The Issue That Will Not Go Away

Years ago, on a flight to Chicago to visit an old friend, I found myself seated next to a young woman wearing a t-shirt identifying herself as a proud member of the pro-choice generation. “How lucky for you,” I wanted to tell her, “your mother wasn’t a member.” But I said nothing, a moment of cowardice I now regret. Still, what good would it have done launching that particular warhead? What she probably needed was counseling, which I was scarcely qualified to give. And prayer, which I’ve sent her way ever since.

I thought of her the other night while watching a segment or two of the recent “Unite for America” livestream show put on by Oprah Winfrey for Vice President Harris. Described as a “star-studded gala,” the show was aimed at boosting voter enthusiasm for Harris’ campaign in Michigan, one of those battleground states she has got to win. Celebrities like Chris Rock and Ben Stiller were there, along with virtual visits from Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, among others. Perhaps even Lady Macbeth showed up, I don’t know. But I never got a ticket, although Michigan is only four hours away by car.

What put me in mind of my seatmate on that long-ago flight was the fact that Kamala Harris, for all the word salads she throws together on issues like the border, crime, and inflation, is perfectly clear on the issue of abortion. Like every pro-choice person I’ve ever met, she remains razor-focused on the absolute right of a woman to do whatever she wants with her own body. “My body, my choice!” is the great mantra of the movement—for which she has, for the past four years, been chief point person in the Biden White House. It is just plain “immoral,” she robotically repeats, for anyone to come between a woman and any decision affecting her own body. Not even the child she carries in her womb may intrude upon that sacred space.     

It is astonishing to me that even after fifty years of hearing the same tired old shibboleth, the pro-choice crowd continues to trot it out as if it were a thunderbolt fallen from the sky. To them, the argument is as fresh and delicious as this morning’s first cup from Starbucks. 

They all seem to get away with it, too. I mean, were viewers treated to a single dissenting voice the other night from any of the media outlets covering the event? There was not even the faintest hint of a question from anyone that there might actually be another person to consider in the equation. Total autonomy for me athwart tyranny from thee. And if you object, well, then you’ve thrown in your lot with the tyrants.  

Oprah was surely not going to object. Although she didn’t seem to mind nudging the vice president on other issues, like the border, about which Harris has been infuriatingly unforthcoming. But on the matter of abortion, and a woman’s absolute right to choose at any time to terminate her child’s life, not a peep from anyone. Even FOX seems averse to bringing it up. No wonder Kamala has so little to fear from challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. Which leaves open the question whether the majority of voters come November will also give her a pass.   

And yet the arguments in favor of killing the unborn remain as specious today as when I first heard them a half-century ago. And no less pernicious. Does it ever occur to anyone that it is the same argument advanced by Herr Hitler and his Nazi thugs pursuant to the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem? Or slaveowners and their Democratic apologists on the eve of America’s Civil War? Are the outcomes any different when doctors and nurses in all those Planned Parenthood clinics across the land set about solving the problem of unwanted children? Just liquidate as many as you need to, using the most efficient and cost-effective means to do so, including (where possible) tax dollars to help pay for it. The arguments in favor of killing the unborn remain as specious today as when I first heard them a half-century ago. And no less pernicious. Tweet This

Such is the abortion regime across America. And until we decide to put an end to it, we remain complicit in allowing it to continue. If killing babies is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If we permit the killing of some for the convenience of others, we can kill anyone for any reason. The last time I checked, the Fifth Commandment was still not divisible; it does not make x number of exceptions in order to accommodate the demands of some at the expense of others. It is a fixed and unalterable truth, which no one has the right to set aside. Not if they wish to remain civilized.  

Yes, but what happens when people stop being civilized? How, then, does one arrest the descent into barbarism when all the standards for protecting the most innocent and vulnerable among us have ceased to apply? If all the guardrails come down, what will keep the strong from preying upon the weak? And it does not finally matter which victim you have in mind—whether an enslaved black picking cotton on a plantation in the prewar South; or a Jew awaiting extermination in a German concentration camp; or an unborn child scheduled for execution in an abortion clinic. In each case, it is the same homicidal impulse, the same refusal of life at stake. Someone is no longer perceived as precious and irreplaceable; they are seen, instead, as a stranger—an enemy—whom we are at liberty to kill.  

How does one go about persuading such people to think differently about life? To see, for instance, the child in the womb as a person, as someone no less deserving of dignity and right than anyone else? “If a certain thing does not interest me,” writes Luigi Giussani, “then I do not look at it; if I do not look at it then I cannot know it. I need to give my attention to it.” In a word, I must truly desire to know who this other is and thus go out of myself in order to know—and, yes, to love—this other.

“This then is the moral rule,” he concludes: “Love the truth of the other more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it. More concisely, one could say: Love the truth more than yourself.”

Alas, this is the language of metanoia, of conversion, to which politics can make only the most marginal contribution. But it must be made all the same. But only if it is combined with, harnessed to, the work of prayer. Between now and November, we’ve certainly got our work cut out for us.

[Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Flikr)]