Nuance 30

My mother phoned me one night at half-past eleven to talk to me about abortion. That's right. The year was 1988, and she was being treated for lung cancer. I was her primary family support. She talked for around half an hour about how strongly she believed that abortion was a woman's right and that the state, nor anyone else, had no right to tell her what to do with her body. I didn't really know what to make of the call, but I did feel decidedly creeped out. Why would a woman phone her son late at night to talk about abortion, of all things? Especially to think that for nine months, when I was in utero, she could have easily made that decision about me and I wouldn't be here. I since, following her death in 1991, learned from my aunt that Mom had been through at least two abortions. The last one happened when I was around sixteen, and I suspected then that she was pregnant. She told me nothing, of course, and when I did ask if she was pregnant she, naturally, denied it. This was all rather upsetting to me. Profoundly so, actually, given that I would never get to know the brother that had been taken in utero. I wasn't exactly pro-life or pro-choice in those days, though I did veer more on the pro-life side, but with reservations. When I was younger and a teenage Jesus Freak we were under a lot of influence from the pro-life people, especially in the Catholic Church, and since we were connected with the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church, this became an open conduit for a good number of things, both good and bad. But even in my early twenties, I was beginning to ask questions, especially when I heard Malcolm Muggeridge speak about abortion, when I would have been, I think, 23. Muggeridge had been something of a spiritual mentor to me in his writings about Jesus, Mother Teresa, and Simone Veil, all of them, especially Jesus, being of prime importance in my life. During the question and answer phase of his talk that May evening in 1979, someone, me I think, had delivered a question about his position on capital punishment, and if he would be so kind as to defend the rights of condemned prisoners as passionately as the unborn. He sounded a round and profound no about this, spoke in almost impassioned support for the death penalty, and I immediately got up and left, turning my back forever on this perfidious mentor I had adopted. In the following years, I had conversations with a number of women who were undergoing abortions, and found that I really had no right to judge them. Not one of them was in a position where they could successfully raise a kid. Neither was it my place to judge them for their sexual behaviour, whether or not I might disapprove of the moral details (I am still a firm believer in monogamy, and I do not approve of casual sex or multiple partners, but I am not going to tell others how to use their genitals.) When I was a twenty-two year old Jesus freak living in intentional Christian community while attending classes at Langara College, a young woman who had befriended me told me about her own abortion following a rape. I could only empathize with her, but at least I was able to clarify that anyone impregnated by rape or incest had every right to abort. In 1997, I was connected with a radical Christian community involved in my Anglican parish church, and they were vigorously, militantly, pro-life, even pooh-poohing the notion of abortion in cases of rape or incest. Two of their members were actually implicated in a stabbing incident of a Vancouver abortion doctor. I recognized these men in the police drawings and reported them to the authorities. I had many drawn-out and anguished conversations with some of those people. They simply could not accept that the rights of the mother need to be given priority, that women should not be treated like baby machines, that in the first trimester, a fetus cannot be reasonably or rationally considered a human being. Yet, at least one of those individuals was nearly aborted by her mother while in gestation, and it simply is not easy to argue about that with someone like her, given her circumstances. I think there are many valid reasons for both positions, pro-life and pro-choice, but I still lean these days towards choice. I would still hope that abortion be treated as a last resort by women, that alternatives and supports be put in place for those who choose to give birth, but really, it is the woman's decision, and she should be supported, no matter what she decides. Still, there are so many unanswered questions here, and I do hope that people on both sides of the argument can tone down on their screaming enough to really start hearing each other. I don't think that terminating a pregnancy is a decision that is easily or lightly made by any woman or girl who finds herself with an unwanted pregancy. If I was a woman, and unexpectedly pregnant, I have no idea what I would do. But I would hope, that whatever my decision, there would be people by my side to support me, and to not judge my personal decision about my own body.