A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a liberal friend of mine on abortion. His position, as you would expect, was that abortion should be legal because a woman has the right to choose, and that Roe v. Wade was the correct call by the Supreme Court in 1973. Not surprisingly, I countered that the woman is given a choice both before and after the pregnancy, but the fetus has none at either time. He conceded that he felt late-term abortion was wrong, but that it should be allowed early on, as in the first trimester. I didn’t quite understand the distinction he made, as he has children, and looked forward to their births from the moment his wife learned she was pregnant. Sadly, he seemed to argue that the value of human life is in direct relation to the attitude of the parents. But who here was promoting the greatest liberty? I would argue it wasn’t him. The greatest liberty, in my view, would be that the people choose on the right to abortion at the state level, as it is certainly not a constitutional right. Moreover, my friend is conflicted on when the fetus actually gains any rights. But I am not. I believe the fetus has rights from the moment of conception, and I would be loathe to force my personal view on someone else (I would vote no, however, in a state referendum). By contrast, my liberal friend is fine with Supreme Court justices forcing their views on all Americans even if not constitutional, provided he wants the same thing.
One reason my friend argued strongly for abortion rights was because he wants his young daughter to have that right in the event of an unwanted pregnancy sometime in the far flung future. My question is if this is what he truly wants to instill in his daughter as she grows into adulthood. My hope is that his daughter will grow up to be a woman of virtue who will keep herself chaste until marriage, or at least until she is certain she is with the man she will spend the rest of her life with. This used to be the normal expectation, and not the exception. It may seem staid today, but I think it is still the ideal that all fathers should want for their daughters, and an ideal for which young women should be taught to strive. Second, I think my friend knows that I’m right on the constitutional question of abortion. In the same manner that marriage for heterosexual or homosexual couples is not a constitutional right, abortion is not a constitutional right either. Nonetheless, abortion may be an option, but it certainly is not a solution. The message society is sending today is that it is okay to live irresponsibly and treat unborn life as cheap when it is an inconvenience. Is that really what we want to teach the next generation? Or do we want to teach them to value and honor life first? When my friend looks into his young children’s eyes, I hope he remembers that he and is wife are creating a future world, and this next generation will reflect their teachings back on them for better or for ill. Perhaps he knows already.
Though my friend is an agnostic and believes moral values are relative, he sends his daughter to a Christian school that, not surprisingly, teaches moral values are objective because they come from God. I hardly understand it, because if one set of values is as good as any other, then why does it matter? I think this must be terribly confusing for his daughter. Yet my deepest fear for her is that she will go off to college not knowing if the Christian faith is even reasonable to believe, and that she will lose her faith because it is not backed up with her intellect. It has been demonstrated that statistically, 50% of all children raised in Christians home or are raised to be Christians lose their faith because they have no idea why they are Christians. I actually think it is better to grow up as a practicing agnostic in public schools than to grow up as a Christian in Christian schools without knowing why, since the latter case is often a setup for falling away from the faith when the world challenges what one believes. Christianity is about truth, and not about being a “good person” (though this should be the result). If Christianity is not truth, then it is not worth pursuing, and it doesn’t matter if children are brought up to be “good” only to discover in adulthood that there is nothing objectively true about that word or Christianity itself. That is precisely why I fell away from my faith until my late 30s, losing many years I could have been using being a positive force in society as well as being productive in God’s kingdom.
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