Rob,
I had thought a
point by point examination of your editorial would be the approach to take in
answering your justification of the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade. Indeed,
I have spent days pouring over your editorial piece to that end. There are so
many manifestly wrong assertions – of the law of love, of reason, of judgment –
that a full answer becomes, was it not on a matter so manifestly at the heart
of God, nearly picayune.
Tell me I am wrong
if I have misinterpreted your editorial. This is its sum and substance:
It is wrong to overrule Roe vs. Wade because there is an insufficient social safety net to support women whose impoverished existence prevents them from being the kinds of mothers that can give to their children the love, care, and sustenance necessary to their formation.
Thus, you will
hoist children on petards you charge the church and the larger society either
(a) with having created, or (b) with having at least maintained, or (c) at a
very minimum, with having failed to deconstruct. In essence, you make the
church and the larger society bearers of the bloodguilt of children killed by
abortion because, as you seem now to see matters, a child’s mother cannot be
directed by law to reject the death of another as an answer to fear or
difficulty.
You don’t seem to
be able to bring yourself to the stage where you propagate your newfound
support for Roe by circulating photos of yourself licking a cake festooned with
the message, “Abortion is Healthcare” as did Miley Cyrus recently. Indeed, you
claim that every abortion is “a tragedy,” and every live birth is “ideal.” But
you do not explain why these assertions are so. And you certainly do not
explain why, if the reasons that these assertions are so are, as I suspect they
are, why you would oppose restoring the once clear standard of legal protection
for uterine children.
I think this is
what you are not saying aloud but must be thinking:
Every abortion is a tragedy because it ends the life of a child in being. Every live birth of a child is ideal because such births continue in each being a life cycle of hope and the promise of entry into a life-giving relationship with the Creator God.
Is this why every
abortion is a tragedy? Is this why every birth is ideal?
There are, of
course, many ways to come to the question of whether an action should or should
not be the subject of a positive prohibition in law.
The Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King experienced frustration in confronting a society of
self-styled Christians that exhibited the most ungodly despite and abuse of
their fellows based simply on the color of their skin. He yearned for all men
to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
And many folks of fairer skin joined him in that yearning. But he wanted more
than that.
He wanted changes in the law that would afford equal status under
law to colored people, so that they could enjoy, with the white man, the
accommodations, businesses, and affairs of civil society unburdened by rank
prejudice.
To that yearning,
however, many fairer skinned folk balked. It asked, they argued, too much to
enact positive prohibitions into federal law before hearts and minds were
converted by the law of love. Let hearts and minds be won, then let laws be
changed.
For this, though,
Dr. King would not wait. He argued, as one might on a mound of God’s Word, that
the civil rights laws should be enacted with dispatch, and not after hearts and
minds were trained. Rather, as Paul to the Romans, Dr. King to his Christian interlocutors
posed that it was right that the law should be changed so that it could teach
the hearts and so that it could ameliorate the wrongs.
Dr. King explained:
“It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face.”
You know that when
the Apostles forbade abortion as a moral act, in the Didache, it was simply a
restatement of the law of love, that we should not do to another, the nascent
child, what we would not have done to ourselves.
And when the
English common law, at least as long ago as the 13th Century, as confirmed by
Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England, had concluded that
abortion is a homicide of a living human, it did so for precisely the same
reason. De Bracton wrote, "If there is anyone who strikes a pregnant woman
or gives her a poison which produces an abortion, if the foetus be already
formed or animated, and especially if it be animated, he commits homicide."
William Blackstone explained the basis for the law this way: “Life is the
immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it
begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the
mother's womb.”
Dr. King knew that
the law should teach rightly, and thus should make a positive legal wrong of
the morally wrong act of race hatred.
So too the Apostles, the common law, and
the positive statute laws of this Nation prior to Roe vs. Wade taught rightly
that the human child in the uterus was a living being, a human one, and fully
possessed of the natural rights endowed on each of us, at the moment we came
into being, at conception, and not by passage through the magical gateway of
the cervix.
You are at a
crossroads, Rob.
You must choose. It will be insufficient for those who have
welcomed your editorial for you to merely assert, as you have, that Roe should
maintain its legal status while begrudging that every abortion is a tragedy.
Lincoln understood
how corrupting of the heart and mind the gospel of death could be. So, in
addressing another evil, contumacious of the Imago Dei in every African slave,
he put the slavers’ case as the slavers saw things:
“Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.”
And that certainty
of moral right in the decision to snuff the life of a child out in the womb is
what allows Miley Cyrus to lick the abortion cake, and allows thousands of
adoring fans of child murder to applaud her depiction of doing so. But it is
not just that she must be allowed to celebrate the moral rightness of abortion
while you bemoan – in 90-pound weakling fashion – its tragic proportions. As
Lincoln put the case for the slaver, so you must see the case for the
abortionistas: full national recognition as a legal right and a social blessing.
Sadly, you are
along the path to granting all that they ask because, while you claim to see
every abortion as tragic, you reject the gracefully direct and instructive act
of restoring the legal status of the uterine child as it was before the
aberration of Roe and its progeny.
Indeed, as Lincoln
continued regarding slavery, you must decide regarding abortion:
“Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement.”
Only fools lay in
the center of the road, Rob.
There is no chance for life there. There is no
chance for having God take delight in your soul there. Either choose life or
choose death. But put an end to the mincing about the question.
Frankly
acknowledge that the lives of every black baby taken by an abortionist and
given by its mother represents a grievous moral wrong that society can only
correctly mark as a homicide. Or, celebrate the power of the poor to liberate
themselves from the quaint notions of a curious desert religion.
Jim Henderson
