Valerie Gatto does not want to
talk about abortion. That’s probably prudent, inasmuch as she very much
desires to be the next Miss USA, and contestants in that pageant are
expected to have ruthlessly anodyne interests along the lines of reading
children’s literature to blind dolphins. But she is admirably direct,
even bracing, about the aspect of her life that intersects that
troublesome issue: She was conceived when her mother, a teenager at the
time, was attacked on the streets of Pittsburgh and raped at knifepoint.
Valerie Gatto (www.valeriegatto.com
Asked by a radio interviewer about whether her mother
had considered abortion, Miss Gatto was as scripted as a contestant in a
presidential debate (which is, after all, much the same business as
hers), saying that her mother had been presented with the possibility
but had never seriously considered terminating the pregnancy. Instead,
she was determined to put the child up for adoption — until changing her
mind the night before her daughter was born. God, Miss Gatto’s
great-grandmother told her mother, would not give her more than she
could handle. In the event, it became a question of what Miss Gatto’s
mother and grandparents could handle; she had the benefit of being
raised in an extended-family household, one that by every indication is
composed of extraordinary and kind people.
Miss Gatto, deflecting the question of abortion specifically, said that she did not desire to be the candidate of Roe v. Wade. “My story is bigger than that.” In a sense, that is true, but in another sense, it isn’t.
Miss Gatto is of course under no obligation to be a
standard-bearer for either side of the abortion debate; it is only the
worst kind of fanatic who cannot accommodate the fact that his own
interests and enthusiasms, however sincerely held, need not be
universal. And if Miss Gatto’s message is scrupulously inoffensive —
that life can go on even after enduring an act of horrific personal
brutality — it is nonetheless a worthwhile one.
There are many kinds of
courage in the world, of which a mother’s courage is a very specific and
demanding variety. Rape is a special kind of cruelty in that it
transforms the life-giving act into an act of torture. To suffer the
crime and yet cherish the life is an act of transcendence, a perfection
of generosity rarely if ever equalled by the merely human.
My own view is that those in the pro-life camp who wish
to carve out legal exceptions for cases of rape are undermining their
own position. If our desire is to protect the lives of the innocent
unborn, then the circumstances of their conception, no matter how
horrible, cannot be allowed to overrule their standing as members of the
human family. But that is not to say that the circumstances do not
matter. We should be fully cognizant of exactly what our position
implies, and of the extraordinary burden such a standard would impose on
women who have suffered a particularly heinous kind of assault.
The remarkable fact is that a not insignificant number
of women who become pregnant through rape do not choose to terminate
their pregnancies, deciding instead to forgo adding to the sum of
violence in the world, even though a portion of it has been cruelly
visited upon their own persons.
But set aside, for the moment, the question of the legal
status of abortion. The fact is that abortion is at the moment legal
and widely available. Miss Gatto was born in 1989, well into the age of
the universal abortion license. Her mother could have terminated her
pregnancy easily, and the matter could have remained entirely private.
She chose to do otherwise, and then took the additional step of taking
on the burdens and difficulties of raising the child rather than giving
her to adoptive parents. This is by no means to denigrate the decisions
of women who do give up their children for adoption — I myself am
grateful that such a decision was made in my own case, and that abortion
remained illegal in Texas in 1972. I have no idea whether my biological
mother, whom I have not met, would have been tempted by the
availability of legal abortion; still, I object to the notion that my
own life should be optional under the law. Miss Gatto’s mother
must have known that she was not choosing an easy road, even with the
support and assistance of her parents.
The remarkable fact is that a not insignificant number
of women who become pregnant through rape do not choose to terminate
their pregnancies, deciding instead to forgo adding to the sum of
violence in the world, even though a portion of it has been cruelly
visited upon their own persons. In a culture that treats abortion as
barely if at all distinguishable from mere contraception, that is
heroic. And it is heroic regardless of our specific political
differences on the issue of the legal standing of abortion, important —
fundamentally important — as that question is.
That heroic act involves unusual personal endurance.
Beyond the usual trials of pregnancy, women who have conceived via rape
often have unexpectedly traumatic reactions to the sometimes-invasive
medical procedures involved in pregnancy; they frequently experience
unsupportive or hostile reactions from friends, family, even churches;
many of them are not aware of such resources as may be available to
assist them. They worry, inevitably, about what they will someday tell
their children. The most common advice given by women who have gone
through with rape-conceived pregnancies is to seek counseling and
support as early in the pregnancy as possible.
“My story is bigger than that,” Miss Gatto says. And so
it is. What’s in question in the abortion debate is not the scope or
moral color of Miss Gatto’s story, but whether she gets to have a story
at all. She does, but millions don’t. A Miss USA contestant has no
special responsibility to wrestle with that issue. But citizens do,
whether publicly or privately. We are burdened with that problem; it is
more likely that we will arrive at a medical solution, in the form of
some universally effective contraception, than a moral consensus. (“The Enlightened One,
if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a
technical solution.” — Michel Houellebecq) And when we are thinking
about what sort of citizens we want to be, we might consider the case of
Miss Gatto’s mother and others in her position, who have endured what
few of us will ever suffer and given more than most of us ever will be
called upon to give.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
No comments:
Post a Comment