06/26/2022
Heart of the Matter
By Bill Chisholm
The back-story is an important piece of telling the whole story. Without some background it is a bit like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture on the box.
My mother’s first pregnancy, ended with the death of her first born due to what is known as “blue baby”. He was named, John, and she held him close in her heart throughout her life, though she had four more children, and she always included him in her thoughts of family. She had to suffer not only from the loss of her own baby, but be reminded of her loss by the joy of near family whose babies survived and thrived.
My mother was a devout Roman Catholic. So the experience of losing her first born and her religion gave her strong feelings about abortion. She was also a thinker, one devoted to expanding her own horizons, an admonition she passed on to me almost daily.
I took her admonition to “expand your horizons’ seriously and it took me into realms of thought and spirituality outside her paradigms and comfort zone. She would challenge me, share books and articles that would broaden the scope of whatever issue it was that we were looking at.
As she was entering the last months of her life, she was still sharp as tack. My siblings and I would take turns providing what minimal care she needed. It was my turn when the first Gulf War began live on CNN. It just so happened that I had written a piece on the issue of abortion, after having read Cider House Rules, which dealt with the question of Pro-Choice or Pro-Life. I knew good women, who had made the tough choice to have an abortion, and were being vilified by the so called Pro-Life folks.
Prior to writing my article on abortion, I had seen a TV show dealing with the abortion question. It featured women from different parts of the world, from different religions, who had made the choice to terminate their pregnancies because of poverty, war, fear of family reaction.
My personal feelings, guided by my awe of Nature, and the wonder of the Magic of Life, brought me down on the side of not favoring abortion, but as I read and listened to the stories of the women who chose to do so, I came to realized that maybe it wasn’t so black and white, that there were circumstances, that first of all, I couldn’t comprehend as a man and second as one not walking in their shoes.
I started thinking about the word “abort”, it means to” bring to a premature end”, to cut short the mission. So in expanding the notion of what an abortion might mean in human terms, terminating a pregnancy certainly falls under the definition, but then doesn’t it also apply to ending the life of another before one lives to the ever changing definition of “life expectancy.” What about miscarriage? Does that not come under the definition of “abort” and where did that “decision” come from? The Pro-life folks seem to believe that all pregnancies are somehow sacred and should be carried to term and in some states is a crime. So who is the criminal in this case.. Nature? God?
Those who claim to be pro-choice often speak of the fetus as the “most vulnerable”, but are they more vulnerable than anyone else whose life could be snuffed out by another, have their life aborted? I then had to ask myself why women, who for various and deeply personal reasons, chose to abort a pregnancy, were vilified, while men, politicians and soldiers that were aborting lives on a seemingly regular basis around the world weren’t being held to the same standard.
So there my Mom and I were sitting in her living room watching Bombs over Baghdad begin. How many lives were about to be aborted? We watched the news reports for sometime and then turned off the TV. I read my Mom, my article. She sat there for sometime and then she said to me, “William, I would just like to thank you. You’ve taken me to places I would never have gone on my own.” I replied that it was she who constantly urged me to expand my horizons.
I don’t claim here that I somehow changed my mother’s beliefs about abortion, but I know that she looked at it from a broader perspective and that’s why I share the back story, but now to the heart of the issue.
As a candidate for the legislature, I was once asked if I was Pro-Life or Pro-Abortion. I responded that I didn’t believe anyone was pro-abortion, that it was an unfortunate choice to be made about an unwanted pregnancy and that there was no way for anyone to know the all circumstances that led a woman to that decision.
The heart of the issue to me is two fold, first “unwanted pregnancies” and how to prevent them and the second is the discrepancy between how men are treated and how women are treated in regard to both unwanted pregnancies and to the notion of aborting life. It is I think sadly ironic that the act of creation is often called “making love”, but it is often an act of fulfilling lust, too often an act of violence, an act of power over.
Many of those who claim to be Pro-life are anti access to contraceptives, anti-s*x education and family planning. They are really Pro-birth, though even there they don’t support prenatal care and certainly post birth they don’t feed, clothe or support either health care or education for those they demand be born, but they will pay for incarceration for the unwanted, unloved... For the most part what we are talking about here is an “unfunded mandate”, which so called conservatives are always squawking about with regard to other laws or regulations,
The heart of the matter is unwanted pregnancies and underlying that is lack of s*x education, and here I’m not talking just the biology, but the emotional, psychological and soico-economics of a pregnancy. Male pressure is certainly an aspect that needs to be addressed along with access to contraceptives. Issues of poverty and domestic violence, economic opportunities to help change some of the underlying social structures need to be addressed and you don’t see those issues on the table.
Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems at the same level of thinking at we created them.” Maybe we need to expand the discussion, bring in more points of view and end the polarization.
