[The NOEL News, Spring 1991]
Did you ever study for the wrong exam? There you were with freshly sharpened pencils and a head full of trigonometry--and you were handed a blue book and a list of essay questions about the Spanish-American War. Oh no!
There are times that I wonder whether the pro-life movement is confused about which test we're taking.
[Religion News Service, April 25, 1995}Smile and the world doesn't always smile with you. When Verlyn Klinkenborg reports on a pro-life protest outside a Milwaukee abortion clinic (Harper's, January 1995), the first thing he tells us about the participants is: “They were smiling. 'They smile all the time,' said a woman named Catey Doyle...in the room with me.” Likewise, when Julie A. Wortman writes in The Witness about her reluctance to attend a meeting on evangelism, her first complaint is, “Most of the people I've encountered who enjoy talking about and doing evangelism have seemed unnaturally smiley and friendly.” When liberals peer across the barricades, they don't only see their opponents thinking wrong thoughts. They see them smiling about it, which is even more unsettling.
[NPR, “All Things Considered,” January 21, 1998]
A recurring question in the abortion debate has been whether the fetus meets the definition of “person.” Why should this be relevant? What advantage is it to be a person? What does a person get?
At the most basic level, persons get protected from violence. Not all persons are allowed to drive or to vote, but every person is allowed to call the cops if someone tries to beat them up. There are probably many laws that are unnecessary or foolish, but the irreducible minimum are those laws that protect persons from violence--that prevent the larger and stronger from crushing the smaller and weaker. Laws against violence even the odds, replacing an older and more instinctive law of “might makes right.”
[Religion News Service, November 26, 1996]
Has this happened to you? You’re watching some talk’n’politics TV show, a few people sitting around a table with a photo backdrop of the U.S. Capitol, and one of them is a total idiot.
You’re thinking, “I can’t believe what the one next to the potted plant is saying,” and “Did you hear that? How’d she/he get on this show?” and “I could do better than that — in fact, my labrador retriever could do better than that!”
Well, that would be me.
[Christianity Today, April 24, 1994]
In a year which has seen many discouragements for the pro‑life movement, March 10 marks a particularly low point; it is the anniversary of the killing of abortionist David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida. When the pro‑choice movement tragically gained a martyr, they gained another boost in the fashionability of their cause. And those of us who oppose both abortion and murder must wonder once again why God allows these setbacks to occur.
[World, January 15, 1994]
One of the most hard-nosed and incisive debaters of the pro-life cause is Gregg Cunningham, whose exchange of letters with C. Everett Koop appeared in a recent issue.
Gregg's Center for Bio-Ethical Reform handles a busy calendar of speaking engagements and produces “Hard Truth,” a devastating video showing aborted babies. Every cause needs articulate, aggressive champions like Gregg.
But Gregg's latest newsletter set me to thinking about what else a cause needs.
[Cornerstone, Summer 1998]
A foot, a rib, a womb. A piece of glass. Whalebones smoothed and polished, netted in cloth. The mother takes her daughter’s hand.
The girl is dizzy; bright sunlight stripes through the shutters and dims her eyes. The old cloth tape is in her mother’s hand. A pause of disappointment; her waist has still not met the mark of 20. The whale bones that stripe across her bones, the bones of the dead behemoth, are stonger than her bones. Her bones are young and they will give. She pauses between small tastes of air. On the day she was born her waist measured 16 inches. The bones press in. The mother thinks: this hurts, yes, but this is the way the world is. Not to do this would hurt my daughter more.
[First Things, December 1994]
Paul Hill's thesis has sometimes been expanded into “the big what-if,” the scenario often used to challenge pacifists. What if you had to defend your own children from a criminal? Wouldn't deadly force be justified then?
Anyone finds such a prospect deeply distressing. But the very impact of this image hinders us from realizing that shooting an abortionist fails the analogy in three important ways.
[World, January 21, 1995]
All through a long afternoon I had listened to true stories: women, strangers to me, pouring out intimate tales of love and loss. True stories are sometimes less strange than fiction; their outcomes can almost seem inevitable. This day, every story ended with an abortion.
The spring evening was fair and warm. After dinner I left the hotel for a long walk, thinking about the day's conversations. Then I noticed on one building a plaque reading “Planned Parenthood.”
[Adapted from Real Choices, Conciliar Press, 1997]
Glance around any room where people are gathered and a curious pattern emerges: they tend to be in pairs. At a church, a concert, a movie theater, a male head is usually near a female head of roughly the same age. Other creatures gather in herds or flocks, or peel off as solitary loners, but humans prefer the couple bond. They gravitate toward it naturally; it’s how they seem to want to go through life. Why?
