortion, but not be dedicated to the prevention of unintended pregnancies. It didn’t make sense to me then, nor does it today.

That was my experience in elementary and Junior High School. We’re talking 1970s here. As I grew into my later high school and college years, I came in contact with young women who had unintentionally become pregnant and had chosen abortions. They were traumatized and scarred for life. They walked down the street taking notice of children who were one-year-old, two-years-old and so on, wondering “what if?” They had made the difficult decision out of shame, guilt, or too often (and this is the part that saddens me the most) out of fear of their own fathers.

When the pro-life movement circulates tales of the casual, carefree abortion, I think of these women, and it further separates me from the movement. There are no recreational abortions. They are all difficult days in someone’s life.

Later in life, I began to absorb the historical perspective. Have you ever taken a walk around a 19th-century cemetery and observed the number of mother’s with dates on tombstones that match those of their infants? My goodness. Not only were women often kept in the dark as to what actually caused pregnancy, but it was too often a life-or-death business. Anyone who has had to fork over the lion’s share of their paycheck to a daycare provider knows that without control over one’s reproductive life, there is little control over one’s life in general. Most women of the nineteenth century and those before lived with that reality.

For those reasons, I have to come to the inescapable conclusion that in the first half of the twentieth century, I probably would have been a pro-choice guy. I don’t consider myself as such now, but I want to make it very clear that I appreciate how people can arrive at that conclusion. .

But here, as Paul Harvey would have said, is the rest of the story. As I mentioned earlier, I am not the most religious guy in town, and as such, I am free to tackle the topic of viability. Just as I offended my fundamentalist friends earlier, my Catholic friends are equally horrified at the suggestion of viability, but hang on. There’s good news at the end of this….

In my view, Roe v. Wade will forever be flawed because it is an attempt to provide a legal answer to a moral question. That can’t have a happy ending.

If you are, like me, untethered by religious conviction and can allow yourself to accept viability as a legal solution, yet you still believe that life begins at conception, the wind is at your back. In Mr. Trump’s speech, I don’t believe it is an accident that he recognized a child who survived after being born prematurely at only 21 weeks. This is obviously not an ideal situation, but it reinforces my belief that medical science is pushing the date of viability back closer to conception every day.

If we are looking for a moral solution, let’s focus on preventing unwanted pregnancies, via abstinence or contraception or whatever your beliefs dictate. A woman’s control over her reproductive life is control over her life, and I am hesitant to stand in the way of that. Nor do I wish any woman to have to walk down the street, looking at children and doing the math; feeling the shame and the guilt associated with abortion.

As for the legal solution, let’s remember that we are dealing with a constitutional right of a minor. I, as a citizen and a voter, can’t support infant car seat laws and late-term abortion at the same time. It doesn’t add up. Won’t happen.

I can, however, hold my nose and tie Roe v. Wade to viability, because I know that in the long term, the date of viability is going to move back every year, until someday in the future, it meets the demand for in-vitro transplants and who knows what other technologies might arrive.