on abortion

Well, that didn't take long.

Hillary Clinton hadn't even finished accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency when I started seeing comments like "Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party kill babies." It put me in mind of a time a few years ago when conservative blogger Matt Walsh wrote a post that began, "Killing babies is wrong. If we can't agree on that, there's no way we'll ever agree on anything." At the time, I had started to write a response, "Women are more than just vehicles for giving birth," or something similar; but I gave up.

For one thing, Walsh's contempt for liberalism and vewpoints other than his own is palpable, and his disregard for women whose situations he will never experience were just too much to deal with. I had other things to worry about. And for another thing, I realized Walsh would never listen to anything I had to say, let alone think about it. His absolute certainty of his own convictions is his greatest strength and his greatest tragedy as a human.

I'll never get through to the Matt Walshes of the blogosphere, but most people I know are at least willing to consider another viewpoint, even if they know going in that they'll disagree at the end. If you're one of those people, and you're inclined to think of abortion as either murder or as killing babies, this post is for you. Please keep in mind that it's coming from someone who considered himself to be pro-life for years.

Yes, I changed my position on abortion, for reasons that I will express here and in later posts.

I'll start by saying that the rather hardline position I've encountered from many people opposd to abortion rights is actually a relatively new and unconservative thing. It was only in the 19th century that Karl Ernst von Baer first observed an ovum through a microscope, and not until 1876 that Oscar Hertwig observed fertilizaton occuring in sea urchins.

Until that point, the notion that life began at conception was an alien concept to human morality. No one knew a woman was pregnant until she had announced it to the community, and she didn't know it herself until had felt the quickening of the fetus in her belly. Women could miss periods for any number of reasons: poor nutrition and health among them.

As a result, for thousands of years in nearly every culture, it was completely acceptable for women to induce miscarriages. The song "Scarborough Fair" existed in part to tell jilted young women how to prepare a douche that would induce one. (You didn't think it was a love song, did you?)

Still, we live in the 21st century, and our knowledge can't help but shape our morality. We know now that biological life begins around the time of conception. Within a few hours of fertilization, the initial zygote begins to divide, it begins to consume and to expend energy, and it begins to grow. There's no denying that the blastula, as it is now known, is biologically alive; but counting this as the start of a person's life is still driven more by convenience than by medical science.

I'm not trying to have it both ways here; let me illustrate.

Let's imagine that a woman -- we'll call her Christie -- is ovulating, and she has sex with her boyfriend or her husband. (We'll assume it's her husband.) Sometime after they have sex, his sperm reach her ovum, and succesfully fertilize it. It's a biological miracle. Christie is pregnant and going to have a baby!

Well, no. Probably not. Of every 100 ova that are successfully fertilized, only about 68 actually implant in the uterus. That means for every 100 women in Christie's situation, 32 of those supposed children don't make it. Some of them disintegrate in their mother's fallopian tubes on their way to the uterus; and others just fail to implant, and are never heard from again. This is a completely natural part of the process.

Four weeks later, only 42 percent of those 100 fertilized ova are still alive, at the stage they are considered embryos. In another four weeks, only 35 have reached the point that they are considered fetuses. The other seven all spontaeously miscarried, and it's entirely possible the woman didn't even notice. By the time all is said and done, only three in 10 actually make it through the entire course of pregnancy and are born. The odds are thoroughly stacked against Christie having that baby we thought we saw.

If we truly believe that life begins at conception, and human life is sacrosanct, then we should be expending a lot more effort trying to save the seven in 10 that don't make it that far. But we don't. Why not? Is it that we don't believe that life is sacrosanct, or that we're indifferent to the deaths of 70 percent of embryos? Or maybe the start of life is just as hard to pinpoint as definitively as the end of it is.

Death, like life, seems like it should be easy to point to and define as well. One minute you're alive, then you're not. You're living, or you're dead. Cut and dry.

Unfortunately, the point of death is something else that people have argued about for thousands of years. In many premodern societies, people would delay burying a body because they believed the soul could return within a window of a few days and the presumed deceased would be revealed only to have swooned. In 19th-century England, there were enough alarming stories of people who had been buried alive while presumed dead, that the graves of the wealthy often were equipped with apparatus so that the wrongly interred could alert gravetenders to their plight and be rescued.

