had happened to all of the independent thinking that its motto had promised? Put a piece of Aristotle, Plato, or the Bible in front of these same people, and the flood of questions was strong enough to knock the ark off Ararat. But, when it came to flesh and blood reality, heart-thrumming, heat-filled issues like sex, they ducked behind Catholicism, expecting the religion to speak for itself in a way that I had begun to realize I could not allow it to do for me. The price of a life structured by these iron-clad ideals left little room for the examination that I was just starting to fumble through. As I engaged with both my classmates and myself about the issues in the upcoming election, the rigidity of the faith on such issues and its prominence in the presidential race began to stand out in relief. Pro-life was pro-life and pro-choice was interpreted as anti-life or pro-death, an uncomfortably claustrophobic interpretation of a stance that was meant to open possibilities.
The excitement in my classmates’ eyes about the prospect of Bush stacking the Supreme Court with judges whose priorities would presumably revolve around overturning the legality of abortion made me itch. Why would these young people, especially young women, so adamantly and fervently encourage losing something that had been deemed their constitutional right? They claimed each child a gift of God, sacred in the totality of its soul at conception. Their ardor felt somehow unnatural, and I struggled against the emerging tide of questions in my own mind. If each child was a gift of God and God had endowed us with the free will to choose to accept or deny his gifts, why was it wrong to exercise that choice? Were women biologically responsible for bringing every life to fruition regardless of their circumstances? Were circumstances beyond rape, incest, and imminent life-threatening danger inapplicable to the readiness to parent a child?
Beyond limiting a woman’ s choice, why forfeit this right if it could mean easing suffering? Did God really want children with life-ending deformities to endure the trauma of birth before returning to Him? Why couldn’ t that child’ s mother gently hand it back to God from the warm, sleepy pocket of the womb? Why assume that all people who would choose to terminate a pregnancy were self-centered, soul-robbing killers? The contradictions seemed endless, and the absence of an outlet to really work through them left me feeling trapped
In his campaign, Bush promised to focus his presidency on the“ culture of life.” Yet, expecting both abstinence-only education and the overturning of Roe v. Wade to create an ethos that“ values life” clashed directly with those aspects that make life valuable: information and choice. People tend to make the
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