Abortion dialogue must be priority

rev. daniel rohan

There’s a lot of talk these days about being caught up in the cultural wars. Insofar as those wars involve women’s “rights,” this article takes a stance.

It comes down foursquare for every woman’s right to choose, in any and all circumstances, the fate of a child she may have conceived. If she wants to abort that child, at any stage of the pregnancy, she should be free to do so. This right seems self-evident.

Any opposing view that suggest a child in utero should be granted legal protection represents not only a heresy but an absurdity. How can a zygote or an embryo or a fetus have any claim to protection that supersedes the mothers’s right to rid herself of the unwanted growth within her?

The fact that we have lapsed into cultural warfare, rather than cultural dialogue, over this issue is due in large part to the polarization that has occurred around it. To those opposed to abortion, their adversaries are self-centered, morally challenged people who deny the obvious humanity — not to say personhood — of unborn life, merely to guarantee their own comfort. Abortion on demand, in other words, is a matter of sheer expediency.

To abortion-rights advocates, a naive attribution of personhood —or even of humanity — to an embryo or fetus results from a religious fanaticism that puts some skewed, abstract principle above the reality of woman’s life and represents the worst kind of invasiveness into the most personal and private realm of her existence.

In fact, the great majority of women who opt for abortions do so out of motivations that are far less callous, far less egocentric, than many anti-abortion activists would like to admit. For many post-abortive women, the experience both before and after the fact is traumatic and depressing. Many feel that they had absolutely no choice other than to abort their child. As a result, they react to the typical abortion-rights line with derision or with tears.

As for responsibility, women are often torn between being responsible either toward their unborn child, toward their parents who cannot accept their unmarried daughters’ pregnancy, toward a husband who doesn’t want any more kids, or toward themselves in cases where poverty or emotional trauma make unbearable the idea of another mouth to feed, another life to care for.

Personal responsibility in the abortion issue is not as clear cut as many would have it. Responsibility to whom, when she finds herself caught between conflicting demands?

Those of us who are decidedly against abortion need to question the caricatures to which we’ve become all too accustomed. We need to share, insofar as we can, the pain and anguish so many woman go through when they opt to terminate a pregnancy.

And those on the other side need to open their minds to the obvious: the unborn life is still life. It is fully human life, and it deserves the care and protection we owe to any human being at any stage of his or her development.

Whatever our position on the issue, we need to stop the verbal overkill and begin to talk, with mutual respect and openness. We need to talk, but also to listen.

The churches have been largely silent on this issue. Some have felt it their calling to denounce abortion, yet they give little attention to the plight of the mother and virtually none to the responsibility of the father. Others offer varying degrees of support to abortion proponents, particularly those who speak in the interests of victims of rape and incest.

While both sides claim to represent truth in the matter, on each side that truth is only partial, in that it focuses either on the child or on the mother. Both the child and the mother, however, have a rightful claim on our attention and our care.

That claim leads us beyond the level of reproductive rights and the status of the embryo. It obliges us to set the entire issue in a theological and pastoral framework, where respect for the life and welfare of the person is extended with equal compassion and equal effectiveness to all parties concerned: to the unborn child, but also to the woman from whom that child receives life.

It seems imperative, then, that the churches — yours and mine — provide, at the local level, a forum for genuine dialogue concerning abortion and significance of prenatal life, a dialogue that to all parties involved is responsible, respectful, and compassionate. In today’s atmosphere, if they don’t, there is little chance that anyone else will.

XThe Rev. Daniel Rohan is pastor of St. Mark Orthodox Church in Liberty.