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dcnovice -> RE: Abortion (10/10/2007 7:48:38 PM)
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quote:
in any case, it would be my argument that empathy is a supremely important thing for us to keep in mind. Quite a beloved subject!
Absolutely! We agree, I think, on the importance of empathy. I believe it's a crucial ingredient in human community and moral progress. Indeed, one of my favorite lines in a lifetime of avid reading is Lear's command to himself: "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel."
When I said that empathy is an emotion, I wasn't dismissing it. I think empathy's importance lies precisely in its being an emotion. Empathy doesn't simply give us an intellectual perspective, valuable though that is, on someone else's situation. It enables us to feel a glimmer of what someone else might feel. The word, after all, is rooted in pathos, Greek for "feeling."
Empathy has given you a clear, strong stance on abortion. Interestingly, it's had the opposite effect on me. That's because my empathy tends to be mulitfaceted. I'm cursed or blessed--can't decide which some days--with being one of those folks who see every side in every situation. I drive my friends nuts empathizing with the villains in their stories, and I could probably muster compassion (a word I prefer to empathy) for my own murderer, particularly if s/he struck while I was wrestling with a deadline.
And so, when it comes to abortion, I empathize with a host of characters:
-- the baby, growing and kicking in the womb (I confess I have a harder time working up feelings for the microscopic, undifferentiated organism of the early stages),
-- the women who have shared their powerful stories on this thread,
-- the woman honestly wrestling with the question of whether she can be a good mother to her baby if she carries it to term,
-- the unwanted child who is abused or spends a grim childhood being shuffled from foster home to foster home,
-- the family that fractures from the strain of caring for a disabled child they didn't have the emotional resources to rear,
-- the young, promising student who puts out for an eager boyfriend, winds up pregnant, and is terrified her family will disown her,
-- the women who choose to continue their pregnancies anyway, making sacrifices I cannot begin to fathom,
-- the person, born in difficult circumstances, who thinks "Holy shit. My mom could have aborted me."
-- the mother who feels that glib talk about "quality of life" disses her handicapped child,
-- women who are outraged when men, who will never face the abortion dilemma personally, never be asked or required to surrender part of their own bodies to another being, seek to curtail a woman's access to abortion,
-- men who feel censored when they're told that men have no right to have views about abortion,
-- Harry Blackmun, who agonized about the rights of both mother and child while writing his Roe opinion, and
-- all of us honestly seeking the light on this tough issue.
For me, empathy means that there are no easy answers on this issue.
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