Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

Life Matters - 05/11

By Rich Trzupek
  We know the arguments. Pro-choice women look in the mirror and say: “my body, my choice.” Pro-life advocates look at a fetus and lament “your body, her choice.” I get both points of view. I am pro-life, but I have never tried to demonize those who are pro-choice. We’re all human and therefore prone to making the errors in judgement that are inherent to humanity.
  I find the act of wontedly snuffing out human life evil. This is true whether the life is that of a fetus or a convicted serial killer. There is, in my view, an arrogance in deciding that anyone is qualified to determine the worth of a newly conceived human life, even if the person doing the deciding is the mother. I am equally unwilling to accept the idea that any judge or jury is qualified to determine the worth of an existing human life, even when that human has committed unspeakable crimes.
  Should you disagree with me in either case, I beg you to consider the distinction between ideas and actions. Most ideas are morally neutral. There is nothing offensive when we consider the slogan “my body, my choice” in isolation. Nor is there anything offensive when we consider the Sixth Commandment: “thou shall not kill.” The action that results from a mother using the slogan to justify murder is what many of us consider evil.
  There are some Pro-Life advocates who describe a woman who chose to have an abortion as an “evil person.” I think the majority of us, and I am sure the majority of my fellow Catholics, would not make that judgement. We believe that good people can sometimes commit sinful, evil acts.
  For my part, I believe in the reality of the soul. I believe that the human soul separates us from all of those other marvelous products of creation we call “animals.” I believe that the nature of existence provides ample proof of the reality of the uniquely human soul. I believe that the human soul connects each of us between the temporal existence we understand and the existence to come after temporal death that we are not equipped to understand.
  Atheists often belittle the idea of faith as no more than a comfortable hubris that presumes to know the identity of the Creator. Most atheists further postulate that having supposedly divined the supposed nature of the Creator, monotheistic faiths arrogantly dare to define those systems of behavior as infallible.
  Thus a believer in a monotheistic faith like Islam can choose to point to Sura 5:60 to justify the condemnation of the Jewish people because it describes Jews as those “…whom Allah has cursed and with whom He became angry and made of them apes and pigs and slaves of Taghut.”
  There is, in modern terms, little difference between taking Sura 5:60 as Divine Writ than there is taking Leviticus 20:13 as Divine Writ. In Leviticus Yahweh has this to say about homosexuality, at least as practiced among males: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them."
  Both human judgements ought to be, but rarely are, contextualized within the constraints of their times. A position uttered 2,000 years ago may sound extreme today, though it may have been incredibly progressive when actually put forth. Similarly, people may have said or written propositions that sound horrible to the modern mind, but that would have sounded rational when first uttered.
  The key omission in the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was failure to describe a fetus as a person. Actually, according to Bob Woodward’s book “The Brethren,” Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the majority opinion, initially used the word “person” in describing a fetus. Justice Potter Stewart insisted the offending word be removed. Stewart understood that persons are entitled to the protections of the 14th Amendment which declares that no state shall “...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
  If a fetus is a person, then a fetus is entitled to protection under the law. If it is not a person what is it? In his dissent to Roe v Wade Justice Byron White took the majority to task for, in his view, creating priorities without the constitutional authority to do so and depriving the people of their voice:
  “The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers [410 U.S. 222] and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally dissentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand.”
  White’s words ring true almost 50 years later. If Roe v Wade is struck down, as it ought, it will not mean the end of abortion in the United States. It will rather return the power to value life, or potential life to the people, where it should have rested all along.
  Email: rich.trzupek@gmail.com