Abortion 2

Years ago, a case came to the Supreme Court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, which was about the state's duty to remove a child from the home if there was clear evidence of abuse. One of the issues batted back and forth was what was described as the razor's edge problem: you've got to protect the child, but if you're mistaken and the parent is not guilty of abuse, then you've done a horrendous injustice. The entire margin of error for acting correctly in such a situation is about zero. Social workers in that situation are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

That's not the only razor's edge problem in this world. I teach a number of classes that include major writing assignments, and a lot of the writing that students turn in is, honestly, embarrassing. I've worked for my entire career on what to do about it, but it's not as easy as it looks. My first instinct is just to knock off tons of points for sloppy writing. The problem is, that pushes many students toward being alliterate, of being anti-reading and writing, which is almost worse than never having learned to read and write in the first place. So I can't turn a blind eye to sloppy writing, but I also can't go in, guns a-blazing, and try to obliterate it with the force of my wrath. What I have to do is carefully balance points lost for errors with resources for improvement, as well as a good deal of encouragement anytime I do see good writing out of someone who'd previously struggled. This might seem a pretty simple idea, but it's tempting just to treat bad writing as an enemy, a pestilence, something to be stomped out with as much force as necessary. It has in common with DeShaney a fierce and desperate wish to pin down the problem to one simple target, and then bash away at that target with shock and awe tactics. In reality, the solution can be just as bad as the problem if applied bluntly, with no precision.

So I do understand that motive. I understand the feeling. I don't judge it and I don't condemn it. But I have to reject it. It's childish, and it's counterproductive. There are vanishingly few genuine problems in this world that can be done away with through an application of force to one spot, one straightforward cause. Almost anytime we hear someone assert otherwise, what we're really hearing is their fear, not their reasoning.

And abortion is the most glaring example of this.

I genuinely don't get why people who otherwise are so skeptical of government solutions to anything make such a huge, and completely irrational, exception to argue that outlawing abortion would be a step in the right direction. Outlawing alcohol worked great, didn't it? Outlawing gun ownership will certainly get guns out of the hands of criminals, right? Why, outlawing driving in excess of the speed limit has made our interstates safe enough to picnic on!

In the late 1960s and 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, there was a good deal of agitation for repeal of the laws prohibiting abortion. Doctors and nurses in particular knew just how many women were showing up in emergency rooms after botched back-alley abortions, or coathanger self-abortions. That is what is achieved by criminalizing abortion. Not fewer abortions, because I guarantee you that the botched and coathanger abortions succeeded in killing those babies. But they also resulted in gruesome deaths for the women, which is surely not what was intended.

I'm very much in favor of finding a way to make fewer abortions happen. Criminalizing them is not that way. It's another razor's edge problem. Ideally, you want to give the procedure to the medical profession, because that can have two beneficial effects:

• Fewer dead women.
• Less secrecy, which means more opportunity to talk, to offer help, to witness, to love.

Unfortunately, persuasion and witnessing don't work every time, and some women exercise the freedom the law gives them. But the solution is to step up the help and the witnessing. Getting impatient and swinging a sledgehammer blow at the procedure is just going to have the backfire effect of driving the women underground, where they will still kill the baby, and often themselves as well.

Peter didn't want to stand idly by while the soldiers arrested Jesus, so he lashed out at Malchus, servant of the High Priest, cutting off his ear. Jesus denounced Peter's act and healed the servant. Jesus never demanded imprisonment for sinners, but went to them, spoke to them, met their needs, loved them, told them to go and sin no more. That's the model we should follow. We clutch the idea of a law to ourselves as though it's the answer, but the only thing it provides is false, illusory comfort, and enough history of disastrous backfire that we have no excuse for not knowing better. Abortion is a razor's edge problem, and we stand more risk of getting it wrong by trying to cut through it than we do by waiting and praying and keeping our emphasis on Christ's Great Commission to all of us.