A Common Language
The number one comment this week has been a rebuke of sorts. It seems I still hold onto my faith in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. Oddly enough it seems in these moments when people are the least kind that is when faith is the strongest and most necessary.
The conundrum comes when it is those people of faith that are the most cruel. I harken back to a religious counseling class I took when I was getting my masters degree. The whole idea of the course was to be able to speak a common language no matter who your client was and what religious background they came from. A large part of talking through issues like abortion is speaking a common language.
I’ve heard a number of defenses of the pro-choice point of view and one main defense of the pro-birth position. Until you can interpret and mimic that language it will be next to impossible to convince anyone of a position. Even then you are fighting an uphill battle. It is much like the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelites. There is only one that can control their holy land and it is both of their holy lands.
In order for a moral law to exist, it has to exist universally. The preservation of life is a moral law and yet is not universally followed in all circumstances. Freedom of choice is a universal law in the social structure of our society. Yet it is not followed in all circumstances. Here you get the ultimate collision of moral laws. Which one wins out in the end?
Is life universal when someone goes to bed without a warm meal? Is life universal when they have to lay their head down on the cold concrete of the street? Is life universal when they have committed the most egregious acts our mind can imagine? Is life universal when cancer ravages their body and they have no insurance? Whatever the source of our morality, that morality demands some consistency.
Similarly, is choice universal when someone makes a choice we disapprove of? Is choice universal when one or more of those choices could become dangerous to those around us? Can the pursuit of one’s happiness infringe on the rights of someone else? In the spaces between our intellect, our most animal urges, and conscience, we find the logical limitations of life and choice. It is in these places where our collective cultural language and traditions seemingly take over. It is in these places where agreement and understanding are the most necessary. It is in these places where our sacred honor has left us.
I hope you are able to be this interesting and “neutral” in your classes. If so, your students are blessed.
1Thank you Larry. In fact, we are pretty much barred from talking about controversial topics in the classroom by our district. They don’t want our point of view introduced no matter how measured it can be. I try to separate pro-lifers into two groups. There are those that cravenly take the stance and use it as a weapon to use whenever they want fundraising money or votes to do the things they really want to do but can’t say out loud in polite company. Then, there are those that honestly believe it and fervently try to make it happen. Barring any damage inflicted on anyone, I can’t get too angry with them. It is a belief after all. We deal with it as best we can.
2My problem with the “pro-lifers” is that all too many of them are in the first group.
You may be familiar with the statement by Sister Joan Chittister, which I agree with wholeheartedly.
“I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”
3My only disagreement with her stance is that I think they are not pro-life, they are pro-forced-birth. And misogynists, even the females.
The only way I can see to have a common language with those folks would be to accept their stance as somehow morally defensible… which it isn’t.
‘The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members’. – Mahatma Gandhi
4Those who are opposed to abortion to a very large extent use that stand as a preferred tactic to repress their fear of the total oblivion their own death will bring to them. Within twenty years after they die, there will be few still alive who remember them; within a hundred years, they will at best be remembered by a gravestone itself wearing away under acidic rainfalls. Only a very few will be remembered– heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman or Jonas Salk.
As Ernest Becker points out in “Denial of Death,” humans are the only species we know who can imagine their own death and can fixate on its significance. He says that the knowledge is so overwhelming we would be paralyzed if we did not develop a way to repress it. (After all, as infants we began by believing we were the center of the world, and we had enough trouble accepting things were otherwise.)
So we adopt belief systems that help us believe that we will live on in memory as well as individuals despite our physical death — religion, philosophy, etc.
One of the ways is to become a hero. Becker says “the hero is the person who pays the price society specifies.” Heroes remain alive for generations, even centuries and millennia.
Becker stops there, but we can extrapolate: There are many people whose belief in their adopted strategy is not strong enough. Their ability to repress is insufficient. These people gravitate toward becoming a hero to compensate.