For centuries, someone who had drowned was considered dead, full stop. That changed with the discovery of artificial respiration. Now swimmers caught in the undertow can be rescued and brought back in a dramatic moment where once they would have been written off. Cardiac arrest is another ending once considered definitive, but thanks to CPR, people have been brought back from the point of death in those situations as well. Modern medicine even has removed and replaced people's hearts.

Nowadays, we consider death to be final once a person's higher brain waves cease. Now if that's the point at which we consider life to end, it makes sense that it's also the point at which we consider life to begin. Those higher brain functions and the connections that make them possible occur after the sixth month of pregnany, or around the start of the third trimester.

So let's suppose we have a mutual friend who is clinically brain dead. Doctors can keep him alive indefinitely. His heart will continue to beat. His lungs will continue to breathe. There may even be involuntary muscle movements on his face that we will interpret as signs of consciousness. But the EEG tells a painful truth: There is no one there. He will never wake up, he will never recover. Ethicistis agree, it is time to remove him from life support and let his body expire so that his family and friends can move on with their lives.

Now on the flip side of that we have a fetus three months into pregnancy. This fetus has no higher brain functions yet, and while it may have a stimulus-response reaction to an abortion, science has shown repeatedly that the fetus is incapable of experiencing pain until around the start of the third trimester.

So how would abortion be a moral evil at this point? The fetus is alive in the same strict biological sense that our hypothetical friend is, but the fetus can feel pain no more than he could, can process what is happening no more than he could, and is just as incapable of surviving independently as he would be.

Now you may argue that the fetus has human potential, and I would agree with you. That's why I'd say abortion is not a Good Thing, and why I think that most who favor abortion rights would agree.

But there can be compelling reasons for women to have an abortion, something the Supreme Court recognized in its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and I will not sit on the seat of judgment and presume to know their situation better than they; nor will I sit and compel desparate women to risk their lives to have an unsafe and illegal abortion when a safe and legal one could be available.

No one wants to see abortions administered. It's more a matter of "Should a woman have the right to make that decision if she wants to?" and "At what point does that right lapse?"

'activist' judges

Can we please put to rest this notion of activist judges?

It's a line I keep hearing from conservative friends of mine who are upset by judges who don't follow the strict constructionist philosophy of Antonin Scalia. In Scalia's definitively conservative view the only interpretation of the Constitution is the one that was held at the time of its writing. Any judge who views the Constitution as a living document whose meaning and interpretation changes as America ages, is overthrowing laws based on their personal views.

Under such a reading, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation was a blatant case of judicial overreach. A group of activist judges on the U.S. Supreme Court took it upon themselves to overthrow the entire social order in the South, and to discard a hundred years of segregation.

That was hardly a constructionist reading of the issue. It clearly was justices overturning laws "simply because they don't like them."

I understand the conservative reasoning on this, but I don't buy it. This is a case of justices doing something just and interpreting the law, which the Constitution requires that they do, rather than merely advancing a political philosophy.

And really, would you want a strict constructionist reading of the Constitution? Even if such a thing were possible -- it's not, because the people who wrote the Constitution lived in a different time, with different social values and experiences from ours -- I'd hate to live in a 21st century governed by the attitudes, mores and beliefs of latter 18th-century America.

We're the same country in the sense of continuity, but our demographics, technology, economy, politics, and geopolitical position are radically different from theirs. Even Thomas Jefferson felt that the nation should ditch the Constitution every 30 years or so, and start again from scratch, to reflect the changes in society.

If you wish to assert a constructionist view of the Constitution, the burden of proof is on you to show how a criticism of "activist judges" can be leveled in the case of same-sex marriage rules but does not apply in case Brown v. Board of Education -- which, it should be noted, also overturned the court's previous "Separate but Equal" Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.

Another disastrous constructionist rulings is Dred Scott, which is widely regarded as one of the worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions in history.

The Constitution makes the point quite directly that the rights not expressly given to the federal government are reserved for the states. The rights not expressly given to government at all belong to people.

