Numbers

Approximately, thirty million – that is the number. This is the number of voters between the ages of 18 and 43 that would be deprived of their right to vote in the upcoming US presidential election. They are not felons, though some of them might have been. In fact, they are universally considered innocent of any act that would disqualify them from casting a vote. Yet, were it not for the decision of the Supreme Court in 1973 there would be approximately 30,000,000 additional voters in this election. This was brought to mind recently after recalling the thoughts of the late Christopher Hitchens in his memoir “Hitch 22”. When Mr. Hitchens was a young man he learned his mother had aborted a pregnancy not long prior to her becoming pregnant with him. This knowledge had a profound effect on Hitchens attitude regarding abortion. He understood the existential contingency of his own life as a ‘choice’ made by his own mother.

Mr. Hitchens never came around to fully supporting an unborn child’s right to life. But in his memoir he evinced a human honesty about abortion’s reality even as an atheist/humanist he intellectually squirmed under the moral claims of innocent human life.

This election, just as those of the recent past, does not provide any hope for amelioration of the unjust decision of the Supreme Court. The unmooring of our national foundations from the moral first principles of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is but another strident assertion of a ‘no’ in the long progress of the escalating ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to God’s revelation of himself 2,000 years ago in the god-forsaken outback of the Roman Empire. A revelation that began in the womb of a young girl who quietly said ‘yes’.