One could imitate a ringside announcer in introducing the two fighters in the abortion contest. In the the corner to my right are the Anti-Abortionists who call themselves Pro-lifers. Many times they believe in sending everyone who is involved in an abortion to jail. There are those times when they settle for making a get rich quick piñata by filling it with money and beating it with our legal system--see the Texas abortion law.
In the corner to my left are ideologically wild women who believe that abortion should be legal and accessible up until the time that the unborn fully exists its mother. They believe that this kind of access to abortion will free or enable women to become equal to men because they will have their cake of sexual freedom and eat it too.
And like the relationship between one's biological sex and gender equality where there are gender identities that lie in between the two opposites but their biological sex will be forced into choosing between one of two options. So too are all of those groups that lie in between those two fighters in the abortion contest. They will be counted as being in the camp of either the fighter in the right corner or the one in the left corner. And such overly simplistic thinking plays a major role in making a controversial issue into an unnecessarily high divisive one.
Oklahoma is the latest state to pass a restrictive abortion law since the Mississippi abortion law was heard by the Supreme Court. One has to wonder if those states that are passing restrictive abortion laws have some inside information regarding the upcoming SCOTUS decision on the Mississippi abortion law. That is because if SCOTUS rules significantly against the Mississippi abortion law, then state governments like Oklahoma must return to the drawing board of the abortion issue having just wasted their own time and taxpayer money in formulating new laws.
As a pro-lifer myself, one of my concerns, besides the lives of the unborn and the women involved, is how these laws will unnecessarily cause this nation to be even more divided than it is today. That isn't because I think that national unity is more important than human life, it isn't. But the more divided this nation becomes over this issue, the more each side, including the pro-life side, will be condemned to singing only to its own choir when discussing the issue either privately or publicly. And from my pro-life perspective, laws alone will not stop abortion, changed minds and hearts will. But the more divided we are about this issue, the less we will listen to each other and thus the more we will become solidly fixed with our current commitments.
Also, the more divided this nation becomes, the less that many of my fellow pro-lifers will refuse to listen to women as they share about the dilemma they face when pregnant. That abortion is not just about the lives of the unborn, it is about women and the sacrifices and risks that nature calls on them to make when carrying a child. And in a very true sense, a woman's labor begins after the child is born. All of that occurs in a context of the frailty of human relationships and in ever changing economic and social worlds. For some women, pregnancy is life threatening. And unless one has seen a women deliver a child, one will never know that giving birth can be traumatic for many women because of the stress and strain put on the body. And all of us pro-lifers, especially those who have reduced the abortion issue to just the life and rights of the unborn, need to listen to a wide range of stories by women who have become pregnant with some who have carried their child to term while others have decided to get an abortion.
Unfortunately, the giving birth and raising of children by women is a victim of the oppression of women in our society. It is a victim by virtue of guilt by association. It has been unfairly associated with past, even present, male oppression of women. When the Sex Revolution began women were so often made dependent on men by society and its systems. And many women who had entered the workforce were, and still are not, treated as equals to men. And because giving birth and raising a child has been so strongly associated with men keeping women down, those women who struggle with that oppression have been understandably swayed into seeing motherhood as a tool of that oppression and thus are reluctant to recognize the human life that the unborn are because of what they think they need to do to be free of male oppression and be counted as equals to men.
In many ways, the fighters introduced at the beginning of this article are examples of the Pharisee from Jesus's parable of the two men praying (see Luke 18:9-14). In that parable, the Pharisee thanks God that he is a righteous person who shares none of the sins and faults of the person considered to be one of the worst in society at that time: the tax collector. So the more we become like one of the two fighters described above, the more we become like that Pharisee and that is displayed by how we talk about those who reside in the camp of the other fighter. That is why making abortion into such a divisive issue is so harmful to this nation. And such makes is less and less likely that we can resolve the abortion issue in a fair and just manner.
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