So while I disagree with Roe v. Wade, I don't see that as ruling by judicial fiat. It's a statement that the Constitution does not give government -- at any level -- the right to dictate whether a woman can have an abortion. And since the government lacks that right, it means the individual woman has the right to choose.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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remembering jennifer

A friend of mine, in Texas once for some sort of news conference or seminar, had the misfortune of being pegged as a liberal Northeaster in need of being rescued from her evil ways. Or perhaps those so pegging her were misfortunate; when they regaled her with the horrors of abortion and then asked her how she could support such a thing, Jennifer replied that she doesn't support abortion. Instead, she said, she prefers to impale the heads of little babies on spikes.

They left her alone after that.

Of course, you should always blame the media

When all else fails, blame it on the media. Surely it's that the liberal media has it in for the pro-life movement and hates crisis pregnancy centers. There can't be any other explanation for why the silent work of crisis-pregnancy centers doesn't get more coverage, can there?

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we believe that the news media won't make any effort to present our story, we don't spend any effort reaching out to the media and giving them a story that they'll run with. So the news media doesn't report anything positive about crisis pregnancy centers, thereby proving that they are in bed with pro-choice activists.

Media outlets love heartwarming stories about people helping other people in need. That's a big part of liberalism, don'cha know?

Forget the rhetoric, take the time to develop a serious media campaign, and spend the money it would take to implement it properly, and pro-life groups will find they're getting more coverage of their activities.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm not just a liberal journalist. Let's pretend that I'm also a pro-choice liberal journalist. Chances are that I'm going to be one of those who just takes abortion as a for-granted position, and it's not an obsession for me at all, any more than auto insurance reform.

Every time I run into someone who is strongly pro-life, they rant and rave about how Planned Parenthood is killing babies, how the media are deliberately covering up the dangers of legal abortion to protect their allies in the abortion industry, and how we always go for the sensational stories that make pro-lifers look like idiots and ignore the things they quietly do to help pregnant women.

Every now and then I'll encounter other wackos who automatically assume that I'm going to hell and publicly call on people to pray for my soul, without even stopping to find out anything about my spiritual state.

That's a fairly rude way to treat someone. It irritates the real me, who has been pro-life since his teen years. I can only imagine how much worse it would go over with a pro-choice me.

This isn't just about publicity and marketing. A lot of it is about plain old-fashioned manners.

Want coverage of other aspects of the pro-life movement than the loudmouths at demonstrations and protests? Then find some way to make "business as usual" sound compelling. It's not that hard -- there are literally thousands of public relations firms that do just that for their clients, every day.

Get the local Birthright or some other pro-life group to hire me, and I guarantee I will start getting them into the newspaper, and not just little three-inch press releases, either. Most advertising money is money poured down the drain, anyway.

I can't begin to tell you how many times as a reporter and as an editor small-business owners called us up to let us know about what was going on, or just loved it when we used their business for a news story. Nonprofits loved it too -- it always drove up the giving and got their message out to the community.

Conservatives and churches have bandied about the term "liberal media" so much that they've created a divide that doesn't have to be there. Groups that could benefit tremendously from the news media just don't think about it because they've been told so many times that the media have it in for them that they believe it. And so, rather than being in the world but not of it, we withdraw further from it, and create our own media to broadcast our message loud and clear to people who already know it by heart.

It is within our ability to get the right horns tooted, but to do that we need to take the initiative to do it, and make a better effort to get along with the people who work in the news media. Complaining that it's not our fault doesn't accomplish either of those purposes.

pro-adoption

One thing the muckraker in me has always wanted to do is to try to organize an adoption awareness event, and ask Planned Parenthood or some other pro-choice group to help support the event.

And then when they refused, I would have a field day with their commitment to choice not extending to choices that don't involve abortion.

Fortunately for everyone, the muckraker in me long has been underfed and reined tightly in by those dirty old ethics of mine. Setting someone up for a fall is just low, and I couldn't do it, even to a group that supports abortion on demand.

But it is an entertaining thought.

an end to abortion

A friend of mine and I recently got into a spirited debate about the role of Christians in the political arena, which is why there are a few entries on the subject here. Greg made the claim that since the abortion issue flared up in the legal arena first, that the courts are where the push to stop abortion should take place. (Just to explain his argument, it was Roe v. Wade that made abortion a constitutional right in the United States, not a law passed by Congress or a state legislative body. It was entirely by judicial fiat, although later abortion laws have come from legislators.)

