What's behind anti-abortion frenzy?
Notre Dame's commencement begins at 2 p.m. Sunday, when the twirling universe will stop cold to witness the latest battle in America's Hundred Years War over abortion.
The sprite in me is tempted to focus on something, anything, else -- bottled water, what SHALL we do about it? -- but the abortion issue seems to be heating up in a way beyond the flap of a prominent Catholic school conferring an honorary degree upon a president who supports a woman's right to end her pregnancy.
According to the latest polls, suddenly more Americans call themselves "pro-life" than "pro-choice" -- 51 percent vs. 42 percent -- a dramatic shift from just last year, when 50 percent were pro-choice and 44 percent pro-life.
What does this mean? Well, I suppose if you are pro-life, it means the nation has had an unexpected moral reassessment. As if waking from a dream, it gazes down and suddenly sees the blood on its hands, and recoils in moral horror.
Or, if you are pro-choice, you might dismiss the polls as meaning nothing, a hard rightward swing among Republicans and nothing more. You might point out that human rights are not determined by majority vote, thank goodness, and that just as the pro-life movement didn't fold its tents and go home in 1995, when 56 percent of Americans told pollsters they were pro-choice while 33 percent said they were pro-life, so now the shifting numbers don't affect bedrock reality -- that this is a decision a woman should be able to make for herself and not one made for her by her husband or her deacon or anybody else.
The first question about abortion is whether it is an absolute or not. If you believe abortion is wrong under all circumstances, that abortion the day after conception is the same as 250 days in, a crime and a sin and an atrocity, well, you can proceed to the next page because this isn't something under consideration, for you. No shame there, and I'm not criticizing you, or ridiculing your religion, just saying that we are thinking about the issue here, evaluating it, and if you are only willing to play a game where you are guaranteed to win at the end, then it isn't quite fair to pretend you're part of the discussion. "Abortion is murder." We get it; thanks.
Myself, I consider this a gray region. Abortion isn't murder -- well, not until the last stage of pregnancy, when it is -- but rather a sort of murder, murder lite, and I'm glad that I've conducted my life in such a way that I've never been party to one.
That said, I don't consider a fertilized egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence to be the equivalent of the Gerber baby, and find people who do to be curious, especially for the anger they bring to the debate. If being pro-life meant an across-the-board reverence for life -- if pro-life activists were also Human Rights Watch members, also fierce opponents to capital punishment and vigorous battlers of AIDS in Africa, and of course anti-handgun and anti-war -- then I could almost understand the compressed rage that pro-lifers often exhibit.
But they aren't. Nor are they in favor of the contraception that would prevent abortions, a tipoff that this -- at its core -- is not about preventing violence to the unborn so much as it is about unraveling a modern society where women are able to plan their pregnancies. Stealing is bad, and religion speaks against it, but no congregation ever took to the streets to protest theft. There is an intensity -- at times a frenzy -- behind the abortion debate, which hints that something else is going on, that religion is attacking modern sexually open society at its weakest point, taking a stand that requires them to not only see abortion as a morally significant act, which it is, but to insist that morality cannot shift under any circumstance, and that having an abortion is the same if you're 14, or 24, or 64.
The "abortion is murder" line is just that -- a slogan. The people saying it obviously don't really believe that, in their hearts, because otherwise they'd be even more extreme than they already are. If it's murder, then why aren't they talking about, not only banning abortion, but also conducting enormous public trials to prosecute the millions of women who have had one? That doesn't seem to be on the table.
I called this issue the "Hundred Years War" above, after checking to see what year Margaret Sanger went to prison for running a birth control clinic -- 1917. Not quite a century, but I'm confident that whatever Barack Obama says Sunday, we'll still be arguing this at the end of his second term.
It helps to connect the abortion debate to the contraception debate because it is a continuum, the way World War II was really the second act of World War I. If you believe that sex is for procreation and nothing else, then a pro-life stance flows naturally. If you believe it's for procreation, at certain times, but also for fun, then you're pro-choice. Don't hate me for bringing the news, but the for-fun element seems to be winning, no matter what last week's poll numbers say.
Abortion almost defies joking, but Sarah Silverman rose to the task:
I want to get an abortion. But my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.