The problem for the so-called “pro-lifers” (and I say so-called for even the most fervent of them, because they cannot care for human life beyond the terms they set for themselves), is that “the hero is the person who pays the price society specifies.” Are they going to look for a burning building to run into, a crazed gunman they can tackle? Are they going to give up their present material comforts to aid the homeless in Somalia for the rest of their lives, all in the hopes that society will decide they paid the necessary price? No. They simply do not have the emotional, physical or social resources to risk.
So, what they do instead is SELL society on the idea that they are paying the price. They create a victim, they create a danger and then they promote themselves as the heroic intervener.
The entire so-called “pro-life” movement is based on a metaphorical struggle. Abortion plays the role of Death, they play the role of God (or some other all-powerful concept), and the fetus is themselves. Every time they “rescue” a fetus, they provide themselves with a chimeric instance of their god rescuing them from total oblivion. This shores up their weak faith.
As they have scant resources, it is important that their chosen victim be marketable as a worthy one. For this, the fetus is ideal. It is a blank slate on which they can write anything without fear of contradiction. The fetus can be described as blonde, blue-eyed, innocent, a child of God, a future Einstein– and it will never, ever contradict the describer! People who work with severely troubled teens or psychopathic killers can’t get away with that– their intended “rescuees” can not only tell them to f*k off, but they can also destroy the depiction by killing people, etc.
So, the first job of the so-called “pro-lifers” is to save themselves from the horror of personal oblivion; the next job is to sell society on them being heroes; and their third job is to create the perfect, most effortless sort of heroic endeavor.
We are basically looking at a dysfunctional self-help movement.
51st group are evil and the 2nd group are still evil and help support the truly evil. The so called ‘baby killing’ is pure BS, spread around by both types of forced-birthers. Their own book of BS FairyTales says the fetus is a baby AT 1st BREATH!!!! So to hell with their BS about at conception. What they decide will never affect me much but I would like my G’daughter to live free.
6In 1965 I got pregnant right out of high school by my boyfriend of a couple of years. He was a sophomore in college. I was lucky because my parents didn’t kick me out and both sets of parents decided we would get married, which we did. Abortion wasn’t even brought up since the only way to get one at that time in California was to go to Mexico and women often came back with infections that put them in the hospital. And worse.
At my 20th high school reunion, one of my best friends revealed to me she had an abortion when she was in college. She was the oldest of three girls and brilliant enough to have been accepted at Stanford but chose to go to Occidental College because her parents had gone there. A lot was riding on her being successful. She traveled to Connecticut where another friend of ours in college there arranged for a “back alley” abortion for her. She told me that during the procedure the guy laughed and talked with his female assistant about how he was going to be able to buy his wife a mink coat now. My friend was humiliated, but she said to me “I would rather have died than tell my parents I was pregnant and disappoint them.”
In 1972 when I finally got a chance to go to college after my kids were older, I had the opportunity to visit the anatomy lab at USC where the dental students were dissecting cadavers. On one table was the torso of a young woman of 23 who had killed herself rather than tell her family she was 3 months pregnant. I remember touching her cold flesh and saying to her in my mind how sorry I was she felt she needed to do that.
So, what does all this mean in light of the “leaked” draft of Alito? Women are going to die. After nearly 50 years I never thought we would be going back to those days, but here we are.
And in some states now, they are talking about making criminals of the women who do have them. Here in Texas, they used to talk about how all the draconian hoops women had to jump through before getting an abortion were for their own health: transvaginal ultrasounds, 24 to 48 hour waiting periods, and forced viewing of ultrasounds because the poor dears needed to have it all man-splained to them because they’re too dim to understand the consequences of what they’re doing. But as with Bob Boland’s comment above, now the gloves are off and they’re showing their true vindictiveness to women. And once the babies are born, are they going to be there to help? Nope. You’re on your own, honey.
7Nick, one of these days you and I need to get together and have a beer and a long conversation. I think that we have a lot in common. Moral choices are almost never easy, because in most cases they are not black and white. And we never have all the facts, many of which are necessary to make the best decision. Example: often we find that what is best for a person is not what we first think is best for a person. Given more facts we may find a better choice. And what do we do when what is best for a person is not what is best for the person’s family?
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