My take? The rot in America's soul that led to Roe v. Wade didn't begin in the court. It began in the American people, and it's among the American people that we have to fight to reverse Roe v. Wade -- not through legislative means, but through the spiritual weapons Christ gave us, namely prayer, fasting and love -- again, not the charitable feeling sort of love, but the hardcore love that allows us to open up our homes and lives to people in crisis pregnancies.

Lobbying is about mustering political muscle and getting politicians to vote a certain way because they hear one set of voices screaming the loudest. That's a lousy way to make changes, because other people can scream loudly too, and when all the screaming is finally done, you're left with hurt and division where there didn't used to be. Heck, I'm pro-life and I get turned off by the blistering pro-life comments I hear and read.

If we -- the church, pro-lifers, sanctity of marriage people, whatever label we affix for the sake of argument -- get things changed legally without winning the hearts of the people, we've lost more ground than we've gained in the most important battle before us.

I won't say political effort is wrong, but I am concerned -- deeply concerned -- that it seems like so much effort, and such a loud effort at that, goes into politics these days, when the church is at its most effective when it quietly goes about doing God's work and allows that sort of committed lifestyle to rock society to its core.

end the culture war

The best way to end a culture way is to stop shooting bullets.

Members of the media aren't the enemy of the pro-life mission. I'm pro-life, and always have been. I've attended the March for Life a few times, I've attended peaceful demonstrations, and I've written a number of articles and columns that present my pro-life views directly, tacitly or subtly. No one's ever protested that or tried to run me out of the business.

While I've known a few jackasses, most journalists aren't anything like that. We have our blind spots and our shortcomings, and yeah, sometimes we have our own agendas that help determine what stories we report and how we report them. We're human.

Talk to me levelly and fairly, treat me with respect, and chances are I'll be willing to admit to some of my failings, and I'll even try to correct them. A friend of mine did that with my views on the Second Amendment and how I report on firearms. I'm looking for a chance to do a story on guns as a sport, so I can present a side of the story that often gets overlooked because of the deaths that often stem from irresponsible gun owernship.

That sort of skill at dealing with people is something I think many of the most outspoken pro-lifers lack. Yeah, maybe it's not fair that a good many journalists are pro-choice. What can I say? Life stinks. I wish more of my colleagues valued life the way I do. They don't.

There is a pronounced tendency in the church, particularly among Christians who are outspoken politically, to deal with the media with a massive chip on our shoulders. Such attitudes do little to engender understanding or sympathy for any cause. There are groups I've dealt with that shoot themselves in the foot regularly because they view the media with distrust every time, and regularly use the media's forums to reinforce the negative relationship. Self-righteous condescension doesn't win many converts.

The way to get journalists to change their attitude toward abortion and toward pro-lifers isn't to scream about bias and deliberate efforts to discriminate or suppress the truth. If someone does that to me, I shut them out, even if I agree with them on the important issue. I don't have time or patience for vitriol. The message is in the delivery as much as the content.

PETA makes the news as often as it does because their actions are patently ridiculous, and they're usually stunned by the negative reactions they get. In that sense they're like many pro-lifers: as a group that mingles among itself, it just can't understand how anybody can possess the same facts and not leap to the same sense of moral outrage.

so jane roe's a christian

Norma McCorvey (famously known from Roe v. Wade), recently filed suit over her original suit that ended in the Roe v. Wade decision. (McCorvey is now a Christian and pro-life.) A correspondent of mine complains that this is "the most ignored story since Alan Keyes ran for president!"

Yeah, yeah. It's that liberal bias again.

Gee, perhaps it was ignored because it isn't really much of a story. As the judge notes, petitions such as McCorvey's are meant to be filed in a more timely manner than the one she filed. It's a symbolic thing that's likely to get a lot of attention within activist circles, but has little to no news value outside those circles.

If I were editor of a national newspaper, I wouldn't assign a reporter to cover it. At best, it might make the news briefs in a metro daily I were editing. (Of course, if she lived in our coverage area, I might ask for a feature on what has prompted her turnaround -- although, again, the time for that feature really would have been 10 years ago when she adopted a pro-life philosophy.)

