A Brief, Beautiful Life
Part Two of two

By Dave Andrusko

Part One was all about all things ugly. Part Two is all about everything that is lovely, noble, and true.

Yesterday, a Canadian friend of many years sent me the story, "A brief, beautiful life," written by Genevieve Lanigan which appeared in Ottawa Citizen.

Since you read this powerful account at www.ottawacitizen.com/health/brief+beautiful+life/1896124/story.html, I don't want to spoil it by going into detail. Instead let me make two observations. (Initially the chronology gets a little complicated, so please bear with me.

The August 14 opinion piece, written by Mrs. Lanigan, is a follow- up to an August 2008 opinion piece written by Margaret Somerville. Dr. Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and someone whose articles you should take the time to find online and read.

In 2008 Somerville had stitched together a lovely column out of her own convictions about the intrinsic value of every life and a letter Mrs. Lanigan had written to her which Somerville described as a story "of a pregnant woman's truly remarkable, life-affirming and life-respecting response to a tragic situation and why she decided against abortion."

Why had Mrs. Lanigan written her own follow-up essay for the Ottawa Citizen

"Dr. Somerville has told me that many people have been wondering how the pregnancy ended."

As I say I don't want to ruin this beautiful account, so let me focus only on the context into which Dr. Somerville put Mrs. Lanigan's story.

If you think we have it tough here, it's nothing compared to Canada where it almost seems sometimes as if the Arctic winds have frozen Canada's heart toward unborn babies. Dr. Somerville wrote about an article that had just appeared in Canada's dominant newspaper, The Globe and Mail, which was "strongly pro-choice in the sense that all the women featured believed they had made the right choice in having an abortion." Mrs. Lanigan's story was "very different."

Somerville made many keen points, but let me mention two. First, she responded in advance to those who would say it was fine that Lanigan chose life, but that was her choice and the point was that she had the choice.

"That's correct, if you focus just on having choice," Somerville observed. "But if you focus on the substance of the choice she made and why, and compare that with the substance of the choices made by the women featured in the Globe's article and why, there's a night-and-day difference. These two stories reflect two very different sets of fundamental values." Overwhelmingly, however, "only the pro-choice values stories are being told in the general media. The pro-life values stories are dismissed as being too personal, just based on religious belief, and so on."

Second, Somerville followed that up immediately by observing, "Why one set of reasons for holding certain values is regarded as automatically validating these values in the public square and the other set of reasons as necessarily invalidating the values based on them is an important question that I can't explore here."

Let's think about that for a minute.

No matter how open to public scrutiny, no matter if your concerns are conveyed in language that is accessible to all people, if your opposition to the slaughter of unborn children in grounded in your faith, it is trivialized and dismissed as mere "religion." That the Civil Rights Movement was awash in "religion"--that its language, its organizing principles, its appeal to White America was bathed in an appeal to (and undergirded by a faith in) the God of the Bible--just gets ignored.

Double standard? Of course. But the larger and more important point is, according to Dr. Somerville, "that this imbalance in media coverage means there is not a balanced approach to the abortion debate in the public square and, whatever our own personal stance on abortion, we should all be concerned about that."

Be sure to take five minutes and read, "A brief, beautiful life," written by Genevieve Lanigan found at  www.ottawacitizen.com/health/brief+beautiful+life/1896124/story.html.

Please send your thoughts and observations to daveandrusko@gmail.com.