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Shadow Government
Head code
by John A. Jackson
I think I understand. "Gay" means homosexual. "Black" means African-American. Or not a latte. "Indian" means Native American, or Indian or...
"White" means?
"Adult" means obscene. "Choice" refers to the right to have an abortion, or to have your chad counted. The "right to life," on the other hand, begins at conception and ends at birth.
Certainly.
This is a column about abortion, of course.
I do not write about abortion very often. The subject makes me tremendously uncomfortable. But it would be cowardly to avoid it, especially since the new Bush administration spent the first of its limited political capital making a gesture against abortion.
I am uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to take the obvious dive: I will not say, "I'm not a woman; let those who have to bear children decide."
On any other subject I would say, "I am a human being; nothing human is outside my concern." That is true here, too. Of course. So I must write as honestly as I can.
Nor can I say again, as I said for many years, "I can't know whether the fetus should have the rights of a human being. But I am absolutely certain that women are human beings, and have the right to control their own bodies."
And I will not say again, as I surely could, that nothing about the vexed and painful human questions of pregnancy and abortion will be enhanced by government intervention. On any side.
I don't know what the fetus is, but I know it is not a human being in the same way a woman is a human being.
I don't know what an abortion is, but I suspect it is not nothing -- and I know it is not an act of murder.
I don't know what sort of life the Pro-Lifers favor, but I have a lot more respect for their beliefs, as I understand them, than I do for someone who thinks life is meaningless or for sale or a property of the state.
I favor everyone's right to free speech.
But counseling with a bullhorn outside an abortion clinic -- scaring patients and intimidating caregivers-is not free speech to me; it is some kind of weapon.
When the Pope talks about abortion or contraception, he strikes me as irrelevant. When he dismisses women's claims to full humanity, he makes me mad. But when the same man talks against capital punishment or social injustice, I applaud wholeheartedly.
And when he talks about the sanctity of human life...
I fall silent. And I wish I could agree. But...
As I understand his position, George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general would use the government's coercive power to make the victims of rape and incest retain within their bodies and give birth to the products of those crimes.
The only legal abortion in John Ashcroft's world would be to save the mother's life, if then.
Is it possible to enforce such laws without also requiring the prosecution of women who have illegal abortions?
The pro-life forces are always more comfortable talking about imprisoning doctors who violate the new anti-abortion laws.
But if the laws are to mean anything, women who have abortions, as in the old days, will have to be punished for doing so. Take a pill and go to prison.
Does the administration really intend such rigors?
If it does, it should say so. Then the debate will have some honesty.
If it does not intend to prosecute women, if it will not seek that power, then it should shut up and declare the subject closed.
(John A. Jackson may be contacted through this newspaper or by sending e-mail to TomShadwell@cs.com.) ER