In a great article titled, ' I Don't Know if I'm Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos" making the rounds on electronic media, Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported that he is rethinking his long time support of abortion on demand. It is a thoughtful piece, which you would do well to read. It gives us a glimpse of the moral underpinnings of people who were supporters of untrammeled freedom to kill unborn children. I am delighted to see that people with Navarrette's presuppositions are beginning to rethink their support for the abortion industry in this country. In the past, Navarrette always felt constrained to support abortion, because he is a man. In other words, he felt that he had no stake in the abortion discussion. Because he was unlikely to become pregnant "he had no dog in this hunt."

 

What ethic refuses to take a stand about abortion, because you're a man and not a woman? Are there really no other possible arguments against abortion than the one that says it doesn't touch me because I don't have a womb? Am I really unaffected by that which is being perpetrated around me? This sadly solipsistic ethic works until the killers come for me. Who will then speak for me? Who will then defend me against unrighteous death? Am I not responsible over against my family, my community, and my nation? Of course I am. Who would say otherwise? This is what it means to be human; to define ourselves over against the other; to be responsible to and for the other humans. Navarrette, like others, is awakening to the fact that hiding behind sexual reality, by making the claim I am a man and therefore am not responsible for what happens in the lives of other people, is a total capitulation of human moral responsibility, a complete surrender of what used to be called common human decency. Unfortunately such human decency has become uncommon and needs to be defended again in this generation.

 

So while, for yourself, you may be ambivalent about abortion, you may not be ambivalent about the crying needs of those who are around you. You must recognize that this slaughter has had corrosive effects on our culture and society, causing the death of some 55 million children and counting since abortion was declared to be legal by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973. Perhaps 1973 was the high water mark of the solipsistic ethic which ignores the effect abortion has on others, including women and children. Navarrette is no longer convinced that if it doesn't affect him directly abortion has no impact on him. What a wonderfully clarifying realization this is; all caused by the explicit videos of the trade in infant body parts being perpetrated by Planned Parenthood. No, in a truly human ethic we're all in this together. Let's defend those who cannot speak for themselves and pray that when we cannot speak we will be defended.