Winding Down to the Weekend

After a too-busy morning within a too-busy week dealing with worldly, Wall Street worries (both the headlines you’ve all no doubt seen far to much of, plus numerous globe-spanning conference calls with my primary client that’s based there), an injury and X-rays for our refrigerator-emptying teenage athlete, and a near obsession with this bloody, heavyweight 15-round fight that seems to be about who ought to lead the free world and determine the future of the planet, war in the Middle East and whether we’ll all be standing on street corners selling apples and pencils next year because of misguided policies…

…a cup of decaf, a bowl of tapioca pudding and a few minutes watching it rain while web-surfing more existential/eternal issues before my next conference call seemed like just the thing to get me re-centered.

In that vein, check out this timeless, honest and well-reasoned personal story-post ‘How I became pro-life’ over at Conversion Diary.  I tripped over it serendipitously via Paragraph Farmer (who has some terrific thoughts about prayers for protecting Palin). Here’s CD, from the post she did back in January:

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice… my husband… made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

“It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people’s-life,” he quipped. “Everyone is pro-their own-life.”

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line…

“A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!” I would say to myself. “Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?…Eight weeks? No, they’re not human then, those must be involuntary spasms…”

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed “fetuses” touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK…

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a “baby” or a “person,” when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn’t sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human…

…there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word…

…Being pro-choice for me (and I’d imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn’t want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

That’s just the first couple of pages. It goes on for several more. Well worth the time if you’re in a thoughtful frame of mind. [Fair warning: some may want to postpone the tapioca pudding until after reading the post. No pics, but some of the descriptions of Supreme Court case testimony are rather disturbing.]

UPDATE: In a related vein, check out Albert Mohler’s to-the-point column posted this (Monday) morning.

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