By Elliot Boswell
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.
In another of Wallace's matchless phrases, a "blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up."
And though this last paragraph may seem like a uniquely 21st century, liberal sensibility, it's coded deep within this country's constitutional DNA.
In a pretty much unprecedented move, our Founding Fathers went ahead and legally acknowledged the fallibility of human judgment, that even the smartest and wisest and most pious among us err sometimes. We know it as amendmening the Constitution.
I agree with Miss Cowan when she characterizes abortion as a "tragedy," an immeasurable one at that, though I am highly conscious of the fact that I speak from the secure position of knowing that I'll never have to make the decision.
It's an equal tragedy that anyone would feel incapable of bringing a person into the world because they cannot provide support, either financially or emotionally. Yet, people do it.
It's a tragedy that anyone would choose an abortion because they don't wish to subject one more person to the often painful struggle of living, yet people do it.
As most of us realize, there are countless tragedies in our 21st century world. But, the fact remains that we owe it to each other as free-willed citizens the right to act as rational, independent human beings with the full capacity for good and the full capacity to recognize that even our most deeply-held convictions may be wrong.
Miss Cowan writes that "many men and women were pressured by family friends and society" to have an abortion and yeah, she's right.
My aunt was one of these women, and she chose to have the baby. My cousin is eight years older than I. He taught me how to throw a curveball, and this summer, I will attend his wedding.
The point here is that my aunt had the choice.
Because of the immense privilege we have of living in a country where we can both choose for ourselves and know that reasonable choices will be universally respected, well, that sounds awfully like a truth we can hold t o be self-evident.
To at least one, admittedly impressionable undergraduate, the possibility that the privilege of choice is in danger is the greatest tragedy of all.
Elliot Boswell is the living
editor of The Beacon
