College was full of fun and frivolity, the time of my life. Between near-daily parties with fraternity brothers, classes that were interesting, even inspiring, it flew by.
I developed the idea of going to law school my sophomore year, partly to continue my time in school and out of the work force, but mostly for idealistic reasons.[1] I was pretty much an apolitical, happy-go-lucky student; and while I discovered deep within my breast a core concern for social justice I remained blissfully under-aware of controversial issues. Such Constitutional crises of the day happened to “other people,” certainly not me.
So it was in my second year Constitutional law class. We started with Marbury v Madison, (established the right of judicial review)[2], continued with such infamous decisions as Dred Scott v Sandford (a slave is not a citizen but property without social, civil or political rights) and Plessy v Ferguson (allowed separate but equal treatment of blacks), to Brown v. Board of Education (over-ruled Plessy and outlawed racial segregation in public education), Miranda v Arizona (right of accused to be informed of rights to counsel and to remain silent) and then an oddly named case, Roe v Wade.
As I started reading the facts of Roe I kept bumping up against a new term, a word I never heard before, “abortion.” I had no idea what the case was about but as I kept reading—“Jane Roe…alleged that she was unmarried and pregnant; that she wished to terminate her pregnancy by an abortion”—its meaning became apparent.
It stunned me. I recall how revolting this was to me. In all my days of wine and cheese parties, dances, ball games, pub crawls and the like, who had time to consider such gross realities. If nothing else this case—indeed my whole law school experience—helped me realize the Pollyanna naiveté of my relatively carefree world.
But while the abortion issue held no relevance for me, there were others, like Roe (Norma McCorvey), for whom this was critically important, so I had to approach the issue with the proverbial open mind of legal objectivity. In this light the Court’s 7-2 ruling that the Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to privacy (under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment) was correct.
But was it morally correct I wondered. In most cases the fetus would become a living being, so aborting it, while not technically the murder of an out-of-the-womb human being, could nonetheless be seen as one.
However, the Court did not address the moral issue of when life begins: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicne, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."[3]
I didn’t consider the issue again until years later, when the issue once again took center stage during Reagan’s second term. I recall struggling over whether it was an acceptable practice in the eyes of God vs whether we, as a society should condone it, that is, whether we should we accept the Roe ruling or discard it as many were/still are trying to do. I prayed about it and thought about it.
After months of this I met a customer in our Louisville store, an elderly gentleman who I learned was a minister. I don’t recall the denomination but it was one of the mainline churches. I sensed he could offer some direction on the abortion issue for me so I asked him what he thought—was it a sin? Was it acceptable or not?
His answer was not at all what I expected: “Abortion,” he said, “was not a murder for there is no human life until God breathes the breath of life into it. It’s right there in Genesis 2:7. If a woman chooses to do this it is her business. It is not a sin in the eyes of God.”
I can’t say that he answered the issue once and for all for me, as I still am searching for the ultimate truth. But I did feel a sense of heavenly sent direction that brought this gentleman to me for the purpose of giving me more clarity on an issue with which I was struggling to come to terms.
Today, I continue to seek the ultimate truth. By putting myself in the mind of those who believe that life begins at conception and who really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is a human, I can understand why they are so fervent to prevent any more abortions. Conversely, I see that those who believe in a woman’s right to choose do not equate the embryo with an out-of-the-womb human who has had the “breath of life” breathed into it.
Perhaps if we all put ourselves in the other’s shoes and saw life from that opposing viewpoint we would have a tad more compassion. And while this may not change our opinion, it just may save us from going to war about it.
Richard F. Dawahare 3/6/07
[1] Though I had not yet heard of him, I suppose Atticus Finch would be the gold standard for such urgings, and indeed he became that ideal upon my seeing Gregory Peck portray him in To Kill A Mockingbird at the student center theater during a break from studying for my last set of law finals.
[2] Were I ever to consider a political office at the federal level one objective I might have would be the radical amendment of mandatory ARBITRATION, especially in such boiler plate contracts as those with brokerage houses, money managers and the like. Congress has wrongly denied consumers access to the courts by allowing these mandated arbitrations in lieu of rightful access to the courts. Consumers have no real choice but to sign away their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. This must end.
[3] The Court only addressed the question of when one’s right to have an abortion begins. The decision established a system of trimesters that attempted to balance the state's legitimate interests against the abortion right. The Court ruled that the state cannot restrict a woman's right to an abortion during the first trimester, the state can regulate the abortion procedure during the second trimester "in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health", and the state can choose to restrict or proscribe abortion as it sees fit during the third trimester when the fetus is viable ("except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother").
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