Happy New Year, Ross Douthat, Let's Talk About Abortion

“Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead. And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just ‘pregnancy tissue.’ After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: ‘If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.’ Instead, ‘think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.’ It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a ‘thing.’ Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, ‘A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember … ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.’ When we want to know this, we know this.”
 — The arguer in me wants me to seize upon the word “want” in that last sentence, and tell Ross Douthat, Sure, yes, when we want to believe something, so as to make the world line up with our personal religious inclination, we can make ourselves — we can blur the line between personal experience and logic, and, semantically, between “believing” and “knowing,” too. But that is a type of cheating. And it doesn’t change the fact that abortion should be kept legal and available to any pregnant woman who so chooses. But the reader in me is thankful for a compelling challenge to my own views.