Sometimes art and real life collide, and sometimes the results aren’t pretty.
It was on my schedule to write something about Fifty Good Men in Sodom today, but real life smacked me up the side of my head this morning.
In, the opening of the poem, I ask who would ever allow partial birth abortions. I’ll still stand by that, but when I wrote that poem in the year of our Lord 2000, I never imagined that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v Wade. But that’s what they did this morning, effectively outlawing all abortions in many states. Some states are not making exceptions for victims of rape and incest, meaning that a rape victim and a 13-year-old victim of incest would be forced to carry a child to term.
That’s not what I had in mind.
I am Catholic, and I accept my Church’s teaching on abortion for myself. I have a quick word of advice to my fellow Catholics and others who believe in the sanctity of all human life: If you don’t believe in abortions, don’t have one (I actually got that one from a bumper sticker, too), BUT don’t impose our beliefs on the majority of Americans, most of whom did not want to see Roe v Wade overturned.
This ban on abortion is not coming from God, but from six justices on the supreme court, some of whom lied to get there. And any ban enforced by law is enforced not by the charity of God but by the threat of violence from law enforcement. That’s conversion at the point of the sword.
Finally, I’m male. I have no right to tell a woman what to do with her body.
Well, all right, I would place some restrictions on third trimester abortions, which most doctors and hospitals resist, anyway. By the third trimester, abortion obviously kills a baby. It can no longer honestly be referred to as a “fetus.”
I think a woman should be able to make up her mind in the first six months if she wants to keep the baby or terminate the pregnancy, but even in the third trimester if the woman’s life is at stake or the doctors realize that for whatever reason the child is no longer viable for life outside the womb, I’d make exceptions.
Folks, can we come to some common-sense compromises?
Probably not. People, like Lear, “howl, howl, howl, howl,” from either end of the spectrum. Radical abortion rights activists consider the right to abortion absolute, even in the final trimester. Radical pro-life proponents would force a rape victim to carry her attacker’s child to term.
Have we all gone nuts?
Probably. Like Yeats said, “the center cannot hold.”
There were not fifty good men in Sodom.
There are not fifty good men and women in the U.S. Senate.
The first drops of fire are already falling.