I have often confessed that I am never more successful as a gardener than before I have planted the first seed. Once the promises are sown, all bets are off. The seed might fizzle, the proferred moisture may be too little – or too much; there are chewing bugs, choking weeds, shredding winds and withering diseases. The more I insert myself into this alchemy of growing, the more I am amazed that any of it thrives. It is utterly simple, and infinitely complicated.
I thought of this complexity today when I learned of the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion rights. The public values on this matter are competing and the respective voices are long-entrenched, and I’ll leave it to wiser minds with more of their bodies involved and at stake to carry the meatier conversation. I’ll admit that I never really believed we would return to this prohibition, not particularly out of concern for the fetuses involved or the women impacted, but because the ready availability of abortions has been handy solution for Presidents, legislators, jurists, preachers and other men – those who have historically calibrated and policed the public moral compass – whose ejaculations needed handy eradication. But that point, I suppose, is unhelpfully snide and picayune. Suffice it to say that the decision is hailed by many as a “win” for “life”. God knows “life” is due some kind of “win” in this culture of death. But forgive me if I feel a bit skeptical. As a culture we have never scored too high when it comes to the sanctity of life; we have viewed our embryos like I have viewed my seeds: never so marvelous as before they are actually born.
If, now, the “right to life” is to be the law of the land, with no competing rights superceding – if this moment is, in fact, an honest assertion and recalibration on behalf of life rather than a triumphalist, albeit pyrrhic ideological victory - let’s get on with building out the premise. Once these babies are actually born, let’s ensure that they have the health care every one of them needs to thrive. Health care providers and manufacturers might protest that they have a right to a profit, and I can’t disagree. But we have decided that such rights are necessarily secondary to the right to life and must be commensurately curtailed in deference to life. Once these babies are school aged, let’s have an honest conversation around what we need to do to keep them safe and out of the crosshairs of harmful actors intent on bloodshed. Let us develop and impose strategies that will prevent the violation of these students’ right to life. Gun manufacturers and owners will point to the Second Amendment and reiterate their right to bear arms, and that is certainly true. But as a culture we have now implicitly declared that the Second Amendment is as secondary as a woman’s right to manage her own body.
These, of course, are only initial considerations. Surely the “right to life” extends beyond the classroom and the playground, to the movie theaters and the ice creams shops and the dance clubs and the worship centers and beyond where the right to life is currently and increasingly routinely abrogated. Into these arenas, yes, but surely into our criminal justice system as well. Life, after all, is life, with one no more valuable than another, so the idea of capital punishment is surely as heinous as abortion. Judging relative value – and when, or even ‘if’ such value can be lost – is surely among the very definitions of sin for those who hold themselves submissive to a supreme being in the vein of the Abrahamic traditions. Vengeance, we are told, is right retained by God. Judgment is above our pay grade. It isn’t a “right” that we can either claim or defend.
And so if life it is to be, let’s honestly, forthrightly, and even inconveniently embrace it. It will not do to plant this garden and then let it go feral and to seed.
