Henrietta Hay's Column

Can we really talk to each other?

Recently on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, a hundred people from both sides of the abortion issue met and sat down together. A group called Common Ground Network for Life and Choice was holding its first national conference including community leaders, academics, writers, and members of the clergy, in an effort to defuse the rancor that usually colors any discussion on the subject of abortion.

According to the New York Times report, participants sat knee to knee in circles - Planned Parenthood members beside Operation Rescuers, a pro-choice Baptist minister beside a social activist who opposes abortion. No one's basic opinion was changed, but they communicated civilly.

Here in Grand Junction recently a hundred people met to look for answers to the question, "Can we really talk to each other?" Subjects discussed included religion and the public schools, single-issue politics, the breakdown of civil discourse and other issues.

Problem was, it was pretty much a case of preaching to the choir. Most of the people there wanted to talk to each other and exchange ideas about issues. We were really searching for areas of agreement. But the people who are so sure of the absolute rightness of their positions that they refuse to search were not there. Talking together on any controversial subject is an art that many Americans seem to have forgotten.

Perhaps the most divisive problem in our current political climate is abortion. It has gotten beyond the moral issue and become a political one. The people truly involved in abortion decisions are women of childbearing age. But the people making the speeches, planning the protests and trying to amend the constitution are white, middle-aged men. Politically, abortion has replaced the ERA as the anti-feminist buzzword.

Certainly those women who believe that abortion is a moral wrong should never consider having one under any circumstances and should be respected and protected from any pressure. On the other hand, those of us who honestly believe that women have reproductive rights which include abortion as a medical procedure are entitled to our beliefs and have the right to the same consideration and respect. This is a very fundamental difference of belief, which will not be healed by rhetoric.

This is not a new problem. Induced abortion has been practiced in every culture since ancient times. Laws will not cause it to go away. They will simply make criminals of women and doctors and revive the back-alley butchers. A whole generation of women has grown up not knowing what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. I fervently hope our daughters and granddaughters never need to learn.

Gloria Feldt, the new executive director of Planned Parenthood says, "...this is so much more than any single issue. To me it's about unwanted children--it's about whether we're going to be able to live on this planet and survive." Of the more than 800 million people in the world who are malnourished according to the U. N., the overwhelming majority consists of women and children.

It has always interested me that the people who protest most loudly about the intrusiveness of government into our personal lives are the ones who demand that government intrude into the most private of all relationships that between a woman and her family and her doctor. Government has no right to tell a woman whether she should bear a child.

If government can say that no woman under any circumstances may have an abortion, then government can also say that under certain circumstances all women must have abortions, as they do in China.

I think the time has long passed when we can find very many points of agreement on this issue. But I do believe we must quit demonizing each other.

Can we really talk to each other? Probably not, but surely we can learn to be civil to each other and lower the rhetoric.