In a short essay in THE SCIENCES, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould once addressed the question of why–with all the available metaphors we could employ to understand/describe fetal development – we’ve settled on either “increments of progress” (from simple to complex) or as “steps in refinement” (from inchoate to sharply differentiated).
Gould came to the interesting conclusion that “some stories can proceed in only a limited number of ways, because the logic of their development (or the limited capacity of our minds) permits no other resolutions.”
Tutored by the media, many noncombatants in the battle to protect unborn life can only understand the abortion debate as an either/or proposition: you are either for a woman’s “right to choose” or you believe the baby’s right to life outweighs any maternal right.
But this is to radically miss an ageless truth: The fates of mother and child are inextricably bound up one with another. There is no way to divorce the two.
As many sadder but wiser aborted women remind us, a pregnant woman is a mother. The only issue is whether she is the mother of a living child or a dead child. Tragically, post-abortion syndrome flourishes because abortion is the ultimate betrayal experience.
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