Informed Choice, Privacy and Civility 
Harry T. Cook


By Harry T. Cook
3/4/16
 
 
All -- or at least a lot of -- eyes are on the truncated U.S. Supreme Court as it considers a case from Texas that either way it is decided will have an enormous impact on a woman's exercise of her reproductive rights.
 
Having studied and written at length over the years about the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, I have come to the conclusion that the case should never have been a case to begin with. After all, it has been almost 100 years since women's suffrage was achieved.
 
To my knowledge there is no law that prevents a man from getting sterilized or having his male organs removed, nothing that prevents him from subordinating his sexual urge so that he does not impregnate a woman, even his wife. In those respects, he is free.
 
So why did the mysterious Ms. Roe have to go all the way to Washington, D.C., to have her most intimate privacy secured and, against all odds, essentially get male judges to understand that it was her body, not theirs, that bears and gives birth to a child? Never have I been able to fathom that shocking disparity.
 
If you've read the late Justice Harry Blackmun's Roe ruling, you have seen how convoluted it is, how unnecessarily circumstantial and how complicated the right to terminate a pregnancy can be.
 
Once state legislatures got their conservative legs, all kinds of mischief was done to Roe v. Wade that had the effect of watering down what had been established as a constitutional right: statutes about how wide corridors in Planned Parenthood clinics had to be, staff privileges at hospitals for the physicians who agreed to perform the outpatient surgeries for pregnancy termination and other nitpicking requirements.
 
Several of my friends -- all women -- consider that what is afoot in their country constitutes a war on women. They would be right. Yet neither they nor I can make out why the war, more than 40 years along, is being prosecuted -- mostly by men. Neither they nor I can grasp what is at the basis of it.
 
Fundamental misogyny is offered as a cause, as my women friends point out that there is not one female professional player on any Major League baseball team, that golfers have their own gender tournaments, that many religious institutions would rather go out of business than entrust congregational leadership to women, that we have -- 227 years on -- yet to have a woman president. The candidate of that gender we now have is being mercilessly pilloried even by members of her own party, by other women, by the media, ad nauseam.
 
I am proud to say that my alma mater had for six years a woman president at the same time that the two largest universities in my state had women presidents -- all three scholars in their own right and able executives. My state had a woman governor for eight years. The Episcopal Church had a woman presiding bishop for nine years. She has recently yielded the miter to the first African-American man to be elected to that office.
 
Here and there, then, progress is being made.
 
That suggests to me that the war on women is not an out-and-out conflict, but fought here and fought there, perhaps as a fierce tactic of retreat. And maybe the last stand is the uterus. The so-called prolife lobby wants to plant a flag on it and declare victory over any choice any woman might decide to act upon
 
In my more optimistic moments, I wonder if that battle flag will go the way of the vile Stars and Bars of the Confederate flag to which soreheads from coast to coast still clutch as if Appomattox were a crater on a distant moon.
 
I so admire Linda Greenhouse, the one-time, prizewinning reporter who for years covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times. She now teaches at Yale Law School. Ms. Greenhouse is the best source for facts minus passion on Roe v. Wade and its long and miserable history. She knows the territory and has followed those who have tried to lay land mines in the way of lawful choice.
 
Still, my granddaughters will grow up in the knowledge that in certain locales in this country and under certain circumstances their bodily organs will be under the control of a mesh of laws deliberately enacted to force them to carry a child to full term regardless of how they got pregnant, if they wanted to get pregnant or if one of the fetuses in question was deformed to the point at which the mortuary would be the very next stop after the delivery room.
 
This is not the kind of country anyone in his or her right mind should want. The answer is for the law to back off, for the busybodies to find something else to fill their time, for all to butt out and have mercy on the women who have to make these terrible decisions and to allow them, yea, encourage them to work in privacy with their physicians as they, the women, make the decisions that are theirs to make.
 
The eventual Supreme Court ruling on the Texas case will be greeted with drumrolls and trumpets, as if a czar were about to hand down an ukase. Nonsense. The court should tell Texas -- and the other 49 states -- to go away and work on child poverty, evictions, rotten education and other crimes committed by civic neglect every day.
 
That would give some much needed credence to the idea that America is "the land of the free, and the home of the brave" instead of a nest of pious buttinskys.



Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 2/26/16 What Is Truth?   
 
Charlotte Fielder, Tucson, Arizona:
You have put your finger on the reason I go to church. It is not to get my beliefs affirmed but to be part of a community that is safe and worthwhile. The people there have become my friends. We work together in a soup kitchen and food pantry so that we are giving as well as receiving. As for the theology? Who cares?
 
The Rev'd Peter Lawson, Petaluma, California:
Thanks for this essay. It stimulated my thinking. Every essay does that, but some more than others and this one called for a response. In the course of my career in the church, I served in a wide variety of congregations from a wealthy suburb in Fairfield County and a small mill village, both in Connecticut, to the Cathedral in Indianapolis, to a Cantonese speaking parish in Oakland, during which I was also the Missioner of the Diocese of California overseeing 15 missions and aided parishes. I ended my career at St. James in San Francisco, which grew from an average Sunday attendance of about 30 to 150 in my 12 years there. I say this not to brag because most of my work didn't really amount to much until I figured out what was really going on in the churches I had come to know intimately. I came to the conclusion at long last that theology and belief didn't make any difference at all when we are trying to replicate the communities that gathered around Jesus and his program during the first two centuries. Preach and teach whatever 'truths' one thinks are central to the tradition allowing the teaching to be questioned all the while. The only thing that builds and grows such a community is nurturing loving connectedness, which is to say nurturing the qualities of honest self-disclosure, empathy, self-giving love of one another and the conviction that we are all equals in this precarious and glorious thing called human life. For what its worth, that's the truth I know. While I still manage to hold onto my skepticism about that truth, I stake my life on it and am trying to learn more.
 
Cynthia Chase, Laurel, Maryland:
Unlike many folks, I recite the words of the Nicene Creed without any qualms. Not that I take it literally, but as I repeat the words I ask myself, "What did these words mean to the people who wrote them? Did they themselves really believe each and every word, or were there verbal slugfests and reluctant compromises along the way, and did some walk out of the meeting never to return? And when the creed was presented to the local congregation, did some people shake their heads at one phrase or another and say to themselves, "I don't know about that. Dad wouldn't have agreed with this at all." I don't know anything about how the creed came about other than the fact--and I'm not even sure about this -- that Constantine wanted to stop all the arguing about the nature of Christ, so he set up a committee to settle the question once and for all. Ha. Good luck with that. 
 
Tom Richie, Anderson, South Carolina:
Now that's truth. Thank you very much.
 
Forrest Schultz, Austin, Texas:
Nice philosophical romp with the nature of truth. How right you are to say that its is "hard come by." Ask any scientists. Ask anybody who does serious research. There are shards of many beakers that have been thrown to a laboratory floor in terminal frustration.
 
Donald Worrell, Troy, Michigan:
Yet another fine essay. I've long thought that the three most profound words in the Bible were, "What is truth?"
 
Danielle Proctor, Evanston, Illinois:
The line from Graham Greene haunts me. It's as if he had been channeling Einstein. But I like the idea that truth may be just like that: always on the move and we always two or more steps behind and never catching up. Yours is a very honest approach to the so-called truth of religion.
 
Diane Lake, Petoskey, Michigan:
I enjoyed this essay even more than usual. I'm looking forward to hearing you speak this summer.
 
Fred Fenton, Concord, California:
You write that if we are looking for truth in religious congregations we are more likely to find it in the members' concern for each other rather than "truths" handed down in dogmas and doctrines. Aristotle said, "Man is by nature a social animal." That is a truth we see at work in church, synagogue, and mosque, but also at Starbucks and other places people congregate.
 
Richard M. Schrader, Jacksonville, Florida:
Your essay examining abstractions such as justice, truth, and God leads us all to a paralysis of thought when we enter into the area of the unknowable. Yet, when we define the scientific term, absolute zero, as the absence of movement, we do not preclude its existence. It is a condition and it is observable. Maybe in time we will find that our abstractions will become a bit visible, but for the present they are hidden and unobservable. Your essays continue to be thought-provoking and eagerly awaited on Friday mornings at 6 a.m.
 
Joel Pugh, Dallas, Texas:
"The best moments come as they greet one another, ask how things are going and make it clear that they are friends who care and on whom friends of theirs can depend." Very good. Thanks.

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at revharrytcook@aol.com.