If anything is clear over the past week since the American Supreme Court leak and the resulting articles in our media outlets as well as the March for Life on the Hill, “the issue” is not settled. The fires are lit South of the border and our key opinion leaders are working hard to stomp them out before they ignite up here..Some will now predictably pound the pulpit, boiling down all of the complexity around abortion to “a woman's right to choose”. They may even define who those pro-lifers are, what they believe, that its dangerous to talk with them, that Canadians do not agree with them, and again that the issue is settled..To be fair, on this issue both sides use the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain over there” warning. On one hand, we mustn't acknowledge that at stake here is human life, even though we will never pat a woman's belly and ask, “And how is fetus today?” On the other hand, we are led to gloss over as unimportant the deep fears and struggles of women feeling powerless, the structures that feed these fears, and the ramifications of coercive legislation..To those settled comfortably on either end of the issue, knowing that to engage the other side is a cardinal sin, that darkness has no fellowship with light, you should probably stop reading..For this writer—let's put the cards on the table—abortion is wrong, and our present non-law allows for a late-term barbarism that we should be ashamed of. Shall we bandy statistics? For every five pregnancies in Canada, one is terminated, and roughly four million lives have been ended since 1969..Problem and resulting conundrum: For this writer, coercion is also wrong..There's the rub..Justice Blackmun, in his preamble to the Roe v Wade decision, put it this way: “One's philosophy, one's experience, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitude towards life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to colour one's thinking and conclusions about abortion.”.To engage this tension as adults, or not. That is the question..This is the existential space that many honest folk find themselves in. You recognize, at times too deeply – perhaps forcing you to skirt the edges of sanity – the heart-rending tension between what you believe to be true about an issue, and how you must take seriously and wholeheartedly the person across from you who denies this truth..Its tough. Engaging this dissonance, as an affirmation of human life and dignity, is not a politically correct feel-good slogan on diversity that we can pat ourselves on the back with; this is pain. Its visceral. This is mix-it-up, bullshit-slinging heated debate (with ourselves and others) that, if we don't slink away to our cozy positions and tribes, could make us lose friends, sleep, and career prospects..The temptation is to default, instead, to virtue signaling. As a pro-life person, I could sit atop my moral high horse on this page and volley verbal buckshot while humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic all day. You could, too, from your horse (though I'm Wellington and you're Napoleon, let's be clear). We could carry on, spinning demonizing tales about the other side to make our position look better: They want to control women; they support traditional patriarchy; they don't like strong women; they don't care about mothers or babies..We can sink to the worst in our nature, this us/them, in-group/out-group game: We have all the information. We can't possibly be on the same team or in any way dependent upon those other guys. We are diverse, reasonable, clear-thinking, and free of prejudice while they are emotional neanderthals; we are selfless, they are selfish; we have science, they have ignorance..And in so doing we will never get to any of the underlying and vital issues. Why are women opting for abortions? Do men put pressure on women to have abortions? How is the professional world geared to not support women uniquely as women and mothers? What do the power brokers of corporate and capitalist economies stand to gain by women aborting their young? Why do so many women feel alone in this decision?.These questions and many others need to be discussed. .Jurgen Habermas was a philosopher, part of the Frankfurt movement, and a key figure in defining the parameters of “the public sphere” – the core of a democracy, and maintained only by conversation. Access to this space – envision an Italian piazza, if you will – must be guaranteed to all citizens and they must actively keep it alive. On the other hand, our piazza is not maintained or owned by politicians (the “representative” class), the market, or by journalists and communications experts. In fact, when these players start nosing their way in and laying out the boundaries of that space, it dies..Do we have a healthy public sphere in Canada?.For two years, we have endured machine-like messaging where in the name of public safety key questions were dismissed, experts were carefully selected for their stance, and countless important voices were denied access to the conversation amidst cliches like “follow the science” and “vaccination is the only way out of this”. Now our conversations are threatened at sword point with the dreaded “misinformation”, akin in its potency to iconic terms like “sola scriptura”, “denier”, “sympathizer”, “un-American activities”, and our leader unabashedly runs from conversation, no matter how many of us bang on Parliament's door. .In 1988, the Supreme Court threw the issue of abortion back upon the people for us to establish a law. Since then we have been told by our elected officials that we just can't handle the conversation..There are many tough questions to be asked, no doubt: What does “the right to choose mean”, and does that also mean supporting late-term abortion? Must my morality match the laws of my country? What are the bounds of privacy under the Charter? Do I have the right to be protected from the majority and the trends of our times?.The conversation could be tough. We'd have to get beyond ourselves, come down off the horses, recognize that persuasion and coercion are not synonymous, and that while I don't have all the information about you, I do have baggage and blind spots. We'd have to take ownership together: If a woman fears that she will have the freedom of what she calls self-determination and choice taken away from her, I have to affirm that her concern is also my concern..But if the alternative is letting Nanny hold our hands and profiting all the while, we must talk. We need to sit at the benches and tables together, put away our flags, and order some drinks. We need to face each other as men and women, not children..Then we need to bar the door, and leave the politicians out of it.