As to Keyes, I don't buy that reflects a media bias against him either. Major news media do cover the presidential primaries -- sometimes with a little too much attention, such as the way we're already starting to hear about the 2004 and even 2008 (!) races -- but after a while it gets to be pretty obvious who the major contenders are. It's not usually a wise allocation of resources to devote equal attention to dark horses as to front runners. I've seen papers do it -- I've done it myself when it's happened within my coverage area -- and contrary to what the "slighted" candidates and parties say, it really doesn't have a substantial effect on the end count.

Still, it's an unusual situation, since it involves the plaintiff in a Supreme Court decision appealing a ruling that went in her favor. Here's how I would develop the story from that angle:

1) Plaintiff in case is seeking reversal of decision that was in her favor.
2) Explanation of legal process, why and how such filings are made.
3) Talk about the arguments pro and con for the judge's decision to throw out this particular request.
4) Quote a few legal experts for their perspective on the whole thing, like "Did it ever stand a chance?"
5) Find any other unusual precedents.

Pretty dry stuff, of little interest to the average reader. If an editor assigned it to me, I would write it, but I wouldn't volunteer to do it, except as a sidebar to a larger story, which as I said, this particular filing didn't warrant in my judgment. As an editor, I wouldn't assign it, unless I'm the editor of a legal journal -- and even then, since the judge made the only decision you could expect, I doubt I would think it's worth much more than a footnote.

Which is what it appeared to have received.

nuremberg files

I'm sure most people who pay attention to the abortion debate are aware of the ongoing controversy surrounding the so-called Nuremberg Files web site.

This is an ostensibly pro-life site that targets doctors who perform abortions. The site lists the names of the doctors, along with personal information such as their license plate numbers, addresses, and so on. Some of the doctors appear in Old West "Wanted" posters, as though they were desperados and outlaws, and whenever one of the doctors dies, the site crosses them off.

Columnist John Leo has an interesting take on the issue as it pertains to free speech, and implied threats. That groups like Planned Parenthood perceive a threat from the site is at once both obvious and understandable. On the other hand, no threat against abortionists is stated directly and no one is urged on this web site to kill the abortionists designated with "wanted" posters.

"Poor taste" doesn't begin to describe this sort of tactic. Such web sites clearly are meant to intimidate the abortion providers in question. If those responsible for posting the site claim to be Christians, I'd have a hard time agreeing that they're representing the character of Christ through such tactics.

It's going to be interesting to see how the Supreme Court handles it. My first inclination is to support free speech/free press, even in cases where that freedom is being abused, but no matter how the court rules, this case is going to have some far-reaching aftershocks.

lobbying for righteousness

I think we should just outlaw crime and sin, and then we'll be in an earthly paradise.

But seriously: The Civil Rights Movement represented a major paradigm shift in our society's way of thinking about segregation and race relations. That shift bore fruit in people's unwillingness to tolerate racism any longer, and their willingness to be beaten (and worse) for crossing the segregation line in the South. Those actions had political significance but what I'm saying is that they are where the real breakthrough happened, not in legislation that Congress signed.

The lobbying effort to change the law must follow the change in society, or it is doomed to failure. During the GOP primary, Bush said he would not support a constitutional amendment to ban abortion on the grounds that a nation that could pass one wouldn't need it. Though his performance during much of the rest of the primary branded him a yogurt-head, I do have to agree with the wisdom of that remark.

If we want abortion to end -- and I'm sure many of us on this forum do -- we need to bring a paradigm shift to society at large, not send high-power lobbyists to Washington.

Politics has its place in church-world relations, but I think it's a much smaller place than we've allowed it to be in the United States. It's also unclear exactly how directly we can apply the example of Israel to the United States since Israel was, in no particular order, a monarchy, a theocracy, called to be a peculiar people different from the surrounding pagan peoples as the church is called to be today.

The United States is a democracy -- a concept not even found in Scripture -- pluralistic, and very much like its neighbors. How the church interacts with it must necessarily be different from how Israel interacted with itself.

The government has chosen (wrongly, I would say) to recognize neither the humanity of the unborn, nor the sanctity of their life. This does not alter the sanctity of unborn life, nor does it release us from our obligation to save those lives.

What I am saying is that our efforts at saving those lives are best oriented at a personal level to the women most likely to get abortions and to the doctors most likely to perform them.

As we effect a social change, we will see our leaders begin to follow.