Sunday, May 16, 1999 [Park Ridge Center Bulletin, May-June, 1999]
Issues of medical controversy hit close to home; in fact, they drop a cherry bomb right through the mail slot. Our bodies are our homes: they are where we live. For this reason, discussions relating to medicine can take on a desperate tone. When one person feels another is asserting the right to meddle with his home,
Tuesday, July 14, 1998 [Cornerstone, Summer 1998]
A foot, a rib, a womb. A piece of glass. Whalebones smoothed and polished, netted in cloth. The mother takes her daughter's hand.
The girl is dizzy; bright sunlight stripes through the shutters and dims her eyes. The old cloth tape is in her mother's hand. A pause of disappointment; her waist has still not met the mark of 20. The whale bones that stripe across her bones, the bones of the dead behemoth, are stonger than her bones. Her bones are young and they will give. She pauses between small tastes of air. On the day she was born her waist measured 16 inches. The bones press in. The mother thinks: this hurts, yes, but this is the way the world is. Not to do this would hurt my daughter more.
Monday, January 12, 1998 [Christianity Today, January 12, 1998]
Wanted: A New Pro-life Strategy
January 22 marks a grim anniversary: 25 years since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. A generation has passed since the first wave of unborn children fell, and the accumulation of each year’s toll totals nearly 37 million. During those years one child was aborted for approximately every three born. Their names would fill the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial wall over 700 times.Pro-Life Wednesday, December 31, 1997 [National Review, December 31, 1997]
"This week is anti-choice week at UB," wrote Michelle Goldberg, a staffer with the University of Buffalo (NY) student paper, the Spectrum. "If you see one of them showing their disgusting videos or playing with toy fetuses, do your part and spit at them. Kick them in the head."
The lively Ms Goldberg demonstrates one of the reasons that it is always bracing to go onto a college campus as a pro-life speaker. In my travels--Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Brown, Wellesley, et al--no pro-choicer has actually kicked me in the head, but a few have looked as if they'd like to. A few more have delivered dark imprecations in the question and answer period, occasionally disguised as questions. And a few more have just glowered at me threateningly, like the wicked witch before the bucket of water hit her.
Friday, June 13, 1997 [Adapted from Real Choices, Conciliar Press, 1997]
Glance around any room where people are gathered and a curious pattern emerges: they tend to be in pairs. At a church, a concert, a movie theater, a male head is usually near a female head of roughly the same age. Other creatures gather in herds or flocks, or peel off as solitary loners, but humans prefer the couple bond. They gravitate toward it naturally; it’s how they seem to want to go through life. Why?
Monday, April 7, 1997 [Christianity Today, April 7, 1997]
In his darkened office Pastor Stan put his head in his hands. It had been a difficult phone call, and Marcia was beginning to cry when he hung up. The baby, in the background, was already crying. Usually, the baptism of a baby is a joyful part of the Sunday service, but this time Pastor Stan had said no. Marcia wasn't married, so he had told her it would be a private ceremony. To put her and her baby up in front of everybody, as if it were the same as any other family, just seemed wrong. The church would be practicing make-believe morality, looking the other way. It would mean pretending sin wasn't wrapped all around this situation.
Pro-Life Tuesday, February 4, 1997 [Religion News Service, February 4, 1997]
This year Jan. 22, the date of the March for Life, dawned chilly and gray in the nation's capital. There was no snow, but ugly rumors troubled the crowd.
It was said that there had been an explosion at an abortion clinic in town earlier that morning. A couple of days before there had been a firebombing at a clinic in Tulsa, Okla. Before that, a pair of bombs exploded at an Atlanta building that housed an abortion clinic along with other businesses.
Pro-Life Sunday, July 28, 1996 [Washington Post, July 28, 1997]
I was pro-choice at one point in my life, but I came over to a pro-life position years ago. I've been there ever since. Perhaps because of my background, I think there's a logic to the pro-choice position that deserves respect, even as we engage it critically. It is possible to disagree with somebody without calling them baby-killers, without believing that they are monsters or fiends. It is possible to disagree in an agreeable way.
The abortion argument is essentially an argument among women. It's been a bitter and ugly debate, and I find that embarrassing. For me, that gives a special urgency to this conference.
Wednesday, May 8, 1996 [NPR, "All Things Considered," May 8, 1996]
On the issue of abortion, I’ve been around the block. At one point, I believed that abortion was necessary to set women free from the burden of unplanned pregnancy. But gradually I changed; I realized that abortion is at root an act of violence, killing children and violating women’s bodies--and their hearts. As such, I couldn’t accept it as a legitimate way of solving social problems. Unnecessary surgery that kills your own child is a cheap substitute for providing women with life-affirming alternatives.
But perhaps because I’d been on both sides of this issue, I still had sympathy for my pro-choice friends.
Personhood of the Unborn
[NPR, "All Things Considered," January 21, 1998]
A recurring question in the abortion debate has been whether the fetus meets the definition of "person." Why should this be relevant? What advantage is it to be a person? What does a person get?
At the most basic level, persons get protected from violence. Not all persons are allowed to drive or to vote, but every person is allowed to call the cops if someone tries to beat them up. There are probably many laws that are unnecessary or foolish, but the irreducible minimum are those laws that protect persons from violence--that prevent the larger and stronger from crushing the smaller and weaker. Laws against violence even the odds, replacing an older and more instinctive law of "might makes right."
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