Reassessing an old debate

A quick pre-emptive strike on issues of gender, rhetoric, class, etc.

In the event that I prove persuasive enough to keep your attention in lower-case text, the piece that follows will address certain issues regarding: Roe v. Wade, Miss Cowan's commentary in last week's issue of The Beacon, American identity, cultural ethics and a whole bunch of other stuff, maybe.

So I feel I should acknowledge upfront that I'm well aware of my personal status as a white American male from a certain socioeconomic stratum who is accordingly shackled to all the mindsets and biases that come along with it. I know, and I'm not proud of them, but what can you do? The rest of this particular commentary should be read with said biases in mind.

Actual commentary

In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace - anyone who knows me at all is laughing to themselves right now; cease and desist, I say - wrote an essay called "Authority and American Usage" in which he takes a look at the current war in English grammar studies. It's way more interesting than I just made it sound. True to Wallace's style, "Authority" is a super-digressive work, touching on topics as varied as the philosophy of language, sociological dynamics of children and, appropriately enough, abortion.

It's fair to take as an axiom that "the question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed," Wallace writes, otherwise there wouldn't be such a vitriolic debate about it.

That is, it is currently impossible, both scientifically and philosophically, to pinpoint the moment when a fetus develops a soul, a fact from which two conflicting arguments emerge.

1) According to Wallace, "… the principle 'when in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,' appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life."

2) At the same time, Wallace writes, "… the principle 'when in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it …' appears to me to require any reasonable American to be pro-choice."

I do indeed agree with Wallace on both, but if you're anything like me, you are raising a serious objection at this point: It sounds like I'm basically endorsing a form of moral relativism. Worse still, it may seem like more liberal pussyfooting, the most useless kind of equivocating that currently exists on the left side of our political spectrum.

I don't think that either of these is true in this particular instance.

Rather, the fact that our country is so starkly divided on the issue of abortion (or so most politicians would have us believe …) means that we should, ipso facto, give serious consideration to the opposing camp.

The pro-life movement is not some conservative fringe group like the John Birch Society, yet neither is the Pro-Choice movement equatable to the leftist vigilantism of the Sea Shepherds.

And I think we can all agree that to condemn one side or another as either moral Puritans or morally bankrupt is a pretty unhealthy approach to the whole democracy in America thing we've got goin' on.

Yet Miss Cowan's piece - "In memory of the unborn victims" from Jan. 28 - shows no such consideration. What I object to first off is the loaded rhetoric. Excluding the headline, there are six deployments of the word "unborn" (both as a noun and an adjective) and exactly zero mentions of the word "fetus." "Decision" (i.e., "choice") is used only once, and exclusively in reference to a certain relevant Supreme Court decision. In its place, we read things like "banned from receiving a human identity," "the lie about the inhumanity of (the) unborn" and even "holocaust."

This is the language of a tyrannical morality, as dishonest and nefarious as the images evoked by "The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban."

It instinctively presumes the ethical high ground, and dehumanizes and vilifies those who dare call themselves pro-choice. Somewhere northwest of London, Orwell is rolling over in his grave.

Not only is Miss Cowan's commentary rhetorically manipulative, but it goes as far as invoking both the suffragettes and the Civil Rights marchers as ideological precursors to pro-life as we know it today.

This is pretty obviously misleading too. As a friend recently said, both women's rights and black right's were, well, about getting rights, and, at least in this debate, the pro-life angle is about restricting them. I know that's overly simplistic.

Plus, there's the ugly truth that current pro-lifers are descendents of Reagan-era politicking, which itself found much of its political base in Southern states, states that gradually defected from the Democratic Party after - you guessed it - segregation was made unconstitutional.

So I find it pretty disingenuous for any pro-life argument to pitch its tent on the foundation of Martin Luther King's legacy, when in all reality - and I'm not accusing anyone of anything here; this is a rhetorical refutation - it's statistically evident that thepro-life argument gets most of its political support after the most racist parts of the Union switched from blue to red.

Again, please don't get me wrong: By no means am I implying that there is a racist element to the Pro-Life Movement, merely that America's systemic racism is a bigger part of the ideological evolution of the right than it is of the left. And to be fair, the left has some despicable history to it as well.

I'm afraid that maybe I'm coming off as skirting the issue, or engaging in the big ol' time-honored game of finger-pointing.

The real object of my writing this piece is the dogmatic conviction of many of us when it comes to a lot of the stuff we believe. The refusal to even entertain the idea that another person's internal code may be just as valid as our own, especially when the two are conflicting.