Roe v. Wade

This is in response to a column in the University of Oklahoma’s student paper on Roe v. Wade. I felt that it was important to respond, and now I feel like it’s important to post it up. It represents a very personal take on the tragedy of abortion in the context of a greater tragedy -- a pandemic of ignorant arrogance masquerading as prevailing wisdom.

It was written with the reader in mind and the assumption that people may not really understand salvation even if they’ve sat in a church all their lives.

The column is here: http://www.oudaily.com/news/2011/jan/26/column-roe-v-wade-still-attacked-38-years-later/

I remember the day well. I was coming up on my 14th birthday and the anniversary of my father's tragic death in an automobile accident. My mother was moving us to the city where she was going back to college to finish her degree. I’d just seen "The Cross and the Switchblade”, and it had made an indelible mark on me: I had interpreted the message to mean that I could do anything, anything AT ALL, and then say sorry and God would just make everything ok. When I heard the Roe v. Wade news a shudder of relief hit me; my plan to beat the system was ON because any female-specific consequences could now be swept away easily, legally.

They say Roe v. Wade was fought for women, for girls just like me. The court tried to forge for me a freedom to make mistakes, as did the message of the movie. They tried to save me, but it was a little, cobbled salvation. It didn't work. Now that I am over 50, I have seen that consequences can't be swept away. I understand that giving me the legal ability to sweep the evidence of my choices away cannot sweep away the consequences of my choices.

The odds on consequences are impossible to calculate. We calculate anyway, the action is taken and its effect on the future unfolds slowly like a retrovirus, obscuring its inception. As life goes on we find ourselves trapped, victims of dice rolled long ago, in ways that are out of our control, no do-overs. I can deny my choices in the inception but I can’t escape their effects.

Consequences are like God’s last ditch effort to stop us, to jar us awake: as they pile up we find we need Saved from our little, cobbled salvations. Age and regret can make a person long for more wisdom than they could ever have, and forgiveness, and to wash the blood off their hands, and help for the ones who are young, who are making their own beds now, sleeping in them always -- and the terrible realization that there is no one on earth who can fill That need.

Among reasons people oppose abortion the most important ones are not as contrived and foolish as the author has been led to believe. Maybe the author hasn't yet watched the effects of her own misguided choices blow up in agonizing HD before her eyes, totally beyond her control. Maybe not yet, and my most sincere desire is that she never make arrogantly foolish choices and suffer the consequences. But she will. We can’t not.

Then maybe the author will feel differently. Or at least understand better.

As we get closer to the end of our little myopic lifetimes and myopic understanding of the past as it relates to the needs of the future we can see more clearly that Little We don't have a lever or a place to stand from which to stem the tide of the disasters the choices of the parents bring on the children.

May the author, and the generations, feel the searing longing for a Truth that is higher than our heads and can Save us, mostly from our arrogant ignorance. That longing produces better plans.