The Right to Life Begins at Birth

On February 5th, Randal Terry will be putting pictures of aborted fetuses, arranged in morbid tableus, on prime-time television.

In his portraits of the unborn, he doesn't discuss the women who bore those fetuses; he does not tell us if the abortions happened because a woman was poor, a woman was raped, a woman already had five children, a woman was not capable of bearing a child, or a woman was dying.  The physical and legal reality that exists between a woman and what's inside her womb, and her family, doesn't matter to him.  Or anyone who is willing to compare a fetus to a Holocaust victim. 

When I was a child in the 1980s my preacher father vehemently defended a woman's right to legal abortion within our church and within our community.  He deeply understood with compassion that women do not always control how they get pregnant, and that they and their families bear the moral choice to continue or, very tragically, end a pregnancy.  He and other ministers exchanged impassioned letters arguing both sides of the issue.  As a child I observed what often gets ignored: those arguing to outlaw abortion rarely considered the liberties or life of a pregnant woman. Their compassion stops outside the womb.

The only choice argument, for the GOP VP candidate

Abortion happens, whether it's legal or not. Do we make it illegal and dangerous, even for victims of rape and incest, or the critically ill, who have the greatest moral imperative to abort? Or do we do everything we can to make unintended pregnancies rare? Period.

Update: I've heard a lot of conservative women on NPR saying how happy they are that Palin is so strongly "pro-life." I wrote this last night:

I don’t know the governor of Alaska, but I find her extreme position on abortion severely lacking in compassion for women who are raped, victims of incest, or who simply don’t want to risk their lives in an unintended pregnancy (esp. if they are already mothers). Both times I was pregnant I was keenly aware that my life could end, especially at my age (600 women in America die from childbirth). And in any case, women always seek abortions whether they are legal or not, so the question is, will we keep women who do it safe in this country; and do we try to make them rare? I’m not so dismissive of more moderate pro-life positions (setting some legal limits for those who are not in the situations I mentioned above), but not that one—and I wonder if she supports the use of contraception (sigh). I guess she’s a libertarian on other issues (just not for all women I guess!).

The Pope Doesn't Anger Me

What if we had no laws for or against abortion? What if we just let women and their doctors negotiate women's health? We have laws now that allow abortion as a right to privacy. If we overturn that law, that doesn't necessarily mean that abortions become illegal--it doesn't shut down Planned Parenthood, but some states would quickly procede to ban abortion, which I think is clearly wrong.

I read some of the Pope's comments about abortion and they struck me in a very spiritual way. I can accept that when a person has an abortion, that person may not be aligned with God at that moment, and that the church can teach that. That perspective is not about controlling women, it's about keeping a human connection with God. He's telling men, too, that you put your money where your mouth is when it comes to God. That's consistent. We are all connected by what we believe and what we do--we share responsibility to some degree. But we do not share our personal, moral and spiritual paths.

So if the pope advocated men (and women) passing laws to BAN abortion, that would be a whole new ballgame. Banning abortion places way too much of the moral weight of a woman's life on someone that isn't related to her.

I wish we lived in a country where we had no laws regarding abortion at all--it's a personal, medical and moral choice.

Bullies and the Culture of Life

It's striking to me that the party of Republicans, that thrives on bullying tactics and ill-defined machismo, barks about a "culture of life." It only counts, they say, when you're talking about unborn human beings. According to most conservatives, once we're out of our mother's wombs, we're on our own in this test called earth--don't ask them for humane respect again until you reach your heavenly father.

So in this great wash of LIFE that actually counts for the rest of us, and them, actually, we encounter a lot of tests that, in my opinion, show whether we are REALLY PRO-LIFE:

Clean air
Clean water
A healthy work and living environment that includes foods without poison and furninishings without chemicals.
Finding God in ourselves and others with traits like dignity, respect, and humane treatment of the insane or criminal.

So I'm appauled that we are using our soldiers to hold up a government that operates like this, until I remember that people in our country also LOVE the death penalty--so it's not like we can expect Republicans to see how brutal and inhuman this whole affair is.