Almost a half-century ago, Magda Denes came out with In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital. It’s still the only defense of abortion that I recommend to people.
That’s because Denes did not dodge the specific detail. She hung around for months at a New York City abortion center and described what she saw: “I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there floating in a bloody liquid—plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises.”
I’m against abortion because I believe in God and see every unborn child as one of God’s unique creations. I professed faith in Christ in 1976, the same year Basic published the book Denes had written out of her lack of faith. She was a Holocaust survivor and had seen so much brutality as a child that sorrow, guilt, and the horror of the abortion killing fields seemed natural to her.
Denes approached abortion in a utilitarian way: Babies interfered with career plans and/or made an escape from poverty harder. She saw unborn children as products of chance and viewed a regime of legal abortion as inevitable. But she also refused to sugarcoat a violent act against the weak and helpless.
Magda Denes died in 1996 at age 62. Soon after that I saw how some Japanese mothers displayed their sense of necessity and sorrow: They buried their aborted children in cemeteries and put milk bottles in front of tombstones.
It’s right to see abortion as a tragedy, and wrong to see it as a necessity: Unless a mother’s life is in danger, she can always choose life, even if it means placing a child for adoption. Joe Biden apparently moved from pro-life to pro-choice so as to advance his career: His reluctance to talk about abortion suggests that he switched in political necessity and personal sorrow. A bad choice, in my opinion, but politics is a landscape of bad choices.
And that brings me to this presidential election. This year, Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about abortion but his son Eric did, in response to a question in July on NBC’s Today Show regarding the Republican platform’s minimization of abortion. He said, “At the end of the day, this country has real holes in the roof. And you’ve got to fix those holes, and you’ve got to stop worrying about the little spot on the wall in the basement.”
I’d feel better about Kamala Harris if she would at least acknowledge that abortion is a spot in the basement, not a flag to fly triumphantly from a balcony. Magda Denes knew it’s a big spot. It would be great as a starting point if Democrats and Republicans could agree on that – and then we could at least discuss what to do about it. ###