By Dave Andrusko
Whoa, why didn’t you and I think of this? Writing at Huffingtonpost.com, John Backman asks (through the headline), “The Abortion Stalemate: Can ‘I Don’t Know’ Break It?”
If we just say, “I don’t know” to the question, “When does a fetus become a human being?” according to Backman, it
“pushes us to relax our grip on our cherished certainty — at least long enough to consider the possibility that we may be wrong. When the certainty goes, so does the strident hostility that often accompanies it.”
Has a kind of seductive ring to it, don’t you think? If you and weren’t so darned sure it is wrong to take the life of defenseless unborn babies and discard the elderly whose “quality of life” no longer measures up, then everything would be hunky dory.
The problem, in a manner of speaking, is I DO know. I know that when we parcel out the law’s protection based on invidious discrimination, nothing but bad will follow. I know that as much as I might wish otherwise, I cannot forgo my obligation to my unborn child any more than I can give the back of my hand to an aging father who needs me now the way I once needed him.
I know that just as it really IS true that it is more blessed to give than to receive, when we withdraw our love and care from those dependent on us we shrink–morally, ethically, and spiritually. And I know that it is more often through trials than easy times that you and I mature as human beings.
Of course, if part of what Backman (“Writer and principal, ‘The Dialogue Venture’”) is saying is that civility is called for, I could not agree more. But I would also ask him to ponder what his response might be if someone were making the case that it is his right as a father to beat his three-year-old senseless.
My guess is Backman would be filled with certainty—certainty that this is outrageous and cannot be condoned. Suddenly he would be wholly unwilling “to relax our grip on our cherished certainty” that brutalizing children is not acceptable.
Backman ends by kind of running in place–“Abortion is an extraordinarily multifaceted issue”–concluding finally that the question of the unborn’s humanity is but one question–“albeit an important one”– among many.
Really? If the unborn is human—as if he or she could be something else—then all the rationales for abortion are just so much filler. You don’t kill innocent human beings.
Of that I am absolutely certain.
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