As you may have found from reading other articles on this website, I believe feelings have an enormous influence on what many people--not all--think about this or that issue. Such people (I am one) find it tiresome or difficult to make much of abstract ideas; instead, their emotions get caught up by concrete instances that “illustrate” an abstraction. These people arrive at many of their opinions, then, via an epiphany, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking.”
Take me and abortion. Abortion was illegal and totally disreputable in my youth (I was born in 1940). Countless tears and shotgun marriages and two great American novels--An American Tragedy (1925) and The End of the Road (1958)--turned on this fact. In the late 1960s, my former college roommate the late Joe Chubb got a small celebrity on New York nighttime radio by espousing far-out opinions, among them abortion on demand.
I thought Joe was nuts. I thought abortion--I still think it--a clumsy and cruel way to practice birth control, though I knew it was the method postwar Japan had used to keep its population from growing beyond what its landmass could support. Abortion sickened me morally and physically; like many males, I was squeamish about blood and the body’s liquids.
Then in 1971, my sister Missy’s five-year-old daughter, Julie Woods, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, fanconi anemia, in which, like leukemia, the marrow fails to produce sufficient red blood cells. Julie underwent many transfusions and spinal taps. My father wept telling me about the little girl’s courage. “She’ll do anything Missy says she has to,” he said. “She just holds out her arms to be picked up.”
The doctors said Julie would probably live until puberty, and by that time science might have a solution, because real progress was being made against leukemia. My father took early retirement, and my parents moved from the New York suburbs to Vermont to be near Missy and her family.
Julie died three months later. My sister and brother-in-law, Woody, were in shock. So was their older child, a seven-year-old boy. My mother tried to act as though nothing had happened. My father drank and raged. Because there would always be a 50 percent chance that their offspring would inherit the anemia, Missy and Woody started adoption procedures.
Several months later, though she was on the IUD, my sister got pregnant. By this time, a year before Roe-vs.-Wade, Vermont had laws to permit abortion when there was a likelihood the fetus was damaged. Missy decided to have an abortion and told my parents after a Sunday lunch. My father fainted. My sister had the abortion.
Having seen what Julie’s suffering and death did to my family, I realized I would have done a lot, certainly broken the law, to get Missy that abortion. If I wanted my sister to have an abortion when she needed one, I realized also that I had to allow other women that choice. If a woman’s reasons for aborting weren’t as good as my sister’s, well, they were good enough for the woman. Who was I to say that her suffering was less than Missy’s?
Thus I came to accept abortion because of an emotion-charged event; I had an epiphany. The Pope or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can say abortion is always wrong, goes against God’s law, etc., etc., and I will answer by pointing to a specific instance where I know it was right.
(Later reflection. "If we could get this issue away from the abortion professionals and their orthodoxies, we could reach a sensible solution," the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on April 22, 2007. "Abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward." I would accept this with the proviso, which I image Brooks would agree to, that pregnant girls who feared to inform their parents could seek a judge's authorization to have an abortion.)
But . . . another epiphany. In the aftermath of the movie Dead Man Walking (1995), PBS’s Frontline series did a program on Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who counsels Louisiana death row inmates and who wrote the autobiography on which the film was based. Sister Helen was shown being feted by those who agree with her anti-capital punishment position and applaud the fact that she and the movie have made such punishment a matter of national debate.
Frontline showed several scenes of a scared white man on death row for the rape and murder of a young woman. Evenhandedly, the program also showed two small scenes of the woman’s parents, who want the condemned man executed. The wife of the couple said of him something like, “His life isn’t much, but he gets to see his family and celebrate Christmas. I don’t see why he should. We will never see or speak with our daughter again.”
To me, that seems an unanswerable argument. If that man, being of sound mind, raped and killed that woman, he should die. Sister Helen argues that to kill him is wrong because it implies that he isn’t human and that it isn’t fair to judge him by the worst thing he did. I agree he is human but think there are some acts so bad that there is no forgiveness for them except from God.
Though human, he, by his act, has cut himself off from the human community. Humanity, acting through the impersonal instrument of the state, may choose to make his estrangement permanent--to say, in effect: “When you murdered, you forfeited the right to live among us. We the people of this state have therefore decided to cast you out.”
