When abortion is mere abstraction
What’s missing from the debate is the wisdom of first-hand experience.
Most—but not all—of the people reading this have never had an abortion. In any given year, roughly 2 percent of American women age 15 to 44 have had one. And, a lot of the Century’s readers don’t have uteruses. So just playing the odds, it is a decent assumption. That means that when we talk about abortion or think about abortion or reason morally about abortion in these pages, we are doing so with a significant amount of necessary, but often unnoticed, abstraction. The conversation is less about anybody’s abortion itself than it is about how we understand the social fabric or the nature of human life in general.
Perhaps this is why abortion has become the quintessential question of opinion in our culture: pro or con, would you or wouldn’t you, life or choice. We take the conversation in philosophical directions or public policy–oriented directions. But we don’t, most of us, talk about our own bodies, our own lives, or the lives of our loved ones.
For me that changed when my cell phone rang on an August evening. I was at a retreat center, sitting on a porch as a thunderstorm rolled in.
