When I was a young man working for a home electronics firm, a pro-life commercial suddenly appeared on the televisions that formed one wall of the store.
The manger, who was white, began to swear. After so many years, I am still sickened by the ugliness of what he said. He was angry at those pro-life and religious fanatics making him pay for more welfare minority babies.
He used worse language than that to describe the situation.
How much support for abortion masks stereotypes and racism? I don’t know for sure, but I have always wondered why abortion clinics seem to appear along with diversity in neighborhoods where I have lived. Other, more prominent people, worry about the connection between race and abortion.
Still, President Obama is correct about one thing in his University of Notre Dame speech: one should not assume the worst of one’s opponents. I have known a number of principled, pro-choice people and also know that racism, that original American sin, can be found in many places and this obviously includes the fringes of the right.
Perhaps interacting with extreme criticisms of the pro-life position that I hear will help me express to the muddled middle why I am pro-life and its relationship to other things I think. This is not to attribute these extreme views to all pro-choicers, though I hear them very often, but to use them to express my grave concerns.
I worry about the impact on the hearts of those who press for the extreme “right to choose” in America. Advocating the legality of third trimester abortion is morally difficult in an era of ultrasound. The unborn child is, to all appearances, a fully formed child and can live outside the womb.
Such abortions are an ugly act, even pro-choice people generally concede this, and ugly acts may be assumed to have ugly effects.
When we begin to trim on the value of human life, especially at the government level, the results are very bad. The United States government has done about as well with human rights as any nation on Earth, but even we declared, by law, that some human life was less worthy than others. Our original sin of slavery still haunts us. Our treatment of American Indians and other groups shows the danger of governments failing to recognize the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” consistently.
I fear big government when it declares that any group is not human or is less than human. Our judgments have not been sound in those areas in the past and the power is very dangerous.
We are a pro-choice nation, not an pro-abortion one or so the story goes. It is moral ambiguity about when life begins or of the nature of persons that causes the problem. I know this is true for many people whose intentions are, often, very good. But then I read comments to something pro-life that I write like this one:
I’ve never denied that life begins at conception. I just don’t care. Human life is cheap, and the life of an unwanted fetus is worthless.
Think what this statement means. It applies to the third trimester with a baby that is days from being born, the life of the fetus is worthless.
It can live outside the womb.
Baby Doe is beautiful, but unwanted, so Baby Doe must die for waiting to be born. Surely this attitude, more pervasive than I would like to believe, is dangerous.
How pervasive is this attitude really? How many Americans believe all human life is cheap? What will be the implications for the rights of my friends with mental handicaps or who are very elderly if it is widespread?
Educating folk and helping them see the dangers of this attitude is of paramount social importance. Is this the result of some kind of social Darwinism (not even real evolutionary science) that can only see the masses and not the man? Where such attitudes infect the right, these beliefs must be purged without mercy as barbarous and pseudo-scientific claptrap.
Though I think there are better solutions, I sometimes think I would be glad to grant the left a bigger government (with support services for all people) for strong laws protecting human life from conception to death. Though I do not think government programs are usually the best way to help women in trouble, the poor, children, or the handicapped, perhaps, I think hopefully, such a cultural trade would be accepted.
Better, I dream, a left-of-center government that would protect human life and value it, than any government or culture that begins to think “life is cheap.” Reality awakens me from such dreams when I realize bitter human experience.
Sadly, such big governments are hard to find . . . perhaps because anything so big as government begins to think in terms of programs and not individual persons. A mother loves her child and this is different than a government helping children. Humanity may be lost in the process and corners begin to be cut if turning that corner becomes expensive.
As a result I favor a small government that provides some social support (Reagan’s safety net) and strong families and communities that provide even more. I favor policies that try to find the balance between liberty and life worth living. This is a difficult task that is fraught with the chance to make errors, but since the error of killing a person cannot be fixed . . . I hope always to err on the side of life.