From an "On Point" Radio Diary
One of my fellow bloggers here at Ripple of Hope suggested I post this text. It's from a Radio Diary I did for the WBUR/NPR show "On Point" on Tuesday night.
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I had a baby a week ago. When you deliver a baby, you become overwhelmingly aware of both the robustness and the fragility of life.
You feel how robust life is in the brute strength of the kicking and pushing going on inside you. But you are also struck by life’s fragility as you pray helplessly that the heartbeat you're hearing over the monitor won't slow down or stop before the baby is delivered.
It’s within this context that I have been watching so much of what’s happening in politics of late. The country has been talking a lot about life. And, somehow, the conversation seems so much cheaper than the real thing.
There’s been the Terry Schiavo case and, more recently, the death of the Pope. The Supreme Court ruling against execution of minors. The battles around appointing pro-life judges. New revelations of murder and torture of prisoners of war.
All of these are serious issues. But all of these have been high jacked in one way or another, and by one side or the other, to promote what seems less about a culture of life, and more about pure political agenda.
One side has chosen fear-mongering. They seem to argue that life is so fragile, its flutter so tenuous, that it has to be defended with a fierceness, a zealotry, and a kind of meanness that seems to give no credence to life’s robust, nearly indestructible essence.
And the other side seems so afraid to give ground to its opponents that it denies any fragility at all. All questions of life—at any stage—seem to get treated cavalierly, as if any qualm, any instinct to reach out a protecting hand, is fundamentally both ideological and traitorous.
Well, I don’t buy either side. I couldn’t possibly. Especially not while while that sense of strength and delicacy that holding a tiny but screaming new baby sears into you is still with me. And enough of us are parents, have families, or care for those who are sick or dying, that I don’t think most of us buy either side entirely.
I believe most of us understand, better than we’re given credit for, both sides of the stories we’ve been hearing. Just as any mother would understand how inevitable the baby I carried felt to me in the last weeks…and at the same time, how much his hold on life seemed horribly tenuous until I heard his first cry and held him in my own arms.
Life is not a wedge issue. It’s what we have in common, with all its nuance. And I can tell by the way people look at me and my newborn these days with a mixture of joy and empathy, that those of us not stuck in a turf war understand that completely.
