by Richard Stern

"The killing of an innocent human child is incompatible with going into communion in the body of Christ," said Pope Benedict XVI thirty-odd-thousand feet in the air en route to Brazil, the country with more Roman Catholics than any other in the world. I would love to hear the learned and benevolent pope's views on the death of a thirty-week-old fetus in a tornado of the sort that just annihilated a small Kansas town, but I guess that God does not need to go into communion in the body of His Son. In any event, the pope began his first papal trip to South America with the kind of learned bravado that prefaced his trip to Turkey last year when he quoted a medieval king on the murderous bellicosity of Islamic conversion. It is now 34 years since Justice Blackmun, after a summer's reading of technical and philosophical literature, penned the famous--infamous--majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. A dozen years before that, I had my only personal involvement with abortion. For various reasons, my then-wife, about nine weeks pregnant, decided that it would not be good to have another child and that we should seek an abortion. We consulted her gynecologist and obstetrician who said that there was no physical reason that she could not have a child and that ruled out having it done at our university hospital. That ended our quest. It was a relief to me. I hated the idea of abortion but said nothing to my wife as I felt that child-bearing was her realm and that my own job was to support her in any rational decision she made about it. This was part of the viewpoint that the best decisions are made by those directly implicated in them although I granted that many decisions had to be made by people whose involvement was indirect. (You did not have to have had someone in your family murdered nor did you have to be a murderer, to decide the fate of one.) Perhaps not so incidentally, my wife and I both lived to have decades of joy from the son that was born and indeed from his son born 36 years after Roe v. Wade. It was sometime in the early 1980s that a student in my "Writing of Fiction" class wrote a brilliant story about a college girl who gets an abortion. The surgery was described in excruciating detail from the point of view of the young woman and the psychological aftermath was also depicted with empathetic power. It was a rule in the class that we never question the actuality which might or might not lie behind the fiction we read, but no one in the class doubted for a moment that the author had herself undergone the experience she had so harrowingly described. We had all read "Hills Like White Elephants," the brilliant Hemingway story about a man trying to persuade his girl friend that aborting their baby would be a trivial matter that would only deepen their relationship, and most of us agreed that, all in all, our classmate's story, if not as subtly reinforced by staging (the Hemingway story takes place at a small train station while the couple waits for a train) nor as overwhelmingly powerful at its climax (the girl begging the man to "please, please, please, please, please stop talking"), was as moving and affective. Surely not every abortion nor decision to abort follows the kind of emotional debate which the writing of these two stories or the anguished puzzlement, frustration and--in my case--relief of my personal encounter, but, again, surely, many more engage the intellectual and spiritual depth of those who seek and get them than not. Although as Justices White and Rehnquist, the Roe v. Wade dissenters, argued, there is no constitutional "right of privacy," if there is a derivative right, what better lives in the self-confrontations of privacy than the decision to abort or not to abort. For Brazilians, privacy may not be an issue, but President Luis de Silva, one of a huge family whose lives were narrowed by each other's existence and who himself fathered a child out of wedlock, will surely discuss with the pope his awareness of the state's interest in the lives of young women and, as he told the press, in the recognition of them as complete human beings. Neither will persuade the other about legal or religious penalties and rights, and this great human debate will go on and on.