had happened to all of the independent thinking that its motto had promised ? Put a piece of Aristotle , Plato , or the Bible in front of these same people , and the flood of questions was strong enough to knock the ark off Ararat . But , when it came to flesh and blood reality , heart-thrumming , heat-filled issues like sex , they ducked behind Catholicism , expecting the religion to speak for itself in a way that I had begun to realize I could not allow it to do for me . The price of a life structured by these iron-clad ideals left little room for the examination that I was just starting to fumble through . As I engaged with both my classmates and myself about the issues in the upcoming election , the rigidity of the faith on such issues and its prominence in the presidential race began to stand out in relief . Pro-life was pro-life and pro-choice was interpreted as anti-life or pro-death , an uncomfortably claustrophobic interpretation of a stance that was meant to open possibilities .
The excitement in my classmates ’ eyes about the prospect of Bush stacking the Supreme Court with judges whose priorities would presumably revolve around overturning the legality of abortion made me itch . Why would these young people , especially young women , so adamantly and fervently encourage losing something that had been deemed their constitutional right ? They claimed each child a gift of God , sacred in the totality of its soul at conception . Their ardor felt somehow unnatural , and I struggled against the emerging tide of questions in my own mind . If each child was a gift of God and God had endowed us with the free will to choose to accept or deny his gifts , why was it wrong to exercise that choice ? Were women biologically responsible for bringing every life to fruition regardless of their circumstances ? Were circumstances beyond rape , incest , and imminent life-threatening danger inapplicable to the readiness to parent a child ?
Beyond limiting a woman ’ s choice , why forfeit this right if it could mean easing suffering ? Did God really want children with life-ending deformities to endure the trauma of birth before returning to Him ? Why couldn ’ t that child ’ s mother gently hand it back to God from the warm , sleepy pocket of the womb ? Why assume that all people who would choose to terminate a pregnancy were self-centered , soul-robbing killers ? The contradictions seemed endless , and the absence of an outlet to really work through them left me feeling trapped
In his campaign , Bush promised to focus his presidency on the “ culture of life .” Yet , expecting both abstinence-only education and the overturning of Roe v . Wade to create an ethos that “ values life ” clashed directly with those aspects that make life valuable : information and choice . People tend to make the
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