choices
Being a lawyer of no kind whatsoever does not stop me from commenting about legal things regarding which I know nothing. Abortion was not on my mind when I came across Frederick Buechner's online essay, scroll down. Nor was the legalities of warfare when I read that our Defense establishment had assassinated General Soleimani of Iran by a drone attack on Baghdad airport. Seems as if I've read somewhere, sometime, there is law against targeted assassinations; but then we traced, targeted and shot down Japanese top admiral Yamomoto during WW2, didn't we. Whether it makes a difference in what's legal and what's warcrime if war is legally and constitutionally declared, versus undeclared but underway, I don't know. Also that our government has the Iranian general's forces listed as a terrorist organization, that may change the legalities, I don't know. My standard is that I know nothing.
Warfare has changed in my lifetime, and so has everything else. By the time one lives as long as I have, one sees everything one grew up knowing was right, standing on its head and dead wrong, dead naked baldfaced evil, including many laws.
I guess there will be hell to pay now, for the general's death. One hopes it doesn't ignite nuclear or all out conventional war; but it's mindless to strike and warn them not to strike back if they have any national pride at all. It's equally mindless, without all the facts, to second guess who is approving the targets and giving the go-ahead.
This all started with 9/11 or we wouldn't be mired in MiddleEast war, where the main 9/11 culprits got off altogether, vehement hatred of America preached in Saudi Arabia. All those people hate us for any combination of reasons justified from their point of view; including the culture and racist fact that they, brown people instead of white Germany, paid, are paying, the territorial and human price for Europe's holocaust guilt and shame, with the Palestine situation that is beyond resolution except for boundless hatred and violence. But that's off my direction as usual.
Again, what caught my eye was Buechner's essay, but the general's assassination is relevant because the moral horizon has to do with targeted killing, doesn't it. Part of our internal American division and hatred is about abortion. At one moral end, and it is wrapped up in power politics, is the view that abortion is always wrong, unspeakable evil against the most innocent and defenseless, and disagreement about at what point humanhood becomes unarguable. Most people in my vocation can point to priceless children whom the specific parental decision was thankfully to not abort; and also to bitter memories, grief and eternal regret about an irreversibly empty crib where the opposite decision was made; but also to children who are without loving homes, hungry, without medical and dental care and at high risk in life because parents and families are mired in inescapable poverty in a society that, at the most deplorable end of immorality, could not possibly care less about children's welfare once they are born.
At another moral end, and I'm not sure I'm competent to put it down correctly, is the view, also enshrined in politics, that no one but a woman herself should make decisions about her own body, certainly not government. And that whether to abort or birth is morally, and should be legally, her choice alone.
It has been, abortion that is, and will be an issue in 2020 presidential politics, the election campaign. Who is right? All sides are absolutely certain; but whoever regards self as positioned to dictate right and wrong to others is of a mind to displace God, whom one can set in concrete on either side.
This is not the same as the question of gay partnering, which is clear: love is personal choice, and in the free country that we claim to be, no government should have the power and authority to decide who other adults can or cannot love, marry, live with, have sex with. Like racial segregation, the LGBTQ issue is one of those things of which what I grew up knowing, is now standing on its head, dead naked wrong. As with racial segregation, we were wrong so far beyond any semblance of forgiveness that it's not "accept absolution and walk away", it's make it right whatever the cost.
But abortion: sides are morally entrenched. One side abhors what it sees as human life being legally but immorally destroyed in a holocaustic likeness. Another side abhors government presuming to insert itself and dictate what is arguably the most personal issue of human life, what one may do with one's own Being. And there's no need to shout at me, I'm above the fray here.
The morality is more complex, moral principles and internally inconsistent positions. Dichotomously, the pro-life side, that opposes abortion on the basis that it's killing, favors capital punishment, the death penalty; and militantly opposes social welfare programs, welfare checks, food stamps and universal medical and dental care needed by economically poor families of babies that are born instead of aborted. The pro-choice side, which favors legal abortion, dichotomously opposes the death penalty for even the most heinous crimes against the innocent; but generally favors social welfare programs for the needy. Both sides are inextricably mired in obtuse illogic that apparently they cannot see, comprehend, realize.
Frederick Buechner:
SPEAKING AGAINST ABORTION, someone has said, "No one should be denied access to the great feast of life," to which the rebuttal, obviously enough, is that life isn't much of a feast for children born to people who don't want them or can't afford them or are one way or another incapable of taking care of them and will one way or another probably end up abusing or abandoning them.
And yet, and yet. Who knows what treasure life may hold for even such children as those, or what treasures even such children as those may grow up to become? To bear a child even under the best of circumstances, or to abort a child even under the worst—the risks are hair-raising either way and the results incalculable.
How would Jesus himself decide, he who is hailed as Lord of Life and yet who says that it is not the ones who, like an abortionist, can kill the body we should fear, but the ones who can kill body and soul together the way only the world into which they are born can kill unloved, unwanted children (Matthew 10:28)?
There is perhaps no better illustration of the truth that in an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions. All we can do, as Luther said, is sin bravely, which is to say, (a) know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody, yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.
- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
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