As my regular reader knows, I was a public school trustee for many years. Like most school districts, mine faced competition from a number of independent schools. Many public school trustees were unhappy with these private schools and complained loudly that the provincial government should not be giving them any operational budget funding. These trustees often mocked the schools as places for the rich and snobby who were trying to avoid the real world. In other words, they were the enemy of the public system and needed to be contained.
I saw it much differently. I asked myself why parents (the majority of whom were neither rich nor snobby in reality) would pay large amounts of tuition to send their children to schools that often provided fewer programs and services when a first-rate public system was available gratis. After all, the overlap in courses, class sizes, quality of teaching, and extra-curricular options was extensive. In other words, I was looking for things that were missing from the public system that were important enough to parents to pay big money to provide for their children. I ended up writing a chapter on this for a book entitled Being the Church in Abbotsford (http://churchforvancouver.ca/telling-the-story-of-the-church-in-abbotsford/).
I propose that we do the same with the many pro-choice groups that we have lumped into the enemy camp. Is there any overlap with what they do/stand for, and what we in the life sub-culture do/stand for? Are there ways in which we are the same in some fashion? Is there enough common ground that we could stop ignoring or attacking them, and actually learn from them. After all, at this point, they do have the ear of Jill Public much better than we do.
Could we possibly say, "We have met the enemy and, waddah-yuh-know, we have a lot in common"?
I believe that we can.
The place to begin is the issue of women's full and equal rights. While agreeing that women are of equal worth to men, and as deserving of all that life and the world have to offer, the life subculture feels that biology makes it impossible for women to live exactly as men live; i.e., that child-bearing often requires, in certain regards, a different set of choices as to how women will use their time, talents, and interests. We also believe that child-bearing elevates women in a way that men could never replicate and should be celebrated as a such. Associated with this are a constellation of other convictions, such as that all life (including pre-born life) is sacred, that pre-born babies are both human beings and persons, and that abortion is immoral because it kills a fellow person with equal rights.
The pro-choice culture sees child-bearing as a hindrance to the exercise of full and equal rights, by which they mean identical rights; i.e., there should be nothing in our society that is closed to women, and anything that does slam a door on a woman's freedom to chose for herself (e.g., whether and when to have children) is immoral. These beliefs also bring with them a host of others, including that the pre-born baby (often referred to as a mere clump of cells) is not a legal person and does not have any rights, that only the woman has any say over her reproductive choices, and that abortion is a useful and even moral (and they would also say, safe) way of exercising such rights. Any restrictions placed on the procurement of an abortion (e.g., stage of development of the pre-born child, access to abortion facilities, even debates as to their morality) are dismissed out of hand.
Rather than paying any attention to each other's perspectives, we fall into armed camps heaving salvos across the barricades:
Pro-choice culture - Those anti-choicers are nothing but a small group of Victorians and religious fanatics (mostly repressive Roman Catholics) who put women in second place and support the current patriarchal regimen. They ignore what the majority of Canadian women believe. They lie about abortion's efficacy and safety, and otherwise manipulate women and politicians to institute anti-woman laws.
Where is the common ground here? One more post coming up.
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2 days later.
I don't want to suggest that I'm prescient or anything, but the following are excerpts from a posting that appeared today on my Facebook timeline. It started with a picture of a famous actor of yore, Loretta Young, with a quote purportedly from her regarding her stance on abortion:
"Be careful. Be very careful. Abortion is wrong to start with. But in addition, you don't know who or what you are aborting."
The comments that follow are endless, but I'll select some representative ones to illustrate the type of non-dialogue that typically ensues when a statement of this sort is made:
Sharon Rudolph- I so agree with her. You might be aborting a future very important person.
Betty Stebbins- At least a whole generation of people who could love and be loved by so many. These would have changed lives, for the better. Some of the diseases we still have today may have been cured. Endless possibilities ……...
Ella Pitrono- LOL what??? I don't know what I'm aborting? I'm aborting a pregnancy you dolt! What a stupid statement.
Ella Pitrono- Abortion isn't wrong. There is no valid argument against women having 4th Amendment rights.
Elizabeth Potter Graham- Loretta Young lied to her daughter and told her she was adopted. The child was the child of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, who was married to another woman. Y'all really know how to pick role models.
Diana Viau- Well, you can't convince the top pro-aborts of that. They claim that aborting the poor & the black, it will cut down on crime.Many great people have come from those roots. Of course, when you are as full of yourself as they are, no one is as valuable to you as yourself. God help us.
Lori Choman- Who cares what a Roman Catholic actress who as born in 1912, died in 2000 and was married 3 times thinks about abortion. Stop being cookie cutter people. Not everyone is the same, not ever situation is the same, not every set of rules applies to every situation. Loretta Young in not even relevant, neither is what she thought when she was alive.
Lasallian Heart Remm- RIght... the environment back 30's of the PAST century show some hindrances socially speaking; it might have been hard for many single mothers; YET... nothing of the struggles compare with TODAY's LETAL MODERN ANTI-LIFE STATEMENT, WHICH FORBIDS THE RIGHT TO LIVE FOR HUNDREDS OF MILLION BABIES, WHO WHERE DESTINED TO DO, TO BECOME GREAT PEOPLE FOR OUR WORLD... GOD KNOWS what Humankind has LOST by KILLING THEM... What an awfully painful and horrific truth..
Gary van der Meer- 1 out of 4,000 actress
Wow that's a revelation for the Anti-choice movement
You see what I mean?
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