FROM THE EDGE / A passionate perspective

My unsolved riddle
Does 'choice' mean no dialogue and no apology?

By DOUGLAS LeBLANC
for Episcopal Life

WHATEVER OUR OPINIONS on abortion, we dare not treat it glibly.
 

Jan. 22 marked the 30-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. I'll admit that I did not commemorate this milestone by sending Planned Parenthood's "Choice on Earth" holiday cards to friends and family.
 

Rather, I found myself thinking of two episodes that capture the frustrations of pro-life Episcopalians.
 

In 1991 one of my closer friends attended the General Convention in Phoenix, both to stand for doctrinal orthodoxy and to volunteer her time with the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL).
 

One morning, when she attended the daily Bible study and Holy Eucharist, the gospel reading was the account of John the Baptist leaping in his mother's womb upon hearing the voice of the Virgin Mary. My friend pointed out that this passage has implications for the abortion debate, and her table-mates treated her observation with derision. When I met up with her later in the day, she was crying -- not in self-pity, but in grief that her fellow Episcopalians were so hostile to the notion that fetal life is human life and therefore is worth protecting.
 

The other episode involves a more direct experience. Friends recently had moved from Kansas to Iowa and joined an Episcopal parish. Wanting to know more about their new home, I visited the parish's website and found much of its contents encouraging.
 

Under a "Women's Issues" segment of its links page, however, this parish referred visitors to two vividly unrelated sites: Today's Christian Woman magazine (published by my employer) and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (www.rcrc.org). I dropped the webmaster a friendly e-mail, praising the site, but also asking that the parish consider linking to both sides of the volatile abortion debate. I suggested the website for NOEL (www.episcopaliansforlife.org), in hope that a clearly Episcopal link would be more appealing to this parish than, say, that of Operation Rescue.
 

I received no response from the webmaster -- not a dismissive "Thank you for sharing," not an acknowledgment that Episcopalians could in good conscience disagree with RCRC, not so much as a blunt "Dear Brother in Christ: Go to hell."
 

I'm sure that pro-choice Episcopalians could counter my stories with stories of their own, and I'm not trying to start a face-off of wound comparisons. Calm discussion of abortion is difficult precisely because so many people on both sides are emotionally invested in it.
 

I mention these experiences because both point to a riddle I've been unable to solve: Why is it that the folks who describe this crucial moral issue in vague language about choice seem so uninterested in hearing from the other side? Does choice mean only abortion on demand and without apology? Isn't an informed choice better than one made only by one-sided presentations from either end of the abortion debate?
 

General Convention has struck a delicate balance in the abortion debate. At its meeting in 1994, General Convention expressed its "unequivocal opposition to any legislative, executive or judicial action on the part of local, state or nation governments that abridges the right of a woman to reach an informed decision about the termination of pregnancy or that would limit the access of a woman to safe means of acting on her decision."
 

But the same convention also agreed to this language: "We regard all abortion as having a tragic dimension, calling for the concern and compassion of all the Christian community. While we acknowledge that in this country it is the legal right of every woman to have a medically safe abortion, as Christians we believe strongly that if this right is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations. We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection or any reason of mere convenience."
 

In other words, General Convention emphatically opposes many of the same abortions defended by the National Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
 

Bringing General Convention's committee-polished language into our daily lives is a difficult task, of course. I think that we'll usually find ourselves in the same polarized camps that we were in before General Convention had anything to say about abortion.
 

But the least that we should be open to doing as Episcopalians is building relationships with people who disagree with us. Many Episcopalians will feel a need to do something with broader effects, whether it's joining peaceful protests at abortion clinics or providing escorts to women who face protests (peaceful or otherwise) or lobbying lawmakers to change legislation.
 

After 30 years of legal abortion, I cannot imagine that most Americans soon will believe that each of the nearly one million abortions has a tragic dimension. We are the poorer for it.
 

Douglas LeBlanc is an evangelical Episcopalian and an associate editor at Christianity Today.