Neither Fish Nor Fowl

As a member of the religious left, I do a fair amount of sitting on the fence. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but I generally see two sides of the big "Catholic" issues and am torn between. I consider myself both a faithful Catholic and a liberal to progressive politically.

Those who know me, know that I ride my bike as much as I can in nice weather. This saves me from having to turn on the radio in the car. (Yes, I know, I don't have to turn on the radio. I just do.) When I do turn on the radio, it's most frequently to Catholic Family Radio, which picks up a lot of the EWTN programming and some Ave Maria stuff.

I love about half of what I hear. I'm a big fan of Fr. John Corapi. I enjoy listening to (the repeat episodes of) Mother Angelica, even when I don't always agree with her. I like all the stuff about the Coming Home network and hearing about Byzantine Catholics ("Star of the East" at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings).

What drives me nuts is when I turn on the radio and it's all abortion, all the time. (Or, for a while, it was all Obama, all the time, and everything was negative.)

I agree that abortion is wrong. I agree that it is evil. But that doesn't mean that the women who choose it or the doctors who perform it are evil.

I think that the most common abortion method (I may be wrong on this) is the D&C, dilation and something that starts with a C. I've had one of those, and I've never been pregnant. About ten years ago, I was experiencing abnormally heavy flow -- after 3 weeks of my period, I called the doctor. She performed a D&C on me because it's basically a uterine biopsy, and she needed to make sure I did not have uterine cancer. (I did not, fortunately.) It makes me shudder to think that medical schools might hesitate to teach this technique to future OB-GYNs because it is an abortion method.

So I worry that knowledge which can be used for abortions will no longer be taught because doctors fear being attacked.

My father-in-law is a retired OB-GYN. People generally go into this specialty because they love babies, not because they like performing abortions. He used to write letters to the paper about his experiences in the days when abortion was illegal. Women would try to do it themselves (the infamous coat hanger) or go to a quack. He saw too many women die in the emergency room. Because abortion was illegal, they waited too late to go to the hospital.

The God I believe in can forgive anything. Better a live sinner than a dead one. Live sinners can repent and turn their lives around. If they've had safe, legal abortions, maybe they will have healthy children one day when they're ready.

I know, adoption is a preferable alternative to abortion. I agree totally. Yet I, in the flush of menopause, can comfortably sit back and say that, knowing that I do not have to worry about that ever again. I'm not a pregnant 15-year-old who had sex because she was pressured or thought it was the thing to do and is now too scared to talk to her parents.

And I can't be a hypocrite about this. If that had happened to me, I would have tried to get an abortion without my parents knowing. It's only by the grace of God that it didn't. I'm a big one for learning by other people's examples, and my oldest sister got pregnant before she was married. At least she was out of high school. She tried to self-abort and failed. (This was shortly before abortion became legal.) There was a shotgun wedding when my parents found out, and the marriage was a disaster. He abandoned her and, nine months pregnant and in labor, when they finally located him -- because in those days, you had to get the husband's permission to do a C-section -- he said he didn't want his wife to have a scar, so he refused. My father kicked up such a fuss, the doctor did it anyway.

All of the drama around this traumatized me so much (I was 12 or 13 at the time), that there was no way I was going to have sex as a teenager! But also, there was no way I was going to have a baby and be roped into a marriage I didn't want.

Abstinence is best for teens, I believe, but this is not how I would recommend it be taught.

So having observed at such a vulnerable age all the pain an unwanted pregnancy can cause, I am torn on abortion. No one should feel she needs an abortion. My sympathies are with the Right on how this is a sin and how women who find themselves pregnant should give the baby up for adoption. My sympathies are also with the Left on how little support there is for women who are pregnant and without financial resources and who shouldn't feel their best option is to submit to a backstreet butcher. I feel we spend too much time talking about abortion and not enough time about how to make a world where women don't feel it's their best option.