I should not be writing a column on abortion for the same reason I would not write one on capital punishment: People have already hashed out their thoughts on the topic, most spent too much time on it in their high school debate class, and now they'd rather read about cloning.
Along with gun control and capital punishment, abortion fills out the top tier of the "Topics on Which No One Reads or Writes" list. They're old hat-they have received too much media exposure in recent years, and now people's exhaustion over the topics manifests itself in their near absence from the current public discourse.
But abortion, far more so than either of these other two topics, is a practical issue as much as a moral debate. Of the six million pregnancies each year, half are unplanned. About 1.5 million women with unwanted pregnancies-one-third of whom are in school-elect to have abortions each year.
Because so many deal with this issue on a personal level, I wonder what the repercussions are for its disappearance from the public sphere.
Had the media blackout existed when I first learned about the topic, I doubt my thoughts on the topic would be the same. Although suburban Philadelphia, where I grew up, is not exactly a bastion of conservative or religious thought, you would not know it from my ninth grade sex education class. The primary topic was not sex or education but the rose bush-at the start of the unit, we watched a video that likened a person's sex life to a dying rose, one petal per sex partner. My teacher, whether she found it poetic or more comfortable than the anatomic terms, used the rose analogy with great frequency.
Other topics in the class were taught in an equally obscured and value-laden manner, although if they carried with them comparable analogies, then I regret to inform Miss Ward that they did not stick. Abor-tion was, needless to say, taught as though it were an impossibility.
I had this class right around the time, however, when Pennsylvania's highly controversial abortion laws were being challenged in court. In addition to requiring parental consent and spousal notification, these laws mandate a 24-hour waiting period and an "educational" information seminar for all women choosing the procedure.
So after being taught propaganda in school, I would go home to find the abortion debate raging on the front page and the opinion columns of The Philadelphia Inquirer and my local paper. There, and not in my classroom, the news articles posited the issue as one of women's rights.
They also contained information that was never discussed in my classroom-the medical procedure is safe, quick and has no long-term health repercussions.
Perhaps most clearly, I remember New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's writing on the topic. Her biweekly column stressed repeatedly-overtly at first and then subtly in subsequent columns-that many women deal personally with the issue, and while their silence is understandable, it perpetuates the problem.
"When I hear people talk about abortions of convenience and abortion on demand, I know there is one superlative way to counter those utterly misleading modifiers," she wrote. "[What if] the woman at the next desk, hearing for the umpteenth time about how maybe it ought to be legal but Lord, I could never do it myself, finally blurts out, 'Oh yes you could. I did.'" Quindlen's revealing columns about abortion spurred on the start of my feminist consciousness.
So the fact that the national discussion has been kept in abeyance because of people's satiation with the topic has, I believe, implications on two different groups: Those who need the procedure, and those who will not sufficiently be exposed to the topic.
The fact that the national debate on abortion has disappeared for the last few years is particularly important for people around our age: We've had only a brief time in which to develop our own perspectives, so the content of public discourse has a greater influence on us. In another example, think of how different a student's political consciousness would be if she first became politically aware during Ross Perot's heyday versus today-amidst the backlash to the 104th Congress and disgust over a president mired in controversy and foolery.
On college campuses, we are concerned with cultural differences and, at schools that draw from a national pool, we are fascinated by geographic differences, but we don't often think of the chronological differences that separate us.
I would love to write a column on why the various anti-abortion laws lying publicly unconfronted in various states are abominable, but I am not enough of a poet or a desperado to delve into that task. I am troubled by the fact, however, that no one else is taking on the challenge, from either side, although I understand why. And if it would take another Operation Rescue, with all its abhorrent excesses and feverish absurdity, to legitimate a public return to the topic, I certainly don't want it. But I wonder about the consequences.
Jessica Moulton is a Trinity junior and University editor of The Chronicle.
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