Dialogue? Really?

Sometimes cognitive dissonance is the only way I know how to react to something I see. Something bothered me about Mr. Obama's address at Notre Dame, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Then today Karen Hood Johnson posted an excellent commentary on New Radicals, a Facebook group which, if you are on Facebook, deserves your attention. It nailed why my antennae picked up those disturbing vibes. I post here her commentary.

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I watched with interest as President Obama spoke at Notre Dame. In his speech he brought up the abortion debate, reiterating many of the same points he made on the campaign trail:

"Reasonable people can respectfully disagree. Let's agree that we all have different ideas about when life begins. Let's agree to reduce the need for abortion. Let's agree that abortion is a difficult decision for women and is not taken lightly. Given the number of abortions performed each day, I suspect far too many women DO take abortion too lightly. But let's go beyond that."

Pro-choicers don't believe that women are taking the life of their child. They don't believe it is a viable life, so women are not doing anything wrong to abort. If this is your line of reasoning, then this conclusion is perfectly logical. But this is also where the argument that women "struggle" with the decision comes up short. If abortion is NOT about taking a life--if the fetus is just tissue and not a real, living human being--then why should a woman struggle? Isn't it just like getting an appendix removed? The only struggle might be the expense or inconvenience vs. the benefits--purely a cost analysis.

This is precisely is what I find frustrating in such a "call for dialogue." It's
dishonest. It is not a call to dialogue. It is an attempt to appear as the calm voice of reason. It is a suggestion that pro-lifers are not concerned enough about the social environments that might foster a desire for abortions.

But most importantly, it is a determination to bypass the issue of life. That's where the dialogue must begin. Is it life--or is it not? If you say it is not, then don't be false and patronizing about what a difficult decision it is. If it is not life, you should not be struggling. Nor should you struggle if that logic is applied to other "inviable" lives as it surely has been--the comatose patient, the mentally incapacitated, the patient suffering from dementia, or anyone else deemed "inviable" by some kind of intelligentsia that has tapped into a realm that qualifies them to make such frightening decisions.

Ironically, Obama once said that he did NOT feel qualified to say when life begins. Such an attitude seems humble enough, but if he really doesn’t know--why not err on the side of life?

Obama calls us to talk about what can be done to prevent the need for abortion: Deal with poverty. Create jobs. Provide child care programs for single mothers.

These are things we need to do anyway and things, incidentally, that the church, the target of these kinds of lectures, has been doing for ages.

But what has this to do with abortion? Are you saying that because a poor woman can't afford her baby, we should give her the option to end its life? No, you are saying that a poor woman can't afford her tissue matter, and it is cruel to make her feel bad about removing
it. In fact, we should pay her to do it because it will relieve society's
responsibility to take care of her and her child.

If you do struggle with abortion and find it a disturbing issue, think with your heart about why that might be.

Dialogue? Hardly. I am being asked to have no absolutes because we're all flawed human beings who can't trust our own instincts too much--yet I'm also supposed to trust the better instincts someone else who admits he doesn't know when life begins. I'm being asked to stop judging something that is clearly too weighty for me. And I'm being asked to stop being so stingy and pony up some resources for these poor women who are forced to get abortions. That's not dialogue. That's presumption, and it's being used to mask the truth of the horrifying and logical conclusions about "viability of life" which many refuse to face or deal
with.

Life is either sacred, or it is not. If it is not, God help us all.

Karen Hood Johnson

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