It's strange, isn't it - that a word can have so much power. You read those three syllables and you're already in motion - some of you are stoking the engines up to ramming speed, while others of you are starting to heat the kettles of oil behind your battlements. It's a word that demands you take a position, upends the fence-sitters, allows no neutrality.
Everybody seems to be talking about it lately, so what the hell. Some history & other thoughts:
I grew up in small town America. I know a lot of good, church-going girls with good, church-going parents who decided that, for whatever reason, they'd have no good church-going bastards in the house. It seemed like a real problem, but not one that I really worried about, because:
- I wasn't getting any
- I'd be "careful" once I was
Now, the Lord is nothing if not a comedian, and it came to pass that The Choice intruded into the waning years of my adolescence. My decision is sitting in the other room, doing her homework. It's a terrifying thing to think that she might never have been, if either I or her mother had been a bit more selfish, a little less principled.
Now, those are loaded words. Fighting words - but, in our case, I think, true words. To not accept responsibility for our actions would have been selfish. It's not like we didn't know how this birds & bees stuff worked - Insert tab A into Slot B, lather, rinse, repeat, etc, etc, etc. All babies are natural - some are just more natural than others. If we really didn't want to be parents, we should have taken up bowling instead.
But while I'm willing to state that I don't think abortion is right, I can't make the corresponding statement that it should be illegal. In a perfect world, civilized people would look upon someone who was willing to get an abortion much like someone whom we discover is capable of drowning unwanted kittens - with complete and utter revulsion*. It's not that drowning kittens is illegal (at least not everywhere), it's just that it's so unnecessary. In a perfect world, everyone who got pregnant in a "bad situation" would be able to put the fruits of their passion up for adoption without any hassle. In this mythical, magical world, husbands wouldn't be able to force their wives to have kids they couldn't support, rapists would all be infertile, and pregnancies would never end in tragedy.
This world will probably never exist. We live in (pardon the cliché) a fallen world - and that means more than having to stand firm against the hot gay loving or whatever battle in the culture war we're fighting today. A fallen world implies that, sometimes, all choices are bad ones; that there are situations where nobody is going to be a winner. I thank God that I've never been in that situation.
So why then, do I associate myself with the Democratic party? I've been thinking a lot lately about the bait-and-switch nature of contemporary party politics - and while everyone on the left is talking about the problem with Kansas, nobody seems too willing to think about the problem with New York. I'll probably post something more in-depth on this later, but the fact remains that there are plenty of pro-life democrats out there who vote for such niceties as health-care and a living wage, and abortion comes along for the ride.
Given my choices, I think that the Democratic Party can come closer to establishing the faint glimmer of a possible foundation upon which someone may someday build that mythical world. It's not what I truly want, but it's probably the best I'm going to get. Again, sometimes there are no good choices, just ones we can stomach.
* full disclosure: I grew up on a farm and yes, I've been tasked with drowning kittens. It didn't bother me much then, but I don't think I could bring myself to do it now.
