Most of the pro-choice arguments resonate with me, as far as they go: appealing to a woman's right to control her body, to the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, to the need to prevent narrow and sectarian moral strictures from driving national laws. Legal and safe abortion is a necessary evil -- very necessary and very evil. If we disagree, it is over the matters like notification, waiting periods, trimesters.
But every now and then, amid the repetition of these points, something slips in that makes me catch my breath.
Our staff columnist, a man of sound, staunch, and unthinking Democratic progressive beliefs, wrote a column recently outlining the usual arguments for legal abortion. But about two thirds of the way through he described, as one case among many, a woman who sought an abortion after learning she had contracted a disease that could result in "babies being born with such defects as mental retardation, blindness and deafness."
Some of you know, if you've read other places I write, that for years I had a girlfriend who was profoundly deaf-mute, by birth defect. She was and is a powerful and unforgettable influence on the world and many people in it. To suddenly encounter her -- in the cattle-car collection of that category -- listed as, not only a candidate for abortion, but a positive argument for it, suddenly casts the whole argument, and the person making it, in a new and intensely unflattering light.
I'm willing to bet I'm not the only person to have such an experience.