More Trouble than They’re Worth?

Abstract

For most of my life, and especially for my last 16 years as a political activist and writer, I have been concerned with problems of violence and killing. Growing up in the bloody twentieth century and learning about the violent history of humankind have convinced me that the central problem of politics is how to keep people from killing one another. Explaining and protecting the right to life seem to me the most important tasks of political theory and political practice.

My opposition to abortion and other forms of killing comes partly from my experience of growing up in a large family, where each new child was greeted with joy and love. There is so much diversity in our family that I resist the tendency to deal with persons in the mass, as statistics, with the assumption that they are very much alike and that all are expendable.

The experience of living on a farm, from the time I was 9 until I was 18, also influenced my outlook. I cared for many young animals and observed the care that their mothers gave them. Protecting the young thus seems to me a very natural thing—an instinct that we share with other beings. Living on a farm gave me lessons in the wonder and beauty of life. I saw more than one calf struggle up on its wobbly legs just after birth and watched puppies play before they could even see.

It also showed me the ugliness of wounds and death. I was shocked to find that a sow with a protein deficiency had eaten her piglets; to see my horse with his chest torn open, apparently by another horse in sheer meanness; to watch buzzards eat dead animals; to hear that a friend’s father had been badly gored by a bull. Life and death on a farm are very real, not much like the movies or television. Perhaps this is why John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which I read while on the farm, had great impact on me.

Studying history and reading a daily newspaper also influenced me. They suggested to me that the Dark Ages are always at hand, that the tides of violence always threaten, and that tragic mistakes are often made by good and well-intentioned people.

I was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam and worked full time in Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign of1968. In the early 1970s, I was increasingly puzzled and disturbed by the tendency of the political Left to favor legalized abortion. How could people who were so troubled by the violence and killing in Vietnam so easily accept the violence and killing of abortion? I did not understand this; nor did I understand why abortion was a centerpiece of the women’s movement, which I sympathized with in many other respects.

Thinking that perhaps others on the Left knew something that I did not know, I watched and waited, read about the issue, looked for enlightenment. None of the standard arguments of the prochoice position satisfied me; and some, such as those of Garrett Hardin, appalled me. Information on fetal development and on the brutal techniques of abortion increased my opposition.

A friend from peace politics invited me to join him on the January 1978 March for Life in Washington. I found that the marchers were not the angry fanatics suggested by the liberal press, but nice and friendly people deeply committed to an ideal. I have been marching with them ever since. I am a member of Feminists for Life and of the peace—prolife group called Prolifers for Survival. A free-lance writer, I have written for publications such as America, Inquiry, The Progressive, and the Washington Post. I write in opposition to abortion, infanticide, the death penalty, and war.