MindSpinner

I believe in the sanctity of human life, I really do.

This means that I don’t believe in throwing lives away in senseless wars.

This means that innocent Iraqi civilians’ lives are important just as are the lives of my former students now stationed in Iraq.

This means that a human life is important even after it clears the birth canal. Therefore, educational opportunity is critical, and that doesn’t just mean the opportunity to be tested under NCLB. This means that Erica who is working at Kroger but longing to go to college ought to be afforded the opportunity to do so, because the Ericas and the Erics across this country are our future, and their opportunities or lack thereof amount to our national destiny.

This means that reducing the number of children living in poverty in our country is a responsibility that belongs to us all, even if it costs us - gasp! - money.

This means that, as far as I’m concerned, if we as a society mandate the birth of every child conceived, even those whose parents are not in a position to provide for children properly, then we as a society are morally obligated to ensure that those children’s lives are worth living, that we regard those lives as equally sacred when they need medical care or social services or education, and regardless of race, social class, or eventual sexual orientation. I cannot help noting the utter hypocrisy of moves to ban abortion working hand in hand with moves to cut taxes and then bemoan the necessity of slashing services. The fact is that we are not, in this country, a village intent on caring adequately for all of our children (witness increasing rates of child poverty in the U.S.). Some of us are apparently intent on sounding very holy so that we can feel ourselves holy or get ourselves elected, but we do not put our money where our mouth is. We cut taxes and line our pockets and somehow fail to notice that lots of people seem poorer and more vulnerable as a result, especially our children.

Nonetheless, I’m not going to paper over ending an incipient human life with the words “terminating a pregnancy.” Frankly abortions in the second trimester and beyond become more troubling with each day of fetal development.

However, any notion of the “sanctity of human life” also means that the life of a sixteen-year-old girl is just as important as - no, more important than - incipient life created when egg and sperm fuse inside her womb as a result of an ill-advised tryst in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. The sixteen-year-old’s life has taken shape, is realized. The .1 mm blastocyst is simply not yet sentient life, though it has at least a 50% chance of becoming so if left undisturbed.

Everything taken together means that emergency contraception, as far as I’m concerned, is a boon, not a travesty. Some unwanted pregnancies can be prevented before conception actually occurs, others while an embryo is yet an undifferentiated ball of cells rather than a fetus whose ability to feel pain we must hotly debate. If a “morning after pill” (actually administered anytime during the first 72 hours after sex), can reduce the number of (later) abortions performed, then so much the better. In opting for emergency contraception, women would be exercising choice before the stakes rise with growing limbs, emerging heartbeats, and developing brains, and well within the earliest stage of pregnancy, when nature itself often ends pregnancies spontaneously.

Dictating national morality is a religious conservative’s fantasy, not the stuff of reality. We can urge celibacy and restraint to our young people, but we cannot ignore the fact that many of them will be sexually active anyway and thus need access to information, contraception, and emergency contraception/abortificants, as well as alternatives to abortion, such as adoption.

There are no perfect solutions this side of heaven to the problems of unwanted pregnancy; there are only choices that lead to more harm done or less. I see less aggregate harm done in a world where women have early, informed choices regarding contraception and reproduction, including the opportunity to deploy emergency contraception without a doctor’s prescription. Consequently, I am frustrated this morning by the FDA’s delay in approving the sale of the so-called “morning after” pill.