Among the growing number of snags in the American political fabric is the question of who gets to decide how the use of a woman's reproductive organs should be regulated. Should it be the woman alone, the woman together with other interested parties, the laws of the state in which she resides, or not at all?

 

First, let's acknowledge that this question is absurd on the face of it. Name another bodily organ even the most professional buttinsky wishes to control. My right knee? My left ear? My appendix or gallbladder?

 

Legitimate differences do exist in our national political debate: Is the progressive income tax fair? Do we really wish to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of some other nation's teeming shore? Should America be the policeman of the world? Is free trade boon or bane?

Those are all communal issues that affect the well-being of the public sphere. They generate wide and certainly understandable disagreement. Those matters are and should be worked out in legislatures and, if necessary, the courts. Political parties rise and fall in influence according to how their operatives argue their points and either prevail or fail to persuade. That's a healthy democracy.

 

The same cannot be said about the increasing obsession with reproductive rights -- which is what I prefer to call the issue -- or, if we must, abortion. "Abortion" is a raw word. Its very sound assaults the ear. One of the dictionary's definitions of the verb "to abort" is "to check development so as to cause development to cease, to stop in early stages, to cancel."

 

By common usage, however, the term has come to mean anything from cold-blooded murder to butchery. And in a back alley, it can be just that. In a Planned Parenthood clinic with the surgical expertise of a gentle and sympathetic obstetrician-gynecologist, it can be an act of mercy.

 

The case for reproductive rights isn't about premeditated homicide or lack of respect for life. It isn't about selfishness or convenience. At issue is the lawful termination of a pregnancy and what happens in the lives of those who choose it.

 

In nearly a half-century as a priest, I have helped women and couples wrestle with what to do with unwanted pregnancies -- unwanted for reasons such as the young age of the woman, health challenges, or the inability make an adequate home for the child.

 

Not once in those 50 years did I ever come across an individual or couple who just wanted an abortion because they wanted it. When it became possible within the law to refer such folk to proper clinics, I tried gently to approach the idea of birth control for use in the future. Sometimes abstinence seemed the best advice for an interim time when the sexual contact that occasioned the pregnancy had been casual and absent any kind of commitment.

 

When I was dealing with a female person under the age of legal consent, it became necessary to include parents or guardians in the conversation. Sometimes that did not go well, but the ethical system under which I operated required it. I could not make myself a surrogate parent.

 

In almost all cases, my pastoral counsel helped those women choose between terminating the pregnancy and carrying the child to term. One or two found it acceptable to yield the eventual child to adoption. Still others felt they had the means to be a single parent. Two of those in later years came to me with would-be husbands who professed love for the children in question and, last I knew, were living happily ever after.

 

As one who in my newspaper days wrote extensively about the political and legal scraps over reproductive rights, I became a kind of lay expert on the celebrated 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade that, even with all its qualifications and weird allusions to baseball, essentially took the termination of pregnancy out of the hands of unscrupulous abortioners and into lawful clinics.