Becoming Pro-Life The Hard Way
By DONALD DeMARCO
“Aujourd’hui Maman est morte. Ou, hier, peut-etre; je ne sais pas.” (Today my mother died. Or was it yesterday, I don’t know.)
- + + This is the celebrated opening of Nobel Laureate Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger. It immediately establishes the main character as a person who, being emotionally unmoved by the death of his own mother, is indifferent to life.
This indifference to life and death was brought to me in a memorable way one rainy night in October after I had given a pro-life talk. It would be a 20-mile trip to get back home and I was eager to get started. Before I could get into my car, however, I heard someone calling me. From the sound of his voice and the quickness of his step, I sensed that he had something important to tell me. And, indeed, it was very important.
I listened to him as he unraveled his tale, first with polite indulgence and then with rapt attention. He had been in Uganda doing peace work as an emissary of the Canadian government. The political situation under Idi Amin had reached a crisis point. Canadians like my friend were advised to return to Canada at once.
He boarded a train that would take him out of the country, or would it? His trip was met with unanticipated terror. He was the only white passenger on the train. A soldier came over to him and pointed a machine gun at his face informing him contemptuously that he could blow him away and toss his body into the jungle and no one on the train would care.
For roughly a half-hour, though it must have seemed like an eternity to my friend, the cat and mouse game continued. Would the soldier squeeze the trigger and send his dead body not to Canada, but to who knows where?
The other passengers on the train seemed utterly indifferent to his predicament. No one interceded on his behalf. He was entirely alone, a complete stranger in an alien world. He would be judged without a trial, facing a death sentence for the crime of merely existing. Hope was his only ally.
As time passed, my friend explained to me, his hope continued to grow. The soldier’s delay strengthened the hope that he would not be executed.
What does one think about when facing death? Dostoevsky was given five minutes before he was to be shot. He found the fleeting seconds unbearable and longed for having an endless period of five minutes to enjoy life wherever it would take him. The execution was a hoax. During that brief period, however, one of Dostoevsky’s comrades snapped. The great Russian novelist wrote about him in his novel, The Idiot.
My friend endured a trial of terror, but one that did not lead to his death. What were his thoughts during that ordeal? He was alone and entirely at the mercy of an outsider. He was incapable of any self-defense. There would be no lawyers to plead his case.
His demise, in the mind of his would-be assassin, would be a mere incident. Whether he lived or died was entirely dependent on someone’s arbitrary choice.
When the sadistic soldier withdrew his instrument of death, my friend was reborn! He had emerged alive because an outsider decided to allow him to live. His identification with the unborn became irresistibly and firmly established.
We were all, at one time, denizens of our mother’s womb. To be or not to be was not ours to decide, but the prerogative of another. Just as my friend could not be in favor of extending to the soldier a “pro-choice option,” he could no longer extend that same option to a pregnant woman.
He identified with the unborn who, in their own pre-conscious way, were choosing life. It was now impossible for him to be pro-abortion. Being pro-life meant identifying with the unborn’s nascent desire to go on living and developing. Being “pro-choice” was identifying with the soldier wielding not a curette but a machine gun.
Often, the reasonableness of the pro-life argument falls on deaf ears. Experience can be more convincing than rational argumentation. My friend explained to me on that chilly autumn night how he became pro-life the hard way.
Because I was a speaker and a writer, my friend was calling upon me to be his megaphone to the world. It is a role I am only too happy to accept.
We were all at one time fetuses, unborn, but nevertheless human beings. To identify with the unborn is to identify with ourselves. We should not want our lives terminated at any age.
We are often preoccupied by the moment and lose sight of the larger picture. Our baby pictures should include ultra-sound images of when we were moving toward birth. Approving abortion is a kind of self-abortion, a rejection of an early phase of our own existence. If we truly love ourselves, we should love the whole range of life that belongs to every human being. Just as we should not aspire to be merciless gunman, we should come to the defense of every unborn child.
But there are too many citizens on the train of life who are indifferent, like the main character in Camus’ novel, to the pre-eminent value of another’s life.
I salute my friend and am grateful for his encouraging me to tell the world about his story and how he came to be pro-life. - + + (Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is the author of 41 books, available on amazon.com. His latest two books are Let Us Not Despair and The Road to a Better World. He and his wife Mary have five children and thirteen grandchildren